Towards an Ontology of the Flesh - The Notions of La Chair and Écart in the Late Philosophy of Merleau

Anders Skou Jrgensen, stud.mag. Frit Emne B Vejl.: Joel Krueger

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Contents pages

Introduction 3

1) Let's talk about meaning: what we do, when we do ontology 4-10

2) So, what goes on in the perceptual field? Flesh, world and divergence 10-11

2.1) La chair as mediation: uncovering the style of being 11-16

2.2) A short digression: what about illusions? 16-17

2.3) More on mediation what is la chair and what does it do? 17-18

2.4) But isnt flesh alive?

The difference between la chair du monde and la chair du corps 18-20

Conclusion 20-21


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Towards an ontology of the flesh

- The notions of la chair and cart in the late philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to present an interpretation and explication of two key notions in the late

philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, namely the notions of flesh, la chair, and divergence, cart. Given

that these notions are to be understood as ontological notions, the paper also aims to do a

presentation of what ontology means in the context of Merleau-Pontyian philosophy.

What I intend to do in this paper is thus twofold: my primary aim is to articulate an

interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart within what I will propose to be a Merleau-

Pontyian ontological framework. This will be done through close reading of the last chapter of Le

visible et linvisible (VI). Secondarily, the aim of this paper is to explain how Merleau-Ponty

conceives of philosophical ontology as an expressive act. This will be pursued by arguing from

Merleau-Pontys own conception of language that the telos of the phenomenological, ontological

descriptive account is to express certain ways phenomena present themselves within a life-world.

The telos of this paper then is both to present an original interpretation of the last chapter of Le

visible et linvisible and to explain how the concept of ontology is to be understood when reading

Merleau-Ponty.

The structure of this paper is as follows: first of all, 1) I will seek to explain what

Merleau-Pontyian philosophical ontology is all about, in a general sense, in the context of his

philosophy of language. This chapter will take up slightly less than half of the papers length.

Second of all, I will 2) seek to explain what the present ontological project that is the last chapter of

Le visible et linvisible specifically involves through a close reading of the text. This chapter takes

up the majority of the paper and is divided into the subsections 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. At the end of

the paper I will present my conclusion.


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1) Let's talk about meaning: what we do, when we do ontology

To be able to present my interpretation of the key notions of la chair and cart as proper ontological

notions, that is, as notions pertaining to the meaning of being, it seems necessary first to explain in

broad terms how Merleau-Ponty conceives of ontology understood as a subgenre of philosophy. In

other words, how the study of the meaning of being that is philosophical ontology, according to

Merleau-Ponty, is both properly practiced and understood. This means, to phrase it in slightly more

mundane terms, to explicate not only what we talk about when we talk about being, but also specify

exactly what we do when we talk about being. I will explore these questions in the following.

A possible entry into the concept of philosophy (that is, ontology) present in VI is

found in the working notes to VI. In a short, enigmatic sentence, Merleau-Ponty describes his

practice as indirect ontology: 'On ne peut pas faire de l'ontologie directe. Ma mthode "indirecte"

(l'tre dans les tants) est seule conforme l'tre - "[l'ontologie] ngative" comme "thologie

ngative".' (VI, 231) It is not possible, he states, to do direct ontology - instead, one has to practice

ontology akin to what the theologian practices, when he practices negative theology (roughly the

idea that one cannot describe the positive qualities of God, as this would reduce God to the being of

our wordly concepts). What can he mean by this? To understand this, it is necessary to present a

short sketch of Merleau-Ponty's conception of language, as language is necessarily the medium (or,

if you will, the flesh) of philosophical thought.

In very broad terms, Merleau-Ponty holds what a commentator calls an "embodied"

conception of language. (Ihde, 62) Accordingly to hold such a position within the philosophy of

language means that, 'Language [...] is not something had by a subject, it is the subject in action.

Speech in the broad sense is the performance of thought' (ibid., 69). In other words, meaning or

thought is always already "embodied", understood as bound up in the materiality of linguistic

expression, while linguistic expression is not reducible to the uttering of words in a natural

language, but is to be understood broadly as the mode of acting by the subject as far is this action is

meaningful. As another commentator points out, expression is here to be understood in a broad

sense, including also bodily expression, and even the expressive content of things (Waldenfels,

92). There is no such thing as meaning in itself apart from language (i.e., there are no intelligible

platonic ideal substantial entities), while language cannot be reduced to spoken or written language;

language is a much broader phenomenon concerned with bodies engaged in certain practices that

express meaning, i.e. make signs. (Ihde, 70)


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Now, when we understand something as meaningful, we are actually engaged in the

practice of linguistic expression in this sense. And when we stumble upon a conceptual

understanding of the thing in question, we are thus engaged in the practice of expression in this

sense as well. In other words, understanding is not a only a matter of passive reception of

perceptual content, but of active conception of properties through language; as Dastur puts it, the

boundary between perception and language fades in the act of understanding: perception is a

kind of articulation [...] To perceive is always to sketch a figure against the background of the

world, to organize an area of the visible [...] This is why we can speak about perception in the same

way as we do about a language. (Dastur, 28-29) The essential nature of the thing in question, its

meaning, is the compound of our perceptual access and our expressive practices. The title of the

work, le visible et l'invisible is precisely the distinction between perception and its meaning: 'Mais il

y a tout de mme cette diffrence entre la perception et le langage que je vois les choses perues et

qu'au contraire les significations sont invisibles.' (VI, 263) and one of the main aims of the work is

to describe how the visible and the invisible are intertwined in being.

