Merleau-Ponty, fundamental ontologist

E. F. K A E L I N

Florida State University

M E R L E A U - P O N T Y , F U N D A M E N T A L O N T O L O G I S T

To produce a rather baffling abnormality like double vision could establish only, at most, that ordinary usage sometimes has to be stretched to accommodate exceptional circumstances.

J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, p. 91.

At the time of Merleau-Ponty's death, he was working on a book that was to be his major philosophical effort, an explanation of the world and of our experience of it in terms of "existentials" (existentiaux, out of Heidegger's Existentialia). Such explicative terms, he thought, were necessary because the widespread use of the more general term "categories" had proved to be systematically misleading. In practice, for example, the use of scientific categories applicable to "objective" states, systems, or processes in the description of human behavioral patterns leads to a peculiar result. We find behavior dichotomized, following statistical analysis, into "normal" and "abnormal" or deviant classifications. The former is represented by a tendency of phenomena to group around a center of distribution, while the latter become reduced to statistical "scat- tering." The oddity of this procedure stems from the practical application of these descriptions; and the very term "deviant" suggests the double freight certain of our psychological categories have become accustomed to bear. The "normal" becomes a norm, and is used to evaluate rather than to describe.

But if statistics is the language of science and its generalities are the principal explanatory device o f behavioral scientists, our efforts to com- prehend human behavior still confront a large field of human experiences left unreduced to "rational" determination, except as deviations from the mean, along with the attendant opprobrium of moral or social disappro-

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MERLEAU - PO N T Y , F U N D A M E N T A L O N T O L O G I S T

bation, directed toward those subjects exhibiting non-normal behavior. Some psychologists deplore this discrepancy between what can be done

with the methods of statistics and what they should like to accomplish for persons with "abnormal" case histories; and in an effort to overcome the gap between easily interpreted results and ultimate practical interest, these scientists are seeking less prejudicial methods. Since statistical correlation is a method of analyzing class or group phenomena, the search is leading toward a procedure of analysis capable of interpreting individual cases. Such a method is suggested by Husserlian phenomenology, modified to fit the existential conditions of a single human "transcendence."

The method may be characterized in two stages: a first, or negative stage, is to avoid all presuppositions - a process aided by practicing the epochS, or phenomenological reduction, which calls for the suspension of the natural attitude in which we live out our everyday and quite ordinary lives, either by common sense or by applying scientific (or causal) inferences to and from objects of the world. What the phenomenologist does, then, is not to deny the existence of the workaday world, but to sus- pend any belief from whatever source in a pretended knowledge concerning it. The second, or positive, stage consists in describing what remains of our experience when the natural attitude is suspended. What does remain, of course, is the inquirer's consciousness in a new attitude, called "phenomenological."

Upon reflection, it is discovered that all consciousness is intentional, i.e. an act of relating to some external object. Expressed in language as "All consciousness is consciousness of some transcendent object," this relationship forms the basis of an eidetic description of consciousness itself, or, if you prefer, a statement of an axiom of pure phenomenology. But eidetic descriptions are of essences, not of the appearances of objects; and in moving from these latter to the former we are said to practice the eidetic reduction. In each reduction we place brackets, indicative of the suspension of connection, around the intending consciousness and its correlative object, be it an appearance or an essence. And the last of the reductions is the "transcendental," in which all that remains as a kind of residue of analysis is the "pure Ego" itself.

Phenomenologists of a Husserlian persuasion are judged more or less orthodox depending upon the number of these reductive procedures em- ployed in analysis. It is dear, for example, that Sartre and the early Mer-

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leau-Ponty were dissident disciples in that they denied the possibility of the transcendental reduction: Sartre, because the Ego itself was a transcendent object and not immanent to consciousness; and Merleau-Ponty, because critical reflection could not yield a consciousness separate from the struc- tures of the body-proper. Moreover, the latter's description of the cogito

- another name in his account for existence itself- is of the tacit relationship between self as intending and self intended, mediated by the self's belonging to the world along with other objects (and selves). In this, Merleau-Ponty's conclusions have always been close to another, perhaps the most brilliant, of Husserl's disciples.

