Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908—1961)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work is commonly associated with the
philosophical movement called existentialism and its intention to
begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and
difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite
the same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death,
anguished responsibility, and conflicting relations with others, for
which existentialism became both famous and notorious in the 1940s and
1950s. Perhaps because of this, he did not initially receive the same
amount of attention as his French contemporaries and friends,
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. These days though, his
phenomenological analyses are arguably being given more attention than
either, in both France and in the Anglo-American context, because they
retain an ongoing relevance in fields as diverse as cognitive science,
medical ethics, ecology, sociology and psychology. Although it is
difficult to summarize Merleau-Ponty's work into neat propositions, we
can say that he sought to develop a radical re-description of embodied
experience (with a primacy given to studies of perception), and argued
that these phenomena could not be suitably understood by the
philosophical tradition because of its tendency to drift between two
flawed and equally unsatisfactory alternatives: empiricism and, what
he called, intellectualism. This article will seek to explain his
understanding of perception, bodily movement, habit, ambiguity, and
relations with others, as they were expressed in his key early work,
Phenomenology of Perception, before exploring the enigmatic ontology
of the chiasm and the flesh that is so evocatively described in his
unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible.

1. Life and Works

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born on March 14th 1908, and like many
others of his generation, his father was killed in World War I. He
completed his philosophy education at the Ecole Normale Superieure in
1930, and rather rapidly became one of the foremost French
philosophers of the period during, and immediately following World War
II, where he also served in the infantry. As well as being Chair of
child psychology at Sorbonne in 1949, he was the youngest ever Chair
of philosophy at the College de France when he was awarded this
position in 1952. He continued to fulfill this role until his untimely
death in 1961, and was also a major contributor for the influential
political, literary, and philosophical magazine that was Les Temps
Modernes. While he repeatedly refused to be explicitly named as an
editor alongside his friend and compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre, he was at
least as important behind the scenes.

Along with Sartre, he has frequently been associated with the
philosophical movement existentialism, though he never propounded
quite the same extreme accounts of freedom, anguished responsibility,
and conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became
both famous and notorious. Indeed, he spent much of his career
contesting and reformulating many of Sartre's positions, including a
sustained critique of what he saw as Sartre's dualist and Cartesian
ontology. He also came to disagree with Sartre's rather hard-line
Marxism, and this was undoubtedly a major factor in what was
eventually a rather acrimonious ending to their friendship. For
Merleau-Ponty's assessment of their differences see Adventures of the
Dialectic, but for Sartre's version of events, see Situations. While
he died before completing his final opus that sought to completely
reorient philosophy and ontology (The Visible and the Invisible), his
work retains an importance to contemporary European philosophy. Having
been one of the first to bring structuralism and the linguistic
emphasis of thinkers like Saussure into a relationship with
phenomenology, his influence is still considerable, and an increasing
amount of scholarship is being devoted to his works.

His philosophy was heavily influenced by the work of Husserl, and his
own particular brand of phenomenology was preoccupied with refuting
what he saw as the twin tendencies of Western philosophy; those being
empiricism, and what he termed intellectualism, but which is more
commonly referred to as idealism. He sought to rearticulate the
relationship between subject and object, self and world, among various
other dualisms, and his early and middle work did so primarily through
an account of the lived and existential body (see The Phenomenology of
Perception). He argued that the significance of the body, or the
body-subject as he sometimes referred to it, is too often
underestimated by the philosophical tradition which has a tendency to
consider the body simply as an object that a transcendent mind orders
to perform varying functions. In this respect, his work was heavily
based upon accounts of perception, and tended towards emphasizing an
embodied inherence in the world that is more fundamental than our
reflective capacities, though he also claims that perception is itself
intrinsically cognitive. His work is often associated with the idea of
the 'primacy of perception', though rather than rejecting scientific
and analytic ways of knowing the world, Merleau-Ponty simply wanted to
argue that such knowledge is always derivative in relation to the more
practical exigencies of the body's exposure to the world.
2. Early Philosophy

When asked whether he was contemplating retirement on account of
illness and the ravages of advancing age, Pope John Paul II confirmed
that he was, and bemoaned the fact that his body was no longer a
docile instrument, but a cage. Although it is difficult to deny that a
docile body that can be used instrumentally might be preferable to its
decaying alternative–a body that prevents us acting as we might wish
to–both positions are united by a very literal adherence to the
mind-body duality, and the subordination of one term of that duality;
the body. Of course, such a dualistic way of thinking, and the
denunciation of the body that it usually entails, is certainly not
restricted to religious traditions. This denigration of embodiment
governs most metaphysical thought, and perhaps even most philosophical
thought, until at least Nietzsche. Even Heidegger's philosophy has
been accused of deferring the question of the body, and a
non-dualistic exploration of our embodied experience seems to be a
project of some importance, and it is one that preoccupied Maurice
Merleau-Ponty throughout his entire career.

While a major figure in French phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, at least
until relatively recently, has rarely been accorded the amount of
attention of many of his compatriots. In my opinion, this has been a
considerable oversight, as it is doubtful that any other philosopher,
phenomenologist or otherwise, has ever paid such sustained attention
to the significance of the body in relation to the self, to the world,
and to others. There is no relation or aspect of his phenomenology
which does not implicate the body, or what he terms the body-subject
(which is later considered in terms of his more general notion of the
flesh), and significantly, his descriptions allow us to reconceive the
problem of embodiment in terms of the body's practical capacity to
act, rather than in terms of any essential trait.

In the Phenomenology of Perception, which is arguably his major work,
Merleau-Ponty sets about exposing the problematic nature of
traditional philosophical dichotomies and, in particular, that
apparently age-old dualism involving the mind and the body. It is no
accident that consideration of this dualism plays such an important
role in all of his work, since the constitution of the body as an
'object' is also a pivotal moment in the construction of the idea of
an objective world which exists 'out there' (PP 72). Once this
conception of the body is problematized, so too, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is the whole idea of an outside world that is entirely
distinguishable from the thinking subject.

Merleau-Ponty criticizes the tendency of philosophy to fall within two
main categories, neither of which is capable of shedding much light on
the problems that it seeks to address. He is equally critical of the
rationalist, Cartesian accounts of humanity, as well as the more
empirical and behavioristic attempts to designate the human condition.

Rationalism is problematic because it ignores our situation, and
consequently the contingent nature of thought, when it makes the
world, or at least meaning, the immanent property of the reflecting
mind. One quote from Descartes is illustrative of this type of
attitude:

"If I chance to look out of the window onto men passing in the street,
I do not fail to say, on seeing them, that I see men… and yet, what do
I see from this window, other than hats and cloaks, which cover ghosts
or dummies who move only by means of springs? But I judge them to be
really men, and thus I understand, by the sole power of judgment that
resides in my mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes" (Crossley 10).

Descartes' prioritizing of the mental above the physical (and indeed
the duality itself), is very obvious here and this is something that
Merleau-Ponty strongly rejects. As well as being unjust to existential
experience, it also leaves the problem of meaningful judgment
untouched. The account presupposes the meaningful judgment of hats and
cloaks, rather than explaining how this perception could actually be
meaningful. We shall return to such criticisms of Cartesianism
throughout this chapter, but for the time being it is more important
for us to have an accurate understanding of where Merleau-Ponty
situates his philosophy, than it is for us to have a systematic
comprehension of exactly why he refutes rationalism, or what he terms
intellectualism.

According to Merleau-Ponty, empiricism also makes our cultural world
an illusion, by ignoring the internal connection between the object
and the act. For him, perception is not merely the result of the
functioning of individual organs, but also a vital and performative
human act in which "I" perceive through the relevant organs. Each of
the senses informs the others in virtue of their common behavioral
project, or concern with a certain human endeavor, and perception is
inconceivable without this complementary functioning. Empiricism
generally ignores this, and Merleau-Ponty contends that whatever their
efficacy in explaining certain phenomena, these type of scientific and
analytic causalities cannot actually appraise meaning and human
action. As one critic points out, "if we attempt to localize and
sectionalize the various activities which manifest themselves at the
bodily level, we lose the signification of the action itself" (Barral
94). In the terms of Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy, such an
analysis would "recuperate everything except itself as an effort of
recuperation, it would clarify everything except its own role" (VI
33).

The main point to extract from this is that, for Merleau-Ponty, both
empiricism and intellectualism are eminently flawed positions:

"In the first case consciousness is too poor, in the second too rich
for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see
that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not
be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be
ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be
searching" (PP 28).