The embodied conception of language has important consequences for the ontological

practice: when we do ontology, we always do it as a) an example of the more general phenomenon

of linguistic expression, b) from the point of view of the embodied subject. But ontology is,

following Heidegger, of course much more than a subgenre of philosophy our pre-theoretical

understanding of the world, our way of being, is ontological, and philosophical ontology is a way of

interacting with this understanding, an understanding that is fundamentally an act of expression as

Garth Gillian specifies, philosophy (for Merleau-Ponty) takes its intelligibility from the act of

expression in rapport with the perceptual birth of meaning. [...] And philosophys hold upon truth is

within the act of expression (Gillian, 14-15), while Henri Maldiney points out that,

Philosophy exists in its speech, and philosophy exists from speech. The speech of a

philosopher is one specific manifestation of the ambiguous sense of the logos. []

The logos of the world is not the logos of anyone [personne] and the philosophical

logos is not an interpretation of the world by me nor by man. Instead, it is a revelation

of Being in man (Maldiney, 73)

Philosophical ontology understood as a practice of "expressing meaning", as it were, is bound up in

our concrete engagement with being through language, a pre-theoretical expression of the meaning

of being, the deeper sense of ontology - hence, there is no reality to be described apart from the one


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given to us through perceptual existence, while perceptual existence is always a matter of being-in-

language, as far as this existence is ontological in a working note, Merleau-Ponty goes as far as

describing language as the home of (invisible, i.e. meaningful) Being: Ltre dont le langage est

la maison ne se peut fixer, regarder, il nest que de loin. (VI, 263).

Now, what Merleau-Ponty effectively is going to deny given this position is that there

exists any such thing as a describable pre-linguistic field of perception available to the perceiver

(since everything described become ontologized), keeping in mind that language in this sense is

not to be understood as any given language (English, Greek etc.), nor as a compound of words,

grammatical structures and so on., but instead as the way in which meaning comes to be through

expressive acts performed by the human subject. This position entails that everything that is

available in the perceptual field is always already implicitly enveloped in language, in the specific

sense that language is used here, hence embedded within a pre-given structure of meaning (what we

might call "world"). A child that has not yet learned to speak can obviously still perceive, a point

we as philosophers have to take seriously, Quun enfant peroive avant de penser, quil commence

par mettre ses rves dans les choses, ses penses dans les autres [], ces faits de gense ne peuvent

tre simplement ignors par la philosophie (VI, 27), but the world in which the speechless child

finds itself perceiving is still the world understood, thus the world of meaningful expression: Le

enfant comprend bien au-del de ce quil sait dire, rpond bien au-del de ce quil saurait dfinir

(VI, 29). One might say that the child learns to see the world in the same way and correlative to the

way that she learns to speak her first language, because everything the child understands and every

signifying gesture that the child makes in response to this is already bound up in the language of the

world. Without going into too much detail, Merleau-Ponty here employs a distinction between

objectified language, in the sense we come to know it through the scientific study of language,

linguistics, and operative language (langage oprant), the language that flows with life, through

which we express being in our everyday existence, la langue par celui qui vit en elle, lenroulement

en lui du visible et du vcu sur le langage, du langage et le vcu1 (VI, 165-166) the language we

breathe, if you will. Before the child comes to know language as a given structure of expression, she

expresses herself through signifying gestures that is, lives in operative language.

One could name this the life-world (to use a Husserlian term) theory of perception

indeed, Merleau-Ponty himself calls his project une philosophie de Lebenswelt (VI, 222).

1 Le vcu is Merleau-Pontys concept of lived experience, i.e. conscious, meaningful life.


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According to Don Ihde, Merleau-Ponty would indeed hold that this is case: 'We have been led

astray by those who have spoken of a "prelinguistic" state insofar as we have been led to believe

that this state is equivalent to a state prior to meaning.' (Ihde, 71, my emphasis) The point can be

put like this: given that the subject is always already in-the-world, the world being understood as

the complex of relations between meaningful entities present to the subject, whatever the subject

utters about whatever goes on in the perceptual field is pertaining to this world understood as

meaningful. However, given that meaning is always meaning-as-language, the world is always

already a world of language, and whatever is perceived therefore always already perceived through

(operative) language as well: la structure de [] monde muet est telle que toutes le possibilities du

langage y sont dj donnes. (VI, 200) While this might have led us to a constructivist account of

the sort that we can only see what is already named, the point is rather one of potentiality and

latency: the perceivable is always nameable, i.e. understandable but not necessarily named

already, hence only implicitly meaningful:

Cependant il y a le monde du silence, le monde peru, du moins, est un ordre o il y a

des significations non langagires; oui, des significations non langagires, mais elles

ne sont pas pour positives. (VI, 223)

What Merleau-Ponty states here, by saying that there is such a thing as non-positive (i.e.

indeterminate), non-language significations, is that what goes on in the perceptual field is as much

as inherently implicitly meaningful, but that we need positive significations of the operative

language (expressions of meaning) to awaken the implicit to become explicit. There is altogether

no sharp ontological separation between perceived being and its realization as explicitly meaningful

in language one might say that the difference between realized meaning and potential meaning

in this sense is a difference of degree, not of kind. Meaning is already there to be "seen" in the

things of the world, because the condition of them being noticeable at all as precisely something in

the world is their already being enveloped in language. Meaning is a latent property of the

perceptual field, because perception of something as such is always perception of something as

being in the world. However, one must remember that for something to be nameable it does not

entail that everything about this something can be named at once. In other words, there is always

the possibility of there being more meaning to a thing than can be captured in rigid definitions:

'There is no final, no complete expression. [...] The existentiality of language is such that the field

of implicit silence is always broader than the focus of explicit speech.' (Ihde, 72)


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Now, if we grant that the perception of something is always a perception of something

as being in the world, i.e. as meaningful and thus linguistically embedded, then we must ask how

we ought to understand the implicitness of meaning in the perceptual field i.e., what is there,

when we just perceive instead of perceiving something? If ontology is the practice of articulating

meaning always somehow present in the perceptual field, what does it mean for this meaning to be

un-articulated? Merleau-Ponty proposes the rather vague term of "silence" for this yet unarticulated

meaning: 'Silence, in Merleau-Ponty's use, is the field of pregnant, latent expressiveness always

already present to the living subject. Pregnant silence is always and wholly present; man lives

within the world of implicitly meaningful silence.' (ibid., 73) Silence is in this way understood as

the field of possible speech about the world, the availability of meaning before meaning actually

occurs, the dimension of the perceptual field out of which articulated expression emerges. However,

given that this field of silence is understood as a condition of possibility of articulated expression,

naming and so on, it is necessary that it remains itself a necessarily obscure but inherent part of the

field of perception, because as soon as anything is designated as something in the field of

perception, that is, given a specificity, a meaning etc., it has emerged from silence and is then not

silent anymore. Silence in this sense is thus a negative term, in the sense that one might speak about

negative theology - we cannot name it, understood as describing its positive properties, but we can

designate it negatively. The field of silence from which meaning emerges is then a field of the

inherently unnamable, although it is nothing but what is implicitly namable.

Now, all complexity aside, the point is actually deceptively simple: one can only

describe just what one understands about something, while this something has to be meaningful to

be understandable; and it is impossible for this meaning to present itself except through the medium

of language, that is, linguistic expression, while linguistic expression is only available to people

understood as living, breathing, feeling and thinking bodies. When one describes something, then

one describes something that is in some sense describable, hence implicitly meaningful. This does

not entail that everything describable is already fully described - only that it is within the reach of

description, that is, of language. This does entail though that whatever is describable is somehow

already recognized as being in some sense understandable, hence named - in other words, to dis-

cover something entails not only the dis-coverability of the something, the aforementioned silence,

but that there is something about the something which is already designated, named etc.. We never

discover anything from scratch, so to speak, but always from within a pre-given structure of

meaning, i.e. from within the world. Or to recall and modify Nagel's famous notion, there is no


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view from nowhere, while somewhere is always understood as being within the confines of

language.2

So, what do we talk about when we talk about being, and what exactly is it we do

when we do this? To put it short, we express or make available the meaning of being, understood as

the process of articulating whatever is designated in the perceptual field from within the complex

structure of pre-given implicit and explicit linguistic meaning, i.e. world.

Why then, can we not do direct ontology? Since being is always already expressed

somehow as being in the world, the nature of being in itself (that is, extra-wordly being) always

escapes any sort of designation. Being in itself cannot be any-thing, because anything

understandable is always something within a world, the world which of course itself is. Being can

then not be named, it is in this sense no-thing, but we can still talk about the certain ways it seems

to behave within the scope of the world as it comes to view as particular beings, relations and so on.

To equate being with nothingness is wrong, but since everything has being, and being isnt itself

anything, no-thingness is an integral dimension of being as it presents itself as a commentator puts

it, this negative dimension does not have anything to do with positive nothingness, [..] This

negativity, [...] lies within Being and, ultimately is not different from its very presence. (Barbaras,

81) To do (philosophical) ontology is then not simply to describe being as it is, as being itself is not

available, but to enquire into the way being seems to behave, interrogating as it were what goes on

in the perceptual field with the purpose of giving an always tentative account of the nature of being

itself as it presents itself to the embodied subject. An account, that is fundamentally an expression

of meaning, not a passive reception and pinning down of properties.