Heidegger has always been interested in the phenomena of language. His dissertation was on the theory of judgment in psychologistic theories of knowledge; and his Habilitationsschrift, 1 on Scotist theories of categories and meaning. Sein und Zeit sought the meaning of Being in general and afforded a description of human being in terms of the meanings or creative involvements of individuals 2, and more recently he has topped off his career with a treatise on language itself, Unterwegs zur Sprache. 3 That he finds the discourse of poets more enlightening than that of scientists is odd for our time but certainly not a mark in his disfavor. Philosophy is for him a dialogue between poet and thinker because poets are justly famous for discovering meanings where they are. That he should call discovery "dis-covery" is only an indication of his interpretation of the method of phenomenology.

Husserl, he intimates, was wrong in supposing that phenomenology had a peculiar subject matter- transcendental consciousness. What his mentor had discovered, however, was a method for uncovering what lies concealed in our everyday dealings with the world; it merely endeavors to "let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. ''4 And since what shows itself in all phenomena is the being of entities (its meaning, modification and derivatives), the object of phenomenology is the meaning of Being; in a word, under Heidegger's hand phenomenology became a fundamental ontology. And if he is right, what gets covered over in all of our questions concerning the nature of our everyday existence - even such commonplace ones as Where am I? and What time is it? - is the nature of the questioner (or what is the same, the questioning) itself. Thus, if we may be permitted the redundancy, "phenomenological ontology" must begin with a description of the her

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meneutical situation of questioning: besides the questioner who exists as questioning, there is das Gefragte (what is being asked about), das Befragte (what is being interrogated in the questioning), and das Erfragte (what is found out thereby))

When we apply this interpretational scheme to the situation of living men, we find that human beings question other existent entities concerning their being and find out in successful instances of inquiry the meaning of this being as its essence enfolds in the primary act of questioning. As long as these other entities are non-human, they are described in terms of categories, from which scientific explanations derive their significance. But when these other entities are human (indeed in reflection the questioner himself), categories of a different nature are in order. Whence, the "existentials" or existentialia proferred by Heidegger, and picked up by contemporary clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.

II

The development of an existentialist ontology from Husserlian phenomenology is already a twice-told tale. There exists one historical account of the relationship between the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger; 6 and Remy Kwant has given his most recent study of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy the revealing title, From Phenomenology to Metaphysics. 7 A tenden- tious work which attempts to make Merleau-Ponty into a crypto-spiritu- alist, or at least one whose thought leaves open the door to a traditional metaphysical theology, s this commentary stresses the differences between the early Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological critic of science, and the later, budding ontologist. There is no doubt a change in focus and em- phasis between Merleau-Ponty's earlier and later works, but some of the conclusions are surprisingly similar; and, as far as I can tell, his method - critical reflection - has changed in name only.

Kwant makes much of a new beginning, found in Merleau-Ponty's concept of "la foi perceptive" (faith in the perceived world). Santayana, of course, had the same notion in his idea of "animal faith"; so the idea is not new to American readers. The pertinent question here is why Profes- sor Kwant takes the idea to be "new" to the later Merleau-Ponty. After all, the same man had ended his discussion of the tacit cogito by referring to the same idea:

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Absolute thought is not clearer to me than my own mind, since it is by virtue of the latter that I must think it. We are in the world; that is to say, things are sketched out before us, an immense individual afftrms itself, each existence understands itself and others. All we have to do is to recognize those phenomena which found all these certitudes. The belief in an absolute mind or in a world in itself separated from us is nothing more than a rationalization o f this primordial faith. 9

Yet from the time of "The Eye and the Mind" on, Merleau-Ponty had taken to spelling ~tre with a capital E and his notes contain references to Heidegger, including Gilbert Kahn's rendering of wesen as ester lo [non- standard German and French usages for " to exist" in the manner of an essence], and his references to Sein [Being] as l 'Etre brut ou sauvage [brute, aboriginal Being] establish synonymity between this latter term and his earlier monde per fu [perceived world], n His theory of knowledge is still based upon the primacy of perception, still questions man's capability of logically reconstructing the universe (a silly project at best), and still seeks a foundation for all rational activity on more primitive ground.

