Merleau-Ponty and

the Face of the World

 Merleau-Ponty and
the Face of the World
Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology

Glen A. Mazis
Front cover: “Norham, Castle, Sunrise,” c. 1845, Joseph Mallord William Turner
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mazis, Glen A., 1951– author.

Title: Merleau-Ponty and the face of the world : silence, ethics, imagination, and poetic
ontology / Glen A. Mazis.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005986 (print) | LCCN 2016029477 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438462318 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438462301 (pbk. : alk. paper)
| ISBN 9781438462325 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961.
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005986

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 This book is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Wilshire,
mountain man, philosopher extraordinaire, and dear friend,
and to Donna Wilshire, wild woman of the earth spirit,
philosopher, and also my dear friend.
 Contents

Preface: From Silence to Depth ix

Acknowledgments xxiii
Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty xxv
Introduction: Merleau-Ponty’s Warning of an “Endless Nightmare” 1

Part I
Entering the World of Expressive Silence

I. Hearkening to Silence: Merleau-Ponty beyond Postmodernism 7

II. Language as a Power for Error and Violence 13
III. A Different Silence and the World’s Gesture 19
IV. Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement 25
V. Silence Sings as We Do When Happy: Charged Evanescence 35
VI. Language Can Live Only from its Roots in Silence 43
VII. Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language 51
VIII. Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time 59
IX. Silence Arrives at the First Day 67

Part II
Faces of the World—Desiring Sensibility and Ethics

I. Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World 75

II. The Face of Desire 85
viii Contents

III. Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the

Other World 99
IV. Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 109
V. An Ethics of Flesh: Saint-Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty, and Felt
Solidarity 125
VI. Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity: Kinship versus
Substitution 141
VII. The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than
Absolute Height 157

Part III
The Imaginal, Oneiric Materiality, and Poetic Language

I. Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 175

II. Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 197
III. Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian
Sensitivity 217
IV. Later Writings: Toward an Imaginal Ontology 237
V. Bachelard’s Material Imagination and Flesh of the World 255
VI. Toward a Poetic Ontology 271
VII. A Poetics of Philosophy 293

Conclusion: Sense and Solidarity at the Depths of World 307

Notes 325
Works Cited 371
Index 377
 Preface
From Silence to Depth

Like most aspects of thought that relate to the work of Merleau-Ponty, the two
main inspirations for this book are interwoven. The first is that we are living
through a time that could desperately use the insights of Merleau-Ponty’s work,
since we witness almost daily a destructive inability to connect with others within
our cultures and across cultures at a historical juncture that requires greater coop-
eration. This inability is recognized vaguely to be a result of identifying incorrectly
that we are isolated individuals. We can’t see how we are part of communities,
both local and global, and how even the various parts of our psyches can con-
nect. This uneasy feeling is somehow related to an equal inability to bring nature,
culture, history, economics, and technology into a fruitful interconnection, which
allows them to remain as colliding forces whose oppositions undermine the qual-
ity of life. These were issues that also plagued Merleau-Ponty, but his approach
to finding a new way of articulating an ontology, an epistemology—and as I
will contend in this book—an ethics is one that is still not fully understood by
many scholars and certainly not by the global culture. Merleau-Ponty’s unique
approach to embodiment would offer the contemporary world an understanding
of the interconnectedness of self, others, and the world that still incorporates
an appreciation of difference that could be vital for discerning more clearly the
puzzles of postmodern existence causing global harm.
For Merleau-Ponty, his emphasis on embodiment was not merely a mat-
ter of giving the body a more central role in calculating innovative practices;
his project was to fathom the body’s ways of apprehending reality in ways
that made our more rational and traditional understandings possible. His work
articulates how self, others and world are manifest in a radically different way
when seen through embodiment’s hold on reality. His philosophy could be a fruit-
ful way of addressing the contemporary widespread interest in giving the body
a more central role in thought and practice. Be it in medicine, psychology,
popular culture, or academic disciplines, an emphasis on the role of the body
as portent of new meaning and fulfillment is gaining force. Yet, for all this new

ix
x Preface

attention—or even, as one might be tempted to call it, obsession—the radical

shift that a greater comprehension of embodiment’s sensitive role in understand-
ing self, world, and others in a liberating way is just as distant as in the earlier
historical periods when the dismissing and despising of the body seemed more
the general rule. The body is still being objectified. As a result, the particular
way in which embodiment’s relations with self, others, and the world yields a
very different epistemology, ontology, and ethics is yet to be realized.
This leads to the second inspiration for this book. Given the current
interest in embodiment, there is a turn to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but some
of its most startling dimensions are in danger of being passed by. The empha-
ses of this book are easily overlooked in their importance to the philosophy
of embodiment. Yet, these ideas are necessary to bring the cutting edge of
Merleau-Ponty’s unique ontology of the flesh into greater relief. Since there is
now within philosophy and other disciplines a spreading recognition of the
power of Merleau-Ponty’s sustained interrogation of the body’s differing and
fundamental ways of understanding, it is time to delve more deeply into the
radical nature of this understanding. There is a danger that some of its fur-
thest edges and more subtle nuances will be lost as the major outlines of his
thought become more popular. Paradoxically, as a philosophy becomes more
appreciated, its most radical ideas and important divergences from the norm
are often diminished—just as the rough edges of a stone are smoothed out by
greater handling. This book contends that to enter more deeply into Merleau-
Ponty’s understanding of perception and the new ontology to which perception
brought him requires following a path into his thought that proceeds in four
steps. The first step is to recognize that the power of Merleau-Ponty’s ontol-
ogy of the flesh can be fathomed only through understanding the key role
of silence in his thought. Without both understanding the unique sense of
silence that Merleau-Ponty articulated and then seeing how silence opens us to
what Merleau-Ponty called the mute “gestures of the world,” we will not have
access to the level at which person and world are co-emergent, and this is vital
to his indirect ontology. Also, in fathoming Merleau-Ponty’s sense of silence
and gestural interchange between person and world, one can appreciate one of
the Phenomenology of Perception’s most important conclusions: that perception
has demonstrated another meaning of the sense of meaning itself. This sense
is further articulated in the lecture courses of the 1950s and in the final writ-
ings—the meaning inscribed by motion itself through perception. There is a
give and take of silent exchange that underlies the more deliberate dialogue
between us and the world that will emerge in language and reflection. The
relation between this type of silence and language is not antithetical. Entering
into this silence infuses these dimensions with a dynamic, dialogical import
that goes beyond a human-centered ontology. Silence’s voices are also seen to
 Preface xi

be enveloping in a way that frontal expression and apprehension are not. Part
of Merleau-Ponty’s fears for the future of humanity was his recognition that
the dawning postmodern culture would be unable to hearken to silence. Silence
will be examined as to how it allows the reversibility of humanity and the
world to emerge in a felt understanding. It will be seen how the opposite is
also true: namely, that only the felt sense of reversibility allows silence’s sense
to enter into the perceived depths of the world.
Once this level of prereflective apprehension and dialogue is articulated,
what Merleau-Ponty referred to as “the face” or “physiognomy” of the things of
the world, as well as the physiognomies of other people and creatures, becomes
visible and palpable in a new way. A vital and enveloping apprehension of the
face of other beings occurs within a silent perceptual encounter such that gestures
express a felt sense. We will explore how this sense of physiognomy or face is the
opposite sense of the face as that found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Mer-
leau-Ponty’s articulation of the face of the other encompasses an alterity parallel,
yet differing from that of the face as recognized by Levinas. For Merleau-Ponty
the face’s alterity stems from the écart, or gap, in perception and at the same
instant also an envelopment or co-emergence that engenders an inexhaustible
depth of sense to be explored. That is to say, the face simultaneously announces
difference and identity. For Merleau-Ponty, physiognomies draw us beyond per-
sonal boundaries and propel us into a transcendence of self. However, this pull is
into this world of nature, culture, and history. The face draws us not into another
sort of realm of pure otherness and spirit “on high”; rather, we are drawn into the
particular contingency of ourselves and others as being a never fully fathomable
density and depth of this world. The face does not tear us away from ourselves
as inhering in the particularity of a cultural and historical situation. Rather, the
power of the face-to-face is to open a more deeply felt situatedness within the
enmeshment of the fate of others with ourselves. These others are like ourselves—
mortal beings trapped in a web of fragility and caught in contingency. There is
for Merleau-Ponty in the face-to-face a sense of being released from immersion
in egoistic concerns, as there is also for Levinas in the face-to-face meeting.
However, for Merleau-Ponty, the release is not “above” the ego to a transcendent
spirit, but rather into a “below” of a prereflective experience that underlies any
sense of ego. When we follow Merleau-Ponty’s thought into this second step of
following silence and gesture into its ethical import of the power of the face-
to-face, this perceptual encounter is revealed as being at the heart of an ethics
of felt solidarity. Merleau-Ponty’s work implies this differing approach to ethics,
which has to be teased out from his writings, but will be further articulated in
this work.
Critics and readers have often expressed frustration that Merleau-Ponty
never set forth an “ethics.”1 On the contrary, this work contends that he did in
xii Preface

fact offer his readers an ethics, but that to appreciate it one must recast what
one expects an ethics to look like. This book contends that the kind of ethics
Merleau-Ponty articulated actually underlies the possible cogency of the more
traditional doctrines of ethics, whether Kantian, utilitarian, social contract, or
any of the other traditional articulations of a reflective ethical approach. The
felt sense of solidarity with others provides a meaning and purpose that gives
the more reflective formulations of obligation an urgency and purpose that
would otherwise be lacking. Part of this work’s exploration will be to examine
the inspiration that Merleau-Ponty received from the novels of Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry. A reading of the novels will yield a careful description of the
role of this felt sense of solidarity in transforming traditional ethical obligations
from distant imperatives into compelling feelings that birth expressive action.
The level of experience of what Merleau-Ponty calls “physiognomic perception,”
however, is one that is crisscrossed by other modes of apprehension. It can be
understood only through exploring how Merleau-Ponty means something far
richer than the traditional conceptions of perception. Without understanding
the other inseparable streams of sense within perception as Merleau-Ponty
articulates it, the dynamic quality and depth of sense would not be fully
articulated. The sense in which the felt space of faces is an affective space,
a kinesthetic space, a memorial space, and imaginal space will be explored.
Yet, of these strands of sense that crisscross the prereflective level of appre-
hension and reciprocal expression, perhaps the least understood in Merleau-
Ponty’s gradual reworking of its sense is the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty develops
the complexity, depth, and status of the imaginal as he develops the sense of
perception as key to a new ontology. As this present work follows the develop-
ment of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, the imaginal is a necessary third
step, since Merleau-Ponty continually finds within the imaginal new avenues
to an access to the realm of being. His articulation of the imaginal deepens
as does his ontology. This, of course, is in stark contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre’s
characterization of the imaginal as opening into nonbeing. For Merleau-Ponty,
the imaginal taken in another modality opens the depths of the flesh of the
world. Merleau-Ponty articulates the power of the imaginal to move the per-
ceiver from the realm of silent intercourse with the world to make manifest
perception’s latent sense. This aspect of the imaginal moves toward language
and a reflective sense of the world, self and others, yet also underlies it as that
which can never be directly articulated. The imaginal is not separate from the
interplay of the senses, the kinetic felt sense of gesture and action, the reflective
grasp of the world, and the coming into language of meaning, but rather is
to be located as part of their ongoing genesis. The imaginal in this modality
is not as an after-product. Merleau-Ponty, as we will see, adamantly opposes
both the tradition of seeing the imaginal as only the reproduction of a prior
 Preface xiii

sense or as the bringing into presence of the absent and fictive. The imaginal
is a part of the sense first offered to us by the world inchoately in our pri-
mordial encounter with the world. It is necessary to the further articulation
of perceptual sense, since the latent meaning of perception emerges through
the imaginal. Last, in the ontology of the flesh, the imaginal is essential to
the invisible sense of the visible. Merleau-Ponty’s replaces a separate realm of
intelligibility or ideas with a matrix of the perceivable that itself unfolds as
another “side” or spiral of sense that is the invisible of the visible.
Merleau-Ponty’s deconstruction of the sense of the real cannot be fully
appreciated without seeing the imaginal’s key role in his articulation of the
depth of perception and in the ontology of the flesh. Rather than our sense of
the real emerging from the rational categorical grasp of the world, as often has
been assumed in the philosophical tradition, from Plato to Hegel, the imaginal
unfolding of the perceptual is key to a more fluid, engaged, and ever-evolving
sense of the real. Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology undercuts the dualisms of
ideality and materiality, necessity and contingency, and empiricism and ideal-
ism through its articulation of the flesh of the world as the pivoting between
the visible and the invisible. The imaginal is vital to the pivoting between
the invisible of the visible. The imaginal is also a key to how Merleau-Ponty
avoids slipping into a retreat into the prereflective as somehow being the ori-
gin of sense. The imaginal is a bringing together and moving ahead of the
reflective and prereflective sense of experience that is in chiasmatic interplay,
where the chiasm indicates the way in which two separate entities are inter-
woven. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is an emphatically nonfoundational ontology.
The interplay of perception and imagination, as well as with other modes of
apprehension, such as body memory, the affective, or the gestural, provides
the ongoing dynamism of a nonfoundational becoming.
Yet, like Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of silence as being not the mere
absence of sound or simply an opposite to language, but as being its other
side, and also like his sense that the prereflective and reflective transform each
other continually, there is no simple “naked given” in perception, as empiricists
might posit.2 Neither can the imaginal be taken to be some pure prereflective
experience divorced from language. Merleau-Ponty is led into reconsidering the
power of language to articulate what is as drawing on the realms of silence,
the felt solidarity with the world through face and reciprocal gesture, and the
imaginal. Yet, here again, Merleau-Ponty diverges from the common sense of
the philosophical tradition he inherits. If silence is not the opposite of language,
but is rather taken up into it and is essential to the coming forth of being, this
unfolding deviates from the tradition’s sense that the rational and categorical
fixing of experience in language reveals what is as being the substantial and
self-subsistent. The silent underside of experience and language are drawn out
xiv Preface

by the imaginal dimension of language. The imaginal is at the heart of a

movement between silence, on the one hand, and the world of language and
culture, on the other, through the poetic dimension. The silent sense of the
world dawns and emerges through a poetic core of language that Merleau-
Ponty articulated throughout his work, but comes to full fruition only in the
later indirect ontology and last writings. Given the rationalistic bias so deeply
embedded in the tradition of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, it is difficult
to see at first the key role of poetry and poetic language for Merleau-Ponty
in articulating the depth of the sense of the world. Furthermore, we will see
how the imaginal as the ongoing making manifest of latent perceptual sense
is closely tied to the central role of poetic language in expressing the depth
of the world. In looking at this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s work, it is helpful
to understand how much his approach to the status of the imaginal and the
poetic parallels the work of Gaston Bachelard. We will look at how these
two thinkers arrived at a parallel sense of the imaginal, despite their differing
emphases. We will discover that nuances of the work of both thinkers come
into sharper relief through their comparison.
The fourth and final step of this understanding is then to see how—
through silence, face, solidarity, and the imaginal—time has taken on a depth
that enmeshes human being with the being of the planet in radical ways
and transforms human identity and action. There is a memory that is not of
human making, but is held in the depth of the surround, and resounds with
every step we make on the Earth. It is very much part of the invisible of the
visible, which is a sense of surplus or supplement of sense that goes beyond
metaphors of sight to encompass all aspects of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology has succeeded in replacing the traditional notions of matter with a
materiality that I and others have called oneiric.3 The dream is not merely the
product of the human mind and sense, but emerges from collaboration with
the world around us.4 This dimension of sense is not locatable on a Cartesian
grid of either space or time, but is lodged within a matrix of the contingent
and factical dimensions of the natural world—as explored partially by the
sciences—as well as in strands of the cultural, historical, and psychological
dimensions. All these dimensions emerge from within a time that is itself
chiasmatic—that doubles back on itself in varied and contingent ways. Each
moment may be a reverberation of times deep in the past that leap forward
or burst forth in the present in a way that defies any progressive sense of the
unfolding of time and leaves us within a felt temporality, well beyond the
horizons of normally conceived cultural or historical time. Chiasmatic time
is mythic and global. The horizons span wider and run deeper than those we
keep in mind reflectively, but are part of the felt, embodied experience of the
world. The space is more of a cosmos in being both vaster and yet riddled
 Preface xv

with comings-together of streaks of sense that give it a tissue of consanguin-

ity. The “shreds” of the past, as Merleau-Ponty called them in his unpublished
writing,5 and into which we are drawn, are manifest within time as its depth
dimension. This depth, we will see at the end of this book, comprises part of
the distinctive expression of the face of the things that surround us. The space
of the flesh of the world spirals about us in containing myriad incompossible
spaces, which are also incompossible times. There is a field of space-time. We
will explore this “global locality,” as Merleau-Ponty called it, where in some
sense all time and places are within a present, not progressively or syntheti-
cally but, rather, sporadically and explosively. This charged sense of depth may
often require a cultivated artist’s sensibility to enter and open for others to
experience. Yet there is a potential for all humans to develop this sensitivity,
as expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
The indirect ontology articulated by Merleau-Ponty’s late writings was not
for him simply another ontology. Merleau-Ponty declared that the traditional
dualistic ontologies had given rise to a dislocating way of experiencing self,
others, and world that was leading to a way of thinking that would foreclose
our access to being in the depth of the world and its sense. This foreclosure
posed a threat to fathoming the meaning of the historical world and the being
of who we are as humans. For Merleau-Ponty, this was an important danger.
To recognize this critical edge in Merleau-Ponty, along with the reasons that
led him to feel this way, is my other motive for writing this book. I feel this
critical edge has not been understood in its full potency. The introduction that
follows this preface discusses Merleau-Ponty’s statement of this fear and the
warning that we are heading into an “endless nightmare.” The contention of
this book is that we can avoid this nightmare only by undertaking this path
through silence, felt solidarity, the imaginal, and a poetic ontology to a depth of
time and space. Merleau-Ponty saw ahead for humanity an increasing reduction
of the world of meaning to that of data to be endlessly manipulated in order
to solve practical problems; this reduction would ultimately cause us to lose
touch with the depth of sense. This depth is comprised of the felt gestures of
the world, felt solidarity with the world, the imaginal deepening of this felt
sense, the poetic articulation of the unique way things appear to each of us, to
each group and age, and a rootedness in deeper and vaster horizons that take
us out of the petty and partisan. If we don’t take away from Merleau-Ponty
these dire, if understated, implications of his work, we are failing to do justice
to his legacy. The threat that Merleau-Ponty espied more than a half-century
ago is only more pervasive now.
These steps in drawing out aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work and retracing
constituent notions are not possible without focusing on his radical notion
of depth. This is why depth is highlighted as the culminating point of this
xvi Preface

work and is also the point of departure for the book’s argument. Depth as
understood traditionally is derived from an objectified version of space and
time. Both are taken atomistically as comprised from measurable units that are
either associated or synthesized by the subject. Depth becomes the sum of these
units and is a projective phenomenon of the subject. From the standpoint of
objectivity, depth is merely a subjective phenomenon. Depth in this scheme
is the third dimension in a rational reconstruction of space proceeding from
points to lines, then moving into planes. Depth is taken to be an “accidental
quality” dependent on a perceiving subject located on a grid of spatial coor-
dinates. In the classical philosophical distinctions of Galileo, Descartes, and
Locke, depth is not a primary property of the world, but rather a secondary
one, dependent on a relation to a subject and therefore not self-subsistently
real. Merleau-Ponty also derives his notion of depth from describing space
and its perception, but he does not abstract away from perceptual experience.
Rather, he traces out its lines of force, and extends its sense to other realms;
always for him it is the “first dimension,” or as he puts it in his last published
essay, “Eye and Mind,” the “dimension of dimensions.” We will see that depth
has varied nuances, but the key aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s definition of depth
is that it is the “going together of incompossibles.” We will see how this
notion is vital to understanding perception, but is also central to the sense
of other realms of meaning. In Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of depth, there
is a contra-logical going-together of what should be opposed in space and in
time. The discreteness of the identities of the phenomena that are inseparable
is preserved, such that depth is a transgressive relationship between or among
beings that creates a differing kind of unity. This unity is rent with opposi-
tions and divergences yet unfolds inseparably within a tension. This coming
together of identity and difference is the felt sense and the meaning of depth.
Its differing logic, which might be called inclusive difference, explains how we
are drawn into the field of perception and into many other dimensions with
an increasing sense and no closure.
The point to be stressed here is that this notion of depth is key to mak-
ing sense of the links between silence, the world’s gestures, felt solidarity, the
imaginal, the poetic, and the kind of space and time into which we are drawn
by the planet and history. All these are examples of the kind of depth of sense
that Merleau-Ponty stated was the key to the flesh of the world and his new
ontology. To sketch briefly, silence and language, self and world, inside and
outside, felt connection and rational distance, self and others, the real and
the imaginal, the affective and the logical, and the poetic and the prosaic—all
of these will be seen to be oppositions that do not exclude each other, but
rather come into inseparable interplay. Merleau-Ponty’s term to describe this
relationship was “enlacement” [entrelacs]. These are not the only topics that
 Preface xvii

can be discussed in Merleau-Ponty’s work in regard to his ontology, but they

are topics that have not been emphasized, I believe, because they pertain to
a depth that is at odds with and neglected by our cultural and philosophical
traditions, both European and American. To hear silence in its eloquence; to
feel the material and natural world in its gesturing communication with us
of its sense; to uncover beneath the “ought” of ethics a felt imperative that
is affective and imaginal; to discover the efficacy of an ethics immediately
felt in interrelation instead of painstakingly reasoned or given from above;
to question the real as not in opposition to the imaginal but as dependent
on it; to understand the poetic not as marginal to culture but instead as the
ongoing source of language’s sense, bearing the full expression of the world
and ourselves; and to envision ourselves situated in a vast context of space and
time in the immediately sensed present that undermines the egoistic stance
toward the world that is culturally promoted and dominant—this is a project
not likely to be easily embraced or even considered possible—certainly not
considered imperative—to a more meaningful future. Yet, this is the message
of Merleau-Ponty, I believe. It has been understood in parts, but the key per-
tinence of these topics has not been grasped and brought forth sufficiently in
many presentations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
Another difficulty in articulating Merleau-Ponty’s thought will dictate a
certain divergence of this book from the norm of many philosophical texts in
the way it is written and the logic with which it proceeds. It is part of the
Western philosophical tradition, especially since Descartes’s articulation of his
rational method, that philosophy consists in offering logical arguments that
proceed in steps from the simplest constituents, finding concepts that synthesize
and order them, subsuming them under certain rules and generalizations. By
doing this, we are to arrive at certain universal conclusions about the human
condition or the nature of reality, how we know it, and how it should be val-
ued. Phenomenology, of course, was a movement that set out to undercut the
assumptions of this way of doing philosophy that there were universals outside
the context of experience as first principles and that the reality of the world
could be grasped in terms of these abstractions. Instead, phenomenology sought
to return to “the things themselves” as they appear within a lived context of
relations. Yet, as we will see in this book, Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Hus-
serlian phenomenology and most other phenomenologists to find a new way
of expressing philosophical insights and to redirect the attention of phenom-
enology toward unexplored aspects of experience. The logic of Merleau-Ponty’s
way of articulating these relations is hermeneutical and dialogical: terms that
are mutually incompossible within depth are also inseparable and continu-
ally transform each other. Merleau-Ponty’s articulations move in a spiraling
unfolding, as, for example, when Merleau-Ponty shows how the movements
xviii Preface

of the body are expressive of meaning and not just motion in an indifferent
space. This explains, for instance, the ground of body memory in the “postural
schema of the body,” which then goes on to increase and deepen the sense of
the meaning of gestures, or “motor meaning.” There is a spiral from expressive
bodily motion to memory and back to bodily motion. In the case of the topics
in this book, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of depth makes it possible to understand
silence, the gestures of the world, felt solidarity, the imaginal, and the poetic
in new ways that draw out new potentialities of depth—as a consequence of
these topics having been explicated. We return to where we began but with a
new understanding of depth that includes the many implications to which it
led. In contrast to the Enlightenment idea of progressing in a linear fashion,
Merleau-Ponty’s work progresses in spirals by returning continually to where it
began. However, the point to which one returns has always been transformed
in the process, and given rise to new possibilities.
Also at work in this book is a concern to express the kind of indirect
ontology and sense of embodiment that Merleau-Ponty set forth in a way
that follows the very notions that are central to his perspective. One can read
Merleau-Ponty and note the numerous “examples” that riddle every page of
his texts, but to take them as “examples” of philosophical “concepts” is to
misunderstand Merleau-Ponty’s point. In the traditional way of doing philoso-
phy, it is the marshaling of concepts to form a logically systematic progres-
sion constituting an argument that marks the degree of philosophical insight.
It is the rational and logical structure “behind” or “beneath” the events, as
their foundation, that marks philosophical expression of the truth. Examples
are intended as ways to jog the mind to see this structure, but they have no
real philosophical weight themselves. For Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, all the
accidents of existence in its peculiar twists and turns, and specific qualities
and characteristics of each individual being in its relations with others in the
forming of a Gestalt, are transformed into the evolving structure of sense. In
addition, more rationally given structures are continually altered within the
context of further contingent events This means that examples are not mere
examples, but rather they are the force of circumstances, some of which will
be more important than others given the context of desire, history, and culture
that shape the sense of the world. Any concept is without real sense unless it
is articulated within the context of the concrete events in which it shows forth.
It will be the aim of this book always to articulate Merleau-Ponty’s insights in
a way in which aspects of the concrete world are brought forth in their sense.
There has to be another way to write and understand philosophically other than
to marshal structures in logical progression to form a systematic rendering of
what is to be comprehended, for if Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and perceptual
analyses are correct, this is an empty philosophy. The concrete as rendered in
 Preface xix

its exemplary power, affecting many within a certain broad context, brings us
back into an intersubjective cultural and historical world where transformative
truth is possible—although never absolute, as vainly sought by the tradition.
Interweaving the accidental and the necessary also leads Merleau-Ponty
to his final assessment that philosophy must be non-philosophy. It is possible,
in reading Merleau-Ponty, not to take seriously that his texts are informed by
many other disciplines ranging from biology to anthropology, from literature to
physics, from psychology to sociology, from embryology to psychoanalysis. His
works were informed by these many other disciplines—they were interdisciplinary
before that phrase became widely used—because philosophy is the making sense
of events as comprehended from all these perspectives.6 It does not hover above
them as an abstract capturing of essences common to them all, or as their foun-
dation, but rather emerges from within their midst. The so-called facts of each
discipline are the ways in which we make sense of the world and become part of
the context in which any new sense arises. For Merleau-Ponty, this transformation
of the contingent into the necessary extends even to our bodily comportment. A
differing sense of the divinity of the heavens, or of the political importance of the
crowds in the streets, or of the calling of the Earth in its ongoing fecundity, for
differing people in differing vocational circumstances or cultural situations—say
of an ancient sky worshipper, a modern radical political organizer, and a rural
farmer—means the way they hold their bodies toward the night, the starry sky,
the way they scan the expanse of the labyrinth of crowded city streets, or take
in visually lush agricultural fields, the plants arrayed in a familiar topography,
will be quite different, as would be what each would perceive if transposed to
the other’s customary locale. This is true also of our larger cultural context, par-
tially molded as it is by each of these fields of inquiry: the sense of the body is
shaped by physics, such that the Earth in a post-Einsteinian world of relativity
is experienced immediately differently than it was by individuals living in the
world of pre-Copernican science; also by biology, such that individuals living
in a world where biology has discovered AIDS perceive sexual situations differ-
ently and carry this difference in their embodied sense of themselves. Merleau-
Ponty’s work led me to write Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries,
in which I tried to express what Merleau-Ponty’s ontology meant as influenced
by cybernetics, artificial intelligence, physics, technology, ecology, animal science,
and other disciplines. This work will encounter further fields that were vital to
Merleau-Ponty’s developing philosophy: literature, the study of poetry, painting,
psychology, as well as insights of the natural sciences.
Perhaps it was this untiring curiosity about developments in these many
other fields of inquiry and creative expression that lent to Merleau-Ponty’s
thought the sense that there were always new sparks of insight flashing forward
from topics that he had raised previously. Now, suddenly, they were seen in a
xx Preface

new light. The themes that this book will pursue are explored by Merleau-Ponty
in fits and starts, scattered throughout his texts. Especially now that we have
access not only to the published texts but also to the years of lecture notes,
the summaries of the lectures, years of notebooks, and even scraps of paper
filled with “working notes,” interviews, and other sources of Merleau-Ponty’s
thought, it is possible to see many different related facets of a thought as he
came to express it. Even though Merleau-Ponty is often quoted about the
impossibility of bringing to fruition the thought of the Phenomenology of Percep-
tion because of the more traditional philosophical terms he employed there, it is
not the case that Merleau-Ponty’s thought took a “radical turn” from its earlier
statements. Merleau-Ponty pursued a path of thought that followed the course
that his own philosophy predicts: with each new expression, the whole way of
thought is transformed in such a way as to allow it to go deeper. Merleau-Ponty
expressed this aspect of writing eloquently in his essay “Indirect Language and
the Voices of Silence:” “. . . the language of his maturity eminently contains
the feeble accent of his first works. Without going back to them, and by the
sole fact that they have fulfilled certain expressive operations, he finds himself
endowed with new organs, and experiencing the excess of what is to be said
beyond their already verified power, he is capable . . . of going ‘further’ in the
same direction.”7 This book will pursue each topic of Merleau-Ponty’s line of
thought by using a variety of sources simultaneously to provide at once other
aspects of the insight. As in the work of Merleau-Ponty, the theme at hand
will be primary and not the recording of a linear historical development of the
topic. The one exception to this way of proceeding will be those sections in
Part III that try to show there is a progressive opening and deepening of the
way Merleau-Ponty came to see the vital role of imagination to articulating
the depths of perception and expressing an ontology of the flesh.
However, the legacy of Merleau-Ponty that this book seeks to follow
that perhaps differs most from traditional philosophy is the attempt to remain
faithful to the way that Merleau-Ponty wrote. We will see how Merleau-Ponty
came to see that poetic language was both the source of language’s power to
express the silent, sensual, gestural sense of the enlacement of self, world, and
others and also had the power to renew the overused language in its expres-
siveness of this moving dimension of being. Merleau-Ponty did not write his
new ontology, or his insights about the power of the imaginal and the poetic,
in a plodding prosaic discourse, which would have contradicted the ideas that
he was attempting to express. Throughout his writing there are explosive poetic
phrasings that resonate with the ideas he is articulating. If his ideas are correct,
the indirect ontology of the world can be expressed only by using poetic lan-
guage as part of its articulation. Otherwise, we will be using a language that is
distant or “high altitude.” As in the case of other dichotomies, Merleau-Ponty
 Preface xxi

did not find a mutually exclusive opposition between the rational language of
the tradition and poetic language.
For Merleau-Ponty, traditional philosophical language must have had its
own poetry in its initial articulation, but over time it became a language
encrusted with customary terms and usage through the long use and circula-
tion of taken-for-granted tokens of rational understanding. The philosophical
lexicon needed renewal through expression from within a more primordial
experience of the world that poetic language helps to bring forth. He was able
to employ both, in tension with each other, in order to go beyond what had
been philosophically articulated previously. When Merleau-Ponty begins the
Phenomenology of Perception—even in the Preface, with famous poetic phrases
such as “the real is a closely woven fabric,”8 “the forms of transcendence fly up
like sparks from a fire,”9 or “Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all
the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the
ocean quivering fish and seaweed”10—he is embarking on a path of thought
whose key ideas will resound through fresh poetic phrases and metaphors.11 His
central ideas such as “sedimentation,” “the temporal wave,” “singing the world,”
“the face of things,” “the flesh of the world,” “tufts of meaning,” “hinges of
sense,” the “leaves and winding of Being,” the “deflagration of becoming,” and
the “polymorphousness of the flesh,”—to utter only a few of the many terms
that could be cited—are all fresh metaphors and figures of poetic language.
Merleau-Ponty also strove to keep alive the poetic turns of language that
he found in other thinkers or artists and to use them in his own articulations,
such as his use of Trismegistus’s “the inarticulate cry . . . of light,”12 or Malraux’s
“voices of silence.”13 Yet, I believe that the prejudice within philosophy, inau-
gurated by Plato in his expulsion of the poets from the Republic, is so deeply
entrenched that even those who attempt to follow Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
often disdain as “unphilosophical” any use of poetic language in articulating
insights that would carry forth his perspective. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty
would take these metaphors and allow them to develop a deeper meaning,
following out their associations and images into new paths of thought. One
could say the entire essay “Eye and Mind” pursues what the “inarticulate cry
of light,” or Klee’s image of “the fire . . . working its way along the hand as
conductor” (from the world to the artist), might mean, and that the essay
“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” follows out the wealth of possible
meanings of Malraux’s title.14 In this work, I hope to follow Merleau-Ponty’s
own lead and focus on the power of the many metaphors that surface at key
junctures in his work, allowing their possible senses to unfold, rather than
passing them over as mere stylistic flourishes.
Finally, Merleau-Ponty felt that when we look on the work of other phi-
losophers, what we find is not that it is “done once and for all,” but instead
xxii Preface

that it “flows back from the end into the heart of life.”15 He felt that even if
unfinished or deficient in some aspect, this is not a mark of a “lesser reality”
in a philosopher’s work, but rather the avenue for those who come after to
make it come alive again. Instead of taking the truths of those who have come
before us as an essence or what it has become known to be, Merleau-Ponty
exhorts us to enter into that renewed flow that can move from texts into the
heart of life. In this way, we see of the past work: “It is rather its existence,
its active becoming.” If we seek truly to honor those who have become before
us, then “the only memory which respects them is the one which maintains
the actual use they have made of themselves and of their world, the accent
of their freedom in the incompleteness of their lives.”16 In order to respect
those thinkers who have come before us, it is necessary to enter their ways
of looking at the world and expand those horizons. Merleau-Ponty did this
admirably with all his philosophical forebears, including Husserl, Kant, Hegel,
Bergson, Malebranche, and others in the many fields he incorporated into his
work, always extending their thought further in giving it new life. This work
attempts to treat Merleau-Ponty with this respect: that his work is still alive
and becoming, and needs others to see what is there—only sketched out—
that can further become. Whenever Merleau-Ponty discussed the insights of
his predecessors, he continued to articulate phenomenological and ontological
discoveries within the space of the thought of that thinker and carried further
their insights.
It is the aim of this work to bring forth both the rational and more cat-
egorical insights of Merleau-Ponty but as inseparably interwoven with as many
poetic infusions of newly turned phrases as possible as well as highlighting the
poetry within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. This is the only way I can see to truly
respect the philosopher who has opened so many horizons for me: to use all of
his articulations, descriptions, and ways of thinking and writing and attempt
to reach a level of creative thought and appreciation that would do his work
justice, and yet keep it dynamic and flourishing. Merleau-Ponty’s deft way of
weaving back and forth from the world to text in continually deepening his
original insights until they transform his starting place will be the guide for
this book. Only a discourse that continually spirals back on its beginnings in
enlarging loops, moving back and forth—from abstract to concrete and back,
from self to world and back—daring to unsettle the given language, can follow
Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology to bring forth the slithering senses of the
undergrowth of experience that would otherwise go unnoticed, as last night’s
dreams dissipate in the light of day.
 Acknowledgments

This work is the fruit of decades of spending my days engaged with the work
of Merleau-Ponty and wouldn’t have culminated in this book without the
help of many people. First and foremost, without the constant love, support,
stimulating discussion, and patient listening and responding to rough drafts
provided by my dear wife and best friend, Judith Kennedy, this book would
not have been written. In addition, I have been blessed throughout my life
to have been given a love of learning and a sense of self and purpose by my
mother’s—Charlotte Mazis’s—steadfast love and shining example of affirming
life. My dear friends Catherine Keller and Jason Starr were particularly helpful
at certain moments in writing this book, when I became discouraged or arrived
at an impasse in the writing, by offering advice and encouragement, as well
as discussing thorny topics. My dear friend and sidekick philosopher, Crispin
Sartwell, also gave me inspiration with his untiring work ethic and feedback
on the writing. Although the book is dedicated to Bruce Wilshire, I must
mention here, too, how important were the many long discussions we had
over decades about the importance of the body, and also Bruce’s indefatigable
support of my work: whenever I was down, there was an unexpected phone call
from Bruce asking me what was wrong with “Ace,” his affectionate nickname
for me. He is sorely missed both as a friend and for his keen philosophical
insights. Donna Wilshire was equally a dear friend and supporter of me and
this book, and her insights about the nature of embodiment found their way
into my thinking also, as well as her indomitable spirit. Ed Casey has been
not only a guiding spirit to my work in philosophy since being my PhD
advisor and mentor at Yale, and has kept faithfully to that role for the next
four decades, but also became one of the dearest friends of my life with whom
I have shared some of the most enjoyable moments. He has taught me what
being a real phenomenologist is about. Even though Mike Dillon was already
gone while I was writing this book, it was his love for Merleau-Ponty and his
wonderful guidance as my undergraduate teacher and advisor (as well as being
a mentor throughout my career) that opened the thought of Merleau-Ponty

xxiii
xxiv Acknowledgments

for me. I would dedicate this book to Mike, but I already dedicated my last
one to him. Emmanuel de Saint Aubert was so gracious to me in introducing
me to the Merleau-Ponty archives at the National Library in Paris and also in
affirming my interpretations of Merleau-Ponty over lovely gatherings in Paris,
as well in ongoing dialogue. He helped me take the bolder turns in writing.
Galen Johnson has been a loyal friend and fellow lover of Merleau-Ponty
for the past few decades of stimulating fellowship and has helped propel the
thought of this book. There is no doubt in my mind that I could have never
thought my way through all the thickets of Merleau-Ponty’s thought nor kept
at this project without the four decades of encouragement and dialogue with
the fellow members of The International Merleau-Ponty Circle. It has been my
home within the world of philosophy, and its members’ input are sprinkled
throughout this book. I owe thanks to so many from the Circle, including
Ernie Sherman, Helen Fielding, Jim Morley, David Abram, Veronique Foti,
Dorothea Olkowski, Larry Hass, Kym Maclaren, Patricia Locke, David Morris,
Joey Dillon, Gail Weiss, Brian Schroeder, Alphonso Lingis, Jessica Wiskus,
Frank Chouraqi, Duane Davis, Nancy Barta-Smith, Ann Murphy, Eleanor
Godway, Scott Marrato, Stefan Kristensen, Rachel McCann, Rajiv Kaushik,
Ted Toadvine, Len Lawlor, and many others. Richard Kearney deserves special
thanks for his asking me to think about the Merleau-Ponty–Saint-Exupéry
connection. My college, Penn State Harrisburg, has been wonderfully supportive
and made the intense work possible on this book with a sabbatical in the final
year of writing, as have been my colleagues, with special thanks to Pat Johnson,
Peter Kareithi, Katie Robinson, Bill Mahar, Charley Kupfer, John Haddad,
Sam Winch, Robin Veder, Meg Jaster, Matthew Wislon, Mikund Kulkarni,
Omid Ansary, and Cindy Leach. I must also thank the many supportive and
stimulating students at Penn State, but especially my “Philosophy of the Body”
students (particularly Sarabeth Orlowski, Phil Nelson, Joey Farnish, and Sean
O’Neill) and the wonderful Merleau-Ponty seminar students at SUNY Stony
Brook in Manhattan, who were with me during the final completion of this
book.
 Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty

The following abbreviations will be used to refer to the cited texts of Merleau-
Ponty in each section’s endnotes. Each abbreviation will appear with the page
number following, for example, VI 24. The original pages in the French text
will follow the English citation with the page number after a comma (e.g.,
PP 23, PPF 32).