It is not difficult to see why Merleau-Ponty would be preoccupied with
undermining such dichotomous tendencies. Essentially it ensures that
one exists as a constituting thing (subject) or as a thing (object).
Moreover, that perennial philosophical debate regarding whether
humanity is free or determined is more than tangentially related, and
all of these issues seem to be inextricably intertwined in what
Foucault aptly terms the "empirico-transcendental doublet of modern
thought." This ontological dualism of immanence and transcendence –
see mind/body, thought/language, self/world, inside/outside – is at
the forefront of all of Merleau-Ponty's attempts to re-orientate
philosophy.

While Merleau-Ponty does not want to simplistically deny the
possibility of cognitive relations between subject and object, he does
want to repudiate the suggestion that these facts are
phenomenologically primitive. It may be useful, in a particular
situation, to conceive of a seer and a seen, a subject and an object.
Many scientific endeavors fruitfully rely upon the methodological
ideal of a detached consciousness observing brute facts about the
world. Merleau-Ponty can accommodate this, provided that the terms of
such dualities are recognized to be relationally constituted. In other
words, for him, the seer and the seen condition one another and, of
course, there is an obvious sense in which our capacity for seeing
does depend on our capacity for being seen – that is, being physically
embodied in what Merleau-Ponty has occasionally described as an
'inter-individual' world.

In this repudiation of traditional metaphysical philosophy and its
governing subject-object relationship, it is perhaps unsurprising that
Merleau-Ponty, when speaking of his phenomenological method, suggests
that "the demand for a pure description excludes equally the procedure
of analytical reflection on the one hand, and that of scientific
explanation on the other" (PP ix). Only by avoiding these tendencies,
according to him, can we "rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of
subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent
object, that primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into
being" (PP 219).

The Phenomenology of Perception is hence united by the claim that we
are our bodies, and that our lived experience of this body denies the
detachment of subject from object, mind from body, etc (PP xii). In
this embodied state of being where the ideational and the material are
intimately linked, human existence cannot be conflated into any
particular paradigm, for as Nick Crossley suggests, "there is no
meaning which is not embodied, nor any matter that is not meaningful"
(Crossley 14). It should be clear from this that Merleau-Ponty's
statement that 'I am my body' cannot simply be interpreted as
advocating a materialist, behaviorist type position. He does not want
to deny or ignore those aspects of our life which are commonly called
the 'mental' – and what would be left if he did? – but he does want to
suggest that the use of this 'mind' is inseparable from our bodily,
situated, and physical nature. This means simply that the perceiving
mind is an incarnated body, or to put the problem in another way, he
enriches the concept of the body to allow it to both think and
perceive. It is also for these reasons that we are best served by
referring to the individual as not simply a body, but as a
body-subject.

Virtually the entirety of the Phenomenology of Perception is devoted
to illustrating that the body cannot be viewed solely as an object, or
material entity of the world. Perception has been a prominent theme in
Merleau-Ponty's attempts to establish this, and even in his latest
work, he still holds its primacy as our clearest relationship to
Being, and in which the inadequacy of dualistic thinking is most
explicitly revealed. However, despite the titles of two of his major
works (Phenomenology of Perception and The Primacy of Perception),
perception, at least as the term is usually construed, is
paradoxically enough, not really a guiding principle in his work. This
is because the practical modes of action of the body-subject are
inseparable from the perceiving body-subject (or at least mutually
informing), since it is precisely through the body that we have access
to the world. Perception hence involves the perceiving subject in a
situation, rather than positioning them as a spectator who has somehow
abstracted themselves from the situation. There is hence an
interconnection of action and perception, or as Merleau-Ponty puts it,
"every perceptual habituality is still a motor habit" (PP 153).

This ensures that there is no lived distinction between the act of
perceiving and the thing perceived. This will become clearer in his
later philosophy, where the figure of the chiasm becomes an important
ontological motif for explaining how and why this is the case. At this
stage however, it suffices to recognize that for Merleau-Ponty, "in
the natural attitude, I do not have perceptions" (PP 281). Moreover,
in the "Working Notes" of his final, unfinished work, The Visible and
the Invisible, he states that "we exclude the term perception to the
whole extent that it already implies a cutting up of what is lived
into discontinuous acts, or a reference to things whose status is not
specified, or simply an opposition between the visible and the
invisible" (VI 157-8). Hence, as Gary Madison has pointed out, "what
traditionally has been referred to as 'perception', no longer figures
in Merleau-Ponty's post-foundationalist mode of thinking" (MPHP 83).
To the degree that we can actually speak of Merleau-Ponty's account of
perception, it essentially suggests the same thing as the rest of his
work (and despite the incredible breadth and perspicacity of his work,
one cannot deny that the Phenomenology of Perception is repetitious);
it criticizes our tendency to bifurcate between two positions.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that;

"We started off from a world in itself which acted upon our eyes so as
to cause us to see it, and now we have consciousness of, or thought
about the world, but the nature of the world remains unchanged; it is
still defined by the absolute mutual exteriority of its parts, and is
merely duplicated throughout its extent by a thought which sustains
it" (PP 39).

In other words, the common perceptual paradigm that involves passively
seeing something and then interpreting that biological perception is,
for Merleau-Ponty, a false one. The presumption is still that one
exists either as a thing, or as a consciousness (PP 198), but the
perceiving body-subject conforms to neither of this positions; its
mode of existence is manifestly more complicated and ambiguous. As
hard as we may try, we cannot see the broken shards of a beer bottle
as simply the sum of its color, shape etc. The whole background
apparatus of what that bottle is used for, what consuming the liquids
contained therein means for different people, what it is for something
to be 'broken' etc, comes with, and not behind, our perception of that
bottle. For Merleau-Ponty, perception cannot be characterized as a
type of thought in a classical, reflective sense, but equally clearly,
it is also far from being a third person process where we attain
access to some rarefied, pure object. Just as for Heidegger we cannot
hear pure noise but always a noise of some activity, the objects that
we encounter in the world are always of a particular kind and relevant
to certain human intentions (explicit or otherwise), and we cannot
step outside this instrumentality to some realm of purified objects
or, for that matter, thought.

Perception then, is not merely passive before sensory stimulation, but
as Merleau-Ponty suggests, is a "creative receptivity". In this
respect, it is interesting to observe that our modern vernacular
incorporates this more 'active' and appropriative dimension of
perception. After all, one is often commended for 'perceptive'
observations, and for this to function as a compliment at all, it must
admit of an individual's creative influence, and hence some
responsibility, over the manner in which they perceive.

More empirically, it is also worth pointing out that if we were merely
passive before a sensory image, it would not be possible to see
different aspects of things as we so often do, or for that matter, for
different individuals to construe a particular representation
differently. Consider Jastrow's/Wittgenstein's famous example in which
a picture can be variously interpreted as a duck or a rabbit, or the
prominent psychological diagram that highlights the capacity of an
individual to see a vase at one moment and two faces confronting one
another at the next, depending upon which part of the diagram they
determine to be the background. These experiential studies seem to
reinforce Merleau-Ponty's fundamental point that we are not simply
passive before sensorial stimulation, since the visual experience
seems to change, and yet nothing changes optically with respect to
color, shape or distance. What we literally see, or notice, is hence
not simply the objective world, but is conditioned by a myriad of
factors that ensures that the relationship between perceiving subject
and object perceived is not one of exclusion. Rather, each term exists
only through its dialectical relation to the other, and from this
analysis of the perceiving body-subject, Merleau-Ponty enigmatically
concludes that "Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself" (PP 407).

For Merleau-Ponty, this inseparability of inner and outer ensures that
a study of the perceived ends up revealing the subject perceiving. As
he puts it, "the body will draw to itself the intentional threads
which bind it to its surroundings and finally will reveal to us the
perceiving subject as the perceived world" (PP). It is precisely this
ambiguous intertwining of inner and outer, as it is revealed in a
phenomenological analysis of the body, which the intellectualism of
philosophy cannot appreciate. According to Merleau-Ponty, philosophers
of reflection ignore the paradoxical condition of all human
subjectivity: that is, the fact that we are both a part of the world
and coextensive with it, constituting but also constituted (PP 453).

However, if perception is not grounded in either an objective or
subjective component (for example, it is not objectively received
before a subjective interpretation), but by a reciprocal openness
which resides between such categories, it may be remarked that this
would seem to endow perception with an instability that it clearly
doesn't have. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has the means to cater for
this stability though.

His analysis of the body's tendency to seek an equilibrium through
skilful coping, or what he somewhat problematically terms
"habituality," affirms how perception is learnt, primarily through
imitation, in an embodied and communal environment. While perception
is subject to change, just as communities can change over periods of
time, this possibility certainly does not allow for wild fluctuations
in perceptive experience from one moment to the next. Habit, and the
production of schemes in regards to the body's mobilization, "gives
our life the form of generality and prolongs our personal acts into
stable dispositions" (PP 146). This tendency of our body to seek its
own equilibrium and to form habits, is an infinitely important
component of Merleau-Ponty's body-subject, and it is a theme that we
will return to.