Where before he sought an insight into the "pre-objective" universe of human existence in order to show the derivative nature of scientific observation, however, he later came to question the possibility of practicing a tacit or prereflective cogito. The problem then became one of showing that some kind of knowledge is possible before fully warranted truth claims. Again we are reminded of Santayana, who in Scepticism and

Animal Faith defined knowledge as "faith mediated by symbols. ''12 My purpose is not to point out the extent to which Merleau-Ponty's

thought is comparable to American philosophy. I have travelled that route once before, having found the Frenchman's account of the tacit cogito

consistent with G. H. Mead's account of the genesis of significant symbols. 18 Merleau-Ponty's own later denial of the tacit, corporeal cogito

leads me to inquire whether I was then mistaken. In a note describing the ineffectiveness of his earlier account, he states

that both Descartes and Husserl presupposed the existence of words and meanings in their descriptions of the attainment of self-knowledge, but that his own account, similar in intent to Sartre's "pre-reflective" or non- thetic consciousness (of) self, is no less open to the same charge. 14 And in a very curious statement on the relationship between the speaking subject and the tacit cogito, he claims: "The tacit cogito must make understood

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how language is not impossible [One would think it is not impossible because we possess it], but cannot make understood how it is possible." What was lacking was a dearly stated relationship between perceptual meanings (sounds) and linguistic meanings, i.e. between corporeal behavior and conceptualization (th6mitisation). This symbolization or conceptualization, he added, must be explained by behavior "raised to a higher degree. 'uS Obviously he had forgotten, or subconsciously repudiated his treatment of this same subject in the very first of his works, La Structure du comporternent, where the analogy with Mead is so apparent.

In order to clear up this confusion, caused in part by the sketchiness of Merleau-Ponty's published "working notes," I shall compare the earlier version of the corporeal cogito with its revised formulation, and then pro- ceed in the later sections of this article to describe the ontology it seems to make possible.

III

In their earlier works, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty refer to a restricted phenomenon when they use the term cogito. Both hark back to Descartes' motive to find an indubitable base for all further knowledge, but neither wishes to claim that the existence of a "self" could be established by appealing to it. For Sartre, it is the individual act of consciousness that is self-founding; not a global consciousness or self. But for him, the guaran- tee of knowledge is strictly limited to the actual occurrence of an awareness. Being pre-reflective, unlike Descartes', this cogito is effectuated in act and in act alone. It states only that as long as there is awareness of an object there must also be an implicit awareness of self; for to deny that consciousness of an object is simultaneously an implicit consciousness (of) self is to state that there is an unconsciousness consciousness, which is absurd. Here the warrant for the workability of the cogito is the act of awareness of anything at all. But this language is confusing: to say 'act' may be interpreted as to imply the existence of an actor. This is the same error of substantiality evident in Descartes' own version of the cogito; and for this reason Sartre wrote L'Etre et le n6ant, to explain in terms of transcendence rather than substance how consciousness becomes fully self-conscious. What we ordinarily refer to as "self" he described as the "circuit of ipseity."

At the time he wrote La Structure du comportement and La Ph6nom6no-

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logie de la perception Merleau-Ponty was attempting something similar: to explain the development of self-consciousness from basic perceptions of animals, but without appealing to ontological "categories," such as Sartre's being-for-itself and being-in-itself or even Heidegger's "existentialia," such as Being-in-the-world, Being-with, and Being-in (with its modes-existentiality, facticity and fallenness). His method was to reflect critically on the experiments of psychologists and on the prior reflections of historically determined philosophical systems.

Like Sartre, he contended that existence itself is sufficient warrant for "knowledge" concerning existence; and so gave this interpretation of the tacit cogito :

If the subject exists in situation, if, even, it is nothing more than a possibility of situations, the reason is that it actualizes its ipseity only by being in fact a body and entering into the world by this body. If, in reflecting on the essence of subjectivity, I find it related to that of the body and that of the world, the reason is that my existence as subjectivity is the same thing as my existence as a body and as the existence of the world and that, finally, the subject who I am, taken con- cretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. 18

Hence, all the knowledge I have of myself would stem from this tacit relationship between my body and its world. The indubitability of this knowledge does not, however, have its source in a necessary connection of simple ideas or an intuition of an essential notion. It is given in an act of individual transcendence, i.e. the relation between my body and the objects of the world. Thus he can say, "The first truth is certainly 'I think' but on the condition that one understand by this, 'I belong to myself' in belonging to the world. ''17 Perhaps it would be better to say, "I come to myself by relating to the objects and events of the world."