Merleau-Ponty’s works cited by abbreviation (with French texts paired with

English translations):

BH “Being and Having,” in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Poli-

tics, and Culture, trans by Michael Smith (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1996)

CD “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. by Hubert and

Patricia Dreyfus, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1964)

DCF “Le doute de Cézanne,” in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Éditions Gallimard,

1996)

CPP Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952,

trans. by Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2010)

PPEF Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant, Cours de Sorboone 1949–1952

(Paris: Editions Verdier, 2001)

CR “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in the Primacy of Perception,

trans. by William Cobb (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1964)

xxv
xxvi Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty

EM “Eye and Mind,” in the Primacy of Perception, trans. by Carleton

Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964)

OE L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard [Collection folio/essais], 1964)

HLP Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, trans. by John O’Neill and

Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2002)

ILVS “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. by

Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1964)

LIVS “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in Signes (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1960)

IP Intuition and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France

(1954–1955), trans. by Leonard Lawlor and Helen Massey (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

IPF L’insitution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique; Le problème de la

passivité: le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire, Notes de Cours au
Collège de France (1954–1955) (Tours: Éditions Belin, 2003)

MH “Man, the Hero,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. by Hubert and

Patricia Dreyfus, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1964).

HHF “L’homme, le hero,” in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Éditions Gallimard,

1996)

MN “Metaphysics and the Novel,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. by

Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1964)

MNF “Le roman et la métaphysique” in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Éditions

Gallimard, 1996)

MSME Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: cours au Collège de

France, Notes, 1953, ed. Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Geneva: Mêtis
Press, 2011) [my translations]
 Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty xxvii

N Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. by Robert

Valier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003)

NF La Nature: Notes Cours du Collège de France, ed. by Dominique

Séglard (Paris: Editiond du Seuil, 1995)

PP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Human-

ities, 1962)

PPF Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945)

PrPhl In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. John Wild, John
O’Neill, and James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1988)

EPh Éloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1953)

PRI “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,”

in the Primacy of Perception, trans. by Carleton Dallery (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964)

PW The Prose of the World, trans. by John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 1973).

PMF La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969)

RLL Recherches sur l’usage litteraire du langage: ed. Benadetta Zaccarello

and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Geneva: Mêtis Press, 2013)

SNS Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964)

SNSF Sens et non-sens (Paris; Gallimard, 1966)

S Signs, trans. by Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 1964)

SF Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)

TL Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans.

by John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
xxviii Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty

RCF Résumés de cours: College de France, 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard,

1968)

VI The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968)

VIF Le visible and l’invisible suivi par notes de travial (Paris: Gallimard,
1964)

WP The World of Perception, trans. by Oliver Davis (New York: Rout-

ledge, 2004)

C Causeries (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002)

All references to the unpublished manuscripts at the Bioliothêque National will

be footnoted using the standard notations used to organize the archives and
will provide the French text [my translations].
 Introduction
Merleau-Ponty’s Warning of an “Endless Nightmare”

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body continually probes the sources for an

ongoing renewal of a depth of meaning that gives significance and purpose to
human existence. This is a fundamental question of human existence that many
philosophers avoid. Merleau-Ponty’s responses to this question often surprise
and puzzle his readers, since his philosophy of embodiment challenges most
traditional philosophical analyses of self, interpersonal relations, epistemology,
ontology, and ethics. However, it is first important to note that Merleau-
Ponty’s courage and doggedness in pursuing this fundamental inquiry into the
sources of human meaning, similar to Socrates’s quest, make Merleau-Ponty’s
thought particularly timely at our current moment in history. Merleau-Ponty
could foresee that the forthcoming philosophical approaches of analyzing the
social construction of meaning might give rise to a sense that the meaning
of our lives is merely the result of social construction, which would mark a
dead-end for individuals fighting these oppressive forces. He could foresee the
conclusions and accompanying feeling of despair that there might not be any
viable resources for renewal of sense in our lives. Merleau-Ponty could also
foresee that there were equally problematical trends in global media culture,
other aspects of technology and political economy that would work to seem-
ingly foreclose access to the resources of embodiment’s ongoing possibility to
transform the perspectives of epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics to
more open avenues of cultural transformation.1
The search for renewed sources of meaning in existence is perhaps an even
more haunting question in the early twenty-first century. Globally, humanity
is increasingly answering specific questions vital to human welfare through
science and research in other disciplines, whether through physics, biology,
economics, archeology, psychology, brain science, computer science, or other
fields of inquiry. Yet, for all the advances and glut of technologies, the ques-
tion of seeking ongoing meaning and purpose to existence plagues us, perhaps,

1
2 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

more than ever. Even though Merleau-Ponty has been gone for more than a
half-century, this problem would not surprise him. Merleau-Ponty is coming
to be recognized within the history of ideas as a thinker who saw not only
the problems of the forthcoming postmodern age, but saw also beyond its
blind alleys.
Most of the philosophies of the past fifty years have provided powerful
critiques of how philosophy, culture, economics, media, and globalism form
interlocking systems that foreclose the renewal of meaning in liberating ways
that would promote human and planetary thriving. These critiques and decon-
structions of traditional discourses have been so powerful that many regard
the search for any truth that might break through these interlocking forms of
alienation to be obsolete. It is considered to be commonsense that meaning
comes from humans and our cultural history, and if they have reached various
impasses that seem to imprison us, it is considered naïve to think the world has
unplumbed depths that we could articulate to renew and transform our vitality.
However, Merleau-Ponty saw both the forthcoming critiques and beyond them
to the importance of following embodying being to a series of nontraditional
notions and a reassertion of the importance of the natural world to the cultural
world. He saw how this path could re-open an access to meaning on a new
basis and could revive the sense of truth on a nontraditional, nonabsolutist basis.
This book will try to articulate this source of meaning, but first it is
important to see Merleau-Ponty’s particular challenge to Western culture. This
soft-spoken thinker sounded a dire warning and challenge to European and
American culture in the introduction to his essay “Eye and Mind,” published
in 1961, right before his sudden death of a heart attack at age fifty-three. His
life’s work aimed at articulating the kind of interconnections in the perceptual
world that are palpable, but in order to bring them to awareness and for them
to take on their full significance and become transformative of individual
lives and the collectivity, there is required a hearkening to ongoing sources
of meaning that are easily overlooked in our postmodern world. As we will
explore in the next section, for Merleau-Ponty silence of a particular sort was
the entranceway into encountering the sources of renewing meaning, which
requires a hearkening to be recognized, as do the other sources to which it
leads. This kind of hearkening is easily foreclosed by the kind of engagement
the postmodern world purveys. The fragile, open avenues of renewed sense
are displaced by the reliance on an ever-accelerating pace of technical solu-
tions, barrage of words, data, and images relayed by ever-present media and
the manipulative rationality with which we feel we can take the measure of
any situation. The dawning glimpse Merleau-Ponty had of our technologically
driven, consumerist, and informationally saturated global culture is at odds
with the direction that he could envision as a redeeming one for humanity. This
 Introduction 3

led him to sound an alarm to the world, or at least to the Western cultures,
by writing the most polemical sentence in the entire body of his written texts.
This written admonition occurs in the introductory section to “Eye and
Mind,” after describing an increasing dislocation of both science and culture in
manipulating the things of the world and renouncing “living in them” [renounce
à les habiter].2 The rest of the essay will detail how by contrast the arts can
lead us into an encounter with the world on a primordial level. In these three
introductory pages, Merleau-Ponty envisions a coming world in which think-
ing is exclusively focused on problem solving, or as he called it, “operational
thinking.”3 He sees that the focus of thinking in the dominant culture will
become solely a matter of applying science, technology, and abstract statistical
systems analyses to accomplish projects. This emerging threat, however, does
not stem from what Merleau-Ponty calls “classical science” [la science classique],
since classical science still has respect for the opaqueness of the world. Classi-
cal science hopes to use its models and theories “to get back into the world,”
or to rejoin the world. In contrast, postmodern science has “an entirely new
approach” [ceci de tout nouveau] in which its constructions are autonomous, and
as long as they gather the data sets that will work for the operations planned,
then the increasing distance from a more encompassing world has no bearing.
If humans can manipulate the world for predetermined operative goals, then
within the postmodern context this manipulative success is taken to satisfy
the goal of our human capacity and understanding of the world. Merleau-
Ponty tellingly points out that such a one-pointed emphasis on manipulation
and the thinking that makes it possible turns humanity itself into the thing
manipulated—the manipulandum.4 Humanity is implicitly required to fit itself
and its ways of thinking into categories conformable to the technology being
employed as instruments of detection and implementation. In order to be
processed by these means, the meanings communicated must meet the data
requirements and become bits of information. For Merleau-Ponty, this narrow-
ing of thought and the concomitant cultural practices results in an “absolute
artificalism” in which the deeper meaning of human engagement with the
world has been exchanged for information that can be processed cybernetically.
This, Merleau-Ponty says, is to model our existence on our creation: machines.
Machines, which we have generated from abstract models, now become the
model to understand humans. We analogize ourselves to the mechanical and
reduce ourselves to functioning within its systems of production. Rather than
transcendence being the goal toward which the meaning-making of humanity
stretches, meaning is transformed to a means for completing and improving
coherent models of functioning systems.
If we no longer go beyond ourselves toward a dialogue with the world in
a true encounter, whether with another person or with the natural world, with
4 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

history, or even with the built world as surpassing whatever can be modeled
and represented sufficiently, then thinking becomes a self-enclosure of human-
ity. It is at this point that Merleau-Ponty declares that humanity would “enter
a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man
and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.”5
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of truth and falsity here bespeak a shattering against
that which outstrips us or pulls us into depths beyond our immediate fathom-
ing in such a way that new meaning emerges as given to us from the world.
We become the world’s witnesses and means of expression. This awakening to
becoming transformed in who we are and what we find the world to be as a
continual unfolding through each other is in contrast to a complacency that
we need only reengineer the world to suit our mundane and practical purposes.
This is a sleep, because it is cut off from an impactful exchange with
the world and others. We are beyond the reach of the world in self-enclosure.
As in a dream, even though there may seem to be frenetic action, it is really
a kind of stupor. It is a nightmare, because our very existence as the beings
who can witness and be open to a new sense of the world, history, and others
will be devoured by being encompassed on all sides by a force against which
we feel helpless, like the dreamer who encounters a monster. The monsters of
nightmares come from the depths of our own feelings and imagination, and
so does this historical predicament. This means that, as in a dream, we could
envision other scenarios and allow imagining to go in other directions. We have
endeavored to create this context of operational thought, which now hides its
imprisoning character, if we become complacent. If we remain unaware of the
threat, we may stay in this stuporous state and not awaken to other possibili-
ties. The circles of manipulation, productivity, and diversion in their frenetic
spinning are captivating in the same eerie way as the images of a nightmare.6
We run continually in a chimerical chase and may never realize we are in
a labyrinth of our own making. Merleau-Ponty’s fear is that the threads by
which we are woven into the world and its depth of renewing meaning could
be cut by us as we run around in these violent circles. We will see that these
threads are silent gestures of the world that permeate its makeup that are
understood only by a sensitive embodied dwelling with the world. They are
beckonings that require a rediscovery of our expressiveness through a different
use of imagination and a poetic transformation of language. There is a depth
to the face of the world that offers a rebirth of meaning much greater than
we might believe possible as we live under the sway of problem-solving efforts
guided by operationalized thinking. For Merleau-Ponty, even at this late date
in history, we retain the possibility to enter the never fully elapsed moment
of wonder when the first human turned to the face-to-face discovery of the
sense of the world.
 Part I

Entering the World of Expressive Silence

 I
Hearkening to Silence
Merleau-Ponty beyond Postmodernism

In short, we must consider speech before it is spoken, the background of

silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would
say nothing. Or to put the matter another way, we must uncover the
threads of silence that speech is mixed together with.
—“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (46)

“What is here required is silence,” Merleau-Ponty warns his readers in one of

the last sentences of Phenomenology of Perception after the many long analyses
of how embodied perception gives us another kind of access to the world. The
admonition of Merleau-Ponty to his readers tells them what is required as the
prelude to a truly meaningful act: to pause, listen, and inhabit the silence that
permeates the world. We will use this final clue to Merleau-Ponty’s develop-
ment of the sense and importance of silence by returning to this moment
and then preceding ones in Phenomenology of Perception.1 In the culminating
paragraph of the entire work, we find an exhortation to his readers to throw
themselves into committed, passionate, ethical action as exemplified by lines
excerpted from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre. These lines are those
in which the protagonist likens himself to a father who would unthinkingly
throw himself against any obstacle to rush into a burning building in which
his son is trapped:

Your son is caught in the fire; you are the one who will save
him. . . . If there is an obstacle, you would be ready to give your
shoulder provided only that you can charge down that obstacle.
Your abode is your act itself. Your act is you. . . . You give your-
self in exchange. . . . Your significance shows itself, effulgent.

7
8 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

It is your duty, your hatred, your love, your steadfastness, your

ingenuity. . . . Man is but a network of relations, and these alone
matter to him.2

The pilot realizes that in throwing himself into his act like a man saving his
son that he is responding to the world as it announces an effulgence of sense.
The world at such moments gives one the opportunity to respond to its sum-
mons and affirm all that one has become through one’s heartfelt relations with
others and the world. Why Merleau-Ponty seems to feel that a supremely
ethical action—a possible sacrifice of one’s life for others—should follow as
the conclusion of this long, detailed exploration of perception is an important
question to be answered. The conclusion that makes the most sense, I think,
is that these perceptual insights have a profound ethical import. If we are to
see how Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of perception have this sort of import,
however, first we must see how silence is the primordial level of perception at
the heart of the sense of the world. Then we must see also how silence is the
source of ethics. In answering these questions, the important place given to
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the close of the book can be a vital clue.3
In Merleau-Ponty’s terse sentence leading up to quoting Saint-Exupéry’s
expression of ethical sacrifice, there is the highest place given to the importance
of silence. The reader of the Phenomenology, having traversed the many analyses
of this work that re-envision the nature of embodiment in order to recenter its
locus within the depths of the world, is suddenly exhorted to stop short—at
least for an instant—if one is to act with spontaneous sensitivity to one’s situ-
ation like the hero of the novel. Merleau-Ponty is emphatic: he does not say
that silence is often found before one’s “significance shows itself, effulgent.”4
Rather, he says that silence is required in order for the world to reveal this
effulgent meaning. Taking in the silence allows a spontaneous responsiveness
to the beckoning of the world—a beckoning that seems to reveal the sense of
that person’s life at the moment to be expressed in a particular action. This
moment in the Phenomenology of Perception comes as the culminating moment
in the text that has so carefully articulated how the world speaks to us through
our body in the depth of perception. It might be that Merleau-Ponty’s final
pointer in the book to the depths of the world encountered through silence
could easily be passed over, since in postmodern culture there seems to be an
increasing intolerance for hearkening to silence.
It is also easily overlooked that Merleau-Ponty’s project of exploring the
depths of embodied meaning through perception begins in the Phenomenology
of Perception with a similar invocation. Listening to silence is named as what
is necessary for philosophy, prior to thematizing experience, to open access
to “all the living relationships of experience.”5 In order to disclose this nexus
 Hearkening to Silence 9

of relationships, Merleau-Ponty claims, “In the silence of primary conscious-

ness can be seen appearing not only what words mean, but also what things
mean: the core of primary meaning around which the acts of expression and
naming take place.”6 There is a primary way of being open to the things that
surround us: it is found within an equally primary silence. Yet, to hearken to
silence is an unfamiliar path for Western philosophy; its reflexive response to
fathoming the world is, instead, a further imposition of words. The Phenom-
enology of Perception begins and ends with insisting that a depth of sense and
action becomes riddled with compelling significance when they emerge from
silence—the opening reference speaking of the genesis of theoretical insight and
the last reference of the book to the source of ethical action. As Merleau-Ponty
stated in the opening pages of his last unfinished work, written two decades
later and published as The Visible and the Invisible, philosophy “does not seek
a verbal substitute for the world we see.”7 There is an insistence throughout
Merleau-Ponty’s work that access to Being and uncovering of an emergent sense
of the world within the layers of perception require philosophy to make room
for a meaning-laden silence. By implication, Merleau-Ponty is also suggesting
that his readers seek the meaning of their lives through silence, accessing the
immediate embodied sense of their existence. Whether this is a moment of
philosophical inquiry or of personal existence, however, it is a moment that
is easily passed by.
In our current postmodern existence, it seems that silence is increasingly
banished. Walking down the street, or even through the hush of the woods,
many people have cell phones pressed to their ears or iPods wired into them.
There is not only a continual sonic input, but a bombardment of communi-
cated signs of varied sorts. As Salomé Voegelin states in her insightful explora-
tion of listening to noise and to silence, “Being a critical listener is listening
to silence and being able to bare to hear yourself. If I cannot enter silence,
I cannot really listen to anything but stuff.”8 Listening to the continual play
of messages that keep us occupied and distracted, we are not “bared”—open
in our more authentic selves—to what we might encounter. There is never a
chance for a kind of stillness of dwelling in the body’s feelings and percep-
tions to occur: one that discloses another kind of silence than the mere lack of
sound. Postmodern culture in America touts itself as a return to living fully in
our bodies in many ways—indeed, many seem obsessed with bodies as being
of primary significance, admiring the bodies of celebrities or athletes, “working
out” or following health fads, and so on—yet this emphasis on embodiment as
“having” bodies that are efficient and attractive objects, or as masterful vehicles
of the will, is still to understand the body in a Cartesian way. To discover our
truly embodied selves, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting, the silent dimension of the
body must be explored as a reverberation of the silence of the world interwoven
10 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

with the body in the depths of perception. A more deliberate, rationalized,

and objectified program of retrieving the body’s sense may itself be a way of
blocking access to the silence that opens another sort of exchange with the
world and others. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty leads us to believe that,
unless or until we have hearkened to silence, we have not truly encountered
our bodies as the pathway to depths of meaning and to liberating ways to be
with the world. This is another sort of silence than mere literal silence, one
that is more encompassing and involves a greater depth.
The “body” of current cultural obsessions, whether prurient, medical,
athletic, or cosmetic, is the same objectified body that may previously have
been scorned, or at least undervalued, by religious and philosophical traditions,
considered as a mere object to be utilized as a tool or a vessel of the spirit, or
even as an impediment to spiritual transcendence. Now, given our dominant
materialism, this objectified body is fetishized as the most valued object we
“possess.” Merleau-Ponty’s accomplishment was not to think of the body by
redefining the characteristics of this object; it was rather to insist we think in
an entirely new way to comprehend the being of the body, and through that
new way of thinking, in turn, to understand differently the being of the world.
In the notes for his 1954–55 course at the Collège de France on Philosophy
and the Phenomenon of Passivity, Merleau-Ponty states: “It is a matter of
becoming acquainted, through this lived or perceived, with [the] being that
embraces both the perceived in the restricted sense and the being known which
is called objective.”9 In other words, through perception, embodiment is open
to another kind of being that encompasses what had been taken to be the
subjective and the objective.
What he claims in this context is that the perceived is “not as content of
my consciousness, not as content of human consciousness . . . not as ‘human.’
There is something other than all that; the perceived yet mute (the human is
precisely that which can see the inhuman). But this pre-human perceived.”10
Perception, too, has to be understood as more than a human access to a world.
The interweaving of perceiving and the world perceived—as a “pre-human
perceived”—evokes a dimension more primordial than reflection and language,
which is more a process among beings or an unfolding matrix than an object
appearing to a subject. In this regard, it is more fitting to call human being an
“embodying being,” as part of a matrix with the natural world, other people,
culture, and history. In this work, rather than refer to “the body,” this spiraling
unfolding of the human and nonhuman world will repeatedly be referred to
using the gerund “embodying.” Referring to the body as “embodying being”
emphasizes that it is a distinctive and co-emergent process and also that it is
an unfolding that is equally an enfolding. This level of primordial experience,
we will find, is a site in which other beings speak in the voices of silence.
 Hearkening to Silence 11

The dialogical process of self, others, world, and animality articulated by

Merleau-Ponty leads him to a differing point of access as compared with any
preceding philosophy: “We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the
body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the
seer as in a box.” Instead, Merleau-Ponty follows the dynamics of perception to
reveal how, between the perceiving and perceived, “there is reciprocal insertion
and intertwining of one in the other.”11 For the human person who immerses
himself or herself in the vision of the world—say, for example, at Mont Saint-
Victoire, as Cézanne did for so many years in painting it repeatedly—there
is “a participation in and kinship with the visible, the vision neither envelops
it nor is enveloped by it definitively.”12 This way of intertwining, so that the
human and the world are enmeshed in the process of unfolding together, is
the “flesh of the world” [la chair du monde], or sometimes just the “flesh,”
as named by the later Merleau-Ponty—“and one knows there is no name in
traditional philosophy to designate it.”13 This dimension of our being that
designates the way our embodying being is carried into the depths of the
world by perception will be explored in the course of this book, but what is
essential to our purpose here is the way Merleau-Ponty links this to silence. In
his later writings Merleau-Ponty locates the experience of being doubled by the
other or by the world in being addressed by it, and the means of expressing
this back and forth weaving of the flesh, at the point where expression crosses
over from within silence: “this new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh
as expression are the point to insertion of speaking and thinking in the world
of silence.”14 The term reversibility expresses how I can only experience and
express the sense of what I perceive as if I were perceiving in and through
all that surrounds me, to which I am related. This perceiving as of the flesh
of the world, whenever we perceive, is the happening of a dialogue with the
world that is an encounter with “the world of silence.” We must be cautious,
however, to discern what Merleau-Ponty means by silence. Silence must not be
understood in terms of the traditional binary opposition of sound and silence.
It is helpful here to turn to Bernard Dauenhauer’s distinction of differ-
ent sorts of silence. He distinguishes “intervening silence” from “fore-and-after
silence” and then “deep silence.”15 Whereas the first two are silences that occur
within speech and are more literal silences, Merleau-Ponty is exploring what
Dauenhauer calls “deep silence,” which has various aspects. In its third aspect,
which Dauenhauer calls “the to-say,” there is a sense of silence “which grounds
all that is said.”16 This silence that requires a certain openness of encounter with
the world on a deeper level is “the silence that pervades all discourse.”17 By
pursuing the nature of this silence in Merleau-Ponty’s work, we will be led to
articulate dimensions of sensual, affective, imaginal, memorial, and ideational
sense within the depths of perception that are sources for another more rooted,
12 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

interconnected, and ultimately ethical relationship to self, others, and world.

Yet, without this moment of entering a distinctive silence, the experience of
flesh of the world might remain covered over by the monopoly of thought
as the problem solving of postmodern culture, about which Merleau-Ponty
warned. Without entering silence, we lose access to many further possibilities
of renewed sense.
 II
Language as a Power for Error and Violence

But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words
a certain silence he hearkens to within himself . . . he did not state it,
and could not state it, since it is silence.
—The Visible and the Invisible (125)

Merleau-Ponty’s warning of an “endless nightmare” from the introduction of

“Eye and Mind” takes on more weight if we pair it with what he was writ-
ing at approximately the same time in the third section of The Visible and the
Invisible, “Interrogation and Intuition.” In this third section, Merleau-Ponty
considers what happens if we overlook in forgetfulness the fact that self, others,
and world are always mysterious, always inexhaustible in their articulation. It is
this same forgetfulness of depth, complexity, and mystery that he indicated by
the phrase “operational thinking” in “Eye and Mind” that he discusses here in
The Visible and the Invisible. If this type of forgetfulness becomes the pervasive
way of understanding the world—whether as a culture or a discipline—by
considering world as fully graspable and controllable, “then language is a power
for error.”1 Language becomes a power for error not by generating false asser-
tions and calculations about the world, but rather “language is a power for
error, since it cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things and
to the past and is installed between ourselves and that tissue like a screen.”2
For Merleau-Ponty, without recognizing a depth that could free us from the
“operational thinking” that strives to extend to all matters of thought, this
superficial thought would “set out to construct man and history on the basis
of a few abstract indices.”3 These abstract indices are dislocations of the human
from its interweavement with the world around us. Language obsessively used
in this manner becomes a “screen” that after instituting a rupture “is installed
between us and that tissue” of interconnection with the beings of the world.
It might even be more appropriate to call such language a knife, since it is a
cutting apart of all those fragile, meaningful interconnections.4

13
14 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

This thought of implicit violence in language use is resonant with the

opening sections of The Visible and the Invisible, which begins by expressing
concern that the reflective tradition of Western philosophy is itself a barrier to
accessing sense—that it is itself violating. Two decades before, Merleau-Ponty
had opened the Phenomenology of Perception by asserting that reflection is “a
violent act”5 committed in disclosing the meaning or sense of existence by
rending “the closely knit fabric of the world” that envelops us and is perceived
prereflectively, yet he also conceded that this rending is necessary in order to
“seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into
being.”6 Articulation requires violence, just as creation involves destruction of
prior states. Philosophy’s use of language, however, is not of this innocent or
necessary kind. Despite the necessary violence in articulating the meaning of
existence, there are differing uses of language: ones that can increase the rend-
ing of the tissue of the human-world enlacement and ones that can minimize
this rending. There is a relationship to language and silence that leads to
transformation and further becoming, one that is healing. There is a promise
of renewal and transformation in the opening of The Visible and the Invisible,
when Merleau-Ponty appeals to his readers with the claim, “it is at the same
time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn
to see it.”7 A deeper expression begins with the challenge to perceive more fully
and expand the expressed sense of the perceived world. Philosophy needs to be
wary of the danger of categorical language and become sensitive to the power
of silence to recover our lost sense of the perceived world.
Our technological sophistication fails in that its operational thinking
forecloses the sort of wonder that Aristotle pointed to as the impetus for phi-
losophy, reformulated thus by Merleau-Ponty: “For us, the essential is to know
precisely what the being of the world means.”8 For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy
must undergo a radical turning-back in order to rediscover a more primordial
contact with the world and a way of expressing it. If we cannot displace our
traditional ideas of beings, of representation, of consciousness, of what we are,
then we will not be able to go beyond our “ontological preconceptions . . . so
as to know what world-being, thing-being, imaginary being, and conscious
being are.”9 For Merleau-Ponty, it remains the task of being human to fully
look, perceive, and hearken “by awakening to the world,” and “we cannot
witness it as spectators.”10 A spectator confronts the world from a distance,
as separate and observing. Philosophy, even phenomenology, easily remains a
spectator of the world until it finds another level of experience that is engaged
with the world and seeks to express itself from within that intersection. To
become “awakened” in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, to be a participant witness, is
owing to the distinctive human ability to interweave with the world. It requires
a sense of the miracle of perception: “in perception we witness the miracle of a
totality that surpasses what one thinks to be its conditions or its parts.”11 Fully
 Language as a Power for Error and Violence 15

perceiving as awakened, witnessing in this sense surpasses what we can think

about the world as grasped by concepts or representations.12 Galen Johnson
powerfully expresses this belief of Merleau-Ponty that wonder will open us to
the heart of being in entering the silence that addresses us: “Merleau-Ponty
argues that the philosopher can participate in the return to the wonder of the
‘there is.’ This is the perceptual faith, that there is a world, that there is wild-
ness, and that the world maintains a generosity that will speak to a spirit of
wonder and openness. These experiences are connected with all that Merleau-
Ponty has to say about the fecundity and fullness of silence.”13 It is a wonder
that will not dissipate, for at this level of primordial contact with the world
the mysteriousness of the world does not resolve, but continually opens to
greater depths of sense.14 By contrast, the nightmare into which we fall with
operational thinking or with traditional philosophy is the loss of wonder as a
consequence of the feeling of closure, which is really a self-enclosure. Without
wonder, silence will not be heard.15
Merleau-Ponty’s task was to help us displace the representations that
would screen us from a more open experience, and he knew that “if it is to
displace them as it does, it is necessary that the perception maintain in its
depth all their corporeal ties.”16 For philosophy to avoid becoming complicit
in screening us from the depths of perception, as problem-solving science and
postmodern culture do, it needs to gain access to these depths. This depends
on our maintaining a relationship to embodying being through the power of
silence. In these opening sections of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
warns that these depths are only accessible if “philosophy is not a lexicon.”17
Philosophy’s revealing relationship can only disclose the world, if it “does not
transform it into something said.” Instead, philosophy’s endeavor is such that
“it is the things themselves from the depths of their silence that it wishes to
bring to expression.”18 Silence can be brought into expression, and to do this
is the aim of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, but it requires a certain sensibility
and an alternate use of language that has neither been the norm in philosophy
nor the norm in the increasingly technologically driven culture of the West. As
Lawrence Hass states at the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, a work that
focuses on the idea of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s work, “Merleau-Ponty’s
account of expressive cognition is explicitly offered as an alternative to the
ancient picture of thinking, language and knowing as representation.”19 This
representational view of language as merely copying a self-subsistent reality,
Hass adds, has been dominant from the ancient Greeks through the Enlight-
enment and has filtered into the surrounding culture and persisted unto the
present, yet Merleau-Ponty seeks to undercut this account.
If the philosopher is to engage in philosophy, he or she must speak, “but
this is a weakness in him [or her].”20 In saying this, Merleau-Ponty points to
the paradox of articulation that the source of meaning that phenomenological
16 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

philosophy—or Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology—seeks to articulate can eas-

ily become obscured or covered over by that very act of articulation. He adds
that this weakness is “an inexplicable weakness: he [the philosopher] should
keep silent . . . yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into
words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire work is this
absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not
state it, and could not state it, since it is silence.”21 The source of meaning will
always be a more primordial level of contact, and the philosopher cannot forget
this. It is a weakness to speak, because speaking is not self-subsistent; it does
not stand on its own foundation. It is not full, but rather is torn. It is torn
from the world. It is full of silence. Language, to be expressive of depths, must
fight its own illusion of substantiality. For Merleau-Ponty, language must go
beyond itself in order to be itself as an intertwining or co-emergence. Entering
into a realm of silence is essential for philosophy as the contact with Being.
This would require another sort of language than a language with pretentions
of standing in itself to express this contact that occurs within the dimension
of silence. This other language use would be expressive by keeping this silence
reverberating within language in a way operational thought or traditional philo-
sophical discourse fails to do. In traditional discourse, some state of affairs is
asserted or not, is represented or not. The revealing relationship of language to
world or of silence to language is not located in such an oppositional binary,
as expression is not a yes-or-no affair. Hass ends his long meditation on expres-
sion in Merleau-Ponty by stating, “Merleau-Ponty’s new expressive vision for
philosophy is an uncertain, contingent effort to find new words (beyond their
‘pre-established signification’) that open up a powerful, illuminating way to
articulate the silent, mute ‘concordance with the world’ [VI 39]).”22
The notion that reflection is a violence, or a “rending” of the fabric of
the world, first mentioned in the Phenomenology, is discussed again by Merleau-
Ponty in a working note of February 1959.23 Merleau-Ponty is still struggling
with how reflection might use language in another way that does not put a
barrier between itself and the primordial level it seeks to articulate. He asks,
“Can this rending characteristic of reflection (which, wishing to return to itself,
leaves itself) come to an end?”24 It would not be possible to fully realize such a
goal, for the reason that speech would never be adequate to experience. Rather,
it is a false problem and a chimerical goal, since speech and silence are not
opposed. Merleau-Ponty calls the formulation of the concern whether speech
is adequate to what it describes a naiveté, as it fails to realize that silence rests
on language and language rests on silence. His answer to his question is this
realization: “there would be needed a silence that envelops the speech anew,
after one has come to realize that speech enveloped the alleged silence of the
psychological coincidence.”25 It is not a matter of getting back to a “pure”
 Language as a Power for Error and Violence 17

experience and “capturing” it in language, which traditional philosophy has

failed to achieve. Rather, recognizing that “this silence will not be the contrary
of language,” what is needed is another sort of use of language that allows the
silence within it to come forth in a heightened manner and not be screened
away or covered over (along with the realm of experience from which it stems).
To follow how language can make contact with this primordial level of percep-
tion will take us on an exploration of another sense of silence, with its tie to
poetic language, and will lead us to describe another sort of imaginal than the
traditional treatment of imagination.
Equally important, in his consideration of the rending power of language,
Merleau-Ponty, in this late working note, contrasts his efforts at an indirect
ontology with the scientific discourse that mistakenly believes itself to be self-
subsistent [selbständig], standing in opposition to the self-subsistence of the
being of the world.26 This stance takes the being of the world as an “objectified
Infinity,” one of endless extension, rather than as the inexhaustibility of the
openness [Offenheit] of the Umwelt, or the world seen as a relational context.
The “objectified Infinity” is the assumption of an absolute ground to be repre-
sented through science and through a rational philosophy or metaphysics. The
openness of the Umwelt acknowledges the interrelational matrix that unfolds
inexhaustibly. It is an Abgrund—that is, without foundation. Once again, Mer-
leau-Ponty states that traditional philosophical notions have blocked access to a
“pre-meaning, a pre-knowing, a silent knowing.”27 He also identifies this rend-
ing of traditional philosophy and science with the classical labels, deriving from
Philo, of the logos prophorikos [λογος προϕορικός], the speech uttered, versus
the logos that is not uttered, the silent logos endiathetos [λογος ένδιάθετος].
These are not opposed realms but rather dimensions within articulation. Instead
of seeing the world of science and rationalist philosophy as naming entities that
exist in themselves, outside the relationship to humanity and even to animality,
Merleau-Ponty seeks a way to show this one-in-the-other [Ineinander, Husserl’s
term], the “circularity” between human and world, history and nature, human
and animal, and psychology and ontology.28 This is the flesh of the world: the
way dimensions of varied sense unfold in becoming enfolded.
The turn to the underside of language in silence that makes contact with
l’étre sauvage—“wild being”—can be fathomed only from within by encounter-
ing a nexus of “lateral relations.” In naming relationships as lateral, Merleau-
Ponty means to go beyond causal relations and relationships among discrete
beings, whose being is conceived as external to each other or even in opposi-
tion to each other. Lateral relations are the ways that each being is itself taken
into the being of others, such that one being is implicated in others, its sense
cannot be fathomed outside the nexus or web of interconnections perceived.
This, in turn, means that the very idea of relationship has been transformed
18 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

from its more traditional sense. Relationships are not perceived from a distance,
from outside a nexus, but rather all beings related laterally are interwoven in
their being. In a working note of 1959, Merleau-Ponty states that “there is an
Einfuhlung and a lateral relation with things no less than with the other: to be
sure they are not interlocutors, the Einfuhlung that gives them gives them as
mute—but precisely: they are variants of a successful Einfuhlung. Like madmen
or animals they are quasi-companions.”29 There is a felt interwovenness with the
other beings of the world that are not interlocutors as other humans are, and
yet, like those in altered states of psychosis or with animals, we get something
of the sense expressed by them. All beings communicate in some sense that
is part of what we are given to express through our articulation. The beings
of the world are “quasi-companions” in the manner of being unclear in their
communicated sense, indeterminate, yet with us and interwoven with our sense
of ourselves, as richly suggestive of what our shared surround means.
Merleau-Ponty warns his readers that “this rending characteristic of reflec-
tion” that takes beings as discrete and therefore separable has been exacerbated
to a distorting and destructive degree by the Cartesian legacy. Rather than being
sensitive to these bonds among beings, language is used to break these ties and
screen them from view. This is the Cartesian attempt to present categorizations
as adequate to the truth of expressing being, reducing the sheer diversity of
beings to classes having a common essence. This is the philosophical tradition’s
method of revealing truth in language. The categorization of beings is taken
as revelatory of beings. This use of language by philosophy betrays a mistaken
faith that one can substitute this verbal production for the phenomena, or
at least, as Merleau-Ponty observes, commits the “error if one thought that
speech is in these congealed relations.”30 This is an Enlightenment faith that
lingers, a humanism that claims it is reason’s capacity to read in existence the
underlying structure that would be its essence captured. By contrast, to let
silence and language become heightened in their encounter is to acknowledge
that sense is not solely our production, but is partially a gift of the world. The
weakness of language, once recognized, becomes its strength in embracing that
it is a co-articulation with and through the world as its silent but expressive
interlocutor. Rather than the hubris of humanity being “the speaking animal,
the rational animal,” a claim that has haunted humanity since Aristotle (and
Plato before him), embracing silence is “to act as if language were not our
own.”31 Acknowledging that language is not our own, we hearken to the world
in its silence and, as we will see, this opens us to its gestures.
 III
A Different Silence and the World’s Gesture

The sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without
its having to be posited; the sensible appearance of the sensible, the silent
persuasion of the sensible is Being’s way of manifesting itself without
becoming positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent.
The sensible world itself in which we gravitate, and which forms our bond
with the other, which makes the other be for us, is not, precisely qua
sensible, “given” except by allusion——The sensible is that: this possibility
to be evident in silence, to be understood implicitly.
—“The Visible and the Invisible” (214)

Merleau-Ponty is not evoking a simple sense of silence, understood as the

absence of word or a mute coincidence with the world, as Bergson often seems to
evoke in his philosophy, in which sense is silently apprehended and expressed
within a direct intuition. Although criticizing Cartesianism for its naïveté in not
seeing the silent background of speech in perception, Merleau-Ponty declares
that it is equally naïve to posit “a silent cogito that would deem itself to be an
adequation with the silent consciousness.”1 The silence that underlies language
and is entangled with it is a sense of silence such that “it rests entirely on
the virtues of language.”2 In other words, the prereflective or silent underlies
the reflective or spoken/written, and yet it is equally true that our prereflective
experience comes to be what it is through reflection; the two are interdependent
or, in his later language, “intertwined.” We see here more clearly how seriously
Merleau-Ponty pursues this “circularity” of thought, “where everything that is
said at each ‘level’ anticipates and will be taken up again.”3 Since one phe-
nomena is laterally related to the other in such a way that each transforms the
other, the method of describing them must have a circularity that echoes this
back-and-forth spiral between phenomena, such as this relationship between
sound and silence.