For the moment however, we must return to other manifestations of
Merleau-Ponty's argument for the body-subject. Another idea of central
significance for him is the fact that the body is always there, and
that its absence (and to a certain degree also its variation) is
inconceivable (PP 91). It means that we cannot treat the body as an
object available for perusal, which can or cannot be part of our
world, since it is not something that we can possibly do with out. It
is the mistake of classical psychology, not to mention the empiricism
of all sciences, that it treats the body as an object, when for
Merleau-Ponty, an object "is an object only insofar as it can be moved
away from me… Its presence is such that it entails a possible absence.
Now the permanence of my body is entirely different in kind" (PP 90).
It is inordinately difficult to fault this claim that the omnipresence
of our body prevents us treating it simply as an object of the world,
even though such an apparently axiomatic position is not always
recognized by traditional philosophy, as we have already seen
exemplified by both Descartes, and Pope John Paul II.

Another factor against conceiving of the body as being completely
constituted, and an object in-itself, is the fact that it is that by
which there are objects. Our motility, that is, our capability of
bodily movement, testifies that the body cannot be the mere servant of
consciousness, since "in order that we may be able to move our body
towards an object, the object must first exist for it, our body must
not belong to the realm of the in-itself" (PP 139). This Sartrean term
will be accorded with more significance as we progress, but for the
moment, one only need see that Merleau-Ponty is making explicit that
the aspects of an object revealed to an individual are dependent upon
their bodily position.

For him, it is also clear that we are not accorded quite the same
privilege in viewing our own bodies, as we have in viewing other
'objects'. For Merleau-Ponty, this is because "the presentation of
objects in perspective cannot be understood except through the
resistance of my body to all variation of perspective" (PP 92). We
cannot see our body as the other does, and as Merleau-Ponty says, "the
reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at the last
minute" (VI 9). I think it is relatively clear that we do need the
other to attain to true awareness of ourselves as a body-subject. Even
our vision of ourselves in a mirror is always mediated by body image,
and hence by the other, and it would seem that we can't look at our
own mirror image in quite the same way that we can appreciate the
appearance of others. These more existential aspects of our existence
suggest that there is something fundamentally true about
Merleau-Ponty's more general suggestion that our body should be
conceived of as our means of communication with the world, rather than
merely as an object of the world which our transcendent mind orders to
perform varying functions.

Merleau-Ponty offers one particularly good example of the body as a
means of communication, which also makes it clear that a
subject-object model of exchange tends to deprive the existential
phenomena of their true complexity. He suggests that:

"If I touch with my left hand my right hand while it touches an
object, the right hand object is not the right hand touching: the
first is an intertwining of bones, muscles and flesh bearing down on a
point in space, the second traverses space as a rocket in order to
discover the exterior object in its place" (PP 92).

More significantly, the hand touching itself represents the body's
capacity to occupy the position of both perceiving object and subject
of perception, if not at once, then in a constant oscillation.
However, as he puts it, "when I press my two hands together, it is not
a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects
placed side by side, but an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can
alternate the role of 'touching' and being 'touched'" (PP 93). Mark
Yount expresses Merleau-Ponty's point well, when he suggests that "the
reflexivity of this touching-touched exceeds the logic of dichotomy:
the two are not entirely distinguished, since the roles can be
reversed; but the two are not identical, since touching and touched
can never fully coincide" (MPHP 216-7). This double touching and
encroachment of the touching onto the touched (and vice versa), where
subject and object cannot be unequivocally discerned, is considered to
be representative of perception and sensibility generally. Pre-empting
the more explicit ontology of The Visible and the Invisible (and with
which we shall become increasingly concerned), Merleau-Ponty hence
tacitly argues for the "reversibility" of the body, its capacity to be
both sentient and sensible, and reaffirms his basic contention that
incarnate consciousness is the central phenomena of which mind and
body are abstract moments (PP 193).
a. Habit

However, Merleau-Ponty has another vitally important and related point
to make about the status of our bodies, which precludes them from
being categorized simply as objects. According to him, we move
directly and in union with our bodies. As he points out, "I do not
need to lead it (the body) towards a movement's completion, it is in
contact with it from the start and propels itself towards that end"
(PP 94, my italics). In other words, we do not need to check to see if
we have two legs before we stand up, since we are necessarily with our
bodies. The consequences of this simple idea however, are more
extensive than one may presume.

On a more complicated level, the sporting arena testifies to this
being with our bodies, as does the wave, or other gesture, that simply
responds to given circumstances without the intervention of
traditional philosophical conceptions of thought and/or intention. For
instance, the basketball player who says that they are "in the zone"
perceives the terrain in accordance with some general intentions, but
these are modified by the situation in which they find themselves.
Their actions are solicited by the situations that confront them, in a
constantly evolving way.

Interestingly enough, in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty also
makes use of a sporting analogy. He suggests that:

"For the player in action the football field is not an 'object', that
is, the ideal term which can give rise to a multiplicity of
perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent
transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the 'yard lines';
those which demarcate the penalty area) and articulated in sectors
(for example, the 'openings' between the adversaries) which call for a
certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if
the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him,
but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the
player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the goal, for
example just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of
his own body" (SB 168).

This passage implies that to perceive the football pitch it is not
necessary that an individual be aware of perceiving it, but this is
not the only significance of this revealed mode of being. The
perceptions/actions of the sportsperson reveal a form of intelligence
that informs much of our everyday interaction, and that refutes many
dichotomous positions (PP 142), most obvious among these being the
insistence that a separate act of interpretation (to determine a goal
or intention), is necessary to give action a meaningful form.
Moreover, Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of sporting activity also imply
that as we refine our skills for coping with existence (based upon
past experiences), scenarios show up as soliciting those acquired
skilful responses, and it is this aspect of his work that attracts
Hubert Dreyfus' attention. For Dreyfus, this "skilful coping does not
require a mental representation of its goal. It can be purposive
without the agent entertaining a purpose" and this pre-reflective mode
of existence reveals many of the postulations of dualistic thinking as
abstractions.

Moreover, if this purposive action without a purpose (other than best
accommodating oneself to the situation in which one is immersed), is
forestalled, say if a particular golfer starts to ponder the
intricacies of their swing, where their feet are positioned, mental
outlook etc, rather than simply responding, it is certainly probable
that they will lose form. So what, one may ask? According to
Merleau-Ponty, the point is that "whether a system of motor or
perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think', it is a
grouping of lived-through meanings which moves towards its
equilibrium" (PP 153). The emphasis upon rationalistic thought, and
its tendency to dissect human behavior through the 'I think', can
conspire to turn us away from the body's acclimatization to it's own
environment. Merleau-Ponty hence seems to explore a more basic
motivation for human action than is usually taken to be the case.
Rather than focusing upon our desire to attain certain pleasures or
achieve certain goals, his analysis reveals the body's more primordial
tendency to form intentional arcs, and to try and achieve an
equilibrium with the world.

Through reference to embodied activity, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear
that our actions, and the perceptions involved in those actions, are
largely habitual; learnt through imitation, and responsiveness within
an environment and to a community. Indeed, without such a
pre-reflective base, language-games would be unlearnable, and as
Wittgenstein was also beginning to do at virtually the same historical
moment (the early 1940's), Merleau-Ponty hence emphasizes the
philosophical importance of the act of learning, and by implication,
training. According to him, philosophy has generally been unable to
adequately address these phenomena (PP 142), and it is worth repeating
what I take to be an important sentence from the Phenomenology of
Perception. Merleau-Ponty suggests that empiricism and intellectualism
(the two logical outcomes of metaphysical thought), "are in agreement
in that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning, and
that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance,
that still empty but always determinate intention which is attention
itself" (PP 28).

This emphasis upon consciousness in the act learning, is also what
Dreyfus is intent on exploring in relation to Merleau-Ponty's
philosophy, and he agrees that in the act of learning, consciousness
is irremediably embodied. Dreyfus asks, "if everything is similar to
everything else in an indefinitely large number of ways, what
constrains the space of possible generalizations so that trial and
error learning has a chance of succeeding? Here is where the body
comes in". It is worth suggesting that this might apply equally if
everything is dissimilar, other to everything else – the body narrows
this disparate range of phenomena down, or more accurately, renders
them intelligible. Our skilful embodiment makes it possible for us to
encounter "more and more differentiated solicitations to act", and
enables us to react to situations, in ways that have previously proved
successful, and which do not require purposive thought.

However, in order to begin to fathom what Dreyfus' "embodied
solicitations to act" might involve, it is worth contemplating the
suggestion of another commentator, who also emphasizes the importance
of the body in learning:

"Movements of the body are developed almost without conscious effort,
in most cases. There seems to be a sort of intelligence of the body: a
new dance is learned without analyzing the sequence of movements.
Children learn dances very easily and well… This is also the reason
why habits can be formed: the body seems to have understood and
retained the new meaning" (Barral 137).