2) So, what goes on in the perceptual field? Flesh, world and divergence

Starting from the point of view of the embodied subject, Merleau-Ponty wants to give an account of

what goes on in the perceptual field, because, naturally, this is where being presents itself to us. The

purpose is to do ontology, still, and since being is never present except through perceptual

2 One has to be weary of making too strong claims about our being captured in this sense within the confines of our

world one might object, since discoverability entails world that entails language, can animals not discover

anything?. One might reply, though, that the claim that understanding implies world implies language doesnt

necessarily prevent animals from experiencing one just has to posit that the worlds of animals are language worlds

as well (i.e. structures of signification).


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existence, Merleau-Ponty wants to give an account of the nature of being as mediated through

perceptual existence. However, what is imperative is to remember that the one who is to do

ontology of course herself is what she is describing and asking for, i.e., the nature of being, is

always also the nature of herself as a being. In a way reminiscent of Spinozistic philosophy, being is

then interrogating itself about itself. Obviously though, from the point of view of the subject, there

seems to be a difference between the being of the subject and the being of whatever is present to the

subject giving an account of being then involves both giving an account of what binds the

embodied subject to the beings of the world (i.e. in virtue of what they are part of the same), and

giving an account of how this binding also seemingly involves a separation between the beings of

the world and the subject. Merleau-Ponty wants to describe the first as the function of la chair,

flesh, the second as cart, divergence or separation. In the following Ill seek to describe the way in

which these notions are fleshed out, if you will, in VI. On a short note, since the aim is to do an

original interpretation of these notions, I have focused as much as possible on a close reading of the

text and not on commentary of scholars, as was indeed not the case in the first half of this paper.

2.1) La chair as mediation: uncovering the style of being

Since we already established that any sort of ontological practice, i.e. expressing the meaning of

being, must be done starting from what shows itself in the perceptual field, the task becomes first of

all to pay attention to whatever there might be there to be noticed. Merleau-Ponty starts from these

two components of the ontological practice, observation and expression, what he calls the seeing

and the speaking:

Voir, parler, mme penser [] sont des experiences de ce genre, la fois irrcusables

et nigmatiques. Elles ont un nom dans toutes les langues, mais qui dans toutes aussi

porte des significations en touffe, des buissons de sens propres et de sens figures, de

sorte que ce nest pas un de ces noms, come ceux de la science, qui font la lumire, en

attribuant ce qui est nomm une signification circonscrite, mais plutt lindice

rpt, le rappel insistant, dun mystre aussi familier quinexpliqu, dune lumire

qui, clairant le reste, demeure son origine dans lobscurit. (VI, 170)

Seeing and speaking (and thinking understood as a mode of speech) are interesting words due to the

fact that every language seems to have them, however, they are not very clear in relation to what

exactly it is they designate. We all know what it means to see and to speak, but what exactly the


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meaning of speaking and seeing is, ontologically speaking, is somewhat ill-defined we get the

reference but are not very clear on the meaning. Merleau-Ponty suggests that we start our

phenomenological enquiry into the meaning of being by enquiring into whatever these ill-defined

words may be said to express phenomenologically. In a way reminiscent of the Heideggerian mode

of enquiry, where one starts with the necessarily pre-ontological understanding of being all-present

in everyday life and then explicates whatever proper ontological understanding may be deduced

from phenomena constitutive of this everyday life, Merleau-Ponty starts with these words (seeing,

speaking) that we all know and use and then seeks to contribute to them a proper ontological

dimension in other words, he starts with the world we know and then seeks to re-discover, as it

were, the meaning of being implicit in it:3 notre construction [] fait retrouver ce monde du

silence. [] Il tait l prcisment comme Lebenswelt non-thmatis. (VI, 222) Since I have

already presented my view on the notion of speech in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, I will

concentrate my presentation on the notion of seeing.

Starting with seeing, what seems to be the case first of all is that seeing is the way in

which what is visible presents itself to us. Thus, we start our enquiry into the nature of seeing by

enquiring into the nature of visibility:

Le visible autour de nous semble reposer en lui-mme. Cest comme si notre vision se

formait en son coeur, ou comme sil y avait de lui nous une accointance aussi troite

que celle de la mer et de la plage. (VI, 171)

The visible seems to rest in itself, but our vision does not seem completely disconnected from it it

is, as he states, as if our vision formed itself in the heart of the visible. Our seeing and what is

seen is not distinguished in a way comparative to the distinction between subject and object; one

notices that the image Merleau-Ponty applies metaphorically to the distinction does not place the

subjective and the objective components in separate ontological realms: the closeness is like the one

between the ocean and the strand, both materially manifest, not the like the separation between the

immaterial and the material of the classical ontological distinction between subject and object.

Although he does not posit vision and the visible in two separate ontological realms,

Merleau-Ponty does assert that some form of ontological distinction is to be upheld or else the

idea of vision and thus its correlating phenomenon would lose its meaning: il nest pas possible

3 This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty is straight forward Heideggerian, but I follow the authors cited in this chapter,

Dastur, Maldiney etc. in seeing close affinities between the two philosophers.