Whatever the language used to depict the relation, Merleau-Ponty chose perception as the privileged field of self-analysis. Distinguishing between the body as a physical, physiological, psychological and existential object, he elaborated the notion of the body-proper as an intentional relationship between sensori-motor field and surrounding perceptual field. It is for this reason that his early work has been interpreted as a kind of crypto- positivism.

But primordiality and indubitability of knowledge are not the only fea- tures of the cogito, no matter how it is effectuated. There remains a further discussion of the reflexivity implied: the knowledge of the cogito is by and

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of the same thing. And it is premature to talk of 'subject' and 'object' at the level of knowledge gained by the tacit cogito; for in perceptions which precede conception, in barely conscious acts of willing or doing something, "objects" are not yet delineated from an undifferentiated environ- ment. They are created by perception as Gestalten are first experienced in the felt expressiveness of significant space tensions. Whence, then, the reflexivity in the tacit, pre-reflective cogito?

Here, once again, the answers given by Merleau-Ponty hardly differ from the earlier to his later periods. In the former, basic, pre-reflective knowledge was described as the feeling of tension within the intentional arc maintained between the body proper and its surroundings, tacitly given in each act of transcendence and continually modified by the appearance of new Gestalten, since every act of knowing throws one back to the changing condition of one's own body proper. It was for this reason, it should be remembered, that Merleau-Ponty failed to follow Husserl into the third and final reduction. There is no intuition of a constituting consciousness, but only the naked feel of our bodily tensions in every act of knowing. "Objects" are derived from the pre-objective domain of experience as a figure appears on a ground; perceptually, they too are space tensions, felt in the corporeal schema. And within the configuration of a gestalt, there is nothing which counts as an atom or element which by summation can be erected into a substantial thing, no absolutely significant u n i t - only relative differentiations within the apparent whole.

The weakness in this account is the hurried conclusion that speech (which must be established to change the nascent sense of a gestalt to the acquired sense of a concept) is explicable in the same terms as visual perception. Just as we can feel ourselves feeling (the right by the left hand), and others may see us seeing, we can hear ourselves and others speaking. Communication would have been established if, in hearing ourselves speaking, we register the same (or similar) modifications of bodily schema as are provoked in others hearing us. This, of course, is Mead's principle; it guarantees communication when two transcendences are directed to (Sens, basically, is a direction) the same object or feature of the common world. Although Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of "expression," borrowing from both Saussure and Malraux to do it is, he was not satisfied that such a theory accounts for an effective language (la parole par- lante), or the use of verbal gestures to create a novel meaning; and pre-

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supposing at least enough language to understand the reduction of knowledge to the corporeal cogito, Merleau-Ponty was led to admit the failure of his phenomenological philosophy.

When he started over, he produced two essential texts: Signes, which attempts a phenomenological interpretation of language; 19 and Le Visible et l'invisible, which attempts to transcend even that. In his own words, the Phenomenology of Perception called for completion in a fundamental ontology. 20 And having given up on the second, or eidetic, reduction of Husserl (in that Husserl's essences are treated statically), he began reading Heidegger seriously. He begins with Heidegger's discussion of "dis- closedness," the Erschlossenheit claimed by Heidegger to be distinctive of Dasein's being, and analyzed as Befindlichkeit, Verstehen and Rede (affectivity, understanding and discourse). Since his own account of man's openness to the world (consciousness-body) seemed to be stopped at Befindlichkeit (how one finds oneself, or how one feels), Merleau-Ponty thought he had discovered the way out of his dilemma.

The new cogito, at least, must not leave open the circle of ipseity. It is not enough to feel our own condition; that is often the source of serious neurosis and psychosis: our being must be brought to full understanding and expression, in discourse or other creative media, including human relations. Heidegger finally sought his enlightenment from the poets; and, given his predilection for the visual universe, Merleau-Ponty interrogated the painters of our culture. Thus, his "Eye and the Mind" constitutes an ontology of painting, 21 and an easy transition to the posthumous Le Visible et l'invisible.