From this description, we can ascertain that it is usually not through
conscious reflection and analysis that a dance or other language-game
is learnt, but through repeated embodied efforts that are modified
until the "right" movements are achieved. This intelligence of the
body (for example, its capacity to innovate and retain new meaning),
again denies the heavy emphasis that much of the philosophical
tradition has placed upon interpretation, and certainly any conception
of interpretation that contrasts itself with a purely passive
perception. This can also be envisaged as applying just as well to the
intellectual, as it does to the dancer. In reacting to their own
different, but nevertheless distinct set of influences, they still
choose modes of action in relation to past success. Even in the most
apparently 'thoughtful' of activities, the body inclines itself
towards an equilibrium.

It is worth making explicit that this habit to which we are referring,
is far from being merely a mechanistic or behaviorist propensity to
pursue a certain line of action. Our habitual mode of being is
constantly being altered (in however small a way), and the point is
that habit is far more akin to a competence, or a "flexible skill, a
power of action and reaction" (Crossley 12), which can be mobilied
under different conditions to achieve different effects (PP 143).
However, we may want to ask, as Merleau-Ponty does, "if habituality is
neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what is it
then?" According to him, "it is knowledge in the hands, which is
forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated
in detachment from that effort" (PP 144). Merleau-Ponty suggests that
this type of "knowledge in the hands" is primordial, and he implies
that if we completely detach ourselves from this habitual base, we
risk embarking upon philosophic and scientific endeavors that are of
no practical benefit, and that might also artificially serve to
legitimize the mind-body dualism.

Another good example of this practical and embodied intelligence that
Merleau-Ponty insistently points us towards, is the driving of a car.
We are intimately aware of how a particular car's gearshift needs to
be treated, its ability to turn, accelerate, brake etc, and
importantly, also of the dimensions of the vehicle. When we reflect on
our own parking, it is remarkable that there are so few little bumps
considering how many times we are actually forced to come very close.
Indeed, even when reversing many drivers need not really monitor the
progress of their car, because they 'know' (in the sense of a harmony
between aim and intention) what result the various movements of the
steering wheel are likely to induce. The car is absorbed into our body
schema with almost the same precision that we have regarding our own
spatiality. It becomes an "area of sensitivity" which extends "the
scope and active radius of the touch" (PP 143) and rather than
thinking about the car, it is more accurate to suggest that we think
from the point of view of the car, and consequently also perceive our
environment in a different way (Crossley 12). Notably, this thinking
is not reflective or interpretive – we do not have to perceive the
distance to a car park, and then reflect upon the fact that we are in
a car of such and such proportions, before the delicate maneuver can
be attempted. Rather, it is a practical mastery of a technique which
ensures that the given rules can be followed blindly (or at least
without reflective thought), and yet nevertheless with an embodied
intelligence.

In one paragraph from the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
captures the issues at hand particularly well. He observes that:

"We said earlier that it is the body which "understands" in the
acquisition of habituality. This way of putting it will appear absurd,
if understanding is subsuming a sense datum under an idea, and if the
body is an object. But the phenomenon of habituality is just what
prompts us to revise our notion of "understand" and our notion of the
body. To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at
and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the
body is our anchorage in the world" (PP 144).

In this paragraph, Merleau-Ponty defines understanding as a harmony
between what we aim at and what is given, between intention and
performance, and this also sheds some light upon his suggestion that
consciousness is primarily not a matter of "I think that", but of "I
can" (PP 137). Action in this paradigm is spontaneous and practical,
and it is clear that we move phenomenally in a manner somewhat
antithetical to the mind-body distinction (PP 145).

However, it is worth pointing out that while habit and the tendency to
seek an equilibrium might help us adjust to the circumstances of our
world, they don't simply make things easy. For Merleau-Ponty, "what
enables us to centre our existence is also what prevents us from
centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is inseparably
both freedom and servitude" (PP 85). Merleau-Ponty's point seems to be
that though the body searches for equilibrium, as a mortal and
temporal body it is also precluded from perpetual equilibrium (cf PP
346).

Merleau-Ponty's claim that knowing is far from an imperative for human
action will be considered in greater detail throughout, but for the
moment it is more important to consider some other consequences of his
account of embodiment, particularly in relation to his suggestion that
we move spontaneously, and pre-reflectively, in accord with our
bodies. According to his version of the pre-reflective cogito, when
one motions towards a friend to come nearer, there is no preceding or
ancillary thought prepared within me which motivates my action (PP
111). I do not perceive a certain signal in my mind and then decide to
act on it, or if I do, it is a rare and derivative occurrence.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the immense difference posited by the
philosophical tradition between thinking and perceiving (and of
course, mind and body), is hence revealed as a mistake.

However, this suggestion that pre-reflective existence does not
require interpretation, or any prior formulation of intention, is an
important one and deserving of prolonged consideration. Insisting that
we cannot discern an interior state that precedes the expression of
that state, Merleau-Ponty suggests that "I am not in front of my body,
I am in it or rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation
in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say
that it interprets itself" (PP 150). One would struggle to envisage a
much closer relationship to the body than that, and Merleau-Ponty
elsewhere goes so far as to suggest that:

"Nothing is changed when the subject is charged with interpreting his
reactions himself, which is what is proper to introspection. When he
is asked if he can read the letters inscribed on a panel or
distinguish the details of a shape, he will not trust a vague
"impression of legibility". He will attempt to read or describe what
is presented to him" (SB 183).

According to Merleau-Ponty then, there is no 'mental' correlate of
reading that makes it possible to definitively know that reading is
taking place. Faced with the demand that they prove that they have
actually read, an individual can only refer, with circularity, to the
words that have read themselves, repeating what is in front of him or
her. If further justification is demanded, eventually one can respond
only by pointing out that "this is simply what I do", and that these
are the practices that I engage in.

Refusing to accord the 'mental' any privileged status, Merleau-Ponty
even suggests that:

"If I try to study love or hate purely from inner observation, I will
find very little to describe: a few pangs, a few heart throbs – in
short, trite agitations which do not reveal the essence of love or
hate… We must reject the prejudice which makes "inner realities" out
of love, hate or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness:
the person who feels them. Anger, shame, hate and love are not psychic
facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types
of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside"
(SNS 52-3).

Human subjectivity is no longer conceived of as residing in an
inaccessible, private domain of the 'mental'. Rather, Merleau-Ponty's
notion of the body-subject entails an affirmation of public and
surface interaction, and of the physiognomic qualities of our bodies.
This does not preclude deep feelings, but merely suggests that they
must necessarily be manifested in our public lives. A disturbance
aroused in the affective life of an individual will have correlative
repercussions in the physical, perceptive, and expressive life of that
person. This will obviously have significant ramifications for how we
conceive of relationships with the other, but these are not merely
flippant remarks designed only to refute intellectualism and
empiricism. Merleau-Ponty has thought through the consequences and
recognizes, for example, that the Japanese express the emotion of love
in significantly different ways to the archetypal French or Australian
citizen. But for him this cultural variance, "or to be more precise,
this difference of behavior, corresponds to a difference in the
emotions themselves. It is not only the gesture that is contingent in
relation to the body's organization, it is the manner itself in which
we meet the situation and live it…. Feelings and passional conduct are
invented like words" (PP 189).

This quote is slightly misleading, because Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
of situation does not want to suggest that either passional conduct,
or words for that matter, can simply be constructed from nothing by a
self-actualized individual. The word invention, which seems to imply
an individual inventing something, is the problematic term here. Both
passional conduct and words however, are invented, but by a community,
and hence subtend any individual existence.
b. Philosophy and Reflection

However, for some critics Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body-subject,
and his emphasis upon the intentional arc that inclines one towards an
equilibrium and tacitly suggests the derivative nature of thought and
interpretation, induces a picture of humanity that is too easy, and
not reflective enough. There is, after all, a tendency to interpret
his position as being an advocacy of simple, spontaneous relations,
and a nostalgic desire for some primordial inherence in Being. It has
been suggested that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology does not give the
required amount of attention to reflection, and other factors that
might complicate this spontaneous, pre-reflective state.

On the other hand, it might also be claimed that not only can
Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of situation accommodate rationality, it
also consigns it to its proper place. While in many ways his
philosophy does affirm the primacy of perception (broadly construed to
incorporate the practical action that it cannot be distinguished
from), this doesn't simply come at the cost of sacrificing the
validity of rational processes. Rather, it attempts to ground them in
our situation, and to reinforce that reflection should not feign
ignorance of its origins in perceptual experience. His point is simply
that the "I can" precedes and conditions the possibility of the "I
know" (PP 137). As Merleau-Ponty states, there is "a privilege of
reason, but precisely in order to understand it properly, we must
begin by replacing thought amongst the phenomena of perception" (PrP
222).