19
20 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Given Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the form of a phenomenon emerges from

contingent facts becoming “sedimented” into the flow of experience until they
give it a certain shape, which is his appropriation of Husserl’s idea of Fund-
ierung, the fact of literal silence cannot be dismissed in its importance either.
For Merleau-Ponty, as he says in Phenomenology of Perception, “form integrates
within itself the content until the latter finally appears as a mere mode of
form itself.” At the same time, the literal fact as the “initial establishment” of
knowledge remains within “this dialectic of form and content” in such a way
that its “concrete richness will never be exhausted.”4 The qualities of a literal
silence—such as its stillness, lack of sound, openness, calm, alteration of the
sense of space as wider and more expansive, the intensifying of the presence
of the face of other beings, the increased power of the immediate, and other
experienced qualities that could be teased out from its texture—are aspects
that are taken up into a deeper sense of silence. This deeper sense of silence
is not separable from literal silence and how it appears within the dialogue
with the perceiver. Unfolding in time, the depth of the dimension of silence
grows, and the experience of a person or collective can augment or dimin-
ish it. A person who goes on a meditative retreat and lives in literal silence
for days, for example, begins to perceive the things around him or her with
another sort of intensity and depth of sense, but correlatively also perceives
another sense of silence as a kind of stillness, expansiveness, hush and depth
of presence in situations that had lacked that quality previously. On the other
hand, a collective that lives in noise and haste, shutting out literal and deeper
silence, will not be able to perceive either easily.
Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of a prior level of sense discovered in a silent
communion with the world had been described in the Phenomenology of Percep-
tion using the idea of the “tacit cogito” as a correction to Western philosophy’s
reliance on Descartes’s “explicit cogito” of “I think therefore I am.” The tacit
cogito, as conceived by Merleau-Ponty, was part of his shift relocating primary
meaning of the apprehended world away from consciousness toward being
embedded within embodying experience in perception, kinesthesis, action, and
expression. However, it is also a shift to beginning to explore the phenomenon
of silence, a dimension largely ignored by the tradition. This is important to
keep in mind, since the idea of a tacit cogito is later discarded by Merleau-
Ponty, yet I believe that what Merleau-Ponty says in the context of the tacit
cogito about silence remains important, even if the idea of a tacit cogito is a
misleading idea. Merleau-Ponty will state flatly in a working note of January
1959, “What I call the tacit cogito is impossible” in the sense that it seems
to imply some sort of ungraspable self-consciousness that might also provide
a foundational level of experience.5 Both the idea of a consciousness of self
at the prereflective level and an enduring separable presence of self are denied
 A Different Silence and the World’s Gesture 21

by Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Instead, Merleau-Ponty comes to see

there is a “mythology of a self-consciousness to which ‘consciousness’ would
refer.” He replaces the idea of implied origin or constituting source of sense
with a notion that “there are only differences between significations” and “fields
and a field of fields.”6 He discards the notion of tacit consciousness because it
would imply the mistaken idea of referring to some “positive signification” as
a positive sense of self where there is none. Instead, meaning occurs between
things, and between things and our embodying being, as processes.7 There-
fore, there is no positive origin or locus of sense as a foundation to which
we might return. Despite this problem with the original idea of tacit cogito,
Merleau-Ponty flatly declares in a late working note: “Yet there is a world of
silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language
significations—yes, non-language significations, but they are not accordingly
positive.”8 Meaning need not be directly articulated, yet can still come forth,
even in silence. It is not the articulation of a self or origin in the perceiver, but
a nonfoundational co-emergence. Despite abandoning the idea of tacit cogito,
Merleau-Ponty does remain dedicated to the task to “rediscover this world of
silence,” even in his last writings.
In Phenomenology of Perception he also calls the tacit cogito the “silent
cogito,” and describes how within the silence of perception there is a “motor
power” (une puissance motrice).9 Merleau-Ponty explores this realm of silence by
offering his readers a wonderful example of experiencing sleet. He details how
in speaking the word “sleet,” the immediate experience is a “motor presence”
(une presence motrice) that puts the speaker and the interlocutor back into the
context of its appearance.10 The initial sense is not a thought or a representa-
tion; the word itself does not stand out in its identity, but is more like a way
into a world. The motor power of the word evokes from the perceiver a kind
of gearing into or joining up with the particular flow of the phenomenon’s
movement. The movement that fills the world of sleet is like a gesture of
another person. It is not an empty movement, but a movement tracing out or
impregnated with sense. Since movement is inseparable from perception, as I
enter the context of the percept I am “moved.” This felt sense of movement is
revelatory of sense, a nondiscursive sense. This parallels Merleau-Ponty’s explo-
rations in his course notes of 1953–54, only recently published for the first
time, in which he details how movement inevitably and primordially sketches
out meaning.11 Rather than motion being empty of sense until interpreted by
human consciousness, as the Enlightenment tradition would have it, Merleau-
Ponty declares, “movement reveals being” (le mouvement révèle l’être).12
To return to the passage about sleet in Phenomenology of Perception, there
is a detailing of how the “motor presence of the word” emerges from the
expressive movement of the world perceived. There is an interweaving sense
22 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of the word “sleet” [gresil]13 and the perceptual experience of sleet. We enter
into certain specific senses of the word “sleet” that Merleau-Ponty asserts we
could never fathom from either a representation or an intellectual analysis or
synthesis of sensations. He likens it to a wonder-inspired face-to-face encounter
with this weather. We might get a better sense of what this means by imag-
ining meeting someone we know unexpectedly on the streets. We wonder at
their sudden appearance in front of us and are taken by their face’s expression
into a shared context of feelings and sense. This rush of feeling is not yet the
explicit identification of the situation that our minds might churn out in the
next instant, seeking to catch up with our immediate felt reaction to the other.
Rather, like the shock of being thrust into the cold, blustery, and bombarding
world of sleet, we might be suddenly be hit by their turmoil or fear without
yet having reflectively realized what context we have entered. Merleau-Ponty
proposes that the word “sleet” speaks by drawing on and drawing us into
this silent background in which a word has a “behavior-producing power”
(une puissance de fabriquer des comportements) and is the source of the word’s
meaning.14 Again, if we can analogize to how we respond to perceiving the
expression of another person, this is helpful to imagining the response to the
world’s expression in sleet or bounteous sunlight as if it has flashed a certain
expression upon its face. Another person’s expressions of fear or love or disgust
are senses we “get” immediately, before thinking about them reflectively. We
feel what the disgust or fear is like, and, furthermore, we feel the quality of
this distinctive disgust or fear in the context of the situation communicated.
Merleau-Ponty is saying the world gestures to us in a similar fashion. Like other
people or animate beings, the world is an interlocutor. However, in our philo-
sophical tradition, not only are all inanimate beings around us seen as mute, as
dumb or brute presences, but also the motion encountered within the world is
taken to be the “empty motion” through a void between objects expressing no
particular sense. Whatever sense might be attributed to the world’s movements
or gestures is taken by the philosophical tradition to be a subjective projection.
For Merleau-Ponty, however, the world of silence as a world of move-
ment speaks to us indirectly. Movements are expressions of the sort that can
be identified as winding, pulling, soaring, tugging, sinking, sliding, exploding,
meandering, skimming, embracing, striking, and so on. Differing movements
are meaning-laden flourishes inseparably entwined with our embodying being
in the emergent sense that underlies language. Merleau-Ponty explains how we
encounter a meaningful world, silent but expressive:

The word’s meaning is not compounded of a certain number

of physical characteristics belonging to the object; it is first and
foremost the aspect taken on by the object in human experience,
 A Different Silence and the World’s Gesture 23

for example, my wonder in the face of these hard, then friable,

pellets falling ready made from the sky. Here we have a meeting
of the human and the non-human and as it were, a piece of the
world’s behavior, a certain version of its style, and the generality
of its meaning as well as that of the vocable is not the generality
of the concept, but of the world as typical. Thus language presup-
poses nothing less than a consciousness of language, a silence of
consciousness embracing the world of speech in which words first
receive a form and a meaning.15

Meaning (sens) is expressed by the world in the face-to-face encounter of the

perceiver as an event in enveloping silence. Just as there would be a felt sense
in the human-to-human encounter as perceived prereflectively, such as recog-
nizing that person or group as welcoming or as excited or as hostile, so the
objects and events in the world are recognized in “the aspect taken on by the
object in human experience.” Objects and events have a character or quality
that makes sense in the humanly felt context of relations. The encounter of
the human and the nonhuman addresses the perceiver as “a piece of the world’s
behavior.” By contrast, it is a result of the Enlightenment way of conceiving
the objective world that Anglo-American thought and culture sees the world
as mere matter in motion. The world around us conceived as inert cannot be
expressive. Yet, in the moment of Merleau-Ponty’s example, we feel the cold
sleet on our faces as a harsh expression of the world. We find ourselves within
this slippery, icy, wet surrounding presence coming down from the sky as a kind
of aggressive shove to which we must respond. The sense will vary according to
personal or cultural context, but this is a meaningful gesture of the world. The
world’s gesture has a distinctive feeling, tone, rhythm, movement, energy, angle,
melody, pace, mood, and so forth. The world–human nexus of sense within a
sleet storm differs strikingly from a moment in a pleasantly gentle breeze on
a mild spring day, or sitting beneath a tree in a sun-dappled spot on a hot,
lazy summer day, or so many other presentations or gestures of the world.
Seeing the world through general categories allows us to retreat to a remote,
high-altitude thought in which these particularities lose their sense, but this
is to make oneself deaf to the silent dialogue that is possible with the world.
The primary silence of encounter is not a lack of literal sound in the
environment, since surely during a sleet storm there are sounds such as that
of the sleet hitting the ground, the wind whistling, and so on. Yet there is a
hush in the initial encounter with things insofar as the perceiver achieves a
letting be of the perceived presenting itself. This silence is inseparable from a
reticence on the part of the perceiver, a hesitation to impose well-worn labels of
sense on what is encountered. To encounter the silence of the sleet is to refrain
24 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

from dismissing it as “just another day of sleet,” and instead to be open to its
announcement of what it is and means. It is the moment of openness before
imposing categories—before the sense of self emerges—that has a quietness to
it, a sheer quietness of silence, to which the perceiver contributes by a certain
stance toward the world. One dimension of this silence of encounter is the
pause that allows the shining forth of meaning through gesture and face, a
dimension we will explore shortly. It is a waiting without imposing expecta-
tion of form and content. There is an attentiveness that takes in these tracings
through the opening of a caesura in the flow of sound, motion, and thought
that is another constituent of the silence. This focused attentiveness is like the
silence of a kiss, but here it is a kiss with the world though perception. “Com-
ing from the other side” in this dyad of perceiver and perceived, the silence of
the world’s gestures is a silent speaking indirectly through movement’s qualities
of shape, rhythm, pace, and so on. The face, as will see, is an expression of
each thing—analogous to a person’s smile—that comes from the distinctive
signature of its varied sensual qualities.
 IV
Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement

Silent speech, without express signification and yet rich in meaning—

language—thing.
—“The Visible and the Invisible” (268)

There is another aspect of silence in this primordial realm, however, that stems
from the nature of the flesh of the world. The flesh is, as Merleau-Ponty
describes it, “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tan-
gible upon the touching body . . . and draws this relationship and even this
double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.”1 There
is a constant dynamism from perceiver to perceived and back in all aspects
of perception, such that this interplay becomes a matrix, wherein each partial
sense is related to all the others in a way that is mutually transforming. It is
this sense of the interplay of myriad beings within each percept that is part
of the underlying sense of silence. As a fission in which the perceiver in some
sense is thrown out into myriad depths of the world as related to that percep-
tion before returning to himself or herself as the sense of the percept resolves,
there is an unrecognized depth to each percept.2 It is a paradoxical quality that,
as the community of beings joins their voices, they become increasingly one
voice, and at the maximum of intensity transcend the sense of sound itself to
emerge into this moment of stillness or silence.
As an example of this, Merleau-Ponty describes how Cézanne paused
before painting a landscape, taking in so many indirect voices until they
reached a silence, with so many senses coming together until they expressed
a sense that outstripped them all while at the same time underlying them
all, evident in all. He relates how Madame Cézanne reported that Cézanne
would stop before a field he wanted to paint and look at all of its aspects with
“widened eyes,” allowing himself to take it all in. He would pause in the sort
of silence needed to have an encounter in which it seemed as if the field was

25
26 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

“germinating” itself within him. What Cézanne sought was an encounter with
the landscape such that “motivating all the movements from which a picture
gradually emerges there can be only one thing: the landscape in its totality and
its absolute fullness.”3 This fullness of all the aspects of the sensual appearance
of the field coming together as a totality was what Cézanne called his “motif.”
As Merleau-Ponty describes it, “all the partial views one catches sight of must be
welded together,” and quotes Joachim Gasquet as saying this moment is when
the artist is able “to join the wandering hands of nature,” such that “a minute
of the world is going by which must be painted in its full reality.”4 This sense
of “full reality” is the point of experiencing the flesh in its full cogency and is
the moment transcending all particular voices in the still point of silence of
so many conjoined voices. As described by Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne would be
seized after this instant of waiting openly and start painting everything at once,
all parts of the painting, and then “the picture took on fullness and density; it
grew in maturity and balance; it came to maturity all at once. ‘The landscape
thinks itself in me,’ he said, ‘and I am its consciousness.’ ” This is the aspect
of silence intimately tied to the nature of the flesh. There is a reversibility of
the painter and the painted, the perceiver and the perceived, that comes about
when one embraces the fullness and density of the matrix of all that intercon-
nects and comprises the flesh, like taking the hands of nature.5
This openness to the depths of the flesh of the world is a gesture of
embrace. An embrace is a gesture expressing the power of silent contact and
movement. It is the quiet that opens an avenue in time and space for a
movement back and forth across boundaries. The flesh is the overlapping and
intersecting of all the senses of meaning to be apprehended in perceiving an
aspect of the world. Yet, in the reversibility of the flesh, these silent senses are
given to the perceiver as if they were the way the world sees itself through the
perceiver’s vision. As Renaud Barbaras expresses this coming back to oneself
from the depth of the flesh in The Being of the Phenomenon: “[It is] in the
hollow of a chiasm, at this ‘point of turning back’ where the conversion of
silence into speech and of speech into silence happens. It wants to catch in
the act of equivalence between the sense-being of the world and the world-
being of sense, between the entering of oneself and the leaving of oneself.”6
This is what the flesh means; it indicates that we are taken beyond ourselves
and beyond language to silence. It means being carried toward taking in an
interplay one might be tempted to call a chorus of so many silent, gesturing
indirect voices of the world.
The silence of depth opens the surface to an interplay of myriad other
senses of things in a network of interrelation.7 This sinking into things in
perception, and the interplay of sense within each percept, has the quality of
hushing or stilling the sounding voices and enunciated categories that resound
 Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement 27

within consciousness, even in quiet reflective thinking. Arriving at this depth of

silence only happens in a kind of releasement into the body’s more primordial
exchange with the world—like Cézanne’s silent communion with the landscape
he was about to paint. All perceivers have this capacity as part of the flesh of
the world, yet artists are more likely to have cultivated and honed this openness
and acuity. Another aspect of this hush is the quieting of the clamoring voices
of ego, since at this moment the painter is no longer the personal Cézanne,
with his particular worries and projects, but a keenly sensitive human being
joining the hands of nature. This releasement from the self—which is a stream
of sounding phrases of identity, category, and projects that pass through the
perceiver in everyday absorption in the world—is transcended at the point of
fully attending and opening to the interplay of the flesh of the world. One
lets go into perception and is taken beyond the self. Merleau-Ponty describes
such a moment in this way: “The perceiving subject, as a tacit, silent Being-at
(Être-à), which returns from the thing itself blindly identified, which is only a
separation (écart) with respect to it—the self of perception as ‘nobody,’ in the
sense of Ulysses, as the anonymous one buried in the world, and that has not
yet traced its path.”8 One allows oneself as perceiver to be taken into the world,
as the movement of the flesh, in a silent “being-at” whatever is the focus of
perception. There is a “nobody” who perceives, because all the reflective voices
of the ego have been stilled at the moment of attention. Dauenhauer’s analysis
of deep silence describes how, moreover, “in doing silence I am yielding to
the belief that there is something that I am not the source of, and that there
is something to wonder at, to be awed by.” Dauenhauer continues to describe
this as going beyond the ego’s limits in order to attain a “yielding before a
power that I cannot control.”9 One comes back to oneself from being released
into the world, where these latent meanings have now been gestured forth by
the world, but from a depth that is hushed or silent.
This silence is a potential depth of sense always present in the world
through perception, found in the indefinite receding to planes and layers,
points and planes of overlap, and connection of sense woven into other senses.
When this silence, or heightened state of the senses, is entered into, there is
a hush that is intrinsic to the inexhaustible depth of richness of sense constellated
among a myriad of beings. To point out yet again that this is not a literal
silence, one might think of the moment in an orchestral composition when—
with more and more instruments joining into the piece and more and more
voices of a chorus sounding—there comes a point when the literal sound
is transcended and a silence emerges. Silence can be found at the heart of
overwhelmingly resounding voices. A master of evoking this sort of silence in
the midst of overwhelming sound is Gustav Mahler. In his Eighth Symphony,
Mahler employs a massive orchestra and chorus to achieve what sounds like a
28 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

thousand voices, as his piece is often referred to, of varying timbres and musical
parts. Yet, at a crescendo of the voices of the choruses and orchestra, expressing
a sense of redemption through love, the hearer may have the uncanny sense
that through all these voices one has penetrated to the heart of silence. It is
this silent, still point in the midst of many instrumental and human voices
that expresses the power of love. In the midst of this gigantic sound, there is
also a hush for those who hearken to it. The same can be said for Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony as the chorus sings Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and the orchestra
sounds fortissimo the stirring melody, there is a peace and a profound silence
in the joy of being—the hush of another sort of silence. This massive pres-
ence so powerfully expressed also summons from the listener the quality of
yielding-in-relation that Dauenhauer finds in opening to deep silence: “deep
silence binds me to the other and the greater-than-me, however interpreted.”10
If the interconnection of what is dissimilar in important ways allows for
the “reach” of depth that is signaled by the gesture of the world in silence, it
is also true that the gaps among those beings that become related are equally
a part of this gesture. In The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature and Music
after Merleau-Ponty, Jessica Wiskus observes, using Merleau-Ponty’s analysis
of perception, that rhythm can occur only among sounds or events that are
noncoincident, and even though they are noncoincident, they are inseparably
joined; paradoxically, they wouldn’t come to be joined without the gaps among
them. She states, “rhythm is not the meter or the tempo, but the expression
of silence that holds each articulation together.”11 The rhythm of a musical
piece returns always to what is not sounding, the background of silence, and
this return builds up a depth. The silence underlies the sounds and events that
form a dynamic whole. Wiskus points out that a metaphor in language works
in a way similar to rhythm in music in that both work “within a hollow or
relief ” formed among the words or sounds. This noncoincidence of sounds in
music or of words in a poem, even if repeated, “inaugurates depth,” a depth
“in multiple layers.”12 This depth is one that draws on silence as the way in
which the flesh of the world holds together while also maintaining a gap
between distinct beings or events.
Last, we must add to this consideration of the silence of the depth of
flesh another sense of movement that contributes to it. The way that world of
silence gestures to perceivers can be comprehended only by describing a differ-
ent sense of movement than the traversing of a series of points on a Cartesian
grid of space. This other sense of movement is vital to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis
of perception. Just as the silence we have discussed is not literal, so too the kind
of movement that he sees permeating the perceptual world is not necessarily
literal. These two nonliteral senses of silence and movement are interrelated.
In “Eye and Mind,” he speaks of “a movement by vibration”13 in order to
 Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement 29

describe the kind of motion that the artist expresses in a painting. Yet the idea
of this sort of movement in space runs throughout his analyses of perception.
In order to understand “movement by vibration,” one needs to see lines in a
different way than, for example, a marking across the surface of a paper or
canvas. The line that can move within a painting is a line understood not as
an outline or as “a thing or an imitation of a thing,” but rather as “a certain
disequilibrium” in the sense of space itself. This disequilibrium is perceived in
a realm of “pre-given spatiality,”14 or in other words, with the sense of space
that first opens things up for us, and not in our rationally constructed sense
of space. Klee’s line or Matisse’s line is a line of force or a motion of vitality
and dynamism in the depth of a space out of which things emerge and take
on a more resolved shape and place. These lines riddle our underlying sense
of space, and are brought forward into expression by the sensitive perception
of the artist.
Merleau-Ponty connects this movement by vibration with what comprises
depth. The movement by vibration is elicited in a painting by “this mutual
confrontation of incompossibles.”15 For example, Cézanne uses many outlines
for each object to paint them, and in doing so imparts a movement to his
canvases. These many outlines of the same object in a Cartesian grid of space
would be incompossible or contradictory, yet in perception they constitute the
object’s depth in being co-present. This movement, which adds to depth, is
what Cézanne seeks to express. Merleau-Ponty says of these lines in “Cézanne’s
Doubt” that they are the way “of pursuing reality without giving up the sen-
suous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature,
without following the contours, with no outline to enclose the color” because
Cézanne “wanted to depict matter as it takes on form.”16 In doing this, Cézanne
attempted to “paint this primordial world” where there is dynamism of space
that he sought to express.17 The seeds of this notion of movement as articu-
lated by Merleau-Ponty are already present in the descriptions of the chapter
on “Space” in Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty describes space as
alive with currents within it when he writes, “The movement upwards as a
direction in physical space, and that of desire towards its objective are mutually
symbolical, because they both express the same essential structure of our being,
being situated in relation to an environment, of which we have already stated
that this structure alone gives significance to the direction up and down in the
physical world.”18 The vectors of this movement transect our immediate per-
ceptual sense of space and are more like “the phantasms of dreams” that “reveal
still more effectively that general spatiality”19 in which we live. As in a dream,
there is constant motion in perceived space; each motion, like a dream, has
an existential sense to its contour, shape, trajectory, and expanse. Even though
usually unnoticed within perception, the same moving lines of force are present
30 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

in the background, but they are experienced more prominently in dreams or

artistic expression. In the waking life of the world of silent perceptual encounter,
therefore, there is more primordially a kind of space in which we may sense
“the bird which hovers, falls, and becomes handful of ash, [but] does not hover
and fall in physical space; it rises and falls with the existential tide running
through it, or again it is the pulse of my existence, its systole and diastole.”20
This explains how in encountering something in space that has an uplift in
its trajectory of movement, the sense of uplift conveys not only affective but
also imaginal, memorial, and other meanings. A downward movement of an
object in space may similarly have a depressive affective sense, presented in this
concrete guise.21 Merleau-Ponty quotes Binswanger’s explorations in existential
psychology, which demonstrate that the affective sense of “up and down” and
the perceived directions of movement in space “up and down” are inseparably
linked. As Binswanger concludes, there is “a direction of significance which,
so to speak, runs through the various regional spheres and receives a particular
significance (spatial, auditory, spiritual, mental, etc.) in each one.”22 The space
of perception is riddled with directions of sense.23 Merleau-Ponty’s description
of space as crisscrossed with moving forces of sense in the Phenomenology can
be seen as complementary to his later description of “movement by vibration.”
Both contribute to describing how movement dovetails with depth to give the
world of silence a continual gesturing of meaning to the perceiver.24
In Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, many passages that do not specifically
name “movement by vibration” can be read to elaborate the sense of what this
means. In his detailed descriptions of the flesh of the world, it can be seen
that even the simplest perception is an internal movement of sense. This internal
movement contributes to the gesturing of the world in silence. The passage in
the “Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, which describes how a
very simple percept, such as the red of a dress, is actually part of the matrix
of the flesh, demonstrates this point. The perception of the red is articulated
as a journeying through the affective, historical, personally memorial, imaginal,
sensual, and myriad other meanings that constellate around and comprise this
red. Merleau-Ponty has mined the notion of the gestalt in perceptual awareness
to uncover varied depths of apprehension, times and places. Rather than only
thinking of the context of a visual field, historical, or other fields, the idea of
the flesh suggests all fields are potentially open to each other in comprising
perception. The “thickness” of perception that occurs at every moment is a
nexus or matrix, as shown by the example of seeing the red of a dress. For
Merleau-Ponty, this red dress is

[a] punctuation in the field of red things, which includes, the

tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers, and of the Revolution,
 Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement 31

certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation

in the field of red garments, which includes along with the dresses
of women, robes of professors, bishops and advocate generals, and
also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red
literally is not the same as it appears in this constellation or in the
other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in
it or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor,
or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five
years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also
a fossil drawn up from imaginary worlds.25

This is what Merleau-Ponty means by the flesh: that even in the most simple
percept varied senses play off one another in perception and make of each
thing perceived more of “a variant in a dimension of variation.” This helps us
to understand better why in the silent encounter with the world there is this
constant movement by vibration and opening up of depths. This interplay
makes a percept more of a “straits between exterior and interior horizons ever
gaping open” and “not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being.”26 Rather
than offering a stolid presence, each being of the flesh beckons toward possible
openings and links to deeper sense.
The sense of each percept, open in this way to the interplay with many
related senses, points to other depths of sense. This is one aspect of what Mer-
leau-Ponty means by the “gestures” of the silent world. Each thing or event or
creature perceived is part of a movement by vibration. There are silent gestures
here, as when one aspect of the red of the dress vibrates with the liveliness of
the gypsies’ dance steps, and so has a striking quality that turns heads toward
the wearer of a red dress. Or, perhaps, there is a quality of the red dress that
bursts forth in the midst a plainer environment that surprises people, like the
red clay capturing the eye of onlookers in an area of brown dirt. Or, perhaps,
the red of the dress gives the woman an air of distinction, like the feelings
people experience in the presence of bishops and advocate generals. Maybe the
red dress strikes a note of protest in a room of conservatively dressed people,
like the red of the Revolution. If Merleau-Ponty is correct, all these and many
more senses are present as the depths of the flesh constellated in the sight of
the red dress. These myriad senses interplay in the “movements by vibration”
within the silent world of perception that go unnoticed until an artist or
someone who enters sensibility deeply makes them apparent. These senses are
found in a nexus of relationships, which is a gestured dialogue of the world
with the perceiver before speech and reflection.
These suggested and multifaceted senses that underlie speech and reflec-
tion and are transformed into something else by being identified and described
32 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

through categories, or as Merleau-Ponty puts it in the 1954–55 lecture course

on Institution and Passivity, “Thematization . . . to verbalized knowledge, is
a true transformation.”27 Perception is another sort of encounter: “Perception
is not therefore categorical subsumption.”28 If the sleet, like the wind in the
trees, like the traffic outside, like the day’s political events, are all “a piece of
the world’s behavior,” then each has entered into a certain relationship with
us and communicated something distinctive about itself through its dimension
of gesturing with other aspects of the world without being represented by a
universalizing idea. Portions of the world have been put into a kind of round
dance together, and the sense perceived is rather almost as if these are a form
of “self-expression” of the world channeled into these aspects. The world is
like a behaving being in this envelopment and in gesturing forth senses with
which we conjoin.
The kind of identity gestured forth in such silent communication differs
from the identity clearly and distinctly named or categorized. The felt sense of
things communicated to us is a pervading and infiltrating sense. It does not
result from any synthesizing act of intellection bringing it to thematic discrete-
ness. The term that Merleau-Ponty uses to describe this overall sense com-
municated to the perceiver silently in this particular fall from the sky of these
beings encountered as sleet is the sense of its style. We feel it as a co-presence,
communicated as an aspect of the world’s behavior: “a certain version of its
style.”29 Style is a gestalt phenomenon. It is the way aspects of the world that
could otherwise be discrete become interrelated in meaningful wholes through
auto-organization. These meaningful wholes themselves become related within
greater gestalts that manifest more encompassing styles. This process manifests
a style perceived as the display of this distinctive behavior of the world that is
called sleet. There are more encompassing styles, however, such as the overall
sense of the weather, or of the natural world. Merleau-Ponty first introduces
the term “style” in the Phenomenology of Perception. In one passage, he defines
the notion in terms of the distinctive sense communicated by Paris:

Just as a person gives evidence of walking and in the sound of his

voice, each express perception occurring in my journey through
Paris—the cafés, people’s faces, the poplars along the quays, the
bends of the Seine—stands out against the city’s whole being, and
merely confirms that there is a certain style of significance which
Paris possesses. And when I arrived for the first time, the first roads
that I saw as I left the station were, like the first words spoken by
a stranger, simply manifestations of a still ambiguous essence, but
one unlike any other.30
 Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement 33

The rhythms of people’s interactions, their way of approaching each other, the
architectural facades of buildings, the allotment of space, the pace of life, the
density of crowds, the sort of things eaten, worn, discussed, and so on, and
myriad other aspects form a whole with a certain sense as the distinctive “style”
of Paris (or New York or Rome). Merleau-Ponty characterizes this style as a “still
ambiguous essence, but one already unlike any other.”31 This sense is unique
and endures amidst change and variation. Style is a singular identity that is
palpable and yet present nowhere as a graspable entity. It becomes manifest as
an unfolding of sense as differing aspects interlink to form an overall “feel” of
the place, just as we get a “feel” for a person whose behavior begins to cohere
as an expression of who they are as we gradually witness aspects of it. This
resembles how the sound of someone’s voice—the pitch, rhythms, intonations,
pauses, pacing, and emphases—and the way he or she walks—the posture, gait,
pace, swinging of the arms, uprightness, and so forth—are related to all the
other aspects of that person’s behavior and expression. They take on a sense
both indefinable and palpable, and yet quite recognizable, as observed by the
psychologists cited by Merleau-Ponty in his essay “The Film and the New
Psychology.” There he cites evidence of the perceptual recognition of differing
aspects of a person’s behavior and expression, such as subjects being able to
correctly distinguish samples of Michelangelo’s handwriting from samples of
Raphael’s handwriting in 221 of 257 cases.32
This is the kind of sense gestured forth silently as the sense inherent in
the gaps among events—the kind of sense Wiskus detects in the emergence
of rhythm in music, discussed earlier. This is likewise the kind of sense that
the painter expresses, which is carefully explored by Merleau-Ponty through-
out his work. The painter’s expression emerges from the swirls of the lines,
the combination of colors, the density of the paints applied to the canvas,
the brushstrokes, the presence or absence of outlines, and so forth, in their
interrelation within a whole. The multifaceted aspects cohere and have a unity
of sense as a style to be experienced in perception, so that a Van Gogh, for
example, is immediately recognizable as a Van Gogh, and immediately dis-
tinguishable from a Cézanne. Although a rationalist might contend that such
perception comes about after noting resemblances and coming to a synthesiz-
ing judgment, Merleau-Ponty asserts that perception of style occurs at the
level of primordial perception as a felt sense. Interestingly, findings in animal
studies corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of prereflective perception. It has
been found that pigeons can immediately perceive style in paintings that are
displayed to them. Pigeons can look and immediately recognize the differences
between a painting done by Picasso or Matisse.33 Researchers have called this
ability of pigeons, rats, and other animals to recognize the style of something
34 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