The Visible and the Invisible is a suggestive title. All Merleau-Ponty's theorizing about man and his world to this time was concerned with the visible: man's body seeing and seen, touching and touched, by self and others; and the world as seen and touched by both. Hardly anything was said earlier of the "invisible" except of those unseen three sides of the perceived cube:

If there is a cube for me with six equal sides, and I can have an experience of the object, it is not that I constituted it from the interior [as a constitutive consciousness]; the reason is that I delve into the thickness of the world in the perceptive experience. The cube with six equal sides is a limiting-concept by which I express the fleshly presence of the cube that is there, before my eyes, under my hands, in all its perceptual evidence. 2~

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As per Husserl, perception is still supposedly dosed owing to the appearance of an "essence," called here a limiting-concept. But if this is the case, geometry is taking explanatory precedence over the perceptual experience itself. In the later period, the essence or static concept of figures had to go; and there was no place else to go but back to the "flesh" of my body in contact with the "flesh" of the object.

But my flesh is not seen; it can only be lived. The notion is borrowed from Sartre, who describes the flesh as the viscous mixture of consciousness and body felt most urgently in sexual desire, where flesh seeks flesh. The flesh is the body in its movements, external and internal, and these movements can be touched by other movements of like kind. All knowledge, in this scheme, is carnal knowledge, by whatever name it may be called; and in the new law, "intersubjectivity" has given way to "inter- corporeity."23

Witness the intercourse between the flesh of my corporeal schema and that of the cube in the new Merleau-Pontyan testament:

...my vision and my body themselves emerge from the same [intercorporeal] being which is, amongst other things, cubical- The reflection which qualifies them as subjects of vision is that same thick reflection which allows me to touch myself touching; i.e. that the same thing in me is seeing and seen: I do not even see myself seeing, but by encroachment I achieve my visible body; I prolong my being seen beyond my being visible to myself. And it is for my flesh, my body of vision, that there can be the cube itself closing the circuit and achieving my being-seenY 4

Englobing the flesh of my body and the flesh of the cube, we find the flesh of Being itself, that universal dimensionality of all measurable dimensions.

However confusing this latter sentence, enough has been said to establish the significance of "the invisible." This notion is not to be taken as the complement (or logical contradiction) of the visible. In every case, it should be interpreted as the in-visible. The meaning of cubieity is in the cube; the mind is the other side of the body, i.e. unseen but expressed in its movements; 25 the pregnancy is in the gestalt; Being is in the dimensionality of the visible world" all in-visible. What we must learn is to inter- rogate beings in order to dis-cover the Being we share since we belong to it. (Nous en sommes.)

In this scheme, the reflexivity we seek for adequate self-knowledge is to be found in the chiasm of human existence, in that criss-cross between

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myself and my world and between myself and others and their worlds. We each encroach upon the other, since in perception the world touches me as I reach out towards it only to find myself therein. I am always in the world, but it too is always in me. In speaking I must violate the silence with my words, but I hear myself speaking as others do. And we hear each other speaking and adapt our responses to each other's gestures. The new cogito is experienced as chiasm.

The chiasm (or reversibility) is realized by the doubling of my body into an inside and out, and that of things into an internal and external structure [i.e., positive and negative spaces of every 3-dimensional figure]:

It 's because these two sorts of doublings (dgdoublements) exist that the following is possible: the insertion of the world between the two leaflets of my body and the insertion of my body between those of each thing and of the world. ~8

I f this is a lot of invagination, it constitutes only so much knowledge. Let us return, then, to the cube:

...if there is flesh, that is to say if the hidden face of the cube radiates somewhere in the same way as the one facing me does and coexists with it, and if I who see the cube am also visible, I am visible from another side, and if it and I together are taken up in the same element - should we say of the seeing or of the seen? - this cohesion, this visibility in principle, is stronger than all momentary dis- cordance. 27

The flesh of the perceiver is united with the flesh of objects seen, both participating in the flesh of the visible world; and Being itself is the Flesh of all flesh. Consciousness, engaged in the actions of the body, always has its blind spot (punctum caecum); when it looks at the world, it can only see objects or itself (in a future projection)" it can never look upon Being itself. But, man is always in the world (1l est au monde), just as he belongs (II en est.) to Being, the in-visible par excellence.