Analytic thought, and philosophy per se, can and should be used to
render pre-reflective experience intelligible, for as he points out:

"It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of
reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total
situation, which involves reference from the one to the other. What is
given is not a massive and opaque world, or a universe of adequate
thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of the
world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, reflects back
to it only its own light" (VI 35).

Indeed, despite the nostalgic yearning that Merleau-Ponty occasionally
seems to have for a primordial union with the world, he nevertheless
makes it clear that one never returns to immediate experience. It is
only a question of whether we are to try to understand it, and he
believes that to attempt to express immediate experience is not to
betray reason but, on the contrary, to work towards its
aggrandizement. Philosophy is hence a means to improve our ways of
living, and reason has a role in this, providing that it is based in
the phenomenological exigencies of the subject and their life-world.
While his philosophy is poised on the margins of philosophy and
non-philosophy, it is not anti-philosophical in any respect.
c. Ambiguity

Moreover, Merleau-Ponty does not intend to suggest that the complicity
of body and mind that we see in habit and the mastery of a certain
technique, implies an absolute awareness of one's own 'subjectivity'.
According to him, "there is the absolute certitude of the world in
general, but not of anything in particular" (PP 344). Knowing an
individual person in a particular manifestation may presuppose an
understanding of humanity in its totality, but certainly not any
singular motivation for a particular act. Lived relations can never be
grasped perfectly by consciousness, since the body-subject is never
entirely present-to-itself. Meaningful behavior is lived through,
rather than thematized and reflected upon, and this ensures that the
actions of particular individuals "may be meaningful without them
being fully or reflectively aware of the meaning that their action
creates or embodies. In this sense, the behaving actor is not a
fully-fledged subject in the Cartesian sense. She is not fully
transparent to herself" (Crossley 12). There is ambiguity then,
precisely because we are not capable of disembodied reflection upon
our activities, but are involved in an intentional arc that absorbs
both our body and our mind (PP 136). For Merleau-Ponty, both
intellectualism and empiricism presuppose "a universe perfectly
explicit in itself" (PP 41), but residing between these two positions,
his body-subject actually requires ambiguity and, in a sense,
indeterminacy.

According to Merleau-Ponty, ambiguity prevails both in my perception
of things, and in the knowledge I have of myself, primarily because of
our temporal situation which he insists cannot but be ambiguous. He
suggests that:

"My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of
my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully
understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be
one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in
its turn, further developments in order to be understood" (PP 346 cf
426).

In such sentiments Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that the
relationship that we have to ourselves is one that is always typified
by alterity, on account of a temporal explosion towards the future
that precludes us ever being self-present. [The term "alterity" is
basically synonymous with otherness and radical difference, but it
also emphasizes change and transformation in a way that these terms
might not.] There can be no self-enclosed "now" moment because time
also always has this reflexive aspect that is aware of itself, and
that opens us to experiences beyond our particular horizons of
significance. Indeed, it is because of this temporal alterity, that
Merleau-Ponty asserts that we can never say 'I' absolutely (PP 208).
Rather, he suggests, "I know myself only insofar as I am inherent in
time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity"
(PP 345). Elsewhere in the Phenomenology of Perception he goes on to
imply that the subject is time and time is the subject (PP 431-2), and
these sentiments are not that far from certain 'postmodern'
conceptions of subjectivity.

Moreover, the attempt to take seriously the notion of ambiguity would,
or at least should, also involve the deconstruction of what is termed
the 'metaphysics of presence'. Being the "mark of a thought which is
resolutely attempting to overcome oppositional thinking itself" (MPHP
120), Merleau-Ponty's emphasis upon ambiguity, if consistently adhered
to, would seem capable of refuting the various readings of him that
assert that he is overly preoccupied with presence.

Mary Barral puts Merleau-Ponty's point exceedingly well, when she
suggests that "since we cannot remain in the alternative of either not
understanding the subject, or of knowing nothing about the object, we
must seek the object at the very heart of our experience… to
understand the paradox that there is a "for-us" of the "in-itself"
(Barral 130 cf PP 71). In other words, we must attain an understanding
of what Merleau-Ponty describes elsewhere as "the paradox of
transcendence in immanence" (PrP 16) – that is, to understand that
objects are given over to us, influenced by us, just as we are
influenced by the objects that surround us. For Merleau-Ponty, this
interdependence and mutual encroachment is evident in all aspects of
perception and subjectivity. As he makes clear, "whenever I try to
understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes
too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it (S 15). In the
concluding words of the Phenomenology of Perception he insists that
"man is a network of relations" (PP 456), or "man is a knot of
relations", depending upon the translation, and the strong implication
of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is that this is not a knot (or network)
of the Gordian variety, and that these relations are not something
that we can, or even should, want to unravel. The interdependence of
the knot is what gives humanity its very qualities, and by dissecting
it, we risk losing the very thing that establishes us as human.

But I think this point is best explored by Merleau-Ponty when he
describes how in writing his philosophical texts, he might not
necessarily have a precise idea of exactly where his discussion is
leading but, "as if by magic", the words flow from him and slowly
become a cogent whole (PP 177). This is not to be dismissed as merely
being symptomatic of a supposed continental lack of philosophical
rigor. All papers, analytic or otherwise, are not written in the head,
entirely worked out, before they are laid down. The process of laying
them down inevitably effects alterations. Merleau-Ponty embraces this
aspect of writing, and he doesn't consider it merely the derivative
attempt to faithfully transcribe some self-present thought. However,
there is also the further point that where exactly the written
creation derives from (the particular word, as much as the whole book)
is a fundamentally ambiguous point, since it is neither the
self-present subject, nor the cultural world, which determines the
product, but the knot, the sum relation of all networks.

Again, this also necessitates a certain ambiguity at the heart of our
experience. Trying to discern what is a legitimate authentic project
of the self, which is not induced by the demands of one's society, is
infinitely difficult. Indeed, it is not a possibility for
Merleau-Ponty and because of its overtones of an unattainable
individualism, he refused to use the existential concept of
authenticity for his entire career. But he would not want to say that
something like, but slightly different from authenticity (that is, an
individual coming to terms with their own situation in an empowering
way), is an impossibility. In many ways, this is a primary ethical
demand of his. Finally however, this ambiguity at the heart of our
experience will always be there and an authentic path is not one that
we consciously choose by attempting to ensure that we are the only
origin of our projects, somehow attempting what he contends is
impossible; that is, the transcending of our environment. Rather,
Merleau-Ponty's suggestion is that circumstances point us to, and in
fact, allow us to find a way (PP 456). The human situation is both a
product of the 'mind' and our socio-historical situation, and moral
achievement is a tenuous embrace of these facts.
3. Later Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty died before he had the opportunity to complete The
Visible and the Invisible, which was intended to be a text of some
considerable proportions. He left us with three reasonably complete
chapters, as well as his "Working Notes" for the remainder of this
book, and from these two sources it is apparent that his thought had
undergone some transformations. However, opinions vary widely as to
the extent of these changes. Indeed, it is worth recalling that in an
essay that was unpublished in his own lifetime, Merleau-Ponty
describes his philosophical career as falling into two distinct
phases: he tells us that the first phase of his work – up to and
including the Phenomenology of Perception – involved an attempt to
restore the world of perception and to affirm the primacy of the
pre-reflective cogito. In other words, in this period of his work he
was intent on emphasizing an inherence in the world that is more
fundamental than our thinking/reflective capacities. The second
distinct phase of his work, which refers predominantly to The Visible
and the Invisible as well as to the abandoned Prose of the World, is
characterized as an attempt "to show how communication with others,
and thought, take up and go beyond the realm of perception" (EW
367-8). This is important for several reasons, not least that it
suggests a fairly major change in direction. The idea that
communication with others goes beyond the realm of perception, is
sufficiently radical to put him at odds with at least a certain
definition of phenomenology.

Ostensibly in opposition to this type of characterisation, Martin
Dillon's book Merleau-Ponty's Ontology has emphasized that these two
periods of Merleau-Ponty's career are actually intimately connected.
Dillon downplays the significance of quotes from Merleau-Ponty like
that which has just been cited, and instead insists that The Visible
and the Invisible is primarily concerned with bringing the results of
the earlier work, which are often primarily psychological, to their
ontological explication. Merleau-Ponty has also suggested similar
things at times (cf VI 176), and according to this type of account,
the ontology of his later philosophy was already implied in his
earlier works.