“subtizing,” a function of immediate perception, to distinguish it from judg-

ment. Style takes us to the level of prereflective perception that is the body’s
perceptual recognition of the world’s gestures. Merleau-Ponty describes this
dawning sense as une prise glissante, “a precarious hold”—or in more literal
translation, “a slippery hold.”34 It is a glancing recognition within perception’s
dynamic silent encounter, not the firm grasp of contents in reflection.35 The
sense is slipping or moving as the combination of identity and difference.
Style emerges through difference, as aspects of appearance play off each other,
related dynamically in perception, as sleet plays off its differences from snow,
hail, or rain. This kind of interrelatedness is central to the world of silence as
gestured by the world. Unlike explicit and deliberate articulation, the world’s
eloquent gestures of identity occur as manifestations of a singular quality being
expressed without ever being clearly or explicitly sounded.36
 V
Silence Sings as We Do When Happy
Charged Evanescence

. . . there must have been that fecund moment when the style germinates
at the surface of the artist’s experience.
—“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (53)

We would not do justice to the expressiveness of silence if we did not explore

a few other startling metaphors that Merleau-Ponty uses to describe the sense
of silence in setting forth the tacit cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception.
These further descriptions of silence focus on a set of much more evanescent
senses of the expressiveness of silence than we have investigated so far. Since
they could not be construed as founding a sense of self-presence that is later
rejected by Merleau-Ponty as part of the idea of the tacit cogito, they are still
relevant to what Merleau-Ponty has to say about the silence underlying and
infiltrating language that becomes more important only in his later writings.
He says of this silence that signifies to us a slipping and precarious sense that
comes before speech and reflection, that it

does not constitute a world, it divines the world’s presence round

about it like a field not provided by itself; nor does it constitute
the word, but speaks as we sing when we are happy; nor again the
meaning of the word, which instantaneously emerges for it in its
dealing with the world and other men living in it, being at the
intersection of many lines of behavior, and being even once ‘acquired’
as precise and yet as indefinable as the significance of a gesture.1

In other words, in the silent encounter with sleet, still being explored in this
passage, a presence surrounds us like the sense we have as perceivers being

35
36 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

surrounded by the “phenomenal field.” The phenomenal field as described by

Merleau-Ponty is diffuse and enveloping. We are not aware of the field on a
reflective level. It forms the implicit background to perception. If the gesture
of the world in silence imparts a sense like this, then it is something that beck-
ons to the perceiver to enter a diffuse presence as a context to what is being
perceived. Another way to say this might be to turn to Dorothea Olkowski’s
powerful metaphor that she uses to describe the surrounding sense of silence
as embracing and generative: “But all acts of expression, whether speech or
painting, must be considered before they are spoken/painted against the silent
opaque fabric that ‘surrounds’ them and in effect generates them . . . for, as
what both surrounds and generates utterances, it is like a womb or, at least,
something living.”2 So, in this diffuse surrounding sense silence has the power of
a womb or something living through the world’s gestures to generate meaning.
In the Phenomenology of Perception, the notion of “phenomenal field”
replaces the idea of a discrete subject perceiving a discrete object. Instead, the
idea of the field articulates how the body in perceiving is everywhere around
it in what might be called the surround of perception: “to look at an object
is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the
aspect they present to it. But insofar as I see those things too, they remain
abodes open to my gaze, and, being, potentially lodged in them, I already
perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every
object is the mirror of all others.”3 Here, too, we are dealing with a kind of
virtual movement implicit in perception, but this moment is about the sense
of the perceiver that is multiplied almost indefinitely to fill the context or
horizon of perception. The movement is sketched, traced instantaneously and
evanescently, by the perceiving body. If the sense of silent perception forms a
field of perception, then my body, for example, is everywhere within the sleet,
the storm clouds, sky, ground below, and the surroundings of the storm. Part
of my sense of my body would be some vague sense of these perspectives as
encompassing its sense of sleet at that instant. To explain further, this would
mean that as the sleet drives into my face, I would have the sense of its flight
as if I were also witnessing it from thousands of feet above in the sky, from
places in between this vantage and the ground, and even within the pellets
themselves, and so on indeterminately. Notice that Merleau-Ponty cautions that
this enveloping presence is not of the perceiver’s projecting or constructing.
He denies that these nuances are constituted by the perceiver. Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes that this surrounding sense is “a field not provided by itself ”—that
is, by the perceiver. We are taken up and guided in our perceiving by all the
things around us to which we are related as part of the gestalt of what is per-
ceived. These evanescent senses of ourselves in relation to what silently gestures
to us in primordial perception are akin to what Bachelard meant when he stated
 Silence Sings as We Do When Happy 37

in The Poetics of Reverie that “the world is no longer mute . . . the words of
the world want to make sentences.”4 Both thinkers are pointing to how the
world gestures to us senses that come before language. These evanescent senses
arise in silence like Bachelard’s example of the “electric shiver” of the forests at
night5 or Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the shattering or friable quality of the sleet.
It is this second metaphor concerning the “happy quality” of speech as
singing—the sense gestured by the world in its quality of not reaching “the
level of the world”—that I wish to explore for a moment for its startling and
suggestive power. Merleau-Ponty says that the sleet’s silent expression neither
gives us the grasp of the world, “nor does it constitute the word, but speaks
as we sing when we are happy.” This is a remarkable description and requires
some thought to understand how silence “speaks” in a manner akin to the way
we sing when we are happy. He might have said that silence speaks the way we
smile when we are happy; that would have made more straightforward logical
sense as being directly analogous to an expression of sense that lacks sound.
In using this metaphor, however, Merleau-Ponty implies that the silence of
emergent meaning is not literal silence, is not a mute recognition in face of
the world, but is an expression that has a different locus and modality than
spoken language, and therefore is not its direct or binary opposite. To examine
Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor carefully, we must note that when we sing from
happiness it is not the words per se that are of the greatest importance for
conveying the sense of what is felt and to be expressed, but rather the tone,
the lilt, the felt uplift or pull of the rhythm, the movement of our attunement
with the world and its events, or with what surrounds us.
A famous passage earlier in the Phenomenology about the nature of lan-
guage that is often quoted states that the emotional sense (l’essence émotionelle)
that is conveyed by language, its more “gestural” sense, means that “the words,
vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of ‘singing’ the world” (de manières de
chanter le monde).6 What has gone unremarked—and is revealing—is Merleau-
Ponty’s later use of the metaphor of singing in regard to the way the world
gestures to us in silence in primordial perception. The earlier use of the phrase,
“so many ways of singing the world,” points to the way spoken or written
language makes manifest the emotional sense of its referent. In this passage,
much later in the Phenomenology of Perception in regard to the evanescent
sense of the expression of the world’s gestures to us in silence, the metaphor
shifts to emphasize the singing we do when we are in a particular emotional
tone—that of being happy.
The mood invoked by this metaphor in expressing what the silent speech
of the gesture of the world may be like is the mood that most markedly takes us
over as if grabbed by the world, and that lifts us outside ourselves in an upward
trajectory. In addition to Merleau-Ponty’s description that silence’s expression
38 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

“divines” the sense of the surrounding world, the nexus of interconnections is

also described as if it expresses silently “as we sing when we are happy.” The
connection between the two descriptions would seem to be both spontaneous
and evanescent. This silent expression might be said to be an uplifting coming
together of perceiver and an aspect of the world that rises into release, like the
notes when song breaks forth from us—the expression we commonly use to
describe happy singing. This sense of release and being simultaneously grabbed
by the world seems even more apt when one considers the French word chosen
by Merleau-Ponty—the word is joyeux, not heureux.7 Joyeux, like the English
counterpart, expresses the sense that “joy” is a bursting out of oneself called
forth by the strength of happenings in the world; one is not just “happy” in the
sense of a self-possessed contentment with the world. In the context in which
we feel this mood, it escapes from us without deliberate intention, without
having been formed into a more determinate grasp. It is more like a wisp of
sense that is released from us the way steam escapes from a heated kettle. The
perceiver who is made joyous by something in the world experiences a kind of
happiness that overflows itself into an expression that is only loosely intentional.
To return to the metaphor, this silent sense, unlike the sense expressed
through language, would seem to be more like a singing along with the world
and its rhythms in a way that doesn’t quite say anything specifically. This silent
sense would seem to be more like a bubbling over of the encounter, a being
taken in within a thrall and a release from oneself. The second metaphor focuses
more on the overcoming of the activity–passivity distinction in primordial
silent perception. The use of language to articulate the world’s sense would be
less spontaneously solicited by the world and not as evanescent as that emerg-
ing from the underlying silence. We might also note that it is the way we sing
when happy that is the focus of the metaphor in the later passage, not the
affect of happiness that marks this silent intertwining of person and world.
It is not the celebratory content of singing our happiness that is emphasized,
which might be another way to interpret the passage, but rather the manner
of singing: “it speaks in the way one sings” (elle parle comme un chante).8
Merleau-Ponty adds a few further hints to this description of the silent
expression of the world. The relationship of this “before speech” to the speech
that will follow from it is such that it “does not constitute the meaning of the
word”—that is, “sleet.” Rather, this meaning “instantaneously emerges” from
the nexus of intersubjectivity and things. Further, this sense is such that “being
even once ‘acquired’ [it is] as precise and yet as indefinable as the significance
of a gesture.”9 Despite the evanescence and the inability to become clearly
articulated, there is a definite sense conveyed. However, the sense expressed
by the silent gestures of the world is not at our explicit disposal in the same
way as the sense we have in reflection and language.10 The thematized sense
 Silence Sings as We Do When Happy 39

of words is something we can acquire. In this realm of the prereflective—the

not yet spoken, or the logos endiathetos—we encounter its sense, but in a
way we can’t possess. Salomé Voegelin agrees with this point in her phenom-
enology of silent encounter, stating that “the silence is not dialectical, it does
not build identity.” Rather she finds that in the silent encounter there is a
“simultaneity of subjects and objects totally other but intertwined through the
trial of themselves in the other. But this understanding is not pragmatic and
does not lend itself to the affirmation of identity and aesthetic judgment or
to political borders.”11 Nothing is fixed or determinate in this silent encounter.
Yet Merleau-Ponty interestingly observes that in its immediate emergence the
silently gestured sense of the world becomes more precise, because it is at
the intersection of so many lines of behavior with the others who share this
world. It is within our joint dealing with the world that the world’s gestures
and our human gestures to one another that these gestures constellate into a
specific sense that is not articulable as such but is understood prereflectively.
Finally, there are two more metaphors that are even more startling and
puzzling used by Merleau-Ponty to describe the response of the perceiver, the
felt sense, to this silent interchange with the world.12 We can only speculate
about what the sense of these metaphors may be, since metaphors do not
have a determinate meaning, yet we can still read them within the context
of his larger project. Next, Merleau-Ponty gives an image for envisioning the
feeling engendered by the world of silence as being “like that of the infant
at its first breath, or the man who is about to drown.”13 He provides these
dramatic metaphors as a way of adding to his articulation that these evanescent
feelings of self pass by unnoticed for the most part except in the cases when
one suddenly has an inchoate but searing sense of oneself in an extreme situ-
ation under threat. At these instants, Merleau-Ponty writes, there is a sudden
impulsion toward life.
These startling images have a marked charge of affect. When a baby
struggles for its first breath or a drowning person fights to keep breathing
and not swallow water, an immediate reaching for existence occurs that has
the highest charge one can imagine. One is reaching as far beyond oneself as
one can, toward life itself. The baby or the drowning person searingly desires
to enter the air and breath as entering an unlimited element that sustains life.
When they breathe in, they are breathing in the whole world of life. They seek
to enter a widely expanding and diffuse sense of taking in an encompassing
horizon through the element of air that one might call the sense of vitality
itself. To get the full sense of what Merleau-Ponty might have intended by this
metaphor, we can consider another startling metaphor he uses much later, in
“Eye and Mind,” when he likens the artist’s power to enter sensibility to the
way we all enter sensibility with our birth:
40 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

There is a human body when between the seeing and the seen,
between touching and the touched, between one eye and the other,
between hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place—when
the spark is lit between sensing and sensible, lighting the fire that
will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo
what no accident would have sufficed to do. . . .14

With this beautiful image, Merleau-Ponty is reminding us that the human body
has a unique vitality in perceiving the world, a dynamism that is compelling
and consuming. It is a wondrous taking-in of what is perceived with an energy
that is burning, like the images of fire Merleau-Ponty uses in conjunction with
this passage to describe the artist’s acute awareness of the way perception is
truly a joining with the world in a dynamic and consuming give-and-take.
In using these metaphors of the infant’s first instant of life and the drown-
ing man’s holding on to life, Merleau-Ponty, I believe, is poignantly bringing
to our attention that there is a spark lit in each moment we meet the world
silently within perception and take to heart its vitality. Both metaphors suggest
a sense of threat or pain, which can be turned with struggle into promise.
Both serve to focus to a fine point the immediacy and importance of thrust-
ing back into the world what has been thrust by the world upon one. To be
drowning or to take a first breath, to be either facing death or entering life,
are instants that sear us and grab us. If we respond, we have made our place
stand out as ours within existence. This is the metaphoric comparison made
by Merleau-Ponty to how the things of the world announce themselves to us
from the world of silence, if we hearken. The silent gestures of the world are
evanescent, not graspable, like an ongoing creation and disappearance. They
are charged connections that grasp our attention and vivify our whole existence
the more we enter, like the artist, the spark within primordial perception.
To conclude this section, we are enmeshed with silence’s sense in a dif-
fering way than with the spoken language. It becomes a depth of the surround
with which we are enmeshed, but it is perceived without being distinctly
grasped. Despite traditional philosophy and science having often drawn the
boundary between the clear and distinct versus the confused, and, therefore,
asserting that whatever fails to achieve a definiteness of sense is non-sense,
Merleau-Ponty’s description of silence communication sees meaning conveyed
in indeterminate ways. There is a lived bodily understanding that is part of the
sense of things for us, which is both primordial and ungraspable. As Voegelin
describes this sense of the world in silence, she says, “It is a fleeting understand-
ing produced on the spot and instantly revoked.”15 Though evanescent, this
silent exchange with the world is the ongoing primary source of the world’s sense
for us.16 Failing to heed silence, we lurch toward alienating ourselves from the
 Silence Sings as We Do When Happy 41

world’s dialogue with our embodying being—much as Merleau-Ponty expressed

concern about our falling into an endless nightmare. Furthermore, Merleau-
Ponty’s striking metaphors of our exchange with the world of silent encounter
suggest that more fully opening ourselves to this level of silent contact with
the world is to open ourselves to a fleeting and spontaneous sense of ourselves
that is enlivening and compelling. The metaphors express a strength of sense
pulling us into the world and toward expressing our place in the world that
has an energy akin to the first and last moment of life. For a culture that often
feels dislocated, lacking the vitality of engagement with the creation of sense,
this is an important power of our potential silent exchange with the world.
 VI
Language Can Live
Only from its Roots in Silence

What exactly is the silent I? Being speaks in us and perceives in us—the

perceiving I (the I of primary retention) as a gap—as one—anonymous
first of sense—the sense of figure-ground—corporeal schema of space and
time.1

Both language and silence demand to be rethought in a way not conceivable

in the philosophical tradition that preceded Merleau-Ponty, where they have
been understood predominantly in terms of dichotomy: the dichotomy of the
fullness of language versus emptiness of silence, or the presence of sound and
communicated sense in language versus the absence of sound and meaning in
silence. Even those who point to the need for silence to be the background of
speech and language, or see them in dialectical interplay, usually cast them in
terms of the opposition of presence and absence.2 The intertwining of silence
and language in the way they are described by Merleau-Ponty can’t be under-
stood by the tradition insofar as it relies on a binary logic and uses terms to
indicate positivities that have the value of one or zero, of agreement or opposi-
tion. For example, Karmen MacKendrick, in Immemorial Silence, explores how
the thinkers of the West from Augustine to Bataille have repeatedly encoun-
tered silence at the heart of language in such a way “that within even the
most articulate speaking there murmurs the loss of meaning, the coming of
absence which is silence.”3 Silence in this tradition that MacKendrick details
is the absence of sense from the world as furnishing an opening to a sense
beyond the world. This sense of absence in silence then exerts a profound call
to another sort of meaning than the meaning of this world.
In contrast, this is not the sort of silence that Merleau-Ponty details as
being the gesture of the perceived world in its sensual presence to us. This
perceived world surely has other levels of silent meaning as depths within it,

43
44 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

but they are the indirect voices of the myriad things, people, and creatures
around us, echoing within the time of this world. This silence is not a nega-
tion of the sense of the everyday, but is rather its ongoing coming into being
with latent depths within it. In this other tradition of silence as announcement
in withdrawal of the wholly Other, there is the recurring theme of finding
within the realm of silence a transcendence of time. As MacKendrick phrases
it, “temporality is no more removable from language than is nomination.”
Traditionally, then, language is identified with this world and time, and is
opposed by silence as its negation. Since language and time are wedded, it
is in silence that time is negated too, and the eternal, the “beyond time,” is
to be found. Again, as MacKendrick writes: “silence and eternity slip beyond
the containment of words in time.”4 For Merleau-Ponty, however, the depths
of perception are a depth of time. The silent gesturing of the world described
by him is an immediate interchange that enters the depth of the interplaying
presences, not a portal through which to transcend time to the eternal.
Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of silence is another instance of his stance
that instead of the logic of the positive versus negative or of presence versus
absence, there is a logic of envelopment or depth in which incompossible terms
are nevertheless inseparable. He realizes that dualistic logic must be abandoned
in order to articulate the flesh of the world. In the “Interrogation and Dialec-
tic” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, he states, “A negativist thought is
identical to a positivist thought, and in this reversal remains the same in that,
whether considering the void of nothingness or the absolute fullness of being,
it in every case it ignores density, depth, the plurality of planes, the background
worlds.”5 The opposition between being and nonbeing, or between positive
and negative uses of the logic of abstraction—what Merleau-Ponty calls “high
altitude thought”—fails to account for the experienced sense of the world in
which background and foreground are mutually implicated. There are nonlogi-
cal connections that layer or give density to meaning accessed in perception. An
earlier moment in Merleau-Ponty’s thought illustrates this well as he explores
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in his 1954–55 lectures on institution. Here,
he states, one could approach the problem understanding the narrator’s feelings
about Albertine by asking whether this love is real or not, whether it is a deci-
sion or the result of circumstances. None of the alternatives will do, however,
since his love cannot be parsed into these oppositions or positivities; rather, it
“consists in the way questions and answers are linked together—by means of
an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were
seeking, but something else that is interesting. . . . Moreover, all contingency,
even what is radically contingent, ends up being willed.”6 Within the unfolding
of existence, what had been an accident becomes willed or a necessity, or what
was a necessity loses its power. Proust’s narration traces out these transforma-
 Language Can Live Only from its Roots in Silence 45

tions, which Merleau-Ponty finds as a truer statement of the logic of sense than
the abstract set of binaries that philosophy has often used to explain existence.
Rather than being comprised by a series of oppositions, Merleau-Ponty finds
that in the process of unfolding existence, linkages are forged that render the
component events part of a depth of interplaying differences.
Merleau-Ponty articulates this priority of a logic of differentiation in
a working note of December 1960, when he states, “The whole architecture
of notions of the psycho-logy (perception, idea—affection, pleasure, desire,
love, Eros) all this bric-a-brac is suddenly clarified when one ceases to think
all these terms as positive (the more or less dense “spiritual”) in order not to
think them as negative or negentitites (for this brings back the same difficul-
ties), but as differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to Being which
is the flesh (eventually as ‘lace-works’).”7 The tradition speaks of desires or
of thoughts or of language as if they were positivities, yet they are all in a
chiasmatic relationship with each other, and part of their sense comes from
their differentiation from each other. They are not separable dimensions of
sense, but rather are internally related—their identity and sense comes from
their relationships. Within the matrix that is perception, these different ways
of taking in the world are interwoven and midwifing of each other. In place
of these binary oppositions, silence and language, or “inside” and “outside,”
will be transformed into a logic of differences of the enmeshment of self and
world. I have called this a “logic of inclusive differences,”8 which is a logic of
depth in which aspects that seem incompossible come to be interwoven with
aspects with which they both resonate and differ.9 They come together only
within an embracing context that establishes continuities in spite of difference.
The present book will trace this more inclusive logic through Merleau-
Ponty’s thought, taking it to be a key to his work. It can be seen throughout
in his notion of depth, his articulation of embodiment and world, and his
later “indirect ontology.” Depth for Merleau-Ponty is first defined in Phe-
nomenology of Perception as “this being simultaneously present in experiences
which are nevertheless mutually exclusive, this implication of one in the other,
this contraction in one perceptual act of a whole possible process, constitute
the originality of depth. It is the dimension in which things or elements
of things envelop each other.”10 As the world appears as our interlocutor in
perception, the binary logic that states that certain events, beings, or senses
should be incompossible is transgressed in perception’s opening up to them as
nevertheless going together inseparably. It is this rupture yet unity that is the
opening of depth. Even though Merleau-Ponty introduces this idea in terms
of the perception of events and objects in space, he quickly points out, as is
implied in this initial statement, that depth is equally a temporal phenomenon.
When Merleau-Ponty indicates that in perception the receding sides of the
46 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

road should be either parallel or not, or in looking at a cube, its sides should
be square or oblique, but that instead in both cases through perception the
seeming opposites are neither and both, there is also a temporal significance
to these phenomena. The possible times of tracing out the opposing paths or
the differing spaces of opposing shapes are enjambed into one percept. What
are virtual presences with differing times of unfolding and juxtaposed spaces
are co-present in one time/space of the percept. As we explore depth in this
book we shall see that, for Merleau-Ponty, this coming-together as differing
and unity as depth can be understood only temporally: “this quasi-synthesis
is elucidated if we understand it as temporal.”11 It is only because time is not
solely linear and progressive that there is a constant “piling up” of meanings
of differing moments in the moment of present experience. There is a thick-
ness and depth to time that Merleau-Ponty will increasingly seek to articulate.
This is the relationship between silence and language: an incompossibility
and a going-together, where each is implicated in the other to give expres-
sion to a depth. In his essay of 1952, “Indirect Language and the Voices of
Silence,” Merleau-Ponty makes clear that not only are silence and speech not
opposed, but they encroach upon each other and enfold in such a way that
silence runs throughout language; they continue to unfold together: “In short,
we must consider speech before it is spoken, the background of silence which
does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing.” Or
putting the matter another way, we must uncover “the threads of silence that
speech is mixed together with.”12 The movement toward expression and mean-
ing that occurs in the prereflective moment of perception, taking up the world’s
gesture, remains both other to speech and yet within speech and inseparable
from it, part of its makeup. To call silence the “threads” that “mix together
with” language clearly indicates that the kind of silence referred to here is not
negation of sense but its very way of moving forward.
This coming together of the incompossibles of silence and language not
only follows the logic of depth as articulated in Phenomenology of Perception,
but also might be said to be a prime example of the “chiasm” as articulated
in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, including his notes and courses. Later we
will examine how depth is vital to the flesh, and how the chiasm is a carry-
ing forth of his notion of depth, but to introduce the term, Merleau-Ponty
expresses its sense in a working note of November 1960, collected in The
Visible and the Invisible:

The chiasm, reversibility is the idea that every perception is doubled

with a counter-perception . . . is an act with two faces, one no
longer knows who speaks and who listens. Speaking-listening,
seeing-being seen, perceiving-being perceived circularity (it is because
 Language Can Live Only from its Roots in Silence 47

of it that it seems to us that perception forms itself in the things

themselves)——Activity = passivity.13

If events, processes, or beings are of a chiasm, even though they may be said
to have a discreteness or distinctness, they act through and within each other:
they are an “act with two faces.” Merleau-Ponty sees in general how humans
as embodied in relationship to the world are not “in” it, but of it, perceiving
the world but also taking in the sense that the world would have also, as if it
perceived (in “reversibility”). This is not a “oneness” or coincidence, but rather
the écart, the “gap,” between us and the world, between speech and silence, and
yet an encroachment [empietement] between them as coming to be enfolded.
Examples of chiasmatic structures are found in nature when two strands criss-
cross and have distinct properties, yet combined the two parts act as one by
acting on each other. What would seem to be merely side by side or crossing
over between two discrete things actually becomes an example of the logic of
“not-one-not-two.” Ted Toadvine expresses this relationship between silence
and language in his book Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature: “If the relation
between silence and language parallels the relation between the unreflective and
the reflection, then a chiasm obtains between them: on the one hand, there
must be a linguistic sense already emergent in the silent sensible, ‘something
that it wants to say.’ ”14 Not only is there something within the gesture of the
world, as Merleau-Ponty put it, that is moving toward articulation in language,
even if it is just a virtual presence within gesture, but the opposite would also
be true: that language still functions only by arising from silence.
If we are to grant this possibility of silence and language being insepa-
rably interwoven, then Merleau-Ponty calls on us to conceive of a silence that
has an efficacy and a presence within speech and around speech, a felt sense
that resounds so that it “envelops the speech anew.”15 This is not a mute
silence—not a lack or something missing. This silence becomes enlaced with
language. Yet it should make us pause for a moment to consider the effect of
our culture’s intolerance for silence, either literal silence or in the deeper sense
of openness, seeking depth, allowing pause, practicing slowness, attentiveness
to perception and hearkening to the world, which we have delineated. It is
more of a spreading global cultural intolerance in this digital age. If so, it
might be having a devastating effect on postmodern global culture. Literally,
we would become uprooted from being and our language without its roots
in silence. We would become increasingly hollow and self-enclosed without
opening ourselves to the silence within language. This insight should make us
wonder how often we listen for the presence of silence and certainly wonder
how often we listen for the silence that infiltrates speech itself. Merleau-Ponty
is not pointing his readers toward some romantic pure communion with the
48 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

world outside of language like Goethe’s Werther and outside of our everyday
tasks within the world. Merleau-Ponty’s thought doesn’t lead to becoming mute
or inactive, or forsaking our engaged lives in the technological world, since he
is not talking about literal, “pure” silence that would be opposed to language
and its accomplishments.16
It is not unreasonable that Merleau-Ponty’s thought might lead one to
entertain the value of times of literal silence and meditation on the land-
scape—like Cézanne before the field he was to paint—as a way to displace
oneself from the constant activity and problem-solving speech that hurries one
on in its self-enclosed round. Merleau-Ponty’s work points to the realm of
contact with the silent world of perception that is always present, but which
can become stifled without our hearkening. This hearkening might require a
way of speaking and thinking that seeks unsounded depths, displacing us from
the centered subjectivity of the Western logocentric tradition, which upholds
humans as the “makers of meaning.” Again, to return to the working note of
November 1960, just discussed, notice the emphasis Merleau-Ponty places on
the phrase, “perceived circularity (it is because of it that it seems to us that
perception forms itself in the things themselves)——Activity = passivity” (VI
265). If there is this circularity with other humans, creatures of the planet,
and even with inanimate objects, then we are co-speakers with all that sur-
rounds us. However, if we grant that human articulation is interwoven with the
expressiveness of the world, even the expressiveness that culminates in language,
then we have moved out of the human-centered realm to locate the ongoing
upsurge of sense within the world. This is the radical basis for ontology that
Merleau-Ponty was led to by tracing out the many ramifications of the silent
sources of language. This is the turn toward the articulateness of the world
that David Abrams has been pursuing, helping us see how “the-other-than-
human-world” is alive with expressed sense vital to humans, as was evident
to more orally based indigenous people: “By affirming that the other animals
have their own languages, and that even the rustling of leaves in an oak tree
or an aspen grove is itself a kind of voice, oral peoples bind their senses to
the shifting sounds and gestures of the local earth, and thus ensure that their
own ways of speaking remain informed by the life of the land.”17 Abrams’s
reminder to us, like that of Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop, is that, for
many indigenous cultures, the idea that the world speaks is neither arcane nor
violates logic but rather is most obvious and a matter of commonsense. Placed
into this larger cultural context, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh and regard
for the silent gesturing of the world does not seem strange.
For Merleau-Ponty, if philosophy is not be a mere lexicon and “does not
install itself in the order of the said or of the written,” then there must be levels
of sense opened within perception that are nondiscursive, yet can be expres-
 Language Can Live Only from its Roots in Silence 49

sively teased out discursively in a never-ending bringing forth of the inexhaust-

ible. This is why Merleau-Ponty added to Husserl’s admonition—the founding
cry of phenomenology—“back to the things themselves,” another phrase in
opening his last unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible: “it is the things
themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expres-
sion.”18 In other words, Merleau-Ponty does not seek to take things out of the
depths of their entanglement in the world as they are manifest in perception,
but rather to enter further into the depths of the world-human intertwining
and, thereby, into silence. This insistence that language must become open to
a silent speech preceding itself is recognized by Merleau-Ponty as distinguishing
his approach from the dominant tradition of Western philosophy:

It is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as

if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything
we cast to others has germinated in this great mute land which we
never leave. But, because he has experienced within himself the need
to speak, the birth of speech as bubbling up at the bottom of his
mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that
what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is
not a mask over Being, but—if one knows how to grasp it with all
its roots and all its foliation—the most valuable witness to Being.19

The roots of language stem from the silent dimension of the world infil-
trating the “lived” relationships among things about which we have cared or
from which we have fled or over which we have mourned, relationships that
have “bubbled up” from this interconnectedness. These are pulsations of sense
that move in the midst of the manifest content of our words and our language.
Roots may not be visible, but they are very much present as source, conduit,
and anchorage in a certain place. Language doesn’t happen without this prior
life, doesn’t spring forth ex nihilo from absence of sense to an established and
completed meaning without this prior meaning-laden situatedness and ongoing
emergence from a unique constellation of relations. Like roots, our felt, silent
relations supply the nourishment of language, and these everyday affiliations
are the locus of Being, not some “higher” realm above the world.
 VII
Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language

We shall see the idea of complete expression is nonsensical and all language
is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence . . .
—“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (43)

Before we leave this consideration of how silence nourishes language as its root,
we must also point to how Merleau-Ponty’s insistence in the later writings
that an ontology can be only an indirectly written one is a further assertion
of the importance of bringing silence into philosophy and our contact with
being. We have already alluded to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion in his often cited
working note of February 1959 that the rending of the philosophical language
of reflection will only end by embracing an endless circularity between silence
and language, where each continually becomes what it is through the other,
as opposed to silence and language being seen as contraries. This continual
circularity could be seen as a “vicious circle,” or it can be appreciated as the
opening to a sense of reality that is nonfoundational, a true becoming. Merleau-
Ponty cites Nietzsche’s proclamation of the vicious circle—as the new deity
in the sense of the overman’s triumphant ability to will the eternal return of
the same—which is the epitome of celebrating the nonexistence of a founda-
tion for reality. Merleau-Ponty refers to the unending interplay of silence and
language by using Nietzsche’s phrase “circulus vitiosus deus,” saying that it leads
to Sigé embracing the abyss—a reference to Paul Claudel’s use of this image.
This reference, like Nietzsche’s phrase, could sound negative if one didn’t know
the context; yet it is not negative either for Claudel or for Merleau-Ponty
since its import leads in the same direction they seek. The original reference
is to a mythic image in the Gnosticism of Valentinus. It is a figure of gaining
knowledge of the ineffable, symbolized by Buthos, the Abyss, mating with Sigé,
Silence. The coming-together of the ineffable understanding and silence gives
birth to a dimension of understanding that is generative and prior to speech.