IV

Besides the seeming incomprehensibility of the new "existentialia," Merleau-Ponty's later account of the cogito as chiasm has other diffi- culties. First of all, the reversibility between body feeling and body felt is admittedly not a relation of congruence:

To say that the body sees is curiously not to say anything else but: it is visible.

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When I look for the meaning of the statement that the body sees, I find nothing else but: it is visible in the act of looking from "somewhere" (the point of view of the other), or in the mirror to myself. Cf. the triple faced mirror. ~8

Even the touching hand is not touched in the same way it touches; and although each organ is both phenomenal and "objective," in action each finger or hand is active and passive simultaneously: the one encroaches on the other. Slipping and sliding, opening and closing, (d~hiscence or ~cart), bodies see and are seen, touch and are touched, because each belong to the flesh of the world. He who sees or touches me is seen or is touched by me, and in coupling we form the "interlacing" (entrelac) of the visible world. 29

The trick, of course, is to establish coupling with the fleshly objects of the inanimate world. But here once again Merleau-Ponty appeals to the appearance of Gestalten. I f his intent to avoid psychological jargon is to be successful, this notion, too, must be given an existential treatment. And he does not fail us.

A Gestalt, he says, is a "pivot of a system of equivalences, ''30 a configuration, "heavy with significance," a middle term between "subject" and "object. ''81 Occurring at the crossroads between subjectivity and objectivity, the perceived gestalt defines itself as fleshly experience. What is the pregnancy of a configuration, in positive terms, but the capacity to burst forth, productivity, fecundity - all of this before typicality, 82 direc- tionality or sense. Hence the essence perceived is not a static thing formed, but an active forming; a Wesen or "essential" essence, following Heidegger, is one which comes to be and remains what it is; it is both an activity and a specific manner of disclosure, i n a word, a Wesen verbal. The gestalt, in forming, likewise allows a thing to come into existence and to remain as it is; it is a birth of a new meaning:

My body obeys the pregnancy [of the Gestalt]; it 'responds' to it. It's the body which suspends itself towards it, flesh [of the body] responding to flesh of the thing, a8

It is in this way that all perceptual novelty comes into the world, created by revealing transcendence, 34 the outward movement of the body in a tense relationship with the burgeoning structure of the thing being re- vealed.

The movement from perceptual sense to intellectual meaning is, further,

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a secondary phenomenon of transcendence in that Gestalten are trans- ponierbar, i.e. transposable into another context as long as the internal relationships remain centered around the same pivotal scheme. Musical melodies are the obvious example. But language too may exhibit this phenomenon of transposability; it too signifies, according to structural linguistics, according to a system of ordered counters which have no significance outside of differential determination within context. This, of course, is the sense of the linguistic dictum, look to the use for meaning.

Consider how we experience the flesh of a visual object, say, the red of a rose. In fixing the object I "see" that color detach itself from a ground of other colors; my fixation allows determination of the exact red I per- eeive (sense or feel) in differentiation from the color of the entire context. Hence, in speaking of this peculiar quale, I may say:

Its precise form is solidary with a certain configuration or texture: woolly, metalic or porous; and there is hardly any 'thing' to be found in these participations. Claudel was wont to say that a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood could be redder, s5

Concerning the transposability of visual gestalten, no statement could be more succinct, nor exact. A visual quality is not something which can be added to other qualities to compose a thing; says Merleau-Ponty, "it's a certain knot in the weave of the simultaneous and the successive: a concretion of visibility and not an atom. ''86

Logical atomism, taking its units as positively given, has ignored this lesson of "brute perception" (perception sauvage). And the same error is committed by linguistic philosophers who take the meanings of words as already constituted by past usage. The meaning of a word may be its use, but there are original and non-original uses. Meanings themselves are the in-audibles of creative speech. I f I can hear myself speaking, I can understand only in silence. And by transposition, "Between colors and the pretended visible thing, one finds the tissue which lines them, sustains and nourishes them; and which, for its part, is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, the flesh of things. ''aT But since differential systems of equivalences are freely transposable, there is no longer any mystery in how verbal significations come to reflect the nascent significances felt in visual Gestalten. as

I f the existential account of visual and phonetic gestalten allows

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Merleau-Ponty to bridge a gap he claims was left open in his first major treatise, it likewise, through the notion of "flesh," allows a re-interpretation of the relation between mind and body. The gestalt is the median ground between subject and object, 3a for it is in the perceived gestalt that my chiasmatic transcendence bends back upon itself: I feel quality as I see the object. When the figure separates from the ground I insert my own flesh in the form of a feeling (of space) felt. And as a visual object itself, my own body parts to receive the flesh of another's transcendence.