Despite agreeing with the broad outlines of this position, there are
nevertheless some problems with such a characterization that suggest
that the truth of this dispute might lie somewhere between these
respective accounts. The more radical aspects of The Visible and the
Invisible are ignored by the view that conflates these two major
periods, and Merleau-Ponty's treatment of Sartre's work in his two
main texts (VI and PP) also seems to be importantly different. It is
however, more for exegetical than philosophical reasons that I have
separated out Merleau-Ponty's thought into two major periods.
a. The Critique of the Phenomenology of Perception

Before we begin to examine his final attempt to circumvent the
subject-object dichotomy, it is first necessary to get some idea as to
why Merleau-Ponty thought his philosophy had to change. Basically his
main criticism of the Phenomenology of Perception is that it remains
confined within a philosophy of consciousness, or a philosophy of mind
paradigm. He thinks that to a certain extent the Phenomenology of
Perception remains Cartesian, in that it starts from the position of
the reflecting philosopher in his or her ivory tower. Merleau-Ponty
suggests that this starting point presupposes a subject doing the
reflection, and it hence has an element of humanism about it.

More importantly however, he suggests that this starting point also
means that the problems he raises are largely insoluble, as he never
quite gets away from a subject/object dichotomy. If it is unclear what
all of these references to a subject-object dichotomy mean, I am
simply pointing out the tendency in Western philosophy to posit that
which is seen within the field of vision as an object, whereas that
which looks, or does the perceiving, is the subject. Various versions
of this type of thought have recurred throughout the tradition, and
this partly explains the tendency that we have to think in terms of
things in the world (for example, empirical objects or facts), and the
human capacity to reflect upon these brute things of the world, and
hence transcend them. We generally maintain a very distinct difference
between ourselves and the objects of the world – say the seat upon
which we sit – and it might be suggested that we are free, and they
are determined, for instance. Or even if one does not want to assert
that human activity is predominantly reflective (and usually this
amounts to saying that it is free), philosophers and most of us
generally, think in terms of the difference between the empirical fact
of what we did, and our reason which transcends this behavior. This
object/consciousness distinction is a dualism.

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the
Phenomenology of Perception was ultimately unsuccessful in getting
beyond this dualistic way of thinking. Of course, there is little
doubt that Merleau-Ponty is a little bit harsh in regards to his
retrospective accounts of his earlier philosophy, and is also
simplifying matters if he wants us to believe that the Phenomenology
of Perception doesn't significantly problematize this subject-object
dichotomy, and any of philosophies other traditional dualisms.

What is clear however, is that The Visible and the Invisible does
attempt to effect a transition from something like a phenomenology of
consciousness (which is basically just an analysis of how the objects
we perceive present themselves to us), to a philosophy of Being. Being
is another of those words in philosophy that is frequently thrown
around, but perhaps relatively rarely understood. This is partly
because it is not something that we can pin down or define, because it
exceeds all of our resources for attempting to describe it. Let us
suggest, hesitatingly, that Being is that which allows existence to be
possible at all, and Merleau-Ponty becomes increasingly concerned with
such matters.

This move away from a subject-based philosophy also has some important
consequences for the type of philosophy that he was interested in
writing. No longer is his work so strictly an analysis of
phenomenological subjectivity, and this means that in some ways The
Visible and the Invisible is a little harder to get into than his
earlier work. It is not existential in the sense that the
Phenomenology of Perception is. This earlier text is typified by
numerous phenomenological descriptions of our everyday activity and
the situations that confront us, and his later work is more concerned
with ontological matters.

Ontology just means the study of Being, of that which allows things to
be at all, and it is this type of terrain that Merleau-Ponty moves
into. One could even suggest that The Visible and the Invisible gives
the results of the Phenomenology of Perception their ontological
significance. In that sense, the subject influenced, and often
psychological thinking of his earlier work, would be revealed as also
presupposing an account of the structure of Being, which only later
came to be elaborated. It is apparent however, that his thought his
changed to the extent that the notion of subjectivity, and its
controlling place, is further diminished. References to the
body-subject are also conspicuously absent in his later philosophy,
and he seems to have decided that such terminology is inadequate. The
consequences of this move away from a subjective orientation will
become more apparent when we consider his ontology later in this
essay.

Merleau-Ponty also makes one other important comment about the
Phenomenology of Perception, and his reasons for writing a new
ontology, which is worth exploring. According to him, a major factor
behind him setting out upon this different path, was the conviction
that the tacit or pre-reflective cogito of his earlier philosophy is
problematic (VI 179). The pre-reflective cogito is basically just the
idea that there is a cogito before language, or to put it crudely,
that there is a self anterior to both language and thought that we can
aim to get in closer contact with. The notion of a pre-reflective
cogito hence presumes the possibility of a consciousness without
language, and it exhibits something of a nostalgic desire to return to
some brute, primordial experience. This is something that thinkers
like Irigiray have criticized Merleau-Ponty for, and in The Visible
and the Invisible he has come to share these type of concerns.

In his own words, he suggests that while this concept of the
pre-reflective, or tacit cogito, can make understood how language is
not impossible, it nevertheless cannot make understood how it is
possible (VI 179). While a logician might grimace at such a
suggestion, Merleau-Ponty is certainly aware of this paradox, and
seeks to explicate the problems that he associates with this concept
of the tacit cogito. He suggests that like all other philosophies of
consciousness, his notion of the pre-reflective cogito depends upon
the illusion of non-linguistic signification and The Visible and The
Invisible attempts to call into question the very coherence of such a
concept. As he states in one of his "Working Notes":

"What I call the tacit cogito is impossible. To have the idea of
thinking (in the sense of thought of seeing and thought of feeling),
to make the phenomenological reduction to the things themselves, to
return to immanence and to consciousness, it is necessary to have
words. It is by the combination of words that I form the
transcendental attitude" (VI 171).

He later goes on to speak of the "mythology of self-consciousness to
which the word consciousness refers", and contends that "there are
only differences between significations" and language (VI 171).

According to Merleau-Ponty, the tacit cogito is therefore a product of
language, and the language of the philosopher, in particular. He
continues to speak of a world of silence, but the concept of the
pre-reflective cogito imports the language of the philosophy of
consciousness into the equation, and hence misrepresents the
relationship between vision and speech. The famous phenomenological
reduction to the things themselves, which tries to bracket out the
outside world, is hence envisaged as a misplaced nostalgia rather than
as a real possibility.

There is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty's giving up on the
pre-reflective cogito also entails something like a giving up on
phenomenology, despite the fact that embodiment is still a major
factor in The Visible and the Invisible. By way of clarification, it
is worth noting that he still thinks that an analysis of the body is
one of the best ways to avoid the subject-object dichotomy that he
argues is typical of most philosophical thought. At the same time
however, his abandonment of the idea of a pre-reflective cogito, or
consciousness before linguistic significance, at the very least serves
to radicalize phenomenology. It also means that language comes to play
a far more important role in his philosophy than it previously had.

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty used both linguistics, and the language-based
emphasis of structuralism to critique Sartre, among other of his
contemporaries, who only accorded language a minimal role in their
philosophies. He was also friends with, and used the work of people
like Jacques Lacan (a psychoanalyst who suggested that the unconscious
is structured like a language), Claude Levi-Strauss (a structuralist
anthropologist who dedicated his major work The Savage Mind to the
memory of Merleau-Ponty), and also Ferdinand De Saussure (a linguist
who showed what a pivotal role differences play in language, and whose
work has inspired many recent philosophers including Derrida).
Merleau-Ponty was hence very much involved in what is termed the
linguistic turn, and one curious aspect of Merleau-Ponty's place
within the philosophical tradition is that despite the enduring
attention he accords to the problem of language, the work of thinkers
such as those cited above, and others who have been inspired by them
(Derrida and Foucault for example), has been used to criticize him. In
an important way, he paradoxically laid the groundwork for his own
denigration and unfashionability in French intellectual circles, and
it is only in the last 15 years that it has been realized that his
phenomenology took very seriously the claims of such thinkers, and
even pre-empted some aspects of what has come to be termed
'postmodern' thought. Levi-Strauss actually finds The Visible and the
Invisible to be a synthesis of structuralism with phenomenology, and
he is not alone in this regard.
b. The Chiasm/Reversibility

Rather than maintaining a traditional dualism in which mind and body,
subject and object, self and other, and so forth, are discrete and
separate entities, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty
argues that there is an important sense in which such pairs are also
associated. For example, he does not dispute that there is a
divergence, or dehiscence, in our embodied situation that is evident
in the difference that exists between touching and being touched,
between looking and being looked at, or between the sentient and the
sensible in his own vocabulary. On the contrary, this divergence is
considered to be a necessary and constitutive factor in allowing
subjectivity to be possible at all. However, he suggests that rather
than involving a simple dualism, this divergence between touching and
being touched, or between the sentient and the sensible, also allows
for the possibility of overlapping and encroachment between these two
terms.