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que nous nous fondions en lui [le visible], ni quil pass en nous, car alors la vision svanouirait au

moment de se faire, par disparation ou du voyant ou du visible.(ibid.) It isnt possible that vision

merges completely with the visible, because the visible in that case would cease to be visible as

such, since visibility implies vision. The seeing and the seen seem to be co-originary in this sense

while it is not possible that vision and the visible are posited in distinct ontological realms, it is not

possible either that they remain completely indistinct. They are (albeit, distinct) parts of the same

fabric.

Initially, the point Merleau-Ponty is making is more radical than it might at first seem:

the world as it were cannot consist of brute things with properties and the relations between them

on one side and then a seer whose mind grasps these properties and relations on the other

(dualism), nor can seeing be just one of many relations between brute things (monism): Ce quil y

a donc, ce ne sont pas des choses identiques elles-mmes qui, par aprs, soffriraient au voyant, et

ce nest pas un voyant, vide dabord, qui, par aprs, souvrirait elles (VI, 171). What seems to be

the case phenomenologically speaking is a midway between these two. But to understand the

midway, we must understand its components, i.e. the visible and the vision. What is it we see? In

the case of a certain color, we not only see the specific singular instance of the color in question (the

quale) but always see the color as a certain particular instance of all the different variants and

instances of this color the bundle of singular instances, as it were, of this specific color: La

couleur est dailleurs variante dans une autre dimension de variation, celle de ses rapports avec

lentourage: ce rouge nest ce quil est quen se reliant de sa place dautres rouges autour de lui,

[] (VI, 172) This means that when we see a particular instance of (Merleau-Pontys own

example) the color red, we see it within the horizon of all instances of redness that is, different

sorts of red garments, flags, blood, and so on. The red of the surface then has a certain sort of

thickness of signification to it the red itself makes its appearance as being just the red of a

surface, while resonating with the numerous of other instances of red apparent in the cultural fabric

of our world: precisely as quelque chose qui vient toucher doucement et fait rsonner distance

diverses regions du monde color ou visible. (VI, 173) The blueness of this particular coffee cup

on my desk holds in itself, through my vision, a phenomenal interconnectedness with the blue of the

sky, the blue of the ocean and so on, both in virtue of simply being blue and the differentiation in

the phenomenal field of possible blues. (ibid.)

An important point here is that there is no essential blue at work, no blue as such: the

different singular instances of blue together form a field of interconnected blues that, if one occurs,


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resonates with the others. The question is now, if there is no essential blueness that binds the

blues together, in virtue of what are these singulars interconnected? Since the singular blue is

always a blue of the world, and the blue is always a way a certain surface comes to view, and the

surface is (at least phenomenologically) the surface of a body (even if the body is ethereal), these

blues must be connected through the way in which these bodies come to give (as in Husserlian

Gegebenheit) themselves: Entre les couleurs et les visibles prtendus, on retrouverait le tissue qui

les double, les soutient, les nourrit, et qui, lui, nest chose, mais possibilit, latence et chair des

chose.(VI, 173) The tissue, the fabric that binds singulars together as something or other (blues,

trees, foxes etc.) is not a thing itself, nothing that is definable as a particular set of properties, but is

rather a potentiality, a latency, and a flesh of the singulars in question. The being (and thus, the

meaning of the being) of blue is thus the particular framework that is in itself invisible, as it is no-

thing, but is the way in which the thing appears, i.e. if you will, using Merleau-Pontyian

vocabulary, the certain style of the thing: Le sens est invisible, mais linvisible nest pas le

contradictoire du visible: le visible a lui-mme une membrure dinvisible, et lin-visible est la

contrepartie secrete du visible. (VI, 265) The meaning of whatever appears is the secret

counterpart of the appearance, the framework that both structures the singular appearance and

binds the singular appearance to other appearances that share this particular style. In this way, what

is invisible is actually part of the visible, since the visible singular gives itself as meaningful one

cannot see the meaning itself, but if whatever is visible is meaningful, one has access to the

meaning that in this way comes to view.4 The visible and the invisible are intertwined in

appearance, while the way anything appears is in its own flesh. Why flesh? At this moment of the

analysis, Merleau-Ponty wants primarily to stress the bodily being of the thing in question, as he

thinks about seeing as a way of grasping the being of whatever is there in this way it is a sort of

palpation with vision. (VI, 171) The same way we feel a surface and recognize whatever is there to

be felt, we let our vision examine the appearance of whatever is there as a being to be recognized in

space.

4 While Adina Bozga certainly has a point when she says that singularity is not the first and foremost concern of the

ontological framework of VI, I find it difficult to understand how she can state that Merleau-Pontys phenomenology

cannot be considered as a description of the singular (Bozga, 260). It seems clear enough, given my analysis, that the

virtue of which a singular blue color can be blue at all is due to its inhabiting a particular space within the network of

singulars sharing the same style, but that it doesnt owe its blueness to an essential blueness rather, essential

blueness owes its essentiality to the field of singulars that together make up this particular style of being.