51
52 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

It is important to note, however, that the conjoining within the domicile of

the abyss indicates a region without foundation and without form. Merleau-
Ponty likens this to his way of articulation that would allow him “to take a
position in ontology,” but one that was a “negative philosophy.” It is negative
philosophy insofar as mating with the abyss, embarking without a founda-
tional ground, and hearkening to silence in order to enter into embodying
being’s depths of perception means to abandon the persistent positivism that
has limited the Western philosophical tradition. It is to affirm, instead, the
intertwining of what has been opposed: the positive and negative, being and
nonbeing, or language and silence.
The consequence of this discussion for Merleau-Ponty is his assertion that
the philosopher does not seek a language of adequation, but rather that, “One
cannot make a direct ontology. My ‘indirect’ method (being in the beings) is
alone conformed with being.”1 This indirectness, says Merleau-Ponty, is the only
way to bring the rending of reflection to an end. This means that Merleau-
Ponty will have to move toward a kind of language use that expresses more
powerfully the silent expressive gesturing of the world. He must distance his
thinking from philosophically traditional discursive, rational, and categorical
language that attempts to create some sort of closure and distance from the
silent world in order to “rise above” it toward clarity and distinctness. This
traditional discourse is a gesture away from the abyss toward a permanence that
is static and would be the end of movement and ongoing becoming. Instead,
as Galen Johnson points out in interpreting this passage, for Merleau-Ponty the
abyss “is not a nothingness” but rather “an abyss is about depth.”2 Furthermore,
Johnson adds, the depth of the abyss in this passage is full of silence, but a
silence that is meditative and whispers a kind of adoration or affirmation of
existence. This reversal of direction, to which Merleau-Ponty is also alluding,
breaks with the Western philosophical tradition that, from Plato on, has the
recurring theme of rising above this Earth to a realm affirmed as pure being,
escaping the mute and dumb silence of the world of sensual experience that has
no meaning in itself. Here, in embracing the abyss and silence, their coming-
together, the lack of foundation is a release into the vitality of becoming and
its expression. Johnson phrases this expression as a whispering of a silence in
which there endures a radiance and a rhythm, or in other words, the vitality
of the embodied realm.3
As we noted in the Introduction, however, throughout Merleau-Ponty’s
work there is the frequent use of allusive speech and indirect expression. As
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert writes in the beginning pages of his book on
Merleau-Ponty’s movement into another sort of philosophy, Of the Bond of
Beings to the Elements of Being, for Merleau-Ponty after 1945 there was a “sig-
nificative mutation” toward a variety of tropes at odds with classical philoso-
 Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language 53

phy, such that “each figure for Merleau-Ponty is a gesture, and his philosophy
became little by little a continued exercise: a work of expression where there
was in play not only metaphors that illustrate but also a primordial symbolism,
which hearkens to follow closer the structures of life and of the sensible, the
symbolism of the body.”4 The symbolic, in its allusive quality, returns language
to a matrix within life and embodying being, instead of pursuing a discursive
practice located at a distance from the felt and perceived. There is a way to
use language that maintains a more complete self-enclosure. The structural-
ist analysis of language is not a yes-or-no phenomenon, but a more-or-less.
Culture can try to enforce a language use for oppressive purposes, or persons
can withdraw into a language use for psychologically defensive purposes, in
which the use of signifiers merely refers to other signifiers. Then language can
become more of a prison or a fortress, removing us from eruptions of new and
engaging sense. Philosophy can conspire with these enterprises also.
For this reason Merleau-Ponty insists that a philosopher’s use of language
be one “of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble”
as the philosopher has traditionally done, using well-worn terms and concepts
to build a system. Rather, philosophers would allow themselves to be taken up
into the intertwining of the flesh, the realm of silent contact, and use language
“thorough the occult trading of the metaphor,” where speech would become
allusive, not having a manifest meaning, but rather a latent sense that is woven
into these lateral relations among things as flesh. Merleau-Ponty gives credit
here to Bergson, who said that the philosopher must stop using a language of
abstractions and instead use a language of metaphor and allusive description.5
As Bergson put the matter: “Therein lies the initial vice of philosophical sys-
tems. They think they are telling us something about the absolute by giving it
a name.”6 Bergson felt that the tradition of philosophy and its use of language
had screened us off from the reality of lived experience, which is the reality. As
Merleau-Ponty will increasingly insist and practice, Bergson had a prescription
for philosophy: “It will prefer, however, to have recourse to the most concrete
ideas, but those which still retain an outer fringe of images. Comparisons and
metaphors will here suggest what cannot be expressed. That will not consti-
tute a detour; it will amount to going straight to the goal.”7 Bergson felt that
only allusive speech would take us back to the flow of duration that is lived
experience. For Merleau-Ponty, to return to “this great mute land which we
never leave,” which is the primordial contact of perception, philosophy must
attempt to use language “in the living or nascent state, with all its references,
those behind it, which connect it to the mute things it interpellates, with all
its references, and those that it sends before itself, and which make up the
world of things said—with its movement, its subtleties, its reversals, its life,
which expresses and multiplies tenfold the life of bare things. Language is a
54 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

life, is our life and the life of the things.”8 The language of philosophy does
not have to be at a distance from the becoming of the world, self, and others
if it allows allusive language to connect it to the silent primordial world of
perception. Language is rooted in the gestures of the world and in our lives
in the unnoticed fabric of the life of things perceived, and it is this sense of
movement within expression that Merleau-Ponty teases out in its concreteness
through a language that is indirect and takes us into its rhythm and movement.
Both a resource and an influence for Merleau-Ponty for how allusive
language opens the depths of perception are the texts of Marcel Proust.
Merleau-Ponty says about Proust in the “Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and
the Invisible: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations
between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the
contrary of the sensible, that it is its lining and depth.”9 Proust could take the
most mundane perception and evoke a wealth of depths of feeling, intuition,
remembrances, fantasies, and ideas that swim in its depths like denizens of
our embodied life that remain unarticulated or even unnoticed by finding the
most telling images, allusions, unlikely connections of descriptions of objects,
events, and persons. So, in the masterful language of Proust in In Search of
Lost Time, the hawthorns are a temple or a censer; the swirling lamp with its
moving play of light and shadow is like the mind untethered from its usual
secure hold on things; the piano phrase is like the rhythm and feeling tone
of love. In an unpublished working note in preparation for his 1956 course,
“The Problem of the Word,” Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to say of the writer:
“Proust achieved an altogether saintly function of the word as language in the
state of giving birth” (Proust achevé un saint fonction totale de la parole comme
langue a l’état naiyant).10 This kind of ongoing birthing in language happens
when language returns to its silent sources in perception by being able to move
nimbly among all the lateral relations that are part of the flesh.
If we remember back to the passage of the “Chiasm” chapter of the Vis-
ible and the Invisible that we quoted at length—about the red of the dress and
its lateral reactions with the costumes of a certain group of gypsies, certain
red clay terrains, and so on—then we realize the presence of the lines of force
within each percept that the writer of allusive language can harness in using
allusive language. Allusive language moves into the very fabric of these myriad
relations, which are the marrow of what is and, as Henri Bergson affirms, are
not a detour. Proust also understood how a group of hawthorns with their
unique hue and lighting might communicate what is to be encountered in a
church in a way that a sermon might vainly seek to express, or how a madeleine
might become a silent means of manifesting a whole era and topography of
a life and its complex web of human relations that would take thousands of
pages to express. Proust understood how the silence of sensible perception can
 Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language 55

go beyond itself to move into language and become expressed, but can only
do so in an allusive language.
Merleau-Ponty expresses this reaching beyond language from within lan-
guage by breaking out of the usual patterns of usage in his essay “Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence” when he states: “there is a power of
words because working against each other, they are attracted at a distance,
though like the tides of the moon, and because they evoke their meaning in
this tumult much more imperiously than if each one of them brought back
only a listless signification of which it was the indifferent and predestined sign”
(ILVS 44). To use language as a set of determined meanings with set relations
among these signs is to kill the expressiveness of language, its ability to reach
into the undergrowth of silent contact with the world. In allusive language
and in metaphor, the symbols and images create tumult and jostling that are
movements of affinity and repulsion to keep the movement of meaning in
motion. They create an opening within language that allows language to draw
expression beyond its self-contained interplay from the depths of the world,
as the play of new meaning. To have a defined meaning or a settled place
within language’s relations among its terms, even given that there is ongoing
“slippage” among the interplay of those terms, would reduce language to the
“listlessness” of indicating what was already known in an iteration that had no
explanatory, descriptive, or expressive power in renewing meaning’s sense. This
counterfactual specter of listless language cannot fully occur, since language
would then be a prison, keeping us where we had always been, losing the sense
of encounter through language. Yet, language can indeed move toward this
listlessness. An encounter with something is both simultaneously a recognition
and a being beckoned to resolve what is obscure. This interplay is intrinsic to
allusive language, which grasps and points beyond simultaneously. Otherwise,
words and speech would move with an empty motion, not one that sketches
new possibilities. It would be a closed language, rather than one open to the
world and its gestures. Merleau-Ponty regards language as expressive, as always
being at an originary stage, since meaning has to be rebirthed at each moment
in order to be truly engaging and revealing, or as he says in the lectures about
institution: “Culture thus never gives us absolutely transparent significations;
the genesis of meaning is never completed.”11 The vitality that enables language
to reach beyond itself, the creative moment of seeing as if for the first time,
even when it is something of the everyday, must be brought into language’s
expression. Otherwise, language would lose its power to turn us toward the
world expectantly and engage in the exchange of face-to-face encounter.
Language, rooted in the silence surrounding and sustaining it, carries
us beyond the words on the page: “Words, even in the art of prose, carry
the speaker and the hearer into a common universe by drawing both towards
56 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

a new signification by their power to designate in excess of their accepted

definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us,
and through what [the poet Francis] Ponge appropriately called their ‘semantic
thickness.’ ”12 Language’s “semantic thickness” is a movement through the inde-
terminate strata of sense that run like vectors or trajectories from the things
through language. They draw together the interlocutors within the wake of
the gestures of the things of the world. Western philosophy has considered the
word and language as achieving a different level of meaning, in opposition to
sensual presences perceived in the silent encounter, whose silence indicates a
dumbness or non-sense. Are lines of a flowing arabesque, or the color black
or green, or the still face of the rock cliff without meaning unless raised to
the level of language? The answer for Merleau-Ponty—and for many human
cultures—is an emphatic no. The world speaks silently. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t
separate linguistic expression from other forms of expression as being of a
wholly other kind of expression, whether it is painting, drawing, dancing, or
other arts: “And like the functioning of the body, that of words or paintings
remains obscure to me. The words, lines, and colors which express me come
out of me as gestures.”13 An expressive use of language that communicates
the world’s gestures to me has the same spontaneity as the body’s gestures in
lines, colors, and other modes of expression. All language is at bottom allusive,
since it is always escaping its linguistic form of expression toward that which
it suggests, and its gaps are the entryways of the world’s gestures into it.14
Akin to the other sorts of expression, the thickness of language is ultimately
the thickness of perception itself, since perception itself is open-ended and not
a strangling grasp of what is perceived. Philosophy, too, will not escape the
plight of expression in general. Allusiveness, even for philosophical language,
is a strength of expression and not a defect.
The Platonic legacy is to take language as referring to or having a source
in the intelligible realm, which gives an absolute foundation to sense and is
at odds with the material realm. For Merleau-Ponty, rather than escaping the
world around us, greater truth as greater sense comes with entering the inter-
twining depths of the world around us. Plato used the metaphor of a vertical
climb away from and above this world to attain to the pure thought that frees
us from this sensual world. Language, for Plato, was a key to this ascent from
the embodied realm to that of pure idea. For Merleau-Ponty, language that is
truly revealing allows us to go deep into the strata of the sense of this world,
and to do so by virtue of an interplay of the ways of apprehending these
strata. This is where he employs the metaphor of “verticality,” but, in contrast
to Plato, it signifies an inclusive interplay of all ways of taking in this world,
going deeper into it. Since language is allusive, heeding silence can take us back
into the depths of perception, which is vertical grasp of the memorial, imagi-
 Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language 57

nal, affective, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, intuitive, and felt, as Merleau-Ponty

says in a working note of February 1960: “Just as it is necessary to restore the
vertical visible world, so there is also a vertical view of the mind, according
to which it is not made of a multitude of memories, images, judgments, it
is one sole movement that one can coin out in judgments, in memories, but
that holds them in one sole cluster as a spontaneous word contains a whole
chunk of becoming, as one sole grasp of the hand contains a whole chunk of
space.”15 These differing dimensions in which the world appears are strata of
one sole becoming and are grasped as such, within a depth, as inseparable. The
word is likened to the hand, finding a way to body forth a whole becoming of
this world. The silence, as described by Merleau-Ponty, has roots and foliation
even though it has no ground; in other words, the abyss has mated with the
gestures of the world. This mating has borne forth a fluidity and movement
in an unfolding within time. It is a time, however, without foundation and
with fissures and interconnections that we turn to next.
 VIII
Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time

The things call forth art (painting, language) insofar as they are already
in an allusive, lateral situation.1

The key phenomena in the dimensions of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty explores
take time to unfold. Silence happens only in time’s unfolding. Becoming hap-
pens only in time’s unfolding. The back-and-forth that eventually creates the
sense of reversibility requires time’s unfolding. In order to articulate the dis-
tinctive depth of the time of the flesh that allows for this kind of silence,
becoming, and reversibility, moreover, we must also see the doubling back of
time on itself: the way in which time is chiasmatic. For Merleau-Ponty, the
appreciation of time’s duration or unfolding unity is the task of language used
as creative expression: to enter into time and bring forth its transitions and
becomings, to move along with it in such a way that its sense is sketched out
by the movement within language. This means that a deeper sense of percep-
tion is emergent, within time, in an unfolding intertwined with the world.
In Western philosophy, the dualistic fracturing of descriptions of the being
of the world comes from seeing it in instants of time. Silence taken out of
the fluidity of time becomes only a mute instant, no more. It seems a closed
face, something to skip over. Within time and movement, sense is conveyed
by silence. There is no gesture in the frozen instant in which the tracing and
trajectory are lost, yet the instant has been the commonplace yardstick of reality
in Western philosophical and cultural traditions.
If the world of silence is characterized by interconnections and inter-
weaving, then we have to be aware and express how this nexus comes about
through interaction as a process, one that can be teased out only by following
lines of unfolding that also are enfolding in time’s duration. Merleau-Ponty
came to an increasing awareness of the importance of this perspective. In the
lecture course “Intuition and Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty suggests a corrective to

59
60 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

his own earlier method, or at least an admonition to himself to maintain and

heighten a sensitivity to the temporal flow of the world:

World side: do not limit oneself to the static image of the perceived
world taken at an instant. Consider, not abstract perception in an
isolating attitude, which I have done too much (hence, overestima-
tion of sensing or of the quality as mute contact with an endpoint)
but take up the analysis of the perceived world as being more
than sensory. For example my whole perception at each moment
is only the relation of human action, absolute plenitude is the
result of isolating analysis. [The] sensible world [is] full of gaps,
ellipses, allusions: objects are ‘physiognomies,’ ‘behaviors,’—[there
is] anthropological space and physical space.2

To get beyond seeing the silent world as an instant of mute contact, and to
understand the perceived world as capable of an interplay of many kinds of
sense that conjoin in an expression, it is necessary to trace out the temporal
process in a human space. So, for example, to see the gesture of sleet requires
staying within the unity of time in which it shows its sense. To get the deeper
sense of dynamism and interplay within time of varied kinds of sense that
come together, however, the philosopher has to abandon the idea of time’s
unfolding as merely a progressive or successive movement of sensory percep-
tion. Time itself must be such that it manifests the clashing of opposing forces
and has gaps through which unexpected senses enter the interplay and come
into interconnection. The unfolding is also the enfolding of these differences,
so they conjoin to birth new meaning. The differences in kind of apprehension
that are layered within the time of perception renders the perceived within a
context of moving, affective, imaginal, memorial, and other senses. This inter-
play of gaps and unexpected conjoining senses is the manner in which the
silent gestures of the world enter into expression in language used allusively.
Allusive use of language mirrors this coming together of differences through
metaphor and image.
Before moving on to how these interplays within silence are expressed,
Merleau-Ponty first has to articulate the temporality of reversibility into which
silence draws us. He uses one of the simplest examples possible—one that our
own “body self ” provides us—and by doing so distances himself from the
philosophical perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre, who uses the same example in his
chapter “The Body” in Being and Nothingness—with far different conclusions.
For Sartre, when one hand attempts to hold the other hand, the hand that is
held is reduced to the status of an object, of an in-itself, whereas the touching
hand is still the embodiment of the for-itself, of the subject confronting the
 Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time 61

world. For Sartre, this registration of the other hand by the for-itself is part of
the project that ultimately seeks to achieve pure being through the impossible
project of being simultaneously and absolutely both subject and object. Sartre
poses the question, “Can I not see and touch my hand while it is touching?”
The ontology he is articulating allows him only to reply: “But then I should be
assuming the point of view of the Other with regard to my senses. I should be
seeing eyes-as-objects; I can not see the eye seeing; I can not touch the hand as
it is touching.”3 For a thinking that opposes subject and object as two sorts of
substances or kinds of being, the only possible outcome would be either some
sort of collapse of each into the other, the two becoming coincident as being,
or else the two would remain locked in this dichotomous opposition across a
barrier of nonbeing. What is important to note here is that this dualistic sense
is arrived at by looking at touching as it occurs in the instant. Furthermore,
it regards those instants as discrete. The silent exchange of gesture and touch
that leads to reversibility does not occur in this instantaneous time.
Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the dilemma posed by Sartre, who in this
instance represents the dualist tradition that typifies the history of Western
culture and philosophy. If we look at touching in the instant, then, as Merleau-
Ponty writes: “My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching the things, but I never realize coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at
the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right
hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world
is interrupted; or it retains its hold upon the world, but then I do not really
touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer
covering.”4 If these remain discrete moments, as they do for Sartre, then there
is either the sensing or the sensed. Yet, Merleau-Ponty argues, this inability to
overcome this gap, even if accepted as a starting point, does not in any way
undermine the possibility of reversibility if one abandons the either/or logic
of separateness versus coincidence: “To begin with, we spoke summarily of a
reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It
is time to emphasize that it is reversibility always imminent and never realized
in fact.”5 It is true that there is no coincidence, and it is also true that there
is always a gap (écart) between the hands, or the perceiving and perceived,
yet this is not a breakdown of evolving reciprocity. For Merleau-Ponty, each
term in the chiasmatic logic he is articulating retains its distinctness, remains
discrete, and yet there is a mutual transformation, unlike in Sartre’s philosophy.
The gap between the sensing and the sensed, or between the silence of the
primordial world of perception and language, which has the same chiasmatic
relationship, is essential to the way sense evolves and unfolds within time. It
reflects one aspect of the inexhaustibility of the world that provides always
more to express. Merleau-Ponty makes this clearer in the next sentences: “But
62 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

this incessant escaping, this impotency to superpose exactly upon one another
the touching of the things by my right hand and the touching of this same
right hand by my left hand, or to superpose, in the exploratory movements
of the hand, the tactile experience of a point and that of the ‘same’ point a
moment later, or the auditory of my own voice and that of other voices—this
is not failure” (VI 148). Even though my hands fail to coincide, and their felt
sense may shift back and forth through the unfolding of time in an unstable
relationship with each other, this is not a failure to achieve a sense, but rather
is exactly how sense builds up within time.
For Merleau-Ponty, the moments of time do not successively unfold
indifferently to each other, but each holds what has happened and is open to
certain trajectories in such a way that time circles back on itself. This happens
continually, transforming what has been, giving rise to new possibilities. This
means that the unfolding of time is equally an enfolding back into itself. For
example, in the case of the two hands, the sense of “being held” and the sense
of “about to hold” come together with many other instances of both. They
do not remain discrete but intertwine within the overall sense of the body in
the context of the world. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

For if these experiences never exactly overlap, if they slip away at the
very moment they are about to rejoin, if there is always a ‘shift,’ a
‘spread,’ between them, this is precisely because my two hands are
part of the same body, because it moves itself in the world, because
I hear myself both from within and from without. I experience—and
as often as I wish—the transition and the metamorphosis of the
one experience into the other, and it is only as though the hinge
between them, solid, unshakeable, remained irremediably hidden
from me. (VI 148)

Since for Merleau-Ponty each moment is only part of a larger unfolding within
time, these sudden reversals and gaps become “spanned” over time, and even
though the fissures remain, an interplay of the oppositions and overlaps is built
up. During this time span the boundaries blur, the beings come to be linked
and encircle one another in a sense that is both conjoined and dehiscent. The
sense of the hands is not one and not two—or in other words, is a chiasm.
These transitions build up as they unfold over time, with their prolongations
and reverberations. There is nothing that is not enveloped in a gestalt, which
is in turn enveloped within other gestalts.
These transitions have the power to forge a relatedness, such that two
people, for example, who were once strangers now have a good sense of each
other and how the other feels, sees, and thinks. After being taken out of myself
 Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time 63

in the interchange with the other repeatedly, what I feel is no longer experi-
enced as other than me in the same way. The other’s moods and thoughts have
become part of what I can sense in the world with the other, even if I always
keep some distance. Even nonhuman or inanimate beings, such as the strange
environment of the woods, can become a place of belonging through so many
times of taking in the gestures of the leaves, the trees, the scurrying animals,
the loamy paths, the rocks strewn about, and so on. This takes time to grow
and take hold, like new roots in silent contact with the world. The relatedness
also gains depth, as other times, for example, spending a week camping in a
forest suddenly flashes forward to rejoin the sense of the hike in the woods
happening so much later. So, in Merleau-Ponty’s example, the sense of the sleet
may for the first instant be foreign, even puzzling if not encountered before,
but an exchange takes place within time where part of my sense of the world
inseparably includes sleet-driven days.
In his lectures on “The Literary Use of Language,” Merleau-Ponty says
this logic is the lesson that the poet Paul Valéry needed to learn in order to
move forward as a writer, to understand that “there is woven between us an
‘exchange,’ a ‘chiasm between two ‘destinies’ . . . in which there are never quite
two of us and yet one is never alone.”6 To foster reverberation with the way we
are interwoven with the world and the way speech is intertwined with silence
will bring us to a “vertical” sense of these things—of differing layerings of
sense within a vertical time. Rather than the perspectives of reader and writer,
or of speakers, “unifying” into a synthesis, there opens a depth enclosing the
writer and readers or the speakers in a layering of vertical intersubjectivity.
This kind of exchange in language opens us to “a signification and a subject
of signification, a milieu of communication” that returns us to a differing
sense of presence and time: “to restore this, in the present and in the past,
the Lebenswelt history, to restore the very presence of a culture,” which is also
“in the present, not a ‘human’ universe”—and to an “intersubjectivity that is
not perspectival but vertical, extended into the past, existential eternity, savage
mind [esprit sauvage]” (VI 175). This existential eternity is not beyond time
but is so enmeshed in time’s interplays that in some sense all time enters the
moment. It enters not as complete, not as graspable, but as jolts of sense of
other times that streak the present. It is an “eternity” because all time is there
in the moment, but not from outside time, as traditionally conceived, but as
from within time. The “savage” or “wild” quality of being of the world, and of
selves, others, and creatures, is a less orderly, more compellingly energetic and
chaotic sense that resides within time and resists our efforts at domesticating
reality to be more manageable. It is a depth or vitality that is lost in what is
becoming the listlessness of the “endless nightmare” of which Merleau-Ponty
warned, discussed at the beginning of this book.
64 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Ultimately, then, this hearkening to silence as the lining of speech, and as

the primordial contact of perception, is itself a reversibility between silence and
speech and between language and world. Merleau-Ponty writes in the “Chiasm”
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible that “the whole landscape is overrun with
words, but in the sense that “its mute world is such that all the possibilities of
language are already given in it.”7 The trajectory toward expression in speech is
birthed by the world’s gestures in our openness to this silent dialogue. Merleau-
Ponty’s ideas force us to recast our human-centered estimation of ourselves to
acknowledge that “we” don’t perceive, “we” don’t speak, “we” don’t think, but
rather we enter into a “co-perceiving” or a “co-speaking” or a “co-thinking”
with all around us as part of those processes.8 Jean-Luc Nancy makes a similar
point in describing how in really listening and especially to silence, there is
“no subject at all, except as a place of resonance, and of its infinite tension
and rebound.”9 In opening oneself in listening or hearkening one is more fully
taken up in to the fabric of the world that transcends self-other distinctions.
In this sort of co-perceiving or co-speaking, Nancy says, “it is a question of
going back to, or opening oneself up to, the resonance of being, or to being
as resonance. ‘Silence’ in fact must be understood [s’entendre, heard] not as a
privation but as an arrangement of resonance.”10 The silence within and lining
speech releases the listener to a reversibility with the spoken and the speaker.
We can deepen the sense of our perceptual being by entering this level of
reversibility with the world and can also deepen our use of language by hear-
kening to this “fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which both sustains
mute perception and speech.”11 This deepening entails a hearkening to silence
that will open both a felt connection to what we perceive and to horizons
of further sense to be manifested. Then, we can experience the interplay of
levels of sense of “vertical being.” To do this rightly means to abandon our
privileged position within Western philosophy and culture as the supreme agent
of apprehension and expression, which removes us from the laceworks of the
Earth.12 Merleau-Ponty concludes the “Chiasm” chapter by quoting Valéry’s
sense that “language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is
the very voice of the things, of the waves, and the forests.’ ”13 Entering into
our words, if they are spoken with the artist’s attention to what is about us,
are the silent voices of other beings. We say what they would say if they were
to have the power of our speech. This is not to deny our distinct human,
linguistic voice, but is rather to say we can use our language as a source of
reverberation for the many voices in the world with which we are interrelated.14
It also means that even when we are so caught up in well-worn phrases and
practical outcomes that we ignore the silent aspect of speech, there is still a
resonance within our words, there to be amplified, if we come to hearken to
this deeper layer of language. Merleau-Ponty seeks to acknowledge that the
 Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time 65

human voice and the indirect voices of the beings around us “are two aspects of
the reversibility which is ultimate truth.”15 To discover that language as allusive
manifests reversibility and turns toward its roots in silence is to uncover truth
as a giving voice to the primordial levels of perception as an access to being.
 IX
Silence Arrives at the First Day

Moreover, we should be sensitive to the threads of silence from which

the tissue of speech is woven. . . . It is a new way of shaking up the
apparatus of language or of narrative to make it yield goodness knows
what—precisely because what is said then has never before been said . . .
—The Prose of the World (46)

The other temporal dimension at the heart of reversibility to which we have

alluded is the vertical sense of time. This means that in the present simultane-
ously there are layers of other times that are within this time. To return to the
primordial level of perception and cultivate a greater sensitivity to reversibility,
as the artist often does, is in one aspect a temporal “return” to the childhood
of humanity and to the childhood of each of us. In our early childhood, as
described by Merleau-Ponty in the “Child’s Relations with Others,” there is an
“engulfment” in the spectacle of the world and a “state of indistinction from
others.”1 Merleau-Ponty calls it a “syncretism” with others, which indicates a
world in which there is not yet a felt boundary between the infant and the
world or other people. This sense, however, is pushed deep into the background
of experience at three years of age with the development of the sense of being
an individual with a point of view, or as Merleau-Ponty indicates, “The crisis
at three years pushes syncretism farther away rather than suppressing it alto-
gether.” The syncretic sense of envelopment in the world and others remains
as an abiding acquisition deep in each person’s background sense of the world.
The artist is able to rekindle this sensibility of enmeshment with the
world, yet this is not a regression of time; rather, there is a deeper level of
temporal folding back into an earlier level that is not a “return” to an earlier
“point” in a “succession” of moments, as time is classically thought of in
Western philosophy and culture after Aristotle. To return to its sense is not a
“regression” of the artist “falling back” into some abiding “state” that remains
“behind” him or her in time. This is how Freud thought of the relapse into

67
68 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the “oceanic state” of childhood indivision with the world, especially in love.
It is not “a going back” in time, but rather a moving into the depth of time
that has always been present and now flashes forth in an experience. It is like
the experience of the protagonist in W. B. Yeats’s poem, “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree,” who, even in the midst of the bustle of “pavements grey,” hears in
“the deep heart’s core” the peaceful silence of the solitude at the lake.2
This other sense of time is already hinted at when Merleau-Ponty states
in “Cézanne’s Doubt” of artists that “Cézanne’s or Balzac’s artist is not satisfied
to be a cultured animal but assimilates the culture down to its very foundations
and gives it a new structure: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if
no one had ever painted before.”3 For Merleau-Ponty, the birth of meaning is
an ongoing process, and in opening oneself to primordial experience, there is
a sense that one is at the “first day” of humanity itself, which is still happen-
ing if one can make contact with it. This is the vocation of the artist. This
temporal depth can be understood in two equally important ways. Both in
Phenomenology of Perception and in his last published essay, “Eye and Mind,”
Merleau-Ponty speaks of a single “wave” of temporality of which we are all a
part, but not in the sense of a continuity that can be traced back reflectively
as a causal chain of events, one that we can intellectualize in a thought—as
reading philosophy, for example, is part of a long progression from Thales or
Heraclitus or Lao-Tzu to the present. Rather, he means that the origin of our
present sense of the world is still happening as a felt part of the present.
It takes a slowing down and listening to the hush that is the background
to the world’s appearance to encounter this ongoing beginning. In Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says of the perceiver:

The synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal process, which

means, not that it is subject to time, nor that it is passive in relation
to time, nor that it has to prevail over time, but that it merges with
the very movement whereby time passes. Through my perceptual
field, with its spatial horizons, I am present to my surrounding,
I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out beyond
it, and all these perspectives form a single temporal wave, one of
the world’s instants. Through my perceptual field with its temporal
horizon I am present to my present, to all the preceding past and
to a future. At the same time, this ubiquity is not strictly real, but
is clearly only intentional.4

The perceiver is this wave of time that comes to bear on what he or she
perceives at that moment as a finite being focused on something particular,
whereas God would look upon all things of all times but not really engage with
 Silence Arrives at the First Day 69

anything particular at any given time, not really perceive it, because He is it.
The perceived sense has within its depths the sense that has been unfolding as
time itself unfolds and is brought to bear at every instant of engaged percep-
tion as a depth of Vision itself. As Merleau-Ponty writes about perception in
“The Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, “It is Visibility some-
times wandering and sometimes reassembled.”5 The originary sense of what is
perceived is still coming into being or becoming and is never done with. In
the silent encounter with the world’s gestures, the world is still at that first
moment of coming forth which will continually happen. The artist has the
sensibility to be open to this depth of perception and express it.
Time as vertical as well as a single wave is a “stacking” of times upon
one another in a time that goes all the way back to the ongoing originary
senses of the world. Some of those times flash into the present with their felt
sense, because the originating of a sense is incomplete and open-ended, and
continues to happen. So, for example, if Cézanne is looking at Mont Sainte-
Victoire in his meditation that opens him to the beckoning of a motif that
offers itself to be painted, part of his sense may be an unreflected-on felt flash
of co-existence with the humans of thirty thousand years ago who lived in caves
at its foot, or of the tectonic shifting of the Earth’s plates that thrust it higher
into the sky, or of the peasant farmers huddled at its base with the anxious
uncertainty whether their crops would suffice to feed their families and pay
taxes to the King, and so on. Galen Johnson expresses this apprehension of
the artist for Merleau-Ponty: “Merleau-Ponty’s later thought makes clear that
the artwork participates in an order of time other than serial time, and this
other order of time is about ‘event’ and advent . . . multiple historical times
that encroach upon one another, multiple cultures and individuals that that do
not exist in a single serial space and time, but in many spaces and times that
pile up, proliferate and encroach upon one another.”6 The temporal dispersion
and “piling up” within the moment is not ubiquity, but rather the felt senses
of myriad times that dovetail in their sense with the present of the mountain
in that moment of perception. This piling up of times within time requires an
openness of silence to enter, but also, as we described earlier, there is a hush
engendered by the coming together of the many in the one.
To be the artist, or anyone with a sensibility open to the recognition of
this sense, requires a hearkening to the silence of the world, the willingness
to become like the first person experiencing the world as new. It takes a quiet
in the person who meets the silent gestures of the world and welcomes them.
These moments are now held “in” the mountain’s gesture to us that stretches
back to the first encounters with its face. This moment is still happening and
can be joined by Cézanne, which is how he is “joining the hands of nature.”
Rather than being a series of “presents” or “moments,” there is a way in which
70 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

time is one moment, one wave that is still unfurling. This sense of time is
ongoing. It is the same becoming in time of that which was already present
in the originating moment, but comes to be within the unfolding of time.
This becoming in time is alluded to in the chapter on “Sense Experience” in
Phenomenology of Perception, which ends with the famous statement about an
“original past, a past which has never been a present.”7 The past had never
been present until at this moment of expression of what had only been latent
that now comes to be and also transforms the past into having been the his-
tory of that sense. For Merleau-Ponty, this is the time of institution, which
he explains as the “characteristic of the human gesture to signify beyond its
simple existence in fact, to inaugurate a meaning,” but it is a meaning that
“points to a continuation or recommencements. Its value exceeds its simple
presence, and in this respect it is allied or accomplished in advance to all other
efforts of expression.”8 In this sense, Merleau-Ponty explains, the first cave art
is present in all future paintings that bring forth what was latent in that first
expression and continue to transform its inexhaustible sense.9
Merleau-Ponty returns to this theme in discussing the power of the con-
tact with the silent gesture of the world that opens an originary ongoing time
at the end of “Eye and Mind” by claiming “that the whole of human history
is, in a certain sense, stationary” such that “the very first painting in some
sense went to the furthest reach of the future” and “if creations are not a pos-
session, it is not only that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they
have almost all of their life still before them.”10 The many moments that could
be seen to be occurring as if stretched out on a linear time line are instead
envisioned by him as happening together in the present, so he depicts them
as “stationary” in the passage quoted, as if standing there continuously in the
present, even as the present is always becoming transformed by incorporating
other senses into itself. The first paintings in the ancient caves are indeed past,
yet they are to have most of their life still before them, not as a memory, not
as a recorded history, but as a “co-happening” in the present moment of any
artist painting. Those cave paintings are part of all the artworks now being
accomplished or to be accomplished as an open-ended becoming still unfold-
ing.11 The thickness of time has within it time’s unfolding, which also enfolds
itself and the “layering” of vertical time that is itself dynamic, explosive, trig-
gered by varied events.
Silence takes us from the surface to depths. It takes us from the present
to the hush of what becomes by the power of its sense to draw us back into
hearkening to the gestures of the world. Silence asks us to leave the daily sense
of time as a never-ending progression of instants to be reckoned with, counted,
and used productively. Silence draws us into encounter with the world that is
also a drawing into another time, the time of the first day. There is one key
 Silence Arrives at the First Day 71

late working note about this “wild” or “raw time” that provides a pointer to
several of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about vertical time at the first day. The work-
ing note of November 1960 is a reflection on the fact that the experience of
the natural world has the power to trigger vertical time or savage time that is
the first day in time there now:

‘Nature is at the first day’; it is there today. This does not mean:
myth of the original indivision and coincidence as return. The
Urtümlich, the Urpsrünglich is not of long ago. It is a question of
finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an
‘ever new’ and ‘always the same’—A sort of time of sleep. . . . The
sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from
within a passage from one into the other Existential eternity. The
indestructible, the barbaric Principle.12

For Merleau-Ponty there is no return to a time of origin or to a primordial

time when either humanity or the individual was at one with existence or was
in a state of indivision with the world. Rather, there is in the present an ongo-
ing kind of temporality that is an ongoing “originary”—a process of birthing
or coming into being—of which we all are a part. Furthermore, there is this
aspect of time in which there is “enjambment,” or a “piling up” of differing
times in one time. There is not a linear time that stretches from “the past” to
“the present” and into “the future,” but rather certain pasts and presents and
futures come together “stacked up” or layered in a “wild” or “barbaric” or
“raw” dimension of time that cannot be domesticated. This is the primordial,
not as earlier time, but as the depth of time.
Merleau-Ponty continues to elaborate this nonlinear temporality by
describing how, when looking at a landscape, “the visible landscape under my
eyes is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to . . . other moments of time
and past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not
it and they side by side ‘in’ time.”13 The single wave of time has depths which
are fissured and coming together in flashes. Moments of past and other times
come together, but not through progression. So, for example, we can imagine,
for Cézanne, who painted Mont Sainte-Victoire over and over again during
a span of decades, the varied mountain faces of myriad times crowded into
his vision and also into his visceral sense of the interlocutor standing before
him. His meditation seeking his motif is an entering into the silence in which
the world’s gestures take one into “the other side” of sense emanating from
the world as entering a vertical sense of the world as a vertical time. Salomé
Voegelin expresses this idea in saying that “In silence, time does not move
but vibrates gently on the spot, it’s slowed down on my body whose time it
72 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

has become,” and this sense of time in the body is a “stacking of time . . . in
non-linear multiplicities.”14 To sensitively enter silence through bodily percep-
tion is to enter a time of many times present at once.
This coming-together of varied times in one time, in the depth of the
time of the present, Merleau-Ponty makes clear, is not a phenomenon of an
interior or psychic mental machinery, nor does it follow some predelineated
ordering of the unfolding of the world; rather, it is the way in which time
within the human world has a wild quality of joining up with other moments
in sudden linkages with other times that yield the depth of sense: “The Stiftung
of a point of time can be transmitted to the others without ‘continuity’ without
‘conservation,’ without fictitious ‘support’ in the psyche the moment that one
understands time as chiasm.”15 Merleau-Ponty’s last words here are the heart
of this analysis of time: time itself is a chiasm. Time folds back on itself in
such a way that times that might have seemed to be discrete moments now
retain their integrity in one way, but in another way they become a depth
of time, or the “time behind the time,” of time’s unfolding. So, for Proust’s
narrator of In Search of Lost Time, within the taste of the famous madeleine
is the presence of an entire period of his life, not neatly arranged on a linear
timeline, but as jostling within the felt density of the present as having so
many more depths to be explored.
For Merleau-Ponty, the way in which the world gestures to us in the
indirect voice of silence can be hearkened to only by entering into time’s
unfolding. To do so, however, is to allow oneself to be taken into the rhythm
and movement of reversibility, so that one is pulled beyond the previous uses
of language to fathom its “other side,” the silent lining of speech, which allows
us to give voice to the world’s prior expressiveness in its silent gestures. Time
unfolds in fissures and discontinuities, but enfolds the jostling interplay of
sense enjambed within the simultaneous presence of many times, back to the
time of the “first day.”
 Part II

Faces of the World—Desiring Sensibility and Ethics

 I
Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World

Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are

both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world of which we catch a
glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly) but only ever from points
of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in which every object
displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze.
—The World of Perception (70)

Merleau-Ponty may be the first philosopher, at least in the Western tradition,

to ask us to look attentively upon the face of the world and, even more to
the point, to notice that each being—object, event, or creature—has a face.
Even more accurately, his philosophy asks us to turn toward the faces in the
world an engaged attention that is not necessarily a visual regard but rather an
attunement of our sensual, embodying being with the beckonings that envelop
perception. Certainly, the painters and visual artists Merleau-Ponty admired,
such as Cézanne and Klee, and the writers and poets he admired, such as
Proust, Ponge, and Simon, shared a sense of being called into a face-to-face
dialogue with the physiognomies of the myriad beings around them. Any object
might betray a telling expression in a way analogous to human facial expres-
sion. Merleau-Ponty said of Cézanne, for example, that he expressed “that play
of color which must necessarily encompass all that there is: the object’s shape,
its particular color, its physiognomy and its relation to neighboring objects.”
The face of things for Merleau-Ponty is a specific dimension of meaning
that addresses perception’s ability to situate embodying being within the matrix
of sense of the surrounding world. The face is the site at which these interrela-
tions come to show themselves as drawing with a certain felt intensity upon
greater depths, and as announced by this surface of contact with the perceiver.
David Morris agrees that the Phenomenology of Perception “conceptualizes per-
ceived things as having a physiognomic logic” that runs through the rest of
Merleau-Ponty’s later works. Morris shows that this logic is akin to logic of