For example, Merleau-Ponty has somewhat famously suggested that the
experience of touching cannot be understood without reference to the
tacit potential for this situation to be reversed. As Thomas Busch
points out, The Visible and the Invisible highlights that "in the
body's touching of itself is found a differentiation and an
encroachment which is neither sheer identity nor non-identity" (MPHP
110). To substantiate this claim in adequate detail would take us too
far afield of this essay's main concerns, but it is important to
recognize that Merleau-Ponty's initial, and I think permissible
presumption, is that we can never simultaneously touch our right hand
while it is also touching an object of the world. He suggests that
"either my right hand really passes over into the rank of the touched,
but then its hold on the world is interrupted, or it retains its hold
on the world, but then I do not really touch it" (VI 148). There is
then, a gap (or ecart in French) between ourselves as touching and
ourselves as touched, a divergence between the sentient and sensible
aspects of our existence, but this gap is importantly distinct from
merely reinstating yet another dualism. Touching and touched are not
simply separate orders of being in the world, since they are
reversible, and this image of our left hand touching our right hand
does more than merely represent the body's capacity to be both
perceiving object and subject of perception in a constant oscillation
(as is arguably the case in Sartre's looked at, looked upon,
dichotomy, as well as the master-slave oscillations that such a
conception induces). As Merleau-Ponty suggests:

"I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a
moment be touching… In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right
hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the
incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust
towards things in order to explore them. The body tries… to touch
itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible
reflection" (PP 93).

This suggests that the hand that we touch, while it is touching an
inanimate object, is hence not merely another such 'object', but
another fleshy substance that is capable of reversing the present
situation and being mobile and even aggressive. Given that we cannot
touch ourselves, or even somebody else, without this recognition of
our own tangibility and capacity to be touched by others, it seems
that the awareness of what it feels like to be touched encroaches, or
even supervenes upon the experience of touching (VI 147). Any absolute
distinction between being in the world as touching, and being in the
world as touched, deprives the existential phenomena of their true
complexity. Our embodied subjectivity is never located purely in
either our tangibility or in our touching, but in the intertwining of
these two aspects, or where the two lines of a chiasm intersect with
one another. The chiasm then, is simply an image to describe how this
overlapping and encroachment can take place between a pair that
nevertheless retains a divergence, in that touching and touched are
obviously never exactly the same thing.

According to Merleau-Ponty, these observations also retain an
applicability that extends well beyond the relationship that obtains
between touching and being touched. He contends that mind and body (VI
247, 259), the perceptual faith and its articulation (VI 93), subject
and object, self and world (VI 123), as well as many other related
dualisms, are all associated chiasmically, and he terms this
interdependence of these various different notions the flesh (VI
248-51). The rather radical consequences of this intertwining become
most obvious when Merleau-Ponty sets about describing the interactions
of this embodied flesh. At one stage in The Visible and the Invisible
he suggests that the realization that the world is not simply an
object:

"does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on
the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body
in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my
body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or
encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well
as we into the things" (VI 123).

According to Merleau-Ponty then, this non-dualistic divergence between
touching and being touched, which necessitates some form of
encroachment between the two terms, also means that the world is
capable of encroaching upon and altering us, just as we are capable of
altering it. Such an ontology rejects any absolute antinomy between
self and world, as well as any notion of subjectivity that prioritizes
a rational, autonomous individual, who is capable of imposing their
choice upon a situation that is entirely external to them. To put the
problem in Sartrean terms, while it may sometimes prove efficacious to
distinguish between transcendence and facticity [a technical term of
Martin Heidegger's that in Merleau-Ponty's usage refers to the sum of
brute "facts" about us, including our social situation and our
physical attributes, abilities and circumstances], or Being-for-itself
and Being-in-itself, Merleau-Ponty thinks that such notions also
overlap in such a way as to undermine any absolute difference between
these two terms. As a consequence, Sartre's conception of an absolute
freedom in regards to a situation is also rendered untenable by the
recognition of the ways in which self and world are chiasmically
intertwined, though this is not to suggest that the world can be
reduced to us. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty explicitly asserts that precisely
what is rarely considered is this paradoxical fact that though we are
of the world, we are nevertheless not the world (VI 127), and in
affirming the interdependence of humanity and the 'things' of the
world in a way that permits neither fusion nor absolute distance, he
advocates an embodied inherence of a different type.
c. The Other

Given that he rarely makes any distinction between the structure of
our relations with others and the structure of our relations with the
world, his descriptions also pertain directly to the problem of the
other, which has come to be accorded of lot of attention in recent
times under the auspices of what is frequently termed alterity.
Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic ontology ensures that in some sense the other
is always already intertwined within the subject, and he explicitly
suggests that self and non-self are but the obverse and reverse of
each other (VI 83, 160). If I can present his position a little
schematically, basically his later philosophy attempts to reinforce
that self and other are also relationally constituted via their
potential reversibility. One example of this might be the way in which
looking at another person – or even a painter looking at trees,
according to one of Merleau-Ponty's more enigmatic examples – always
also involves the tacit recognition that we too can be looked at.
However, rather than simply oscillating between these two modes of
being – looker and looked upon, as Sartrean philosophy would have it –
for Merleau-Ponty each experience is betrothed to the other in such a
way that we are never simply a disembodied looker, or a transcendental
consciousness. Rather, the alterity of the other's look is always
already involved in us, and rather than unduly exalting alterity by
positing it as forever elusive, or as recognizable only as freedom
that transcends my freedom, he instead affirms an interdependence of
self and other that involves these categories overlapping and
intertwining with one another, but without ever being reduced to each
other. One consequence of Merleau-Ponty's position is that questions
regarding the otherness of the other are rendered something of an
abstraction, at least if they attempt to conceive of that other
without reference to the subjectivity with which it is always
chiasmically intertwined. As Dorothy Olkowski has suggested, "if there
is to be room in the world for others as others, there must be some
connection between self and other that exceeds purely psychic life"
(Olkowski 4), and this is envisaged as an ontological necessity rather
than an attempt to propound a thesis that restores us to the
primordial affection that we have for the other. For Merleau-Ponty, a
responsible treatment of alterity consists in recognizing that
alterity is always already intertwined within subjectivity, rather
than by obscuring this fact by projecting a self-present individual
who is confronted by an alterity that is essentially inaccessible and
beyond comprehension. Far from merely being a negative thing, the
alterity of the other is too complicated to simply be posited as that
which will forever elude us, and such a description ignores the
important ways in which self and other are partially intertwined.

In The Visible and the Invisible then, there is a tacit claim
regarding what a responsible treatment of the alterity of the other
consists in, even if Merleau-Ponty rarely considers notions like
responsibility in any explicit fashion. His final ontology wants to
insist that alterity is something that can only be appreciated in
being encountered, and in a recognition of the fact that there can be
no absolute alterity. If absolute alterity is but a synonym of death,
and inconceivable to humanity, then what needs to be considered,
according to Merleau-Ponty, is the paradoxical way in which self and
other are intertwined, and yet also, and at the same time, divergent.

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty is also careful not to fall prey to what has
been termed, sometimes disparagingly, the horizonality of
phenomenology. He devotes an entire chapter titled "Interrogation and
Intuition" to distancing himself from this tendency of phenomenology –
which he traces to Hegel, Husserl and Bergson – to subsume all else
under the concept of context and background. Engendering a coincidence
between self and world (or self and other), is just as antithetical to
his philosophical purposes as advocating a vast abyssal difference,
and Merleau-Ponty asserts that when we are overly sure of the other,
just as when we are overly unsure of the other, an inadequate
apprehension of human relations beckons. For Merleau-Ponty, alterity
is that which cannot be reduced to the logic of an either/or, as he
doesn't want to espouse a Sartrean version of human relations where
the other can never really be understood, and yet nor does his
philosophy reductively ignore this alterity. He suggests that: "this
infinite distance, this absolute proximity express in two ways – as a
soaring over or as fusion – the same relationship with the thing
itself. They are two positivisms…" (VI 127), indeed, neither of which
he wants to associate with his new ontology.