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Now, further concerning the subjective part of the equation, the seer who sees:

Merleau-Ponty believes that we need to take the assertion that the way or style in which a being

comes to view is in its flesh seriously in a non-metaphoric sense: on va constater que ceci nest pas

analogie ou comparaison vague, et doit tre pris letter. (VI, 173) The assertion must be taken

literally, [le] regard, disions-nous, envelope, palpe, pouse les choses visible.(ibid.). What does

this assertion tell us about the one who sees? Well, first of all, if it is the case that the look is more

than analogous with palpation, the key might be to examine what goes on in palpation: Nous

trouverions peut-tre la rponse dans la palpation tactile o linterrogeant et linterrog sont plus

proches (ibid.). There is a closeness in the phenomenon of tactile experience between one who

touches and the thing touched my experience of, for instance, touching the bark of a tree, feeling

its roughness. After all, being close is a spatial expression. How can it be that I can feel the

textural surface of the tree? Ceci ne peut arriver que si, en mme temps que sentie du dedans, ma

main est aussi accessible du dehors, tangible elle-mme; It seems necessary that my hand, to be

able to touch anything, must itself be touchable from the outside, while it feels from the inside.

It is, he says, a matter of the hand incorporating itself into the universe it explores. (VI, 174) The

world that it opens is in essence the world of the hand itself, in the sense that this hand of mine is,

with its capability of touching, a fully integrated part of the reality of the world at hand. Although

this intimacy seems natural enough to assert in the realm of touching/touched, of tangibility, it does

seem somewhat less intuitive to assert that it is, in the same way, a necessary condition for vision to

be visible. This is exactly the claim Merleau-Ponty is making though, cette dlimitation des sens

est grossire. [] Il faut habituer penser que tout visible est taill dans le tangible, tout tre tacite

promis en quelque manire la visibilit (VI, 174-175) What is visible is cut out in the tangible,

while whatever is tangible is promised to visibility this means that the visible presents itself in

the same world as that of tactile perception and vice versa. There is thus a flesh of the visible as

well as the tangible chair here means style (singular) or way (general) of being manifest as doubly

seeable and touchable. Yet there is a distinction present using the metaphor of the map, Merleau-

Ponty states that,

Il y a relvement double et crois du visible dans le tangible et du tangible dans le

visible, les deux cartes sont completes, et pourtant elles ne se confondent pas. Les

deux parties sont parties totales et pourtant ne sont pas superposables. (VI, 175)

While the two maps in some way represent the same world, they are distinct maps in terms of

content. In terms of meaning, using the metaphor of language, the meaning of a touch and the


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meaning of a look might be co-referential (that, is, adhering to the same reference) but they are

distinct ways of referring. They disclose being, yes, but the manners by which they disclose are

different. Although this is the case, the properties common to experience through vision and tactile

experience are clear enough to Merleau-Ponty: vision is a palpation, the world disclosed is the same

world, and because this is the case, the same closeness that is the condition of possibility of tactile

experience is a condition of possibility of visual experience: the touching hand is dependent on

being manifest in the tactile world, hence touchable, while the vision depends on the seer being

manifest in the visible world. (ibid.)

2.2) A short digression: what about illusions?

What seems to be the case then is a certain reversibility between the one who sees and whatever is

seen if he sees he can be seen, if he touches he can be touched, at least in principle. One might

now conjure up certain objections to this argument, given that this is actually what Merleau-Ponty

believes. One concerns the reversibility between seeing and seen, taking up the idea of the invisible

man, who experiences the world just as anyone else would, but is not visible. This objection is

easily refuted though due to the fact that the claim is about being visible in principle and not de

facto one might throw paint on the invisible man, as he is still manifest as a body with a surface,

thus making him visible. Another concerns the reversibility between visual and tactile experience,

taking up the idea of visual illusions that are seeable but not touchable. Merleau-Ponty does have a

response to a problem such as this, claiming that the principle of reversibility holds even when telle

vision particulire se rvle illusoire, car je reste sr alors quen regardant mieux jaurais eu la

vision vraie et quen tout cas, celle-l ou une autre, il y en a une. (VI, 190) This is actually two

responses in one: the first one claims that, due to the fact that I am able to discover the illusionary

nature of the illusion, there must be a true vision that is, once I discover the illusion (a

hologram, for instance) to be untouchable, I have incorporated this into my vision of it. I am not

able to continue my seeing it as a touchable being, once I have discovered its ethereal nature thus

I have in some way actually touched the untouchable, meaning I have discovered the non-tactility of

its tactile dimension. The second response claims that I cannot understand what it means to be

illusory unless I have a presupposed faith in what I see is actually the case, or else the distinction

between illusion and non-illusion would have no meaning being-illusion thus depends on true

vision as a condition of possibility. To put it slightly differently, illusion qua illusion only makes


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sense as exception to the rule of right perception, which seems to be a matter of the seeable being

touchable and vice versa.

2.3) More on mediation what is la chair and what does it do?

