Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
In the first two chapters of this book, Merlau-Ponty follows “perceptual faith” as the main subject or interrogation. He connects perception to ontological questions and tries “to re-examine the definition of the body as pure object in order to understand how it can be our living bond with nature; we do not establish ourselves in a universe of essences—on the contrary we ask that the distinction between the that and the what, between the essence and the condition of existence, be reconsidered by referring to the experience of the world that precedes that experience.” (27) MP, thus, tries to bring into his ontological theory both thought and language while further braking away from dualistic language and breaking apart the distinction between subject and object. The first chapter Reflection and Interrogation focuses on complicating the distinction between truth and false, reality and imagination/dream/illusion. The second chapter Interrogation and Dialectic tries to find a way for philosophers to talk about Being without the use of dualistic language. He shows how negative philosophy, i.e. skeptic philosophy that seeks the absolute truth in things, changes our perception of the world buy its mere attitude. “Philosophy is the perceptual faith questioning itself about itself. One can say of it, as of every faith, that it is faith because it is the possibility of doubt, and this indefatigable ranging over the things, which is our life, is also a continuous interrogation. It is not only philosophy, it is first the look that questions the things.” (103)
In the third chapter, Interrogation and Intuition, MP connects the concerns of philosophical interrogation with the phenomenological stance on intuition and with its concerns regarding perception. Through this he attempts to show how both analytic philosophy and Husserlian reduction cannot account to the ontological place of perception. E radically claims that the questions philosophers ask are leading them to the wrong answers. “But already when I say “What do I know?” in the course of a phrase, another sort of question arises: for it extends to the idea of knowing itself; it invokes some intelligible place where the facts, examples, ideas I lack, should be found; it intimates that the interrogative is not a mode derived by inversion or by reversal of the indicative and of the positive, is neither an affirmation nor a negation veiled or expected, but an original manner of aiming at something, as it were a question-knowing, which by principle no statement or “answer” can go beyond and which perhaps therefore is the proper mode of our relationship with Being, as though it was the mute or reticent interlocutor of our question.” (128-9)
In the fourth chapter, The intertwining—the Chiasm, Merlau-Ponty presents a theory of being in the world that, in a sense, completes and complicates what he started in Phenomenology of Perception. MP constructs the relation of a person to the world as an intertwining that is a thickness of flesh through which we perceive and live in the world. In the thickness of perception subject and object become indistinguishable. Observing vision, MP claims that “one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command;” (133) that is, it is impossible to show that the subject has control over the perceived object. Moreover, when observing the tactile experience of one hand touching the other, MP shows how this difference between subject and object becomes even murkier as one hand becomes object for the other hand while both are of the same subject. He goes on to equate visual and tactile experience: “We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence.” (134) In both vision and touch there is a double perception from within and from without: seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. In hearing as well, we hear ourselves both from without and from within. Perception, hence, is reciprocal: “there are two circles, or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when we live naively, and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly decentered with respect to the other.” (138)
MP uses the word Flesh “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.” (146)
When considering ideas, thoughts and language, MP claims that these are part of the invisible in and of the world, which can only exist as part of the world and can primarily be ‘understood’ only through carnal experience: “it is the invisible of the world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own an interior possibility, the Being of this being.” (151) When dealing with words and signification, MP claims that there is an intertwining of the word (as a sensible in the world) and its meaning so that the word refers back to itself, creating a unity of signifier and signified, similar to the unity of seer and seen: “the siginification rebounds upon its own means.” (154) Furthermore, “the meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its “style” is in our view to form a metaphor.” (155)
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