I f the metaphor is shocking, put the matter in another way. My own body is itself a gestalt, visible in principle, in whose actions my in-visible mind expresses its essence (verbal). This relation between mind and body, between heaviness and projection to a future delivery, corresponds to the visibility of other objects, likewise expressing meanings, or their own in-visibility. The being which unites these two nodes of significance is the flesh of Being itself.

We need only note that Being is "vertical." Given in every successful perception, every successful use of creative discourse, it surrounds or englobes our being and the being of objects. And Merleau-Ponty calls it "vertical" to distinguish brute or aboriginal Being from the horizontal being of the historical universe of causally linked sequences, the ontic world in which we ordinarily live and may to our dismay become lost.

Our being is "existed" (west or este) as a gestalt detaching itself from all the other gestalten visible in the surrounding world. In perception we become joined as flesh to flesh within the context of all possible couplings. It is this context which is continually modified and enriched by the activity of our coupling. Since some other person fulfills what I leave unseen of natural objects as well as of my own body, the Other, which gives ultimate meaning to us both, is itself in-visible.

Merleau-Ponty states, by way of explication,

It's this negative which makes the vertical world possible, the union of incom- patibles, the being of transcendence, and topological space and time by framing and joining, by dis-joining and dis-membering...and the relation of male to female (the two pieces of wood that children [in puzzles] see adjusting themselves to each other - irresistibly because each is the possible [fulfillment] of the other; and the 'separation' and the totality of the separated parts; and the relationship of the thought and the unthought (Heidegger) - and the relation of copulation in which two intentions achieve a single fulfillment. 40

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In the horizontal world, people merely join bodies and procreate, not knowing precisely when, where or how; in vertical Being, to which they all belong, they participate by creating. And the difference is ontological.

In summary, few scholars may find an improvement in the new over the old Merleau-Ponty. What he set out to investigate in the Phenomenology of Perception is taken as animal faith in The Visible and the Invisible: man's prior relation in the world to other beings both thing-like and human. Although his method remains primarily the same, he now refers to it as "interrogation." And like Heidegger's quest for the meaning of Being, this interrogation may be directed towards theories, to test them, or to the facts of existence which continually threaten their bounds. He re-examines and rejects the rationalistic "reflection" of Descartes, Kant and Husserl; the dialectics of Sartre (a false or "embalmed" dialectic); and Husserl's phenomenological intuitionism, along with its attendant static or "inessential essences." But in so doing, he seems less interested in separating the true from the false, as before, than in refuting the ontological basis of their claims.

From these theories, he moves to the facts. If man's knowledge begins in animal faith, he must learn to question the articles of that faith. What does it mean for a man, for a thing, to exist? Where before he was satisfied with the statement that man's existence, as transcendence, is its own excuse for being - and coming to know, only a mode of transcendence - he later came to doubt the validity of his own prior questioning. Having found the tacit cogito wanting, he even abandoned all hope of attaining self-knowledge in the traditional way.

His own "critical reflection" became suspect because it was too bound up with conventional thought: the categories of traditional metaphysics and all the theoretical terminology of traditional epistemology - subjects and objects, perception and imagination, reflection, dialectic and intuition. All these approaches begin their analysis with too much knowledge taken for granted. Hence, his original problem was badly formulated in attempting to reduce reflective knowledge to pre-reflective experiences; and science, to the tension felt in the intentional arc of the body proper. Having effectuated this reduction, he could not remake the ascent back to war-

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ranted belief. The "categories" had therefore to give way to "existentials." A partial list of these ontological notions is indicative of the strangeness

of the enterprise: element (almost in the original Greek sense, as primal stuff), dimension, universal dimensionality, depth, thickness, chiasm, interlacing, juncture, pivot, hinge, frame (membrure), flesh, Wesen [verbal], brute or vertical Being, pregnancy, growing full, flowing open, openness (a replacement for the "intentional arc"), etc.