I have presented la chair as the way in which a particular singular thing is manifest as a doubly

visible and tangible entity. Merleau-Ponty now asserts that, due to the fact that everything, seer and

seen, as far as its being a thing concerned, is mediated in its being through this flesh, there is a

certain constitutive separation, a thickness of flesh, between the seer and what is seen:

Cest que lpaisseur de chair entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa

visibilit elle comme de sa corporit lui; ce nest pas un obstacle entre lui et elle,

cest leur moyen de communication. (VI, 176, my emphasis)

The separation between seer and seen that is this thickness of flesh between them is thus actually

the means of communication between them in other words, phrased yet again in the language of

transcendental philosophy, flesh is here a condition of possibility of interaction between things. And

this makes sense, because if both things were not manifest as separate entities, albeit of the same

fundamental nature, in the same world, how would they be able to act upon each other? It is only

because I as a seer am not merging with the thing upon interaction, that I can grasp it with my hands

and explore it with my look. What we are actually touching upon here is the notion of cart

rendered as divergence, separation, etc. in English, but a single term in the original French. cart is,

in its most general sense, a mode of being of the flesh as manifest: it is the constitutive separation of

the unity of manifest being into the singulars of the world. Drawing upon the notion of lpaisseur,

thickness, just explored, I, as an example, need to be both of the same tangible world and

manifestly distinct within it to be able to touch at all. When my touch has both certain inner

qualities (my consciousness of it) and outer qualities to it (the physical interaction taking place), this

is due to the fact that I know myself to not be whatever I touch, but to be of the same world, still.

What is going on is then a diffrence sans contradiction, [un] cart du dedans du dehors. (VI, 177)

I am not, in virtue of my being a sensible pour soi, a contradiction of what is there to be seen and

thus not me: being-not-me is not a contradiction of being-me. I am diverging from whatever is not

me, within the same world, through the same flesh, just enough to know our differences. cart, is

present at all levels of being manifest in flesh: the separation between my inner world and my outer,

physical body is a matter of divergence as well la chair is here not a conceptual unity of what


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cannot be unified, the traditional metaphysical concepts of spiritual and physical, but instead the

notion of corporeal manifestation of and thus separation within the original unity of the body, of the

inner life and the outer world:

La chair nest pas matire, nest pas esprit, nest pas substance. [...] La chair est ce

sens un lment de ltre. Non pas fait ou somme de faits, et pourtant adhrente au

lieu et au maintenant. (VI, 181-182)

La chair is thus in time as far as it is now and in space as far as it is here being the mode of

manifestation of things. It is because of this peculiar nature of being a general thing that Merleau-

Ponty draws upon the concept of element (in the sense that fire, water, earth and air used to be

employed as the constitutive components of being). He utilizes this notion to put emphasis on the

fact that la chair cannot be reduced to this individual, singular flesh of a given particular, but must

be understood as a way of being that binds beings together in constitutive separation (that is, cart).

The way in which this element presents itself in the context of human beings

specifically is then as the double-sidedness of the body. Even though Merleau-Ponty goes on to

deny the adequacy of the metaphor, I find it helpful to phrase it in the way that the body is a being

of two leaves (of a page), notre corps es un tre deux feuillets, dun ct chose parmi les choses

et, par ailleurs, celui qui les voit et les touche (VI, 178), one of which is being of objective reality,

a thing among things, and another which is being of subjective reality, the inner life that feels what

it touches. One gets a feeling that there is a completely natural, even necessary separation between

these sides of the body, as there is between the front and the back of a piece of paper, without there

being two parts or components of the being in question.

2.4) But isnt flesh alive? The difference between la chair du monde and la chair du corps

Why call it flesh and not matter? Flesh seems to imply that there is something live at work, some

sort of sentience, but considering the Merleau-Pontyian flesh of the stone I grab and throw into the

flesh of the ocean, it is clearly not the case that flesh is to be understood as being first and foremost

something alive with feeling. Merleau-Ponty stresses that it is not a matter of anthropomorphizing

being, nous nentendons pas faire de lanthropologie, dcrire un monde recouvert de toutes nos

projections (VI, 177), but instead a matter of pointing out that the way in which we, as sentient

beings, are as beings of two leaves, is nothing but an exemplary version of the way beings as such

are as being itself behaves within the world as flesh:


19

Nous voulons dire [...] que ltre charnel, comme tre des profondeurs, plusiurs

feuillets ou plusieurs faces [...] est un prototype de ltre, dont notre corps [...] est

une variante trs remarquable, mais dont le paradoxe constitutif est dj dans tout

visible (ibid.)

We are but a remarkable variant of the double-sidedness of being as flesh everything visible

pertains to the structure of cart due to its manifestation in the flesh. The point is not that everything

out there feels in the same way that we do, but that our feeling things is but an interesting

manifestation of the depths and layers of being present in every visible of the world. The stone on

the beach does indeed not feel anything, but it does have a reality and a thickness (literally, the

inside of the stone, as it were) that we cannot see or feel from anywhere else but the surface of the

stone. The point is thus not to say that the flesh of the human live subject is the original,

primordial flesh from which everything else is constructed, but that the flesh of the human live

subject is constructed through the general structure of the flesh of the world, the general way of

manifestation of being. This is also the reason why we can understand the things themselves at all

we are made of the same stuff of the world and thus always already find ourselves in an intimate

relation with it: Le corps nous unit directement aux choses par sa propre ontogense, en soudant

lune lautre les deux bauches dont il est fait. (ibid.)