In an attempt to avoid this dualistic tendency to conceive of the
other as either beyond the comprehension of a subject, or as
domesticated by the subject and their horizons of significance, The
Visible and the Invisible emphasizes that the other is always already
encroaching upon us, though they are not reducible to us, and for
Merleau-Ponty, the risk of this overlapping with the other can and
should always be there (VI 123). His philosophy consistently alludes
to the manner in which this encroachment is not simply a bad thing.
For Merleau-Ponty, interacting with and influencing the other (even
contributing to permanently changing them), does not necessarily
constitute a denial of their alterity. On the contrary, if done
properly it in fact attests to it, because we are open to the
possibility of being influenced and changed by the difference that
they bring to bear upon our interaction with them. This is the ethics
that his ontology of the flesh tacitly presupposes, and it is a
position that is importantly different from those proposed by more
recent philosophers, including Sartre, Levinas and Derrida
respectively.
d. Hyper-Reflection

Before themes like the death of philosophy, and the non-space of
philosophy began to dominate the philosophical landscape,
Merleau-Ponty had already begun to articulate a similar problem,
though arguably without sharing quite the same nihilistic consequences
that some more recent proponents of a similar position have found
themselves implicated in. Harboring a deep distrust of the philosophy
of reflection, Merleau-Ponty sought to ensure that reflection was not
unduly exalted in the Phenomenology of Perception, and The Visible and
the Invisible reaffirms this contention, albeit in slightly different
terms, through his espoused methodology of "hyper-reflection," which
is also synonymously referred to as a "hyper-dialectic." There are
several aspects of this notion that require delineation, but the most
obvious of these pertains to the role of philosophy, and precisely
what he thinks it can accomplish.

At one stage in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty rather
controversially claims that in the philosopher's descriptions of the
sensible world, "there is no longer identity between the lived
experience and the principle of non-contradiction" (VI 87).
Merleau-Ponty's apparent disavowal of the law of non-contradiction
requires further consideration, as it challenges one of the most
fundamental principles of Western philosophy since Aristotle. In
explaining his rejection of this principle, he suggests that:

"The situation of the philosopher who speaks as distinct from what he
speaks of, insofar as that situation affects what he says with a
certain latent content which is not its manifest content… implies a
divergence between the essences he fixes and the lived experience to
which they are applied, between the operation of living the world and
the entities and negentities in which he expresses it" (VI 87).

For Merleau-Ponty then, lived experience may partake in contradiction
on account of a residue of this difference between the act of speaking
and what is spoken of, as well as a correlative divergence between a
latent content and a manifest content. This divergence that he
theorizes hints at a predicament that seems closely related to what
Jacques Derrida has more recently insisted upon in his strategy of
deconstruction, in that both philosophers point towards the
inevitability of a philosophical expression containing contrary
elements within it. While Derrida has also implicitly entertained the
possibility that the law of non-contradiction might be false, in
suggesting that their may instead be a law of impurity or "a principle
of contamination", it is important to ascertain that their are some
surprising similarities between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida's
descriptions of the necessarily double nature of a philosophy that can
never recapture the pre-reflective faith, or coincide with itself in a
moment of self-presence. This strange proximity between deconstruction
and Merleau-Ponty's own methodology cannot be explored in any detail
in this essay, but Jean-Francois Lyotard and Rodolphe Gasche are two
important 'continental' thinkers to have recognized the manner in
which Merleau-Ponty's notion of a hyper-reflection pre-empted aspects
of deconstruction.

Of course, unlike Derrida, Merleau-Ponty's critique of reflection, and
his subsequent call for a hyper-reflection, quite obviously locates
itself primarily in an analysis of the body where he discerns a
necessary and constitutive divergence within the embodied situation.
As we have seen, this ecart is variously described as the difference
between the sentient and the sensible, the tangible and the touched,
and for Merleau-Ponty, it also applies to several other divergences,
including one between the perceptual faith and its articulation (VI
87). Once again, this concept is most easily demonstrated through an
example that we have previously contemplated – that is, an
individual's left hand touching their right hand, while their right
hand is also simultaneously touching another object. Of this
situation, Merleau-Ponty suggests that:

"If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I wish to suddenly
apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches,
this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at the last
moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I
correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand" (VI 9,
cf to PP 108).

According to Merleau-Ponty, there is hence a fundamental divergence
within the body, but just as this gap ensures the impossibility of any
thorough and all-encompassing self-perception, it is also that which
allows perception, and indeed subjectivity, to be possible at all. It
is important to ascertain that if our embodied divergence inaugurates
our capacity for perception (as well as language and reflection), this
same divergence also ensures that there are certain limits upon this
capacity. Just as we cannot reflexively attain to a self-identity with
the hand that we are touching, for Merleau-Ponty the philosophy of
reflection cannot entirely overcome similar divergences (VI 38).

In his critique of Hegel, Sartre and others, Merleau-Ponty insists
that "reflection recuperates everything except itself as an effort of
recuperation, it clarifies everything except its own role" (VI 33).
There is a temporal divergence that precludes the attempted recovery
of meaning via reflection from coinciding with that which it attempts
to demarcate. The task of hyper-reflection then, is to ensure that
reflection is always aware of its own finitude. It is hence somewhat
removed from philosophical reflection itself, and resides in what
several theorists have referred to as the non-space of philosophy. The
proximity of such sentiments to Derrida has been widely recognized
(and also occasionally contested), but what is irrefutable is that
Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the tendency of the metaphysical
tradition to exalt self-presence, as well as the rationalism that this
usually entails. While traditional reflective thought is inevitable
and indeed indispensable, the idea of philosophy being able to mirror
or transcend nature is disparaged (VI 99). Philosophy and other
reflective pursuits cannot recuperate the pre-reflective faith or
rediscover some pure immediacy (VI 35, 99). On the contrary, he claims
that:

"What we propose here, and oppose to the search for the essence, is
not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effective fusion
with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret
lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and
even reprehend language. If coincidence is lost, this is no accident;
if Being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of Being and no
disclosure will make us comprehend it" (VI 121-2).

Of course, this is a rather negative characterization of what
hyper-reflection involves, and it is worth digressing to consider more
precisely what it is that Merleau-Ponty wants his philosophy to
achieve. According to him:

"What we call hyper-dialectic is a thought that, on the contrary, is
capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the
plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The
bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic
thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact
that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of
idealizations or of things said… but of bound wholes where
signification never is except in tendency" (VI 94).

While this passage reaffirms the enduring role of ambiguity in his
philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic is also described as
acknowledging that not only is every thesis an idealisation, but that
Being cannot be ascertained through such idealisations. He also goes
on to suggest that such a dialectical thought:

"Abounds in the sensible world, but on condition that the sensible
world has been divested of all that the ontologies have added to it.
One of the tasks of the dialectic, as a situational thought, a thought
in contact with being, is to shake off the false evidences, to
denounce the significations cut off from the experience of being,
emptied – and to criticize itself in the measure that it itself
becomes one of them" (VI 92).

Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic is envisaged as being a situational
thought that must criticize all thinking that ignores the conditional
nature of idealizations, and it must also maintain a vigilance to
ensure that it does not itself become one of them. This is why
Merleau-Ponty describes his project as propounding an 'indirect'
ontology, rather than a direct ontology (VI 179). Undoubtedly these
themes are deserving of more prolonged attention, but there seems to
be a significant and underestimated connection between what
Merleau-Ponty's hyper-reflection seeks to achieve, and what Derrida's
deconstructive methodology has more recently attempted. Without
digressing unduly in this regard, his work retains a relevance to
contemporary European philosophy, and not least because many theorists
are convinced that he is a valuable resource who doesn't quite succumb
to the excesses of his successors on the French scene.
4. References and Further Reading
a. Writings
Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Bien, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973.
The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Fisher, New York:
Harcourt, 1969 (referred to as EW in main text).
Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans.
O'Neill, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1962 (PP in text).
The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenology,
Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. Edie,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964 (PrP in text).
Prose of the World, trans. O'Neill, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1969.
Sense and Nonsense, trans. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964 (SNS in text).
Signs, trans. McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964
(S in text).
The Structure of Behavior, trans. Fischer, London: Metheun, 1965 (SB in text).
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968 (VI in text).
b. Some Commentaries and Collections of Essays
Barral, M., Merleau-Ponty: The Role of the Body-Subject in
Interpersonal Relations, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965
(Barral in text).
Busch, T., and Gallagher, S., (eds) Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and
Postmodernism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992 (MPHP
in text).
Crossley, N., The Politics of Subjectivity: Between Foucault and
Merleau-Ponty, Aldershot, England: Brookfield USA, Avebury Series in
Philosophy, 1994 (Crossley in text).
Dillon, M., Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988.
Dillon, M., (ed) Ecart and Differance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on
Seeing and Writing, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997.
Evans, F and Lawlor, L., (eds) Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of
Flesh, Albany: State University of New York Press, Suny Series in
Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2000.
Langer, M., Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Hampshire:
MacMillan Press, 1989.
Madison, G., The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the
Limits of Consciousness, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981.
Olkowski, D., and Morley, J., (eds) Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and
Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1999 (Olkowski in text).
Priest, S., Merleau-Ponty, London: Routledge, 1998.
Schmidt, J., Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and
Structuralism, New York: St Martin's Press, 1985.