75
76 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the faces of animal bodies, but ultimately encompasses another logic of being
that challenges the philosophical tradition.1 As Morris points out, however,
there are overlaps and also key differences among the senses of the face and
its logic in regard to things, humans, animals, and being. These differences are
vital, but to explicate this logic we will first consider the aspects that overlap.
To connect this thought of physiognomic logic with the themes discussed
in Part I, if there is a “gesturing” of the world in its movements within the
dimension of silence “taken in” through our first encounter with things—
“gestures” in things’ myriad ways of unfolding and appearing—then there is
also an expression of beings’ physiognomies that can be felt and understood
nondiscursively as being taken in through a certain focal point. In all cases,
this is one important sense of the face of something. Yet, as Morris also points
out, the face encompasses the sense of the entire being, or what he calls the
logic of the “greater face.”2 The face as it relates to gesture works only with this
double logic. The face is an important part of the gesture and the gesture takes
place only against the context of the face. If someone gestures to us a welcome,
then their face has an expression that is an essential part of the gesture made
by their hands, arms, posture, and so on, it fuels the rest of the gesture with a
certain cogency. Yet, in some way, it also frames the more dynamic expressions
of the gesture and is fed by them. The wave of the arms and hands, the moving
forward of the torso, and the turning of the head toward the other conveys a
sense as both adding to and framed by the accompanying smile and brighten-
ing of the eyes. Similarly, just as there are many movements and aspects that
we take in the felt sense of the “gestures” of sleet falling from the sky or the
“liveliness” of a city, they also have a certain physiognomy that is intrinsic to
their identity. Like the human face, however, in differing circumstances these
physiognomies can convey a wide range of specific expressions.3
Of course the human face as cipher of spirit has been the theme of
philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers, but that attention to the face is
a conduit of something else that expresses itself through the face. The face has
often been taken to be a clue or avenue to something “behind” or “higher” than
the physical face—an assumption analogous to the one in which sensory quali-
ties are conceived as secondary to the underlying substance of a thing, taken
metaphysically. This approach has been represented in the past half-century by
the work of Emmanuel Levinas on the “face of the Other.” In contrasting the
two, Merleau-Ponty’s attention to the physiognomic expression of the beings
within the world of concrete relations will be seen to have a different locus
and to be inseparable from an ontology in which the things and creatures of
this world are inseparably intertwined.
Merleau-Ponty announced at the beginning of Phenomenology of Percep-
tion that his exploration of perception was intended to correct the “mental
 Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World 77

blindness”4 of an empiricism that “excludes from perception the anger or the

pain which I nevertheless read in a face”5 or see “in the appearance of a
landscape, an object or a body whereby it is predestined to look ‘gay’ or ‘sad,’
‘lively’ or dreary,’ ‘elegant or coarse.’ ”6 Empiricism had thereby taken “sense
experience” and “emptied it of all mystery.”7 For empiricism, and for so much
of our postmodern culture following operational thinking, there is no pause to
have a real encounter with the other—be it object, event, human, or nonhuman
creature. Such an encounter is to stop and see the face of the other. In objec-
tion to this blindness to the faces of the world, Merleau-Ponty’s project is to
return to the full encounter of “living experience” and abandon this abstracted
and desiccated representation: “The first philosophical act would be to return
to the world of actual experience which is prior to the objective world.”8 In
Phenomenology of Perception, announcing this project, he says that first among
the steps to restore this sense of the world would be to “restore to things their
physiognomy” (de rendre à la chose sa physionomie).9 Our modern scientific and
intellectual traditions have reshaped the world—its objects and events—into a
“faceless” collection of beings of mere matter in motion. Merleau-Ponty sought
to restore the faces to things, to allow them to have again their “voices of
silence,” for only beings with faces also have voices, in the sense that what is
expressed by each in an indirect voice is some sense unique to it—as unique
as the expression on another’s face. This is what Merleau-Ponty meant when
he said during one of his radio interviews, in 1948: “We are discovering in
every object a certain style of being that makes it a mirror of human modes
of behavior.”10 There is a sense to the events and beings encountered that is
immediately perceived. When sleet beats down on a certain day in a certain
temporal and spatial context, for example, it may strike the perceiver as aggres-
sive or intimidating or depressing. We can’t help seeing other humans without
seeing the expression we read in their faces. We find interlocutors throughout
the world and not only in the human world.
The face of the world might seem a whimsical notion vis-à-vis the back-
ground assumptions of modern Western philosophy and science. Empiricism
and much of our cultural commonsense dictates that to see the sadness of a
city or object, or the liveliness of another city or object, is a mere “projection”
of the meaning constructed by humans only “triggered” by the experience
of an object, not expressed by it. In criticizing the theory of association of
sensations, Merleau-Ponty questions what this “autonomous force” could be
that would bring different disparate and isolated sensations into synthesis by
dint of their resemblance.11 Something could only be so “triggered” if there
were some sense perceived that registered as resembling the other instances of this
sense; or in other words, the association of meanings presupposes what it is
intended to explain. Yet this perception of shared sense among things expressed
78 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

by them is exactly what empiricism denies. In claiming that there is a “trigger”

for an association is to only provide a word instead of a description of how
this might be the case that obscures how this explanation is a vicious circle.
Differing perceptions are drawn together in memory as being of one being
because there is a recognition among perceptions of differing times as having a
distinctive quality that makes them belong together. What is perceived in the
object or event or person that is a recognizable sense is what Merleau-Ponty
calls in the opening pages of the Phenomenology of Perception the “physiognomic
character of the data.”12 What is perceived has a certain “look” to it just as
does a facial expression that registers on the prereflective level of perception.
It is that look that evokes a sense of recognition that is based on an already
existing relationship with other senses we have of the world.
In his first use of this term “physiognomic character” in the Phenom-
enology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seems to be saying that my recognition
of a perception as belonging to some being, along with the sense that I have
encountered it before, that is now part of a developing relationship I have
with that being, is analogous to the instant when I recognize another person’s
face. Merleau-Ponty explores for a moment what happens when we see another
person’s face: “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely ‘what we see.’ ”
The physiognomic is a sense of “a whole charged with immanent meaning,”
such that there is an overall sense, yet it is indeterminate. Merleau-Ponty adds
that this changes the traditional notion of impression or immediate perception:
“More generally it is the very notion of the immediate which is transformed:
henceforth the immediate is no longer the impression, the object which is one
with the subject, but the meaning, the structure, the spontaneous arrangement
of parts.”13 The immediate is not a clear and distinct input of data with an
unnoticed impact on perception. Instead, when one is encountering an object,
event, creature or person, there is an entryway into a process of unfolding
meaning and a structuration of the whole that beckons to become further
elaborated. To pursue the analogy between the physiognomy of anything per-
ceived and the perception of a familiar person’s face, we see that even before
I can start to remember from where I know this person’s face or who they
are or what we have shared together, I am drawn toward this face as taking
up again something recognized that is in the process of coming to expression
between us. It is at first an unclear beckoning, but one that is felt. My body
leans toward the person receptively. Merleau-Ponty says the face of another
person is recognized from its overall expression; it is not a grasp of certain
details that we then reconstruct to posit their identity (except when we fail to
recognize their face, and so resort to this).
This recognition of the overall sense—or we might say of the “expres-
sion”—of someone’s face helps to explain why many of us may be startled to
 Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World 79

realize that “I may be familiar with a face without ever having perceived the
color of the eyes in themselves.”14 We are usually drawn into the communicative
sense of the other’s facial expression, which is not a matter of the movement of
their features or the facts of their appearance, but rather a certain “look” of the
whole together, whether it is expressing love or scorn or warning or welcome. It
is the sense of their style of being, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, their way of being
friendly or suspicious, of pausing to look at the river going by, or of insisting
on a certain political point of view that colors their perception of everything
else in a particular way at this moment. We see both the immediate presence
and the ongoing style in the encounter. The face’s expression presents the other
person’s immediately felt stance toward this encounter within the context of
our and his or her history. The face expresses this relatedness and the way one
is turned to beings in the world. It expresses the feelings, emotions, thoughts,
imaginings, and memories that the other brings to our encounter. Yet, also
flickering in his or her expression are perhaps other relations to aspects of his
or her world. So, for example, I might recognize my friend’s smile of welcome,
but also register simultaneously the drawn, fitful look of some anxiety that
he or she is experiencing at that instant, and both are palpably there in the
expression. Although often ignored, we recognize that such senses play across
another person’s facial expression. The face of the other is a pointer to the
depths and nexus of relationships that make up his or her world.
What is most distinctive about Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is that he not
only sees the importance of these expressions and meanings for structuring our
human world, but he also recognizes that things have a face. Merleau-Ponty
also sees that the physiognomy of things allows them to enter into encounters
with us as they announce their sense to us. Things of all sorts, and not just
other persons, announce themselves as having a “look” with a certain “feel”
that conveys a certain sense about the context of relations within which they
are situated—as an overall initial expression that beckons for further disclosure.
It is not just on the factual level that perception calls for a “perceptual faith”
in resolving what is there—a faith that what appears inchoately will become
more meaningful—but also this concerns the encompassing meaning of what
we perceive. So, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, perceptual faith functions in the
process of perception as “a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve.”15
The sense of what confronts us in perception, like the face of someone we
know, draws us to delve further into its depths. The face of the world is com-
pelling even if it is incomplete, indeterminate, riddled with what is missing,
and may (or may not) become filled in further: “[The] sensible world [is] full
of gaps, ellipses, allusions: objects are ‘physiognomies,’ ‘behaviors,’—[there is]
anthropological space and physical space.”16 The “lived space” we inhabit is not
projected on “physical space” as though on hard chunks of matter, but is one
80 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of unfolding relationships that Merleau-Ponty sees as a face-to-face encounter.

As we have already noted, Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of empiricism in the
beginning of Phenomenology of Perception specifically points to its failure to find
in a landscape, an object, or a body the quality of being “ ‘gay’ or ‘sad,’ ‘lively’
or ‘dreary,’ ‘elegant’ or coarse.’ ”17 The qualities that give inanimate beings a
physiognomic expression, to which empiricism is blind, are lost in the failure
of empiricism that “excludes from perception the anger or the pain which I
nevertheless read in a face” (emphasis mine) (la colère ou la douleur que je lis
pourtant sur la visage)18 or to being able to recognize the reticence within a
religion or the city’s temper as they show themselves to us. So, it is not only
objects but institutions, cities, events, and histories that have a “face” as well.
Finally, it is the world itself, as the widest horizon we encounter, that has a
face and grounds our overall sense of existence: the “ultimate court of appeal
in our knowledge of these things . . . is the historical and qualitative face of
the world.”19 If the world itself is encountered as a face, the general structure
of the perceptual encounter with the being of the world and its horizon is
physiognomic.20
This horizontal aspect of the physiognomic is highlighted in Merleau-
Ponty’s analysis of the child’s dawning recognition of colors. He describes the
child’s experience of first coming to attend to color through the emergence
of “a series of physiognomic distinctions.”21 Recognized as physiognomy, the
varied colors are not yet the determinate colors or qualities that the child
will come to establish later in further acts of thought. Initially, the child has
something new brought to his or her attention, but not a specifiable sense of
color distinctions or qualities. What happens is that “the first perception of
colors properly speaking, then, is a change of the structure of consciousness,
the establishment of a new dimension of experience.”22 This is a horizon of
meanings that opens as something with which we have started an acquaintance.
The physiognomic is more like a “figure,” states Merleau-Ponty in citing Kurt
Koffka, something that is suggestive, that motivates us to further attention.
He also calls these physiognomic characters “performed only as horizons,”
as they both open new aspects of the world as well as transform what was
previously known as now standing within a new context. As Merleau-Ponty
will later say about institution, this figured sense will come to be what it is
through the unfolding of the dimension: “once the color-quality is acquired,
and only by means of it, do the previous data appear as preparations of this
quality.” What comes forward as present opens a future that makes a past
possible in a new sense that had awaited this opening. This past had never
been past, per se, but was a possible past in light of future developments.
Merleau-Ponty expresses this: “The miracle of consciousness consists in its
bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity
 Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World 81

of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it.”
With a new physiognomic perception, a dimension opens of further unfold-
ing meanings that become as having been foreshadowed. This looping within
time is the temporality of “institution,” a topic to which Merleau-Ponty will
devote a course in 1954–55. As Merleau-Ponty says in the course, “institution
[means] establishment in an experience . . . of dimensions . . . in relation to
which a whole series of other experiences will make sense and will make a
sequel, a history.”23 The temporality of institution becomes more prominent in
Merleau-Ponty’s later writing, but here we see this sense of time already used
in discussing physiognomic sense in the Phenomenology of Perception.
The initial encounter with the face of the world in the aspect of its colors
is one that happens prereflectively, before thought structures these experiences.
The figure, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, opens a dimension and serves as a
horizon. In this face-to-face experience the qualitative aspects of the world
dynamically unfold; in order for this to happen, they beckon for sustained
attention or perhaps attentiveness. The analogy between a person’s face and
other sorts of physiognomic expression works well here, since once another
person has come into my acquaintance I have opened myself to a new and
unique dimension of sense. This sense will continue to emerge from the face-
to-face relationship as I become more attuned to the nuances of expression.
The presentation of each being’s face and also the overall face of the world
could be seen to be a leitmotif of Phenomenology of Perception, as Merleau-
Ponty refers in several contexts to the “physiognomy” of things and events, and
to a “physiognomic” sense when discussing several topics, including how one
finds resemblance among differing figures within perception or over time, how
one understands in a prereflective bodily way the possibilities for expression
in a practical field, or how one apprehends the sense communicated by the
gesture of another person. This is the leitmotif of all his references to the war
veteran and patient, Schneider, whose perceptual deficit could be summed up
by saying that he is blind to the face of the other and of events and things.
Schneider sees faces only literally, without their having an expressive value to
him: “The world in its entirety no longer suggests any meaning to him and
conversely the meanings which occur to him are not embodied any longer in
the given world. We shall say in a word, that the world no longer has any
physiognomy for him.”24 Schneider has to resort to ways of either reflectively
figuring out what is required of him or what he is encountering, since there
is no face of the situation which immediately strikes him. Schneider has lost
the spontaneity others have in response to seeing the immediate sense of things
and people beckoning in their physiognomies.
Immediately the question arises, however—if perceivers continually
encounter the face of all beings and events, why is physiognomic sense not
82 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

central to our culturally and philosophically reflective understanding of the

world? Even though things have a face, as in the case of the world’s gesturing,
most perceivers fail to register this aspect of primordial perception, instead
imposing rational categories upon the perceptual field. Merleau-Ponty calls
this perceptual habit “the experience error.”25 Very often people inaccurately
attribute what knowledge they have come to reflectively conceive about the
world as being the prereflective perceptual source of that knowledge. They
become oblivious to the fact that these identifications are constructions. Most
see according to the categories of reflection and do not witness the world as
“lived”—unfolding, always in transition, always birthing new sense—in heed-
ing the sensual details of the world’s becoming. Physiognomic sense appears
in its fullness only within a sensitive, attentive openness to prereflective expe-
rience. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges this predicament in the chapter in Phe-
nomenology of Perception on “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,”
where he discusses how, for the most part, we tend to fall back on a fund
of previous experience that has been “sedimented” into our current sense of
place, or our sense of the person with whom we are speaking, or of the topic
we are pondering. Without “drawing sustenance” from the richness of our
present prereflective immersion in the situation, these senses lack “energy” and
their full meaning.26 Again, if we think of Merleau-Ponty’s later descriptions
in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” we have already discussed
the possible “listless” quality of sense that might become the norm when we
are screened off from the power of the prereflective. We can now see that this,
too, is a loss of energy and meaning from failing to see the face of things.
This disregard for faces allows a deepening cycle of dislocation. Merleau-
Ponty states also that “in moments of weariness” the space around us is
“reduced for the moment to one or two obsessive ideas,” when in the weariness
of alienation, oppression, or illness, perceiving becomes “impoverished.” We
see categories and stereotypes, and this continues the cycle of listless disloca-
tion. Merleau-Ponty contrasts this sort of stereotyped, empty perception with
those moments when we are stimulated, questioning, feeling a “vitality” in
taking in the surround, when things present themselves “with a precise physi-
ognomy.”27 It is the precision of a strength that comes from opening onto an
inexhaustible dimension of experiences that deepen each other, adding to the
grip of that sense on the perceiver, and not the precision of logical clarity and
distinctness. If one thinks of the face-to-face exchange with another person,
we can recognize a different kind of back-and-forth energetic exchange of
sense than occurs in other types of expression. There is a compelling quality
to the exchange, as in the roots of the word: com, “together,” and pellere, a
“driving” or “pulsing” together or back and forth. The world of other beings
also mirrors back the human regard of the face with its myriad faces that, if
 Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World 83

attended to, have a compelling quality and enriching depth. This means that
there can be a cycle of greater situated sense set in motion by attentiveness
to the face of things that augments itself. This is the lesson that the artist
presents to our sensibility.
Merleau-Ponty’s ongoing example of the plight of Schneider provides
a further clue to the nightmare that he feared for Western postmodern cul-
ture, if it could no longer be open to all of the offered sense of the world
at the prereflective level. Certainly Schneider is an extreme example of this
dislocation, due to his cerebral injuries, but this is nevertheless similar to the
sensibility toward which postmodern culture is slowly hedging. Schneider can
function in various ways, but his world has been severely leveled down to an
existence that has little depth of meaning, no spontaneity, and no inspiring joy.
One can survive in a faceless world, but it is a much different existence than
a lively dialogue with other persons, creatures, and the things of the world.
Merleau-Ponty details how Schneider cannot tell if a scene in a film is about
an angry, sad, or happy exchange among protagonists. The facial expressions on
the screen no longer have an immediate sense for him, just as certain situations
no longer have a recognizable sense that we may call their visage.28 Merleau-
Ponty says these failures are indicative of a more general lacuna in Schneider’s
perception with regard to the face: “Faces are for him neither attractive nor
repulsive, and people appear to him in one light or another only insofar as he
has direct dealings with them.”29 The face of the other has lost its immediately
perceivable sense and Schneider has to fathom others’ intentions, attitudes,
and feelings by reflectively considering and judging the results of their actions
toward him. He might decide their expression is compassionate, for example,
because they directly helped him with a task or gave him something of use.
This in effect reduces others to tools for survival. Without face-to-face contact,
Schneider doesn’t really enter the worlds of others. The danger of many human
relationships slipping into purely utilitarian relations is a real threat in a world
dominated by “operational thinking.” Schneider’s inability to apprehend the
physiognomic sense of the faces of other people is part of a blankness for him
of the overall expression of the face of the world and its events and objects,
since it is also true that for him the “sun and rain are neither gay nor sad”
and in general “the world is emotionally neutral.”30 For Schneider, as for the
person exhausted by work, oppression, illness, famine, or whatever else con-
stricts his or her openness to prereflective spontaneity, it may be the case that
as a consequence we live closer to the Cartesian paradigm, imposing general
rational categories upon our emotionally neutralized experience in order to
navigate our way through the day by exercising distant manipulation. This
kind of existence seems in danger of entering “into a sleep, or a nightmare,
from which there is no awakening,” as Merleau-Ponty warned.
84 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Perception, at its primordial level, situates us in ways that may often be

avoided or covered over, and it is at this level that the face of things really
touches us. Even when covered over, the traces of this sense of things perdure.
Merleau-Ponty states, “The thing and the world, we have already said, are
offered to perceptual communication as is a familiar face with an expression
which is immediately understood.” This “understanding” is one that is sensual,
so to fathom the face of things is to return to the sensual surface of things,
which has a greater meaning than has traditionally been asserted. He contin-
ues: “But then a face expresses something only through the arrangements of
the colors and lights which make it up, the meaning of the gaze being not
behind the eyes, but in them. . . .”31 Objects, events, and other living beings
have a facial expression that is sensed in all its perceptual qualities, not in any
of them in particular, but in their pattern, their movement, their interrelated-
ness, and their rhythm—“as a melodic whole with down and up beats, with
its characteristic rhythm or flow . . . a certain human event, recognizable by
its style.”32 This is a felt sense perceived as a whole, or a gestalt-like expression,
such as that on another’s face perceived as being happy or sad or curious. The
rock “face,” as even the English colloquial expression states, usually expresses a
sense of solidity, tranquility, steadfastness, and strength. It may have a range of
expressed senses in differing constellations of history, culture, projects, and so
on, in which it is perceived, but certainly whatever the context, it will not be
perceived as insubstantial, frivolous, airy, or pliable. There is a range of pos-
sible senses conveyed by the face of things in their perceived expression, yet
they express a central core of sense. Every object, event, or being has a face
when it engages us and we perceive it with an open sensitivity that allows it
a weight in our world.
 II
The Face of Desire

In the work of his earlier years, Cézanne tried to paint the expression first
and foremost, and that is why he never caught it. He gradually learned
that expression is the language of the thing itself and springs from its
configuration. His painting is an attempt to recapture the physiognomy
of things and faces by the integral reproduction of their sensible configu-
ration. This is what nature constantly and effortlessly achieves, and it is
why the paintings of Cézanne are “those of a pre-world in which no man
has yet existed.”
—Phenomenology of Perception (322)

The physiognomic level of perception is manifest for an embodied being who

is engaged attentively in its situation. Perception does not occur like the mecha-
nism of a camera shutter that registers the light coming through a lens in a
universe of beings indifferent to each other. Faces emerge only in an encounter.
The term “face” implies that for whatever being is perceived, there is an expres-
sion like that of a face, its qualities beckoning to the perceiver to respond. To
perceive a world of faces and the face of the world itself is to experience a
pull into greater depths; it is an attraction, a being drawn into an interchange.
This interchange will occur only if there is an openness on the part of the
perceiving face that allows the other face reciprocal entry into greater meaning.
This is the sense of the “face-to-face” encounter. An encounter occurs between
persons because we both seek something; we are open to other person as we
seek some meaning from them. If the world, too, is comprised of beings
with faces, they are open to our exploration for greater meaning and also
express sense indirectly or silently to us. Husserl’s phenomenology first articu-
lated the idea of a consciousness actively directed toward the world through
intentionality. Yet, Merleau-Ponty extended this idea with his articulation of
embodying being’s perception as a coition (un accouplement) with the world.
Certainly part of the drive to become open and enter this encounter is the way

85
86 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

perpetual faith throws us into the world and its deepening. As perceptual faith
seeks more sense by pursuing perception beyond its initial vague appearance,
we are pursuing the world, or as Merleau-Ponty expresses this: “Perceiving is
pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in a whole future of experiences, and doing
so in a present which never strictly guarantees the future: it is placing one’s
belief in a world. It is this opening upon a world.”1 One can still take this in
a too-structural sense, however, without realizing that Merleau-Ponty is cast-
ing perception as the primal locus of desire. However, he is simultaneously
reconfiguring desire from a long tradition of being defined as the response to
a lack. Instead, Merleau-Ponty describes desire as the sensitive overflow that
moves to greater fullness. Rather than sheer lack, it is also overflow and excess.
Seeing desire at the heart of perception transforms it from the traditional vision
of perception as the power of seeing the world as composed of indifferent
objects that are being recorded and organized by an epistemological subject.
For Merleau-Ponty, perception is the spark of encounter that happens between
and among faces. This in turn can be understood only because Merleau-Ponty
has transformed our sense of taking in the world through the silent encounter
of an embodied being who first “understands” the world prereflectively in an
interchange of inchoate sense. Perception would not happen in an objective
world of determinate sense.
Faces do not appear as part of a panorama laid out before a detached
mind, but rather beckon to a kinesthetic being having fingers, arms, legs, pas-
sions, dreams, and so on, who enjoins the invitation to engagement expressed
to him or her by the world’s solicitations with his or her own fleshly heft.
The face is offered within a dance that we take up in order to move into the
to-and-fro of unfolding sense between faces. For example, it is only a fleshly
being with lips, eyes, moving emotions, mobile skin, intention, imaginings,
facial muscles, care, and so forth who “catches” the sense of the excitement or
warmth of another’s smile by responding with one’s own expressed warmth or
excitement in an echoing smile. It is a being with limbs, torso, leg muscles,
swinging arms, feet planted on the ground, hearing, smelling, wondering, and
listening who also dreams, feels, and is affected in a striding rhythm that syn-
chronizes with the serenity of a forest path. The serenity emerges when his or
her steps enter into the rhythm of the dappled lighting, the breeze, the swaying
tree branches, vibrating leaves, and trills of birds. One moves into the peaceful
embrace of the trees, the shade, the sky, and Earth in the same fashion as one
answers the smile. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that Schneider does not perceive
things of this sort, whether the friendliness of a smile or the peacefulness of
the forest, because he is forced to rely on “the translation of the percept into
movement via the express meanings of language.”2 His felt sense has been
replaced by an abstracted reasoning. There is not for Schneider the kind of
 The Face of Desire 87

circuit that is unthinkingly available to others in which their perceptions are

already open to responsive movements in a physiognomic dialogue. For him,
the faces of the world have lost their expressiveness.
Merleau-Ponty contrasts Schneider’s impoverished response with the case
of the perceiver who lets the full significance break over him or her, the
movements elicited as responses to the face of the world: “The normal subject
penetrates into the object by perception, assimilating its structure into his sub-
stance, and through this body the object directly regulates his movements. This
subject–object dialogue, this drawing together, by the subject, of the meaning
diffused through the object, and by the object, of the subject’s intentions—a
process which is physiognomic perception—arranges round the subject a world
that speaks to him of himself and gives his own thoughts their place in the
world.”3 What Merleau-Ponty calls here “physiognomic perception” happens
in the dialogical relationship between the world and the perceiver, in which
movements are beckoned forth and happen according to the structure of the
world, midwifed by it. Merleau-Ponty says this is a “drawing together” and
an “assimilation” between perceiver and perceived, such that physiognomic
perception is a power of entering into the silent, prereflective world of sense in
such a way that the overlap or “winding between” (to use Merleau-Ponty’s later
vocabulary) comes to be more closely enmeshed. At the same time, the sense
that the world has faces speaking to him or her “arranges round the subject a
world” such that he or she gains a sense of himself or herself in a face-to-face
recognition. Merleau-Ponty concludes that, lacking this dialogue and result-
ing sense of self in relation to others, “in Schneider’s case, it is foreseeable, a
fortiori, perception of human events and other people will show deficiencies,
for these presuppose the same taking up of the external by internal and of
internal by external.”4 On principle, without this taking-in of the faces of the
world, meaning will be lost, the “characteristic rhythm or flow” that makes
up the sense of stories—in contrast to experiencing the world as “only a suc-
cession of facts.”5 Without physiognomic perception, “like the object, other
people ‘tell him’ nothing” except as “intellectual meaning arrived at through
analysis,” but what is missing and impoverishes that silent communication with
the world and others is “that primary meaning reached through co-existence.”6
The perception of the face is a theme running throughout the Phenomenology of
Perception that can easily be overlooked, but for Merleau-Ponty our co-existence
not only with other humans but also with the things of the world gains its
initial sense from the face-to-face encounter.
Merleau-Ponty had begun to formulate the importance of physiognomic
perception even in his early 1936 essay on Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Hav-
ing. In that essay, Merleau-Ponty criticizes our taken for granted formulation
of perceptual encounter. He complains that “philosophy as well as common
88 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

sense has taken our contemplation of inanimate objects and indifferent things
as representing the ideal and model of human knowledge”7—insofar as it is a
reductive model of what is revealed through “contemplation” or reflection on
perceptual experience. He remarks: “. . . we are used to setting out from a cer-
tain type of knowledge we consider normal: the contemplation of a set of quali-
ties or characteristics that are scattered and meaningless.” Positing this model
of encounter, we then conceive of ourselves as distant from what we perceive,
requiring us to be the subject who interprets and judges, who puts sense back
into things. Marcel’s protest that perception understood as this cool, distant
cataloguing interpretation was a deficient mode of perception, rather than the
norm, inspired Merleau-Ponty early on. Marcel’s insistence that we know our
bodies and then others and the world through intimacy and in “forming a
common cause” in encounter was helpful to Merleau-Ponty’s developing sense
of perception. After establishing that “I am my body,” Marcel, according to
Merleau-Ponty, then realizes of objects: “Here, it is more of a question of pres-
ence, adherence, and intimacy. But similarly, to the extent that I really believe
in objects and grasp their physiognomies rather than their ‘characteristics,’ their
presences rather than their essences, they become something like an extension
of my body.”8 Even in this early essay, Merleau-Ponty stresses that perception
is not the sensory recording of objects at a distance, but rather an opening
of intimacy with the being of the world perceived. He focuses on the idea
of face or physiognomy, I believe, because when perceiving a face one is less
likely to take the other in as an object, recognizing him or her as a presence
instead. Similarly, here Merleau-Ponty is asserting that even an object, when
perceived as a face or physiognomy, is a presence to the perceiver, a joining
through perception’s intimacy. Decades before he begins to use the term flesh,
Merleau-Ponty states that in this intimacy of perception with the face of the
perceived, it is as if the perceived becomes an extension of one’s own body.
This sense of perception is the first step on his path to explaining perception
in terms of desire, rather than in purely epistemological terms. We want the
sense of the world: we desire sense primordially.
This desire is the desire that begins with our first breath-taking in the
world. As Galen Johnson expresses this point, “The self incessantly overflows
into the world, and the structure of desire includes an inherent depth and
richness that is inexhaustible. It will only end, if it should end, when life itself
ends. This, as distinguished from need, marks the life of subjects seeking the
transcendence and beauty of the world.” Johnson then quotes Merleau-Ponty’s
statement from The Visible and the Invisible in which he states, “With that first
vision, with that first contact, the first pleasure . . . [is] the establishment of a
level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated.” The
life of perception is a life of pleasure in its own terms, the pleasure of taking in
 The Face of Desire 89

the world. It is this continued pleasure that forms our most primordial desire.
The early beginning of this sense of the face-to-face with the sounds, shapes,
and colors of the world is also evident in the well-known initial contact with
other persons, namely one’s parents or caregivers who—even before there is any
sense of the other person as existing, or of the self—evoke a smile in the face
of the infant in answer to their own smiles. In his essay of 1951, “The Child’s
Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty discusses this phenomenon as the most
often cited example of face-to-face perception and exchange, predating any
sense of language and reflection. He demonstrates how the infant who smiles
back at the smiling parent does not yet have an image of himself or herself
smiling, or of the parent who smiles.9 In general, the infant encounters certain
behaviors and is drawn toward them because these acts echo possibilities of
the infant’s body felt prereflectively. The action is not intellectually recognized
and then returned; rather, “it speaks directly to my own unique motility.”10
The facial reaction to another facial expression is a primordial entering into
another’s gesture. In the case of the smile, Merleau-Ponty says this is a matter
of “impregnation” by the “postural schema,” which finds its echo in the body
of the infant. The “joining” that happens here is so primordial that there is
not yet the sense of distance from the world to be overcome by taking in the
sense of what is perceived and entering into it. Yet, this already establishes
a pattern of relations with the world that will remain as the legacy of the
involvement with others’ faces and also with the faces of the things of the
world. Faces mirror and echo.
Merleau-Ponty replaces the traditional idea that sensations of perception
are the registration of qualities of objective states with the idea that a prere-
flective understanding of physiognomic aspects of the perceived emerge in a
dialogue of perception and action: “Sensations, ‘sensible qualities,’ are then
far from being reducible to a certain indescribable state or quale; they present
themselves with a motor physiognomy and are enveloped in living signifi-
cance.”11 It is on the level of being solicited by the world, of being beckoned
toward further discovery and action, as being drawn to do, perceive, and
experience that we find attraction, repulsion, danger, promise, and excitement
in the physiognomies of the beings around us. Like the person’s face, the thing
as having a face, has a halo of significance around it. Merleau-Ponty describes
how in perception “the thing is inseparable from the person perceiving it”
and “to this extent every perception is a communication or a communion, the
complete expression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition
[un accouplement] so to speak, of our body with things.”12 The coupling or
intercourse with the things of the world in perceiving them is not the subli-
mation or projection of a sexual drive onto the world. The coupling within
perception is the source of our moving toward and into the world as the core
90 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of desire. A faceless world would not offer itself as a pleasure to be perceived.