Now, a peculiar thing about la chair du corps is its reversibility: whatever it touches

touches it (I feel both the texture of the surface and the surface on me), and it can even touch itself

and touch itself touching. If my hand touches my body, I, as my body, am both touching and

touched. One would now think that if we shared flesh with the flesh of the world, cart or not, there

ought to be a like reversibility when I touch something that is not me why is it that I can feel both

sides of myself touching, but not feel both sides of my touching the other? Merleau-Ponty remarks

that it is a mistake to think my body touching another body of the world analogously with my hand

touching my body la chair is clearly not to be thought of as a great pulsing beast that our bodies

are the limbs and organs of. (VI, 185) But if this is not the case, what then? It is something akin to

the metaphor of the maps used earlier, when two bodies (live or dead) interact: Leurs paysages

senchevtrent (ibid.), their landscapes are entangled, but they are never entirely the same

landscape, the landscapes do not merge. What this means in terms of reversibility is that this

relation is asymmetrical: the relation between the sentient body and the world is a relation where I

as sentient body can feel myself touching while touching the surface, but only feel the surface of the

flesh of the other (be it a stone, a tree or the flesh of a live organism). However, the asymmetrical


20

reversibility present at the level of conscious interaction with objects is already present, to some

degree, at the level of the body touching itself: Il est temps de souligner quil sagit dune

rversibilit toujours imminente et jamais realis en fait. (VI, 191, my emphasis) The point is not

that I cannot reverse the touch (my touched hand can still assume the rank of touching), but that the

touched and the touching cannot coincide in one single experience: Ma main gauche est toujours

sur le point de toucher ma main droite en train de toucher les choses, mais je ne parviens jamais la

concidence; elle sclipse au moment de se produire (VI, 191) This is a very subtle point that

requires the reader to do his own phenomenological experiments, but it is rather crucial to the

argument here. Merleau-Ponty seems to make the argument that, since the asymmetrical relation of

reversibility is already present at the level of the body conscious of itself, the difference between

this reversibility and the reversibility between one flesh and another is a difference of degree, not of

kind. Drawing upon my interpretation of the notion of cart earlier, one might say that the this

asymmetrical reversibility is actually a necessary condition of my experience of the other as exactly

other if there were complete reversibility, I would never be able to tell the difference between my

hand and anothers, nor where my body ends and the carpet upon which my feet are planted begins.

Conclusion

To sum everything up, this paper had two distinct aims: it wanted to present an original

interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart as ontological notions in the philosophy of

Merleau-Ponty, and it wanted to clarify how the notion of ontology is to be understood in the

context of Merleau-Pontyian philosophy. So, what has been said in this course of this paper? It has

been argued that ontology in this context is fundamentally expression of the meaning of being, and

that philosophical ontology is but a variant of our more general language expressions, while

language as such is a much more general phenomenon than that of utilizing a natural language,

namely, the phenomenon of living bodies expressing themselves in the most general sense. In this

discussion of language, it was concluded that all meaningful perception is (life-)wordly perception,

and that wordly perception is essentially perception within the confines of language in the broad

sense just mentioned.

In the second half of the paper the aim was to present mentioned original

interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart in le visible et linvisible. The text of Merleau-

Ponty is dense and difficult, but through a close reading of the original text, one discovers that la


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chair is the way any being comes to present itself as bodily manifest, its style, and that the sentient

body is but a remarkable variant of a the fundamental double-sidedness of the flesh, that is

present at all levels of being. This double-sidedness is an cart, a constitutive divergence or

separation that is a mode of flesh, i.e. a mode of being in so far as being presents itself as manifest

in the world. Therefore the difference between seeing and touching is less than their similarities,

while the difference between the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world is not a difference in

terms of kind, but a difference in terms of said divergence within the flesh as such.

Works cited

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Le visible et linvisible. ditions Galimard, 1964 .

Bozga, Adina: The exasperating gift of singularity; Zeta Books, Bucharest, 2009

Gillian, Garth: In the folds of the flesh: philosophy and language. In: The Horizons of the Flesh. Ed:

Gillian, Garth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Ihde, Don: Singing the world: language and perception. In: The Horizons of the Flesh. Ed: Gillian,

Garth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Dastur, Francoise: World, Flesh, Vision: In: Chiasms Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed:

Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000

Maldiney, Henri: Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty: In: Chiasms Merleau-

Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000

Barbaras, Renaud: Perception and movement: the end of the metaphysical approach. In: Chiasms

Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000

Waldenfels, Bernhard: The paradox of expression. In: Chiasms Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh.

Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000

Documents

Towards an Ontology of the Flesh - The Notions of La Chair and Écart in the Late Philosophy of Merleau