What has remained from his earlier investigations are the thesis of the primacy of perception, when this term is shorn of its traditional inter- pretations; the corporeality of the cogito; and the fulfillment of meaning in the closure of a gestalt. But this term too must be "purified," and brought back to its original carnal significance as the fruit of intercourse between human flesh and the flesh of the world.

In a word, then, The Visible and the Invisible draws out the consequences of Merleau-Ponty's scatological eschatology; i.e. he treats of the first and last things of significance to man in the only way that an embodied consciousness has of understanding any significance at all. Recall his earlier remarks that a theory of the body was already a clear theory of expression, and that in sexual expression the human body and spirit are most perfectly known as one. And we are warned not to interpret this metaphorically: we do not explain knowledge in an appeal to bodily movements because we have experienced carnal knowledge of women; rather we have carnal knowledge of women because all perceptual knowledge is rooted in the flesh.

It should be remembered, however, that half of The Visible and the Invisible is a collection of notes jotted down for future development, left behind by Merleau-Ponty's untimely coronary in May, 1961. The editor of the posthumous volume even goes so far as to indicate that no doubt, given the chance, Merleau-Ponty would have eliminated from the finished first half of the book one of the two identical citations of Claudel, who mused on the significance of the questions: "Where am I? and What time is it?"

I am not so sure. Obviously, Merleau-Ponty was struck by the possibility of two sorts of answer, the ontic and the ontological: the first, in terms of the here and now of conventionally calculated space and time; and the last, of the dimensionality of all dimensions, which is Being itself. If we attack the visibility of things seen in one way, we reach the first sort of

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answer: the way of the Phenomenology o f Perception. But what good is it

to know where I am and the precise hour of the day if I fail to recognize

who and what I am. This quest ion leads to ano the r way, to that of The

Visible and the Invisible.

Like the nar ra tor of A la recherche du temps perdu, whose existential

space was situated between Swann's Way and the Guermantes' Way,

Merleau-Ponty finished his philosophical career at the crossroads, seeking

his own identi ty after having experienced the ontological difference. 41

R E F E R E N C E S

N. B. Unless otherwise stated, all citations of Merleau-Ponty's works are my own translations of the originals; references are to the originals, as indicated. 1 Die Kategorien- undBedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1916. 3 In the Macquarrie-Robinson translation, Being and Time. London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1962. 3 Pfullingen: Verlag Giinther Neske, 1959. 4 Being and Time, p. 58. 5 1bid., pp. 24-5. 8 See Julius Kraft, Von Husserl zu Heidegger (Kritik der phiinomenologischen Philo- sophie). Frankfurt-am-Main: Verlag 0ffentliches Leben, 1957. 7 Subtitled: An Inquiry into the Last Period of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophical Life. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966. s 1bid., pp. 223-4, 241-3. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ph~nom~nologie de laperception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). [Hereinafter, PP.], p. 468. lo Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). [Hereinafter, VL], p. 256. xt VI, p. 223. 12 George Santayana, The Philosophy of Santayana (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 412-27. 13 In An Existentialist Aesthetic (Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 246, 351. 14 VI, p. 224. 15 Ibid., p. 230. 16 pp, p. 467. x7 Ibid., p. 466. x8 Cf. my An Existentialist Aesthetic, pp. 263-90. 19 Now available in the English translation of Richard C. McCleary, as Signs (Evanston, III.: The Northwestem University Press, 1964). no VI, p. 237. 31 Collected in the volume published as The Primacy of Perception, J. M. Edie ed. (Evanston, III.: The Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159-90, translation of Carleton DaUery. 32 pp, pp. 236-7.

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23 Vl, p. 185. 24 Ibid. , p. 256. 25 Ibid., p. 221-3; c f pp. 246, 252, 312-14. 26 Ibid. , p. 317. 9,7 Ibid. , p. 184. 9s Ibid. , p. 327. 29 Ibid. , p. 314. 30 Ibid. , p. 258. 21 Ibid. , p. 250. 33 Ibid. , p. 262. 38 1bid. 34 Ibid. , p. 258. 85 Ibid. , p. 174. se Ibid. 3~ Ibid. , p. 175. 3s Ibid. , p. 203. 89 Ibid. , p. 250. 40 Ibid. , p. 281. 41 Ibid. , p. 324.

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Merleau-Ponty, fundamental ontologist