Only a world of faces, a world with a face, which offers through its expres-
sion and gestures an inexhaustible source of sense and meaning, has an attrac-
tive power over us. We are offered an inexhaustible interchange. The pleasure
indicated here is not a superficial one, not the pleasure of entertainment or
enjoyment, but rather the feeling of a rightness in coming into one’s being as
a witness to the world or, even more, a partner with the world in manifest-
ing significance.13 In the lectures on Institution and Passivity, Merleau-Ponty
states, “Each perception is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond
what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world, it is super-
significant—As particular, it would not be knowing, existing; its particularity
is only what is lacking in order to be everything in the world.”14 Without
entering into perception, particular things would not become manifest; but as
touching us in a vibration of the world, perception of each particular leads us
into the whole world, into the co-existence of all beings in the world. Without
entering the matrix of perception, the particular would not enter the shining
forth of becoming revealed. Each being becomes revealed in its intertwining
with all others. Rather than the subsumption under a category—which in this
passage Merleau-Ponty explicitly denies as being perception—what perception
is about is stated in the next sentence: perceiver and perceived are drawn into
the cohesion of life. This interconnection is an ongoing fulfillment of the desire
for meaningful existence itself.
Renaud Barbaras observes that the flesh is characterized as desire and as
coupling, given that desire is the openness that allows the relation among things
within flesh. The power of the flesh to incorporate—or fold back into—itself
within perception is the action of desire. Barbaras continues: “In this sense, to
say that the flesh is desire is to recognize that it is just as much expression and
the relation to the other only completes a signifying power already at work in
the simplest of perceptions. There is no meaning that is not incarnated and,
in this measure, affection.”15 In other words, Barbaras sees that perception
in Merleau-Ponty is always a joining within a relationship that is a felt phe-
nomenon. It is an expression, not a mechanical or indifferent occurrence, and
it is apprehended as such. The body incorporates, and this is the primordial
sense of desire. There is a pursuit of sense that is the most basic desire of the
human. Not only can there be no meanings that fail to touch embodying
being as affection, but Barbaras states that reciprocally, “There is no affection,
particularly in the relation of desire, that is not already the advent of a sense,
an attempt to carry the world’s opacity to transparency.” The libidinous as
conceived here is not, as Freud would have it, a blind drive to fill our lack
that has become cathected to the beings of the world in process of redirecting
the sexual within the symbolic resolution of the imperatives of biology and
 The Face of Desire 91

culture. Rather, for Merleau-Ponty, the more primordial libidinal attraction is a

movement of sense toward greater sense. Most primary is the perceptual faith
that seeks deeper perceptual sense, where this sense is a sensual, informational,
affective, kinetic, imaginative, and memorial matrix that draws in the perceiver.
For Barbaras, Merleau-Ponty has gone beyond the alternatives of a Freudian
libido that is sexualized and a phenomenological description of consciousness
as epistemologically intentional that lacks this dimension of affection.16
As an embodying being, our ongoing insertion in the world is not
mechanical or indifferent; rather, our continual entry in the world is the
manifestation of desire. This desire differs from the long tradition of desire
conceived as the result of a lack, beginning with Plato’s idea that desire stems
from the nonbeing of the perceptual realm in seeking the higher and endur-
ing Being. This is the source of sexual desire and all other “lower” desires as
Eros properly transcends them eventually toward union with Being qua the
Forms. Even Sartre continues this tradition, declaring desire for the missing
affirmation of the Other, or the passion we invest in myriad projects, as being
ultimately the desire to become the in-itself-for-itself. Most of the traditional
formulations of desire, from Plato to Sartre, focus on desire as first erotic in
expressing this lack, then passing on to some higher realm, whether of the
Forms, God, or Being in some guise. Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, as Barbaras sug-
gests in Desire and Distance, “to conceive of life as desire is to root it in the
possibility of knowledge,”17—but this is a “knowing” that is a felt experience
of the depth of the sense of the world. In the trajectory of perceptual faith
there is always more to be perceived and fathomed, and in this sense there
is a negativity to the life of perception, but it is not a lack in the traditional
sense; rather, it represents what Barbaras calls “the vital level”: “The living
subject is not a being enclosed in the circle of need; it is a dissatisfaction and
therefore exists in the mode of exploration. Far from being reduced to being
only what incites a reaction, the object is, for the living subject, what opens
a depth and calls forth an indefinite approach for the living subject; the sense
of transcendence is rooted in life.”18 The perceiver moves more deeply into the
world, drawn by its face, but there is always an excess of sense to be possibly
revealed and experienced. This flow of perception is motivated by what it has
already become toward even more sense.
There is for Merleau-Ponty, as Galen Johnson phrases it, “erotic and
aesthetic desire” as “both forms of openness to the Other and the world that
are interrogative, a sensitive questioning of both world and self,”19 and as
Johnson further explains, “this incompleteness within the structure of desire,
as distinguished from need, is the desire for the world . . . an overflow or
excess in desire . . . the movement of life itself seeking a world.”20 This desire
is that of perception as a coupling with the world, an embrace that is the
92 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

vitality of becoming through and with other beings. Desire conceived as an

excess or overflow of vitality seeking greater depth of expression reverses the
traditional view of desire, or as Galen Johnson puts it, “Merleau-Ponty’s con-
ception of desire as the source of all expression effects a reversal of Platonism
and a reversal of Kantianism on this point. Erotic desire is not generated by
a lack or a ‘not having.’ ”21 There is no lack of being insofar as we remain on
the level of prereflective perception. Rather, perception is our access to being.
It is not a matter of seeking to possess something of eternal foundation, as in
the metaphysics of desire, but rather to move from a rich initial sense of the
world into a yet deeper one.22 Merleau-Ponty’s 1959–60 lecture course, “The
Concept of Nature,” in its third part, “Nature and Logos: The Human Body,”
discusses how the body is capable of “feeling by a sort of interlocking of the
body proper and the sensible”: “the body which possesses senses is also a body
which has desires and thus esthesiology expands into a theory of the libidinal
body.”23 For Merleau-Ponty, an esthesiology is not only a study of how the
senses reveal the world and bring us into relations with things and other living
beings, but is “the study of the body as a perceiving animal (comme animal
de perceptions).”24 This esthesiological libido of an interlocking or intertwining
through perception is a desire that runs throughout the natural world and its
creatures. Insofar as being embodied is a relationship to the world, a perceiving
and expressing, there is desire on a primordial level.
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert sees this desire at the heart of Merleau-
Ponty’s analysis: “it involves finding again a transcendence before the level
of consciousness in the possibilities of operant embodiment and developing
an ontology as the natural prolongation of an esthesiological and libidinal
flesh.”25 Saint Aubert continues by quoting an unpublished working note of
1960 in which Merleau-Ponty writes, “Eros and sexuality . . . vision, sexuality,
the hand, are more than they contain: they are Gestalts, figures of the whole
person, of total parts. And ‘the more or less total’: nothing prevents sexuality
from being coextensive with the whole of life any more than vision or the
hand. . . . Sexuality as corporeality (i.e., a total system) is all. . . . The libido is
not exactly a univocal orientation to some sex, but a fantastic polymorphism, a
possibility of the diverse ‘sexual positions.’ It is a field, a polarity, the opening
of a dimension, i.e. a ‘ray’ of the world-body. This dimension is primordial.”26
Here the libido is that polarity or pull that is integral to the dimension of
flesh—and to Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the flesh of the world—as a way that
all beings emerge as co-joint, especially human beings, who continually enter
the depths of the world to witness and manifest seeking further co-expression.
It is a field of interconnections and overlappings, such that a “ray of the world,”
which is a trajectory of sense aligning differing beings through an enmeshment
of some aspect of their significance through their sensual appearance, opens
 The Face of Desire 93

up a place of joining. Sexuality can expand, as can other forms of libido, to

occupy a more dominant position in existence, but only by drawing on a
deeper sense of the flesh that opens the world and links up with those beings
that constellate a sense—configuring the “rays of the world.” Saint Aubert sums
up this emphasis on desire in claiming, “The work of Merleau-Ponty keeps
alive a crossing collusion between perception and desire” and “perception is
an integral dimension and an ontological dimension of our life, because it is
already a mode of desire.”27 For Merleau-Ponty, as Saint Aubert highlights,
the being of the world and of humans, animals, and things is not found in
an array of indifferent functions side by side on some spatial grid of arbitrary
points, but is a reaching out, interplaying, and encroaching of boundaries that
has vitality and a feeling of the rightness of going together, a kind of pleasure.
This is the basic libidinal pull, if libidinal is understood more broadly than the
narrowly sexual. This occurs on the most primordial level, the level we have
been exploring throughout this book, in the silent interchange with the world
that we share with animals and all beings of perception.
Perception is an encounter with faces turned toward us, to which we
respond, and without thinking we know from their initial presence something
of what or who they are: “Just as we do not see the eyes of a familiar face,
but simply its look and expression, so we hardly perceive any object. There
is present a latent significance, diffused throughout the landscape or the city,
which we find in something specific and self-evident that we feel no need to
define.”28 This is the physiognomy of a city, landscape, or person. As Merleau-
Ponty says in the next sentence, it is enough to take in the first roads after
one leaves the train station and to hear the first words spoken by strangers
encountered to get an initial sense of the emotional tenor of that town, and
this takes us into a certain trajectory of unfolding action and exploration.
This is the face of the town that it turns toward those who arrive there. These
are the primary kinds of understandings that well up into our bodies as we
express ourselves in relationship to the world that permeate Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of space. “In my perpetual movement towards a world,” Merleau-Ponty
states, at first these are not mere practical motions but movements of expres-
sion, gestures, entering a matrix of expression that “are consecratory gestures:
they draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a space
of expressiveness.”29 The face of things or persons that solicits us is affective,
and its significance is one that, as we quoted from Merleau-Ponty’s late note,
exceeds the grasp of the hand or the immediate givens of perception to be
“more than they contain: they are Gestalts, figures of the whole person, of total
parts.” In the exceeding of what is given in perception, we are motivated to
enter more deeply into the perceived world. Perceptual faith is desire moved
by physiognomic significance.
94 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Perception, the physiognomies of others and the things of the world,

animality, and the libidinal body are brought together in the above-mentioned
course, “Nature and Logos: The Human Body.” In the section titled “The
Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity,” Merleau-Ponty expresses that there is a
libidinal dimension to the perception of things that forms the circuit of revers-
ibility: “This = Einfuhlung. Body-things, penetration, at a distance, of the sen-
sible things by my body. Things as what are missing from my body in order
to close its circuit.”30 The way in which the perceiving body and that which is
perceived are “flesh applied to flesh”—as Merleau-Ponty phrases it in the “Chi-
asm” chapter of The Visible and the Invisible—means that there is “participation
and kinship with the visible” such that neither perception nor the perceived can
fully envelop the other. Instead, as in libidinous contact, there is a “reciprocal
insertion and intertwining of one in the other.” Merleau-Ponty states that there
is no good image to represent this joining, but he suggests that, perhaps, this
libidinal moment of perception is most like two vortices slightly decentered
in regard to each other.31 This moving outside oneself through the other and
back to oneself from within the other is kindled by the physiognomies of the
beings of the world, as beckoning “to go unto the heart of things.”32 When
Merleau-Ponty comes to the paragraph in the “Chiasm” chapter describing
when libido is channeled into sexuality, he says that both with things and with
another person’s body there is a “coupling with the flesh of the world.” In this
coupling with another person, however, a level of reciprocity arises that makes
us aware that in the coupling with the things of the world, “the body contrib-
utes more than it receives.”33 There is a co-joint expression that is the “labor
of desire,” which becomes more acute and reciprocal with the other human
in sexual expression, but also is present with other persons in other forms of
co-expression. Sexual desire unfolds on the basis of our even more primordial
libidinal taking-in of the face of the world. Another way to say this might be
to use Martin Dillon’s image of perception as “the relation of flesh to itself ”
and therefore as a kind of reciprocal touching with the world: “Perception is
the flesh touching-seeing-feeling itself. There is no representation at the level
of perception: there is only flesh in touch with itself.”34
The two kinds of coupling—with things and with other persons—are
themselves intertwined in our coming to perceive the physiognomies of the
world. Merleau-Ponty says there is reversibility or reciprocity amidst flesh that
mingles within other fields of flesh. In defining the libidinal body in the
Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty says, “. . . this is also an opening of my body
to others’ bodies” such that “my body is also made up of their corporeality.”
Among perceivers there is the same sort of crisscrossing and blurring that
happens between the hands touching and touched.35 Once again, this is not
 The Face of Desire 95

a mechanical interaction but one of desire, of libidinal energy, in which the

perceiving body seeks to intertwine in the midst of myriad other perceiving
bodies. Merleau-Ponty says of the body schema, or the way the body has taken
to addressing the perceptible world, that it is also the way of entering into
other bodies’ ways of taking up the world, “which unveils a libidinal dimen-
sion of the corporeal schema.” This means that in some sense my perception
is not limited to my perception, since echoes of other beings are part of my
perception and expression, or, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “Universal-lateral of
the co-perception of the world.” He then expands this intertwining to include
not only others and things, but also our intertwining with animals: “Animals
[are] the body as organ of the for other. Likewise for us: Perception of the
physiognomy grounded on my relation with the world, which is given as a
spatial nature. Taximetry: the others appear to us with a physiognomy.”36 In
the immersion in the world, we encounter the faces of other beings. We co-
perceive and are drawn out into the space of the prereflective circuit and come
back to ourselves from the physiognomic mirroring of this interplay, which
is what Merleau-Ponty means by taximetry. Merleau-Ponty defines the term
taximetric as the sense that “the spatiality of the body is an encrustation in
the space of the world,” rather than being a spatiality that moves out from my
body as the zero point or center point of space. It is a mirror phenomenon of
coming back to myself from the world, “of an inside and an outside and their
exchanges.”37 This is the power of physiognomies that draws us into the world
and mirrors back to us the sense of the world in our shared circuit of percep-
tion. Merleau-Ponty then brings the libidinal into this interplay by saying of
this “endoperception of others, even animals”—that is to say, a perception that
underlies perception—that of it: “ ‘pleasure’ is opened onto ‘reality’—Pleasure
is open like sensing is open onto the things” (N 218). In this entering into
the interplay of physiognomies and the co-perception of the world there is a
pleasure in this openness to the world, as well as pleasure itself being a kind
of openness. The power of this deeper sense of the libidinal is the power to
open and appreciate the world, not to possess.
In the next section, “The Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity; Esthe-
siology; the Union of the Soul and Body Taken Seriously,” Merleau-Ponty
tries to make his interlocutors understand that this level of enmeshment with
other people—also with things and animals—is libidinal and physiognomic,
emerging from a primordial level of life. It is a communication on the level
of silent sensibility that occurs even among animals. The libidinal overlapping
with other beings and creatures emerges from a primordial desire that is the
basis of our human desire. The taking in of the world is a wider dimension
of the flesh from which we emerge:
96 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

As for esthesiology, it emerges from life without absolute break.

As esthesiology emerges from the relation to an Umwelt, human
desire emerges from animal desire. Already in the animal, in the
ceremony of love, desire is not a mechanical functioning, but an
opening to an Umwelt of fellow creatures (possible fixation on others),
communication. The appearances of animals (external appearance,
ornamentation) as organ of communication, the species is not so
much behind appearances as in front of them, as an Ineinander.
Likewise, human communication is as ‘natural’ as the functioning
of human senses. . . . Physiognomic perception of silhouettes,
gestures, faces, signatures. (N 224)

On the primordial level of the circuit of life, faces or physiognomies commu-

nicate. For Merleau-Ponty, this is a level of immediate sensibility that is our
interanimality, as long as we understand that animals are not in a thrall to
survive as they have been seen traditionally, but have a level of apprehending
and expressing sense that, for Merleau-Ponty, verges on the symbolic. Merleau-
Ponty here is giving a description that sensibility is a communication among
things and creatures in the world—very much akin to the silent gestures of the
world explored in the first chapter. We see the facial expression of the world
through aspects, such as silhouettes, gestures, or ways of handwriting. These
are the manifestations of style or the way varied expressions of sense come
together in a resonance of their perceived qualities. Similarly, the face of a
thing or a creature or a person gives us some immediate access to their way of
being, and in this passage, Merleau-Ponty also sees these ways communicated
among animals. The face is always turned to other faces and brings beings into
interplay as the distinctiveness of that being in its particular context.
We have traced the way in which Merleau-Ponty was able to describe
how the world in its gesturing within perception draws us into the “underside”
or “other side” of language within the indirect voices of silence. We have also
seen how this primordial level of experience, before reflective intervention,
opens into depth of sense as vertical, allowing the perceptual to be a matrix
of affective, memorial, imaginative, kinesthetic, sensual, intellectual, and other
senses. This is a level of physiognomic perception in which the perceiver, in
face-to-face encounter with other things, events, creatures, and people, is moved
beyond him- or herself to become co-joint with the world. This is also a level
of desire that is intrinsic to perception continually opening the perceiver to the
world. It has been assumed by many readers of Merleau-Ponty that this desire
is ethically neutral, merely describing the way we function as perceivers in a
world. Ethics has been largely taken as a matter of self-reflective awareness and
deliberately assumed obligation. I want to argue, however, that these ethical
 The Face of Desire 97

imperatives rely on a deeper level of engagement with the world and others that
makes efficacious the more reflectively inspired desires for the good. The flesh
of the world is not a temptation to stray from pursuit of the good—as it often
has been portrayed—but is rather the prereflective basis for ethical goodness.
 III
Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World
and Levinas’s Face of the Other World

I can only address myself to my experience of the world that recommences

for me each morning as soon as I open my eyes, to that flux of perceptual
life between it and myself which beats unceasingly from morning to night,
and which makes my own secret thoughts change the aspect of faces and
landscapes for me, as, conversely, the faces and landscapes bring me help
sometimes and the menace sometimes of a manner of being a man which
they infuse into my life.
—The Visible and the Invisible (35)

The last decades have been marked by much interest in the ethical summons
of the face as presented by Emmanuel Levinas. I believe that much of the
power of Levinas’s appeal as offering an ethics of the face is that his analysis
seems to offer a way to discover an ethical summons that emerges from within
immediate perceptual experience. Without careful thought about the phenom-
enon of the face, it seems as if Levinas is starting with a mundane perceptual
experience that all perceivers share as the basis for their ethical assertions. I
believe that this approach appeals to many, especially in the postmodern era,
as apparently offering an alternative to a metaphysical or theological derivation
of an ethical call to concern for others. In an age of spreading secularism, on
the one hand, and fundamentalism, on the other, a derivation of an ethical
imperative that appears to stem from common daily experience and extends
to spiritual heights without appealing to religious dogma appears to offer a
safeguard against a rampant disregard of ethics within consumerist and capital-
ist culture, and also among groups with radically different religious creeds who
feel no ethical responsibility toward other groups. This is a disturbing ethical
climate. It seems the face might offer a touchstone.

99
100 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

There is no question that a person’s face is expressive in a distinctive

manner. There is also no question that the gaze emanating from the face has
a particular ethical power to call into question evils being perpetuated—as
marked by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, citing Faulkner’s distinctive por-
trayal of the ethical power of the face. Sartre invokes Faulkner’s Light in August
at the moment when Joe Christmas, the protagonist who has been beaten and
castrated by a group of racists and is about to die, turns his face up toward
his torturers: “For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and
unfathomable and unbearable eyes.”1 Sartre identifies this turn of the face
and its regard toward the others as an example of “the look,” an “explosion”
that undermines the sadists’ project. Faulkner writes that for the rest of their
lives, these men will be disquieted by the vision of that steadfast face that
triumphed with its expression of self-possession. Yet the question lingers as to
what is seen in the expression of that face—and of all faces—that touches one
so deeply; the analysis of the face’s power is quite different for Merleau-Ponty
and Levinas, as well as for Sartre. Questions arise as to whether the face’s
distinctive expression is perceived or apprehended in some way at odds with
usual perception and, if so, how to explain this. There is also the question as
to what sort of ethical import the face carries.
Given the way both perception and the face are characterized differently
by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, the role of embodiment and the kind of ethics
that follow are quite different. By contrasting their approaches to the meaning
of the face, the implications for an ethics based on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
are revealed in distinction to more traditional approaches to ethics. As an ethics
that would emerge from the spontaneity of embodying being, the locus of this
ethics would be different from any traditional ethics that finds its ground in
a good that transcends the fleshly or in a detached reason. In The Ontology of
Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity, Martin Dillon says the following of
any ethics drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy:

One immediate consequence of forsaking the immutable Absolute

of earthly becoming is the recognition that there is no absolute
ground for morality. Earthly morality can be nothing other than
earthly mores. There can be no categorical imperative grounded
in pure Reason because there is no pure Reason on earth; there
is only embodied reason intertwined with pathological interest,
that is, intertwined with the pathos of love and hate, compassion
and enmity. No pure reason, only phronesis: only hypothetical
imperatives more or less accurately associated with a plurality of
antecedents—antecedent desires more or less lucidly identified in
the ambiguity of plural relationships.2
 Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the Other World 101

What Dillon is pointing out is that, for Merleau-Ponty, any ethical import of
our relations with others will be of a felt sense that is inseparable from other
affective vectors of our overlapping with others in a concrete perceived situa-
tion. For Merleau-Ponty, whatever the ethical force of the face and its expres-
siveness as it is perceived by others will be interwoven with all the other felt
relations of a specific situation. Dillon agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s approach,
in contradistinction to traditional ethics, writing: “Morality, such as it is found
on earth, is founded upon the pathos of compassion, not upon pure reason
that seeks to exclude all pathological interest. Kant was simply mistaken.”3 The
ethical pull is found in com-passion, or taking on with another certain feelings.
That is to say, an ethics of the flesh will emerge from an overlapping of situ-
ations and ability to join in the concerns of others.
Dillon’s use of the term phronesis draws the parallel between Merleau-
Ponty’s ethical sense and Aristotle’s formulation of a situation apprehended by
phronesis, a holistic taking in of the ethical call. Kym Maclaren also finds that
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception and embodying being overlaps with
Aristotle’s approach, at least partially: “As in virtue ethics, then, in Merleau-
Ponty’s account of embodiment, knowledge of the right thing to do is an issue
of embodying, rather than applying, a rational principle.”4 The fact that what
should be done ethically in a situation is a matter of perception suggests this
close tie to Aristotle for Maclaren: “Knowing how to do the right thing in some
particular situation is thus a matter of a perceptual insight that finds directives
within that situation itself.”5 Certainly, for both Aristotle and Merleau-Ponty,
the locus of ethics arises at the moment of immediate apprehension rather
than through a decree of reason, a set of propositions that articulate stan-
dards, or a transcendent call. Both are also akin in offering a positive ethics
as contrasted with a negative ethics. A negative ethics is an ethical approach
focused on prohibiting certain behaviors that are harmful to the well-being
of others. “Do no harm” and “do not steal another’s property” are exemplary
principles that capture this emphasis on prohibition against violating others’
well-being. Often, this approach presupposes that human beings, if not kept
under control, will run amok and cause harm to others—hence a rational or
spiritually ascendant power is called upon to aid in this control of destructive
forces. The prohibitions are usually aimed at putting out of play our fleshly
state. If we take Merleau-Ponty’s paragraph at the end of Phenomenology of
Perception as a paradigm for ethical action, then for him, as well as for Aris-
totle, the ethical emphasis is on spontaneous actions to be done for the good
of the other as following the flow of an immediate expression spurred by
perception. Despite similarities with Aristotle, however, I would like to suggest
that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the dynamics of the flesh and intersubjectiv-
ity distilled in his sense of the face-to-face gives us a different, more radical
102 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

basis for ethics than Aristotle’s phronesis. Phronesis assumes an apprehension

of the identification and felt solidarity with others at odds with Aristotle’s
analysis of the separable faculties of the soul. Merleau-Ponty’s description of
perception, by contrast, details space, time, ways of apprehending, and other
persons as inseparably intertwined with the body as encompassed within fields
of perception. For Aristotle, virtue is centered on the excellence of the self in
manifesting its capacities, whereas, for Merleau-Ponty, we will see the ethical
encounter is about transformation of the self through the overlap with the
world of the other.
Many of the core ideas of Levinas’s treatment of the face and its role
in ethics are in accord with the tradition of ethical prohibitions, despite dif-
ferences in method, formulation, and certain conclusions. Both are aimed at
devaluing the perceptual and embodied level of existence, which must be put
out of play, transcended, for one to be able to hear the ethical summons.
Given that Levinas’s ethics give rise to a call toward hospitality and sacrifice
for the sake of the Other, these assertions might sound odd; however, the
ethical summons announced by the face follows from the cessation of our
affective and intersubjective overlap with specific others. This turn away from
embodied, perceptual, spontaneous apprehension and reversibility with specific
others in their contingency, their historical and cultural situation, gives the
hospitality of Levinas a much different sense and basis than the trajectory of
the face in Merleau-Ponty. Levinas stands firmly within a tradition of being
called to ethical duty by the interruption of mundane life. Merleau-Ponty,
I believe, sketches out an underlying ethics of felt solidarity, which emerges
from a different understanding of the face and the power of the spontaneous,
prereflective life to move beyond prior senses of the self toward a tension with
the other that transforms both.
Since Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the flesh lead to positive ethics, he is
often seen as not offering an ethics. Positive ethics focus on the good that
one can do for others, and in the Western tradition this is usually regarded as
supererogatory: going beyond what is required by moral duty. Even though
such supererogatory action is considered admirable, it is also seen as lacking
the same ethical force as prohibitions against evil acts. Ethical systems that
prioritize doing good for others often see an element within human being that
would spontaneously seek expression in helping others were it not suppressed
by cultural, historical, or spiritual alienations. Within much Buddhist thought
there is the assertion that the alienation of persons as egocentric, following the
tendencies of a cultural life of acquisitiveness, represses the underlying compas-
sion that all creatures feel for one another. These schools of Buddhism, for
example, have prohibitive precepts to reign in egoistic excesses for beginners,
but aim for their practitioners to achieve a stage of development where good
 Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the Other World 103

actions, aimed at helping all living beings, come about through “spontaneous
right action”; that is to say, right action arises without thought or will. How-
ever, in the Kantian tradition, such spontaneous right action would lack moral
worth since it was not performed for the sake of duty dictated by rational
imperatives. Merleau-Ponty leads us toward an ethics that is positive, akin to
the idea of spontaneous right action, yet also contingent and fragile. The good
is an achievement arrived at in a context that promotes the experience of the
flesh. However, the cultural context may work to dissipate our felt experience
of overlap with others or even actively suppress such feelings in the service of
exploitative projects. The openness to the world and others is a felt solidarity
of the flesh that may seem foreclosed in a given cultural context. It would
have to be a part of this ethics, therefore, to take into account how culture,
history, and intersubjectivity can make possible a sense of responsibility for
creating and maintaining the conditions in which shared ethical expression
becomes possible and efficacious.
A further similarity to Aristotle’s approach is that Merleau-Ponty’s ethics
aims at transforming a person’s way of being in the world in order to develop
sensitivity in the prereflective realm to the myriad others of the world. This, in
turn, would catalyze an overall transformation of the person’s relationship to
the world that would lead him or her to perform spontaneous acts of care and
concern. As suggested above, this might entail ongoing work on social context
to allow such transformation to occur. This is the work of a lifetime, not an
instant. It is also in contrast to judging specific acts for their agreement with
ethical imperatives. Most Western ethical systems, either the deontological or
utilitarian, have focused on the idea behind a certain action or on the impact
of the action’s outcome on other persons. Either the deontological ideas or the
action’s outcomes provide a standard against which to measure the goodness
of actions. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the transformation of the person,
which leads to another kind of openness to the world and others, shifts ethics
from judgments about the ethical merit of specific acts to an ongoing lifelong
effort to attain a certain sensitivity to the world on a prereflective level. This
transformation is one that happens intersubjectively for Merleau-Ponty, with
and through others, since, as Barbaras phrases it, “The world is between the
others and me, present to all but possessed by none.”6 It is from my engage-
ment in the world and with others that I can return to myself as transformed
in a transformed world. This idea of ethics, however, is closely tied in with
the notion of the flesh as a chiasm with the world, others, and itself, which
we will explore. Merleau-Ponty’s logic of inclusive ambiguity7—according to
which, self and things, self and others, and self and the natural world are
intertwined as both distinct and inseparable—reconfigures many aspects of
traditional ethics.
104 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

It is essential to Merleau-Ponty’s perspective that the idea of the face

cannot be separated from the physiognomies of animals, or even of things,
cities, and events. The face is the site of the gestures of the entire silent world
of myriad beings. For Levinas, however, there could be no such overlap, since
only humans have a face that can call others outside this lived realm toward
an ethical one. This is particularly striking in the case of the animal face; as
Derrida expresses in The Animal that Therefore I Am when discussing this issue,
for Levinas, “the animal has no face.”8 Derrida remarks that for Levinas the
subject of ethics must always be only a “fraternal and human face.” For Der-
rida, as for Merleau-Ponty, animals have faces; they have a gaze that demands
ethical response on our part. For Levinas, as Derrida phrases it, “It is a mat-
ter of putting the animal outside of the ethical circuit.”9 We will see how, for
Levinas, the world—its things, creatures, and events—can have no face since
these beings are only perceived within a framework of appropriation accord-
ing to human needs; what has ethical value in this fleshly perceivable realm
is that which instantiates an intrinsic value of a higher order—namely, only
the human being. Derrida sums up his understanding of Levinas with regard
to the faces of animals in stating, “The animal has neither face nor even skin
in the sense that Levinas has taught us to give to those words. There is, to
my knowledge, no attention ever seriously given to the animal gaze, no more
than to the difference among animals, as though I could not be looked at by
a cat, dog, or horse, than by a snake or a blind protozoon.”10 For Levinas,
the animal cannot have a face because faces occur only in relation to a higher
spiritual order that is not present in animals or beings other than humans.
For Merleau-Ponty, the perceived physiognomy of people, creatures, and
other beings are their faces, since the perceived qualities of the world announce
themselves through an encounter that beckons to us from its physiognomy and
is at least indirectly expressive. The silent gestures of the world transcend any
sense we may try to impose on them. The perception of the face is the power
in the prereflective interchange that draws us together with what we perceive.
The face exerts the pull, of the enmeshment with others within perception in
an intensified and focused manner, within which the gaps of difference remain.
In addition, there is a greater immediacy of the reverberations of felt revers-
ibility that betokens a felt mutuality with the perceived other’s face. As Kym
Maclaren articulates this enmeshment in Merleau-Ponty: “Typically, we do not
encounter the other’s expression as a perceptual object; rather, we are swept up
in its meaning and oriented by it. We feel moved unreflectively, to respond
in a complementary way to others’ expressions, to take up the position they
lay out for us.”11 The face is not objectified, it is gestural and expressive. The
face is a distinctive locus of perception that pulls us, with its expressed sense,
into a co-expressive way of experiencing the world.
 Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the Other World 105

Physiognomic perception is a primary pull into the depths of the flesh.

The face is an opening to the layering of the sensual, imaginal, affective,
memorial, visceral, rational, kinesthetic, and other senses within the verticality
of flesh. Given that the face focuses the lines of sense between perceiver and
perceived within a particular context, the face situates. The face of a friend
brings us back to a shared way of distinctively being together in a particular
history and context. The face of a particular mountain we have hiked presents
us immediately with all the peculiarities of its paths, rocks, rises or drops in
elevation, changes in traction, in connection with our shared history. For Mer-
leau-Ponty, the face is what allows us to enter into specific worlds or contexts
at a glance.12 It is that unique physiognomy that, for example, a painter seeks
to express of this particular mountain or forest or field of flowers. For Levinas,
however, the face is that power which pulls us out of this deeply contingent
and particular context; the Levinasian face is the interruption and halt in per-
ception of these spontaneous flows of sense that sweep us along prereflectively
to announce another sort of calling. Hugh Silverman describes this difference
between the two thinkers’ idea of the face: “For Levinas, the face, le visage,
has a visibility. Its visibility interrupts the kind of relation that philosophers
such as Merleau-Ponty had always thought characterized intersubjectivity.”13 In
a fundamental sense, the different approaches to the face-to-face encounter in
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas are almost diametrically opposed.
Levinas begins to articulate the power of the face in Totality and Infin-
ity by exploring the sensibility of the face amidst the sensibility of the world.
Levinas follows a long philosophical tradition in casting the sensible as a kind of
self-enclosure focused on achieving the goal of satisfaction with surface desires.
Perception centers on grasping for objects that refer only to other objects.
For Levinas, perception of the sensible is a realm of appropriation, labor, and
home. The perceptual realm is that which allows the taking-up of finite things
in the activity of achieving self-identification as an ego.14 Levinas does offer
other possibilities for vision and touch as an apprehension of “qualities without
support”—in a case like the apprehension engendered by the face of the other.
This phrase indicates qualities anterior to the crystallization of consciousness
into the “I” and the “not-I,” into subject and object,15 and in this respect one
might think it is a parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s description of the prereflective
world of sensibility in the silent taking-in of the world’s gesture. However,
Levinas separates vision and touch as having a “transcendental function” in the
experience of the face, unlike other aspects of perception or even the visual
and tactile aspects of the perception of objects. For Merleau-Ponty, vision and
touch have a primordial pull within the prereflective silent realm that is at
the heart of the sensual presentation of the world in perception and is always
in the depth of reversibility and enmeshment. This is in stark contrast with
106 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the power of the face for Levinas as he explains it in Otherwise than Being:
the face “presses the neighbor up against me. Immediacy is the collapse of
the representation into a face, into a ‘concrete abstraction,’ torn up from the
world, from horizons and conditions, incrusted in the signification without a
context of the-one-for-the-other, coming from the emptiness of space, from
space signifying emptiness, from the desert and desolate space as uninhabitable
as geometrical homogeneity . . . the trace of a passage which never became
present.”16 For Levinas, the face is a profound disruption and disintegration of
the world of perception that tears us away from our being anchored in that
realm. The disruption feels as though it is emptiness, since the ground shifts
and pulls us away from ourselves as involved in the world of things, and from
our usual interchange with others as seen in regard to our interests.
As Levinas comes to formulate the power of the face more in terms of
the trace in Otherwise than Being, the trace is the trace of a movement toward
a realm where our usual perceptions will be of no avail. The trace is also the
denial of reversibility central to Merleau-Ponty’s description of perception in
the face-to-face, or as Thomas Busch puts it, for Levinas, there is a “peculiar
kind of signifyingness” indicated by the trace of the Other: “The trace according
to Levinas ‘does not belong to phenomenology.’ . . . The Other, who leaves a
trace, is never present ‘in’ a trace but always withdrawn into an unrecoverable
past. In an expression which allows us specific comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s
work, Levinas would claim there is no reversibility between the Other and the
trace.”17 In using the idea of the trace, Levinas is explicitly denying the acces-
sibility of the other as being a radical Alterity. Levinas states that a reversibility
that would have the back and forth among persons would put them within a
“coupling” in which there would be a unity within a larger system of relations
that would undermine the kind of alterity he feels is essential for this to be an
ethical relation.18 As Levinas conceives of the face, not only is there no revers-
ibility or enmeshment of the to-and-fro of the two persons’ particularities in
the face-to-face encounter, but the enmeshment of their worlds and of others
in their worlds is also ripped away at this moment of encounter.
In the encounter with the face of the other, as first expressed by Levinas,
touch and vision yield an uplift emanating from a being that seems as though
it comes from a nothingness, but is actually going beyond the existent into
an openness and illumination.19 It is only a nothingness in comparison to the
context of everyday perception of the things, creatures, and events around us.
In Levinas’s analysis, there is a distinction between the openness and illumina-
tion of a distinct kind of encounter that goes beyond the kind of openness and
illumination in the circumscribed horizon of perception. It is only in cutting
across and disrupting sensibility that a dimension of transcendence opens. In
Otherwise than Being, Levinas states, “The face of the neighbor signifies for
 Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the Other World 107

me an unexceptionable responsibility, preceding every free consent, every pact,

every contract. It escapes representation; it is the very collapse of phenomenal-
ity.”20 The face is what tears us out of the world in which we normally dwell
and even out of the world’s temporality, and “opens the distance of a diachrony
without a common present, where the difference is the past that cannot be
caught up with, an unimaginable future.” The call of the face “disrupts” time
for Levinas; it “is a disturbance of rememberable time,” and might even be
called “the break-up of time,” for the person in face of the Other has been
pulled out of the nexus of relations that make up their day-to-day world. As
Levinas explains, there is a coming-together with an “effaced” nonhistorical
time, a time that can never be assimilated by memory or synchronized with
the present, which renders the present “a trace of an immemorial past.”21
In the face-to-face there is a rupture not only with everyday time but with
the temporality of the earthly realm. There is the opening of a relation with
a presence that is not of this time. This is the opposite of Merleau-Ponty’s
pointing to the power of the face to pull us into the depths of the sensible
where disparate times—as well as the single wave of historical time—come
into a relatedness that gives us the present as a crisscrossing of myriad times.
For Merleau-Ponty, the face opens a depth of time, or of disparate times
“enjambed” in the present. Rather than being released from time, we are more
deeply enmeshed in the dense folding back of time upon itself as it is lodged
within the sensible world. In Merleau-Ponty’s sense of verticality, each percept
in its sensible presence is a hold on an inexhaustible depth, whereas for Levinas
one is dislocated by the other’s face to another kind of intrinsically valuable
presence that is incommensurate with the world in its usual sensible presence
and temporal unfolding.
 IV
Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness

And finally it is necessary that, instead of the other and me being two
parallel For Itselfs each on his own stricken with the same mortal evil—
the other’s presence, which crushes us each in turn in the midst of the
In Itself—we be for some others a system of For Itselfs, sensitive to one
another, such that one knows the other not only in what he suffers from
him, but more generally as a witness, who can be challenged because he
is also himself accused, because he is not a pure gaze upon pure being any
more than I am, because his views and my own are in advance inserted
into a system of partial perspectives, referred to the same world in which
we coexist and where our views intersect.
—The Visible and the Invisible (81–82)

For Levinas, it is the face that reveals transcendence: the face as epiphany
accomplishes the break with the world, which otherwise would envelop us.
This face is not seen by the vision of perception, however, for the vision of
perception belongs to the “egoist” and “the lateral signification of things within
the same.”1 To perceive the face visually, for Levinas, would be to reduce the
other to an object, to the realm of appropriation in service of the drive for
satisfaction, or in other words to enter into the Sartrean project of assimilating
the otherness of persons and the world as a mere extension or possession of
the self as ego. Here we have the dichotomy that Merleau-Ponty’s articulation
of the flesh reconfigures: the opposition between self and other, between mine-
ness and alterity. The challenge that the philosophy of the flesh poses to other
philosophies is whether there needs to be such a stark opposition between self
and alterity in order to have the distance from the other through which the
other’s needs can be seen in their own terms and not as an extension of the
perceiver’s ego-centered needs. The question whether alterity has to be absolute
in order to rupture the egoism of the perceiver and appreciate the well-being
of the other in its own context is a key ethical question. Merleau-Ponty’s

109
110 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

ontology proposes a duality, or écart, within the flesh that renders the self as
having within itself an otherness that folds into the chiasmatic relation with
others. For Levinas, there is a further shift away from perception to where
the truest revelation of the face occurs in a Saying, a speech or discourse of a
unique kind.2 This also contests the sense of the face that Merleau-Ponty finds
vital to his thought as it is the face that gathers the prereflective dimension
of perception and brings to the fore the silent underside of language that will
come to expression. For Levinas, the face announces itself as a presence that
is distant, even in its proximity, that cannot be contained or entered into.
In the face-to-face encounter, Levinas asserts that “the idea of infinity, of the
infinitely more contained in the less, is concretely produced in the form of
the relation with the face.”3 This infinity, Levinas explains, founds the finite,
as exceeding its capacity, but nevertheless emerges in this commerce with the
Other. Encounter with the face, for Levinas, stops one short, bringing one to
a new basis in being.
For Levinas, however, it is not something infinite beyond that comes to
reside in the face that is facing me, for that would be a sort of idolatry. This
would be to misunderstand what Levinas is claiming. Levinas emphatically
states in Otherwise than Being: “A face does not function in proximity as a
sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me.”4 What the
face-to-face encounter introduces is each person’s dislocation in terms of the
other’s going beyond the sensible appearance to the Other. The face is “a trace
of itself, a trace in the trace of an abandon, where the equivocation is never
dissipated. It obsesses me as subject without staying in correlation with me,
without equaling me in consciousness, ordering me before appearing, in the
glorious sense of obligation. These modalities of signification are irreducible to
the presents and presences. They are wholly differing from the present as being
modalities which articulate the very inordinateness of infinity.”5 That which
comes to us through the face of the Other is a becoming abandoned and also
the other’s corresponding abandonment to a proximity of another order of
the infinite. This order cannot be intuited or grasped or experienced except
as a call to recognize the insufficiency of our worldly relations and ways of
valuing each other and the world. There is constant equivocation because of
the tension between our everyday perceptions and these relations that have a
ground in another realm of intrinsic value to which it can never be adequate
and yet to which it gives law and value.
For Levinas, the face refers beyond itself and has no concrete aspects to
describe in terms of its moral significance other than this pointed absence,
which gives me the responsibility of responding to its call of another order,
and this aspect of the face “requires a description that can only be formed in
ethical language.”6 The face can be understood only as a moral summons. The
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 111

speech or language that issues this summons of the face is not discourse or
language in the usual sense, but something that lies behind or before manifest
language. As Brian Schroeder expresses it: “The speech of the Other is a revela-
tion and resists the schema of the subject–object correlation.”7 It is a revelation
in the sense that what comes forth cannot become manifest in the spatial and
temporal world of perception. What is announced cannot be placed within
the world as lived; as Schroeder continues: “The Other remains refractory to
any conceptual categories that the self may form to define or situate the Other
within precisely because the other person defies conception of herself as an
object for consciousness. The self ’s conception of the Other is founded on the
inability to comes to terms with alterity. . . .”8 The face in its Saying with me
invites me into a relationship incommensurate with my powers, whether of
knowledge or affect. In the sensible attempt to grasp the face of the other,
there is the epiphany of the impossibility of this grasp, but not as struggle or
hostility, but as gift to the self of its urgency to desire the goodness that is the
source of a peace and fraternity among humans that embraces plurality. The
resistance offered by the otherness of the face as the revelation of the infinite
in the finite does not occur in violence, but in the peace, which founds the
sense of individual responsibility that has brought us into the ethical—for
faces exist only in the domain of the ethical that preexists the ontological.9
As is the case for traditional ethics and ontology, for Levinas there must be
a break with perception and embodiment for the moral summons to emerge,
since the good occurs only in turning away from the ego-centeredness of the
perceptible and sensual.
This Saying, or discourse, evoked by Levinas is not the speech of the
lived body, born into a history and culture, elaborating a world. The face is a
discourse at the origin of all meaning and comes before language of the world.
Schroeder characterizes this discourse of the face, according to Levinas: “The
originary signification, the meaning of all meaning, is the appeal of the face
of the Other not to do violence to it. The first word is an imperative—the
prohibition against murder.”10 Before all language of the world, there is an
origin in the command from another realm. For Levinas, it is a mistake to
start with the “I can” of corporeality. This would assimilate ethical language
to the activity of the world and make it an egological product. For Levinas,
the ethical appeal can be understood only as the tearing away of the habita-
tion of the lived body by the ethical exigency of the face. The “Other” who
speaks to me presents himself or herself as a face that imposes itself “above and
beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form.”11 This speech presents
the “Other” as irreducible to manifestation, but as nude, destitute, and in
hunger, as both Height and Humility, that engenders my own freedom and
desire as aroused goodness. This responsibility emerges “where the gravity of
112 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

ineluctable being freezes all laughter,” as a “cold splendor,” in “the primordial

discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoid-
ing,” and founding, as ethical, “the true universality of reason.”12 For Levinas,
this imperative command of the face is at odds with any sense of the face
in its vicissitudes, sincerity, concrete engagement in the world, or situated-
ness, since this perceptible sense of the face “is not the primary event of the
logic of being” nor primary expressiveness that is the ground of language. As
Levinas states: “Expression does not consist in giving us the Other’s interior-
ity,”13 and the “Other” who does express himself or herself does this precisely
in not giving themselves to the interlocutor. The expression of the Other is
not found in gestures that echo in my own body or in a caress that takes me
into an affective engagement, as it is for Merleau-Ponty; rather, for Levinas, in
recognition of the face corporeality goes beyond its manifestations to become
the expression of a moral law of obligation for the Other.
For Levinas, this hearkening transmutes the face into a means of com-
mand and communication within a realm beyond any mundane or situated
communication: “In the approach of the face the flesh becomes word, the
caress a saying. The thematization of a face undoes the face and undoes the
approach of the face. The mode in which a face indicates its own absence
in my responsibility cannot be adequately expressed in ordinary language.”14
Levinas sees the meaning of the face to be a power that volatizes the fleshly
dimension of human being and the tie of language to its embeddedness in the
surround. The caress that is invoked by Levinas would seem to be the gesture
of the Infinite, instead of being the reciprocally incarnating caress between
two persons, as the interpersonal caress is for Merleau-Ponty. This caress, for
Levinas, is the reach of the Infinite that lifts the person who looks upon the
face of the Other out of the sensible and affective interplay with fleshly others.
It is a uniquely disembodied and spiritual caress. The Levinasian hearkening to
the expressiveness of the face would be one that is somehow prior to embodied
engagement with the other, or, as David Michael Kleinberg-Levin articulates it
in Before the Voice: “Before I have even uttered a single word, I am, for Levinas,
already under the obligation to the other, already indebted to my interlocutor,
already witnessing in him the glorious presence of God—a revelation.”15 This
revelation of the face of the Other as an openness toward the Infinite or God
underlies any responsive gesture, silent compassion, or words one could utter.
This imperative is located beyond any ordinary expression through language,
which would only compromise what it announces. It is from this other sphere
that we receive our responsibility to the other as command. Schroeder puts this
succinctly: “As a historical entity, the Other is present to consciousness via the
face, but as the trace of the transhistorical Infinite.”16 For Levinas, both the
face and the source of ethical responsibility take us beyond the fleshly world
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 113

of perception, whereas for Merleau-Ponty the myriad faces of the world are
interlocutors within the primordial dimension of silent voices at the core of
sensibility and the language of this world. Both early in his career at the 1946
presentation to the Société francaise de philosophie (which we discuss later in the
chapter) and in the 1957–58 course “The Concept of Nature,” Merleau-Ponty
denies that there could be a realm of God as Being or the Infinite distinct from
the sensible realm. In the lecture course he characterizes this idea of deity as
a renunciation of the body and the ontology of the flesh. For Merleau-Ponty,
“at such a level, God is obscure, beyond all Creation.”17 Appealing to another
realm would negate the way we are drawn to others through the world and
the sensible, such that the call toward love and sacrifice are the invisible of
the visible, found within this world.
For Merleau-Ponty, there is a transcendence of the self, but it is not to a
separate realm. By contrast, for Levinas, the face caresses by being a transmu-
tation of the fleshly into a distinctive kind of saying that turns us away from
the earthly in signaling the “glory of the infinite.”18 The caress experienced
in the face of the Other is a signal of a higher ethical calling. It is a saying
as a signal of a dissolving and opening. This, too, like Merleau-Ponty’s silent
perceptual underside of language is another kind of speech than the usual
sense of expression through language, but it is not Merleau-Ponty’s sensible
gesturing of the world within an embodied engagement in a vertical depth of
sense. Rather, for Levinas, it is the opening of another field: “The ethical is
the field outlined by the paradox of an Infinite in relationship with the finite
without being belied in this relationship. Ethics is the breakup of the originary
unity of transcendental apperception, that is, it is the beyond of experience.”
In other words, for Levinas, the ethical field is the destruction of the silent
interweaving of the person with the world on the multiple embodied levels
that Merleau-Ponty finds in the silent interchange with the world and in the
expression of the physiognomies of all beings. Levinas finds the expression of
the ethical imperative in the dislocating transcendent call of the face that takes
us beyond the world of experience. This field of intrinsic value in relationship
to an Infinite cannot appear within the usual field of perception. It is felt only
in a call, a radical dislocation in relation to the perceptual.
The presentation of the face of the Other occurs only when language, in
the sense of this peculiar saying articulated by Levinas, preserves the “discon-
tinuity of relationship,” when it resists the overlapping of boundaries, when
it breaks shared rhythms that otherwise might enrapture and transport inter-
locutors.19 This discourse of “rupture and commencement” serves to bring
up short the person to whom the face is revealed. The person, for Levinas,
must be wrested from his or her day-to-day existence and brought to face
his or her contingency. This is not the contingency, however, about which
114 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

phenomenology and Continental philosophy have written so extensively, which

is the contingency of historical context, political events, economic oppres-
sions, social movements, or accidents that befall one. Levinas recognizes this
difference with Merleau-Ponty a number of times in Otherwise than Being. In
describing the call of the face of the Other, Levinas states, “I am extracted
from the concept of the ego, and am not measured by being and death, that
is, escape the totality and structures. I am reduced to myself in responsibility,
outside the fundamental historicity Merleau-Ponty speaks of.”20 As we have
seen, Merleau-Ponty also would claim that physiognomies occur at a level of
perception, which although enmeshed in historicity is not at the level of the
ego, but “beneath” it, or at the prereflective level. Yet this prereflective level is
a greater depth of enmeshment within the world and its historicity. It is also
a level of felt mortality and the fragile pulse of existence. For Levinas, ethics
takes us beyond this world to shine a light upon it that it lacks. For Merleau-
Ponty, the face releases us into the depths of the world in which there is a vital
spark that is a creativity of artistic expression, new meaning, and also new ties
of community, intersubjectivity, and ethics.
Levinas identifies the contingency that is confronted in the call of the face
as the contingency from within, comprised of the concerns and projects of ego-
ism. For Levinas, this fabric of the self woven into the face of the world traps
us in self-centeredness. This self-centeredness is transcended in the disruption of
the world by the face “in this incessant overflowing of self ” in the call of infin-
ity.21 The overflowing toward the infinite enacts the dual realization that all are
abandoned as open to the suffering of humanity, but also as open to the “powers
of welcome, of gift, of full hands, of hospitality.”22 Levinas explicitly states that
these powers are not “the prolongation of thought in corporeity,” not part of the
world of “the lived body or incarnate thought,” whose sense “dominates one part
of contemporary philosophy.” This denial is an obvious reference to Merleau-
Ponty. These powers granted in the discourse of the face, which are found in
the sense of obligation, “separate radically language and activity, expression and
labor.”23 They are not just an extension of our usual being-in-the-world, but the
call to take up another source of acting. Levinas recognizes the importance of
the embodied context of worldly relations as permeating language, but insists
“the face to face founds language” as the upsurge of reason that disrupts the
usual basis for expression and communication. Otherwise, language would be
the mere awakening of horizons among persons without the absolute distance
of alterity.24 There must be a shattering of lived horizons for Levinas in order
for us to become awakened to the obligations of sacrifice and hospitality that
call to us from a sphere beyond these everyday connections.
Neither is the face-to-face relationship in Levinas a communication
among perceivers, or even speakers, but the opening of a gap that can never
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 115

be filled. It calls one to face one’s responsibility for being inadequate, and also
to face the inadequacy of all our worldly relations and institutions. Levinas says
of this gap: “Between the one I am and the other for whom I am responsible
there gapes open a difference, without a basis for community. The unity of
the human race is in fact posterior to fraternity. The proximity of the face is
a difference, a non-coinciding, an arrhythmia in time, a diachrony refractory
to thematization, refractory to the reminiscences that synchronizes the phases
of a past.”25 This differs from Merleau-Ponty, in which the face of the other
and the physiognomies of all beings draw the perceiver into a felt overlap
and enmeshment with the rest of the world, spanned within time but never
eradicating the gap, or écart, among us that both remains and is bridged in
the logic the chiasm. For Levinas, the times do not enjamb and layer, but
shatter and give way to timelessness. The unity and the community among
persons is not achieved and sensed, or felt and spoken into being, as it is for
Merleau-Ponty; for Levinas, it comes about only as an ultimate reason that
precedes all reasoning: “A pre-original reason that does not proceed from any
initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason. It is a reason before the beginning,
before any present, for my responsibility for the other commands me before
any decision”26 The originary reason that outstrips our capacity to perceive, to
feel—that shatters our immersion in the world—provides a ground for com-
munity, fraternity, and ethics for Levinas that for Merleau-Ponty does not exist.
In the introduction to Signs, Merleau-Ponty describes at length the
moment of the face-to-face encounter and gives an account at odds with
most of the philosophers of the tradition and of Sartre, who present this
moment as two consciousnesses that cannot know what is “behind” the face
or the regard of the other person. Even if this were true, which it is not for
Merleau-Ponty, then speech in the address to the other would transform the
situation. It would not merely suppress this doubt and lack of connection
with the other, created by a clash of consciousnesses, states Merleau-Ponty, but
would move them forward into a new relation. Just as gestural communication
opens both embodying beings to the world, so “speech takes flight from where
it rolls in the wave of speechless communication. It tears out or tears apart
meanings in the undivided whole of the nameable, as our gestures do in that
of the perceptible.”27 From the face-to-face encounter in silence and gesture,
there is a trajectory of expression that opens up the world as an interworld
in which persons find themselves in overlap with others. For Levinas, speech
is so utterly inadequate to the power of the face that it eradicates it: “The
unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbor in narration.”28 The attempt to
put into language destroys that which outstrips language and returns the inter-
locutors to a plane of sensibility that eliminates the status of the other person
as the “Other,” the naked one beyond description, needing my hospitality and
116 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

sacrifice. Merleau-Ponty would certainly agree that there is no coincidence

with the other person, warning that “the very idea of a complete statement is
inconsistent” and so the understanding of self, like the understanding between
persons, is always partial and on the way. Language will never fully capture the
depths of experience, but these so-called failures are the very means of ongoing
expression and community in what is indirectly, but palpably, communicated,
and still allow that “between men and within each man there is an incred-
ible growth of spoken words.”29 It becomes true that through language, it is
not an isolated self who speaks to others, but rather “all those we have loved,
detested, known, or simply glimpsed speak through our voice.”30 Rather than
there being “a wall between us and others,” Merleau-Ponty states, it is a more
apt metaphor to say there is “a wall we build together, each putting his stone
in the niche left by the other”—each person’s expression fits into the spaces
left by others’ expressions. Speech is a collective, contingent effort like leaving
behind us “a single wake of ‘public durations.’ ”31
Also, as we will see, for Merleau-Ponty, as expressed in “Eye and Mind,”
indirect and poetic language is a powerful force and through its expression as
through the expression of other arts, “It is, therefore, mute Being which itself
comes to show forth its own meaning.”32 The invisible is the “other side” of
the visible and expressing it is an endless and incomplete achievement, but
one that can transform lives, individually and collectively. For Levinas, it is
explicitly stated that “this way of the neighbor is a face,”33 but in looking on
the other as “a face weighted down with a skin,” what occurs “is the divergency
between the visible and the invisible.”34 Levinas discounts those who would
be taken up into the physiognomy of the other and into the affective com-
munication with the other in perception and embrace as becoming taken up
into a false spirituality: “. . . every spirituality is also not a comprehension and
truth of Being and openness of a world” (OB 82). Levinas continues that this
spirituality that would open to the truth of Being is one that “[a]s a subject
approaches, I am not in the approach called to play the role of a perceiver
that reflects or welcomes, animated with intentionality, the light of the open
and the grace and mystery of the world. Proximity is not a state, a repose,
but a restlessness, null site, outside the place of rest . . . No site then, is ever
sufficiently a proximity, like an embrace.”35 For Levinas, the perceiver can never
achieve the kind of spirituality of true proximity, which can only happen by
being dislocated from this sensible world, and is outside of any place.
For Levinas, regard for the Other “forgets reciprocity,” as this “frater-
nity” can’t be forged through the relations of the sensible, the historic, or the
affective. This “proximity” is a closeness that can be forged only through the
power of another unknowable realm: “Proximity does not resolve into the
consciousness a being would have of another being that it would judge to be
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 117

near inasmuch as the other would be under one’s eyes or within one’s reach,
and inasmuch as it would be possible for one to take hold of that being,
hold on to it or converse with it, in the reciprocity of handshakes, caresses,
struggle, collaboration, commerce, conversation.”36 The shared struggle, the
shared endeavors, the sight of another looking into their face, the embrace,
the conversation that bears the soul and all those sensual, perceptual, and
gestural communications do not bring one into an ethical relationship with
the other and do not open a way of true hospitality and sacrifice for Levinas,
but actually obscure its ground and power; whereas for Merleau-Ponty, these
are the very phenomena that bind human beings with each other and with
nonhuman creatures and the world in such a way that we move beyond the
ego—in a parallel to the sort of transcendence Levinas sees as necessary for
hospitality and sacrifice.
To return for a moment to the relationship of the face-to-face human
encounter to physiognomy, the theme of the chapter, we find again the same
opposition between the views of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. In the face-to-face
encounter, Levinas states, “The approach is a non-synchronizable diachrony,
which representation and thematization dissimulate by transforming the trace
into a sign of a departure and then reducing the ambiguity of the face either
to the play of physiognomy or to the indicating of a signified.”37 The approach
of the face can be mistaken in two ways for Levinas: either as a sign of the
presence of God, which we have already seen is too easy an answer for Levi-
nas—that is to say, to assert the other’s face is somehow given as the face of God
appearing in time and space; or as physiognomy, as the sensible play of features
and expressions that ensnare one in the world or perception, affect, memory,
and imagination. Even more to the point of this contrast with Merleau-Ponty is
a following statement by Levinas: “A face is not an appearance or sign of some
reality which would be personal like it is, but dissimulated or expressed by the
physiognomy, and which would be present itself as an invisible theme.”38 The
face for Levinas cannot be a personal one, cannot be tied to site, history, or
singularity, and its sensible expression as physiognomy cannot be a visible way
of bringing forth the invisible, such as the ethical resolution to love, sacrifice,
or offer hospitality. This denial that the visible can be the expression of the
invisible seems a reference to and denial of Merleau-Ponty’s vision.
We need only look at two passages from The Visible and the Invisible to
make this contrast clear with Merleau-Ponty’s opposing ideas of physiognomy.
Early in the work, Merleau-Ponty is laying the groundwork for his notion of
our “vertical grasp” of the world, in which reflective insights, the imaginal,
the affective, the memorial, the intuitive, the kinesthetic, the visceral, and so
forth are all layered within the basic perceptual grasp of the world, and this
passage opens up the theme of the enmeshment of our sense of truth and the
118 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

sense of our encounters with others in a much wider and deeper intertwining
with the world:

Our experience of the true, when it is not immediately reducible

to that of the thing we see, is at first not distinct from the ten-
sions that arise between the others and ourselves, and from their
resolution. As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an
emotional and almost carnal experience, where the ‘ideas’—the other’s
and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy [des traits de
sa physionomie, VIF 29] and of our own, are less understood than
welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.39

Physiognomy is the contingent, sensible manifestation of a style, history, con-

text, and meaning in the interplay of the intertwined perceptible beings and
is understood “through an emotional and almost carnal experience” such that
the realm of ideality, the invisible, shines through the visible. The truth of the
situation, such as one that might call for sacrifice or hospitality is felt and
perceived and arises within the situation. The tensions among people are first
felt and experienced as physiognomies, and the face-to-face encounter draws
upon this richness of prereflective sense.
For Merleau-Ponty, we are not drawn to another realm to find the depths
of the meaning of our lives or the sense of our involvements with others. If
we want to renew the meaning of these interactions, to deepen their sense,
including their ethical pull, it is more a matter of opening ourselves more
fully to an embodied realm. This realm is not one of clear judgments or
reason, unambiguous imperatives, and isolation of a part of ourselves that is
somehow of more integral worth than other dimensions of our being. It is
more a matter of finding an energy and significance of differing strands of
our lives and the world that can conjoin in a meaningful sense of ourselves
in solidarity with others:

. . . far from opening upon the blinding light of pure Being or

of the Object, our life has, in the astronomical sense of the word,
an atmosphere: it is constantly enshrouded by those mists we call
the sensible world or history, the one of the corporeal life and the
one of the human life, the present and the past, as a pell-mell
ensemble of bodies and minds, promiscuity of visages, words,
actions, with, between them all, that cohesion which cannot be
denied them since they are all differences, extreme divergences of
one same something (VI 84).
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 119

It is in the midst of this sensible world and history, which surrounds us

like an atmosphere but is also one of divergences, that the individual confronts
and joins with the faces of others in perceptual sense to find actions that are
the expression of what the overall context has come to mean for that singular
being caught in all these relationships. The divergences play off against the
commonality to stretch and transform each perceiver as open to this interplay.
The realm of perception sensitively taken up is not just an assimilation to the
ego’s appropriation as Levinas portrays it. This unity of sense, however, always
plays across difference, allowing the other to appear as unique. It may be
protested that this can’t be the basis for an ethics because it has no standards
or rules to guide one. However, one might also say the opposite of the long
tradition of rules, standards, and higher powers: that they have no specific
content and can be employed equally by those who save lives or those who
slaughter in the name of a higher power or an ideal. The generality of this
traditional of ethical commands from a higher power allows this leeway of
interpretation and abuse. Second, traditional ethical and rational imperatives
do not guarantee in themselves the sensitive and passionate engagement in
the situation and action that makes for truly ethical action. Following a rule
or command does not express the heart of hospitality. Finally, even when the
overall sense of these principles is agreed on, how they are to be applied to
any situation is always endlessly debatable. Sartre’s well-known example in his
lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” of the student who is torn between
staying at home with his elderly mother or joining in to fight in the Spanish
Civil War, where his brother has been killed, shows poignantly that universal
ethical principles apply to either choice.40
This traditional insistence that only a higher realm than the sensible can
provide the guidance of the Good impels Levinas to substitute the fleshly face
that engages others’ emotional, imaginative, and thoughtful responses with the
face of transcendence: the Other. There must be the presence of a spiritual
reality that outstrips the one who encounters the face and calls one out of
immersion in one’s projects, or there will be no capacity to put oneself in the
place of the other. There must be a blindness to the specifics of the other’s
plight and instead the general command to help anyone as an instance of
the universal call of humanity. Despite the use of language such as “caress,”
“hospitality,” and “embrace,” Levinas is appealing to an absolute, rational basis
for ethics. He tries to distinguish this instance of reason from reason as it is
normally considered as the logic fundamental to rational thought by calling it
“a reason before the beginning, before any present” or “a pre-originary reason,”
understood as a “reason before the thematization of signification by a thinking
subject,”41 but it remains an absolute foundation of a Being beyond the sensible
120 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

and is still, as Kleinberg-Levin states, “a modality of Reason, Reason of and

for the other.”42 For Merleau-Ponty, the face is a particular face as being the
expression that gathers together the sense of how each of us is uniquely thrown
into the world with a personal history of commitments, traumas, joys, loves,
hates, hopes, interpretations, ideas, imaginal expressions, deeds, and so on. For
Merleau-Ponty, it is not reason’s command that is presented by the face, but
rather com-passion—literally feeling with the other—through which we form a
bond that turns us to the other. The face for Merleau-Ponty is turned toward
the world, and its expression is a communication with myriad faces of all sorts
that highlights all the particularities of their situatedness.
In the face-to-face encounter, for Merleau-Ponty, we are not thrown back
upon the Levinasian alternatives of either the self-centeredness of ongoing
appropriation or being brought up short by an absolute Other that dissolves
the immediate encounter between us as fleshly beings. In the introduction to
Signs, written in 1960, Merleau-Ponty asks the question, “What is it like when
one of the others turns upon me, meets my gaze, and fastens his own upon
my body and my face?”43 Merleau-Ponty responds that it seems as if an end-
less interplay of gazes will be set up if we consider the face-to-face as either
between two subjectivities or between two reflective consciousnesses. The self
and the other might be caught up in the power of one gaze on the prereflec-
tive level, or the two might be isolated within their own thoughts about the
other as separate cogitos. Merleau-Ponty states, however, that instead, “vision
is such that the obscure results of two glances adjust to each other, and there
are no longer two consciousnesses with their own teleology but two mutually
enfolding glances.” The face-to-face between persons can never be a solitary
encounter between two persons, since the face-to-face will always also be both
faces encountering the face of the world together, seeing the other face from the
vantage of all the faces in the world—whether human, creaturely, or inanimate.
As Merleau-Ponty says of the transformation of the gaze toward the face of
the world, it “does not belong to any space of consciousness and inserts itself
equally well into the circuit of other bodies. Everything depends, that is, upon
the fact that our glances are not ‘acts of consciousness,’ each of which claims
an invariable priority but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled
by the universal flesh of the world.”44 In face with any physiognomy within
the world, for Merleau-Ponty there is a dispossession into the world and away
from the perceiving self that returns to itself only by way of that circuit. It
returns to itself as both overlapping with and divergent from the world, while
also having a relation with its own act of perceiving.
It is a result of this logic of the flesh as a perceiving being that other-
ness is at the heart of one’s being, the being of the world, and being with
others. Merleau-Ponty renders this logic in the following image: “Along with
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 121

time’s secret linkages, I learn those of the perceived world, its incompatible
and simultaneous ‘faces.’ I see it as it is before my eyes, but also as I would
see it from another situation—and not as a possibility but as an actuality, for
from this moment forth it gleams elsewhere from many fires which are masked
from me.” To perceive the world is to enter this circuit or the flesh of the
world, where each face of something or someone is also many faces because
it is perceived and encountered by many others. The fires of the many visions
spark from within the depths of the flesh. All these others are “my twins or
the flesh of my flesh” as being caught up in the same circuit and open to the
same world. Yet, it is also true, Merleau-Ponty adds, that “I do not live their
life; they are definitely absent from me and I from them. But the distance
becomes a strange proximity as soon as one comes back home to the perceptible
world, since the perceptible is precisely that which can haunt more than one
body without budging from its place.” The perceived world is such that as we
inhabit it, it inhabits us, but in this strange proximity in which our bodies
and the things we perceive are experienced as prolongations of each other,45 we
are thrown into the depth of the co-perception with other perceivers as well as
of the virtual perceptions of the things of the world folding back on us. For
Merleau-Ponty, the world in which the face-to-face encounter occurs, on its
primordial prereflective level, is a dimension whose very being is the tension
of self and other, of same and different, as going together in the phenomenon
of depth. This is in contrast to the world of perception for Levinas, whose
proximity of appropriation must be opened up or dissolved in order that there
be the distance of otherness introduced to give rise to the ethical.
At the beginning of The Visible and the Invisible there is another instance
in which Merleau-Ponty evokes the experience of looking at the face of the
other. In these opening pages he is considering how whatever is perceived also
withdraws from us. The perceiver is plunged into the depths of the world as
part of a circuit of perception with others; yet it is not just things within the
world that withdraw as we move closer to them, but also the faces of oth-
ers we know well: “Here is this well-known countenance [Voici ce visage bien
connu],46 this smile, these modulations of voice, whose style is as familiar to
me as myself.”47 Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the pull as one enters the smile
of the other, which is intertwined with the relationships with the myriad other
faces of the world. The perceiver is pulled into the other’s stance toward the
world as well as taken up in dialogue with others through the other’s face that
leads to “the dimension of a generalized life which grafted onto my own.”48
Not only do we enter the depths of the world through the solicitation of the
things of the world, but also through the face of the other in inhabiting a
gaze that overlaps with that of others but finally slides into a wider seeing
or hearing or touching that circulates through things and the reverberating
122 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

perception of them. This “laterality” is the dimension of the face. What is meant
by my gaze is the gaze that first returns to me only from the world, such that
“my private world has ceased to be mine only; it is now the instrument that
another plays.” Several perceivers turn their gaze to the grass, and Merleau-
Ponty says, “the synergy of our eyes suspends them on one unique thing” in
such a way that “it is in the world we communicate” through an “intervention
of the other;” or, similarly, in listening to music playing, “it is through the
music that I enter into his musical emotion.”49 This added dimension of our
perception, however, “does not resolve the internal paradox of my perception:
it adds to it this other enigma: of the propagation of my most secret life in
another.” As I look upon the face of another person, I am drawn away from
myself as seen by the other person, as well as by all the others of the world
and see through their gazes, as well as through the virtual gazes of the things
of the world embedded within the context. This is why, for Merleau-Ponty, it
is not a matter of “the” self and “the” other: “. . . the problem of the other
is a particular case of the problem of others, since the relation with someone
is always mediated by the relationship with third parties, that these have rela-
tionships among themselves that command those of the one and those of the
other.”50 When I see the face of another person, there is an interplay of our
faces in the proximity and the distance of the interrelated world that takes me
out of myself, but also returns me to myself.
The proximity and distance of these depths are within the perceiver’s
own experience of himself or herself, too. It may seem at first that I grasp
with certainty my perception of the grass and the music, and yet the certitude
of this experience, Merleau-Ponty adds, “remains absolutely obscure.” My per-
ception is always withdrawn into the world perceived by others, which both
reveals itself and withdraws into inexhaustible depths. The world of faces,
for Merleau-Ponty, is a world of depth, such that the myriad constituents of
a simple percept—like the perceived red, discussed earlier in describing the
flesh—themselves play off of the many perceptions of others within the world.
Bernhard Waldenfels describes this fate of perception that leaves us even within
ourselves as an interplay of self and other, or what he calls “a process of self-
doubling”: “The self-relation, typical of our body, turns into a self-withdrawal,
and this leads us to an ‘irremediable absence’ (VI 165/125), including ‘absence
from the self ’ (VI 303/247).” This means that the visible is only visible as also
invisible, and similarly the self is present only by the “doubling up into the
other” with a ‘wandering double.’ ”51 We are doubled both within ourselves
and also with others, such that we neither possess ourselves or the other, if
we pay any attention to the complex sense of our experience. Part of my own
invisible sense is not only from the depth of my experience but from the
depths of others’ experience as shared with me. To fathom this sense requires
 Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness 123

hearkening to its depths. It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty muses in a

working note of November 1960, that “[w]hat is interesting is not an expedient
to solve ‘the problem of the other.’ It is a transformation of the problem.”52
The problem of the self and other is transformed by Merleau-Ponty, because
it is a deepening of the problem of self and world.
Unlike the philosophical tradition that starts with the certainty of self,
Merleau-Ponty begins with the self and other within my experience of self. I
am other to myself as the way of being a self, as is the world other to itself in
being itself and open to further exploration. The écart within perception that
permits us to plunge into the world, encountering others and taking up expres-
sion, is the very way we are in solidarity through the world: “The other is no
longer so much a freedom from without as destiny and fatality, a rival subject
for a subject, but he is caught up in a circuit that connects him to the world,
as we ourselves are, and consequently also in a circuit that connects him to
us—And this world common to us, is intermundane space.” This intermundane
space is the dimension of the face-to-face, with other persons and also with
the face of the world, and it leaves us intertwined. This intertwining means,
for Merleau-Ponty, as stated in the epigraph to this section, that we are all
accused and yet inseparably linked as our only support: we are accused as called
into question, and supported as gaining who we are through and with others.
The differing sense of the power of the face-to-face in Merleau-Ponty
and Levinas cannot be separated from their differing senses of perception
and embodiment. We will see that Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the intertwining
of persons in primordial perception—in which there is an affective, sensual,
memorial, imaginative, and particularized sense of the other as taken on in a
shared experience—will furnish a different basis of felt solidarity in contrast to
other approaches to ethics. We will see that felt solidarity is actually assumed
by these other approaches and is what allows them their cogency. Then we will
also see that the embodied sense of self-doubling within perception and with
others (or as Merleau-Ponty puts it in the late writings, “chiasm my body—the
things realized by the doubling up of my body into inside and outside—and
the doubling up of things . . . there is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-
coincidence, there is the inside and the outside turning about one another”
or “the veering I-Other Other-I”53) leads toward an ethics of the alterity of
depth. We will see how within the fission of perception into the depths of
the world with its return to the site of perception as comprising the sense of
self and other that both overlap and yet maintain distance yields what might
be called a “depth ethics” of horizontal transcendence.
 V
An Ethics of Flesh
Saint-Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty, and Felt Solidarity

For the first time, through the other body, I see that in its coupling with
the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives, add-
ing to the world that I see the treasure necessary for what the other sees.
—The Visible and the Invisible (144)

Levinas’s description of the shattering of our everyday enmeshment with oth-

ers in the encounter with the face—in order to be called upon to sacrifice—
moves in quite the opposite direction of where this book began in quoting
Merleau-Ponty’s use of the passage from Saint-Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre to end
Phenomenology of Perception. After so many pages of analysis of the perception
of self, world, and others in the pages of the Phenomenology of Perception, it is
significant that Merleau-Ponty ends with this quotation. Certainly every author
thinks carefully about the last words of any major work, and Merleau-Ponty
was a writer whose unpublished notes demonstrate how carefully he consid-
ered the ideas that made their way into his published works. There has been
an ongoing complaint that Merleau-Ponty does not offer “an ethics,” both as
an immediate reaction to the publication of Phenomenology of Perception and
afterward, but this book will contend that he does provide an ethics. However,
his is an approach to ethics at odds with the philosophical tradition, though
in keeping with his overall philosophy. The passage quoted from La Pilote de
guerre captures the thoughts of the pilot who is the main protagonist of the
novel, just as they have just survived a vicious barrage of German anti-aircraft
fire on their mission to Arras:

Your son is caught in the fire; you are the one who will save
him. . . . If there is an obstacle, you will be ready to give your
shoulder provided only you can charge down that obstacle. Your

125
126 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

abode is your act itself. Your act is you. . . . You give yourself in
exchange. . . . Your significance shows itself, effulgent. It is your
duty, your hatred, your love, your steadfastness, your ingenu-
ity. . . . Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone
matter to him.1

Here Saint-Exupéry depicts an act of self-sacrifice in which one is compelled

to abandon thought and abstract principles in order to give oneself over to a
pull that surges through the things and people about one that are objects of
love and passion. It is as though these things and people who are loved—if
they are encountered on the level of the voices of silence, the primordial level
of prereflective encounter—impel a person toward doing his or her duty. The
deeper sense of one’s being emerges from beneath the petty concerns of ego
and daily life and draws one toward sacrifice for the good of others. It is
like an electric current that one can feel in moments of clarity through ones
embodied, felt relations with others. However, we will see this conclusion
has to be considered carefully by considering the nature of fiction, in order
to understand other contradictory statements made about the body by the
protagonist in the novel.
We must also consider that the novel Pilote de guerre is more than a
novel, since its world-famous literary author and international figure is its
protagonist. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had been a pioneering aviator
and successful commercial pilot working the early airmail routes in Europe,
Africa, and South America and also a famous and successful author, joined
the French Air Force (Armée de L’Air) and flew reconnaissance missions against
the Germans until the French were demobilized in 1940. This experience is
the basis for the novel. These reconnaissance flights were almost certain death
sentences, as most of the pilots who continued to fly missions didn’t survive.
In addition, the information gathered couldn’t be put to practical use by the
French fleeing before the German onslaught. Pilote de guerre explores how
men can perform such sacrificial deeds. It explores the ways that one feels
compelled to help others when there is no utilitarian purpose or reward for
such acts. It seems plausible that Merleau-Ponty found an exemplar of ethi-
cal action of the highest degree in the portrayal of the protagonist, inspiring
him to end his major philosophical work with a quote from Pilote de guerre,
published in 1942 (translated in English as Flight to Arras). In addition to the
ideas expressed in the novel, there was also the fact—well-known throughout
France and the world—that Saint-Exupéry had, in April 1943, volunteered
to fly further missions in the Mediterranean with the Free French Air Force,
cooperatively with the United States, despite his being eight years over the
age limit for pilots (at 43) and being so wracked with pain from previous
 An Ethics of Flesh 127

crashes that he couldn’t dress himself in his flight suit or turn his head to the
left to check for enemy aircraft. Saint-Exupéry petitioned General Eisenhower
repeatedly to get permission to fly again. Eventually he was lost in July 1944
on a reconnaissance mission. At the time Merleau-Ponty was finishing the Phe-
nomenology of Perception, Saint-Exupéry’s acts were widely admired in France.
Certainly, that the novel Pilote de guerre echoes the lived experience enacted
in Saint-Exupéry’s personal sacrifice could only make a deeper impression on
Merleau-Ponty at that time.
However, to fully understand what led Merleau-Ponty to end his major
philosophical work with these lines from the Saint-Exupéry’s text, I believe
requires of the reader to appreciate the text as a novel. Merleau-Ponty was an
insightful reader of literature whose commentaries on novels and the nature of
literature run throughout his work. In the essay “Indirect Language and the
Voices of Silence,” he states that “like a painting, a novel expresses tacitly.”2 He
continues to explain that the sense of the novel is “nowhere said” but must
be gleaned from “between” the explicit statements made by the characters
portrayed. The example offered is from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, in
which never once is it explicitly mentioned that the protagonist, Julien Sorel,
desires to kill Madame de Rênal as he journeys to see her after her betrayal
of him. The novelist, Merleau-Ponty tells us, initiates us into the world of the
protagonist and makes us live his or her embodied possibilities within that
context. The reader “takes up his dwelling in a character’s behavior and gives
the reader only a suggestion of it, its nervous and peremptory trace in the
surroundings.” To understand the novel in its “oblique and latent significa-
tion,” the reader must imaginatively inhabit that world as it is expressed in the
author’s words. To return to what is only obliquely and latently signified is to
return to that primordial experience of the world as gesture, the prereflective
opening to the world that is an ongoing source of its unfolding.
Merleau-Ponty continues, claiming that literature is a “search and acquisi-
tion” of deeper meaning that is more powerful than even philosophy or politi-
cal thought, and is therefore “more a voice of the spirit.” This means that an
interpreter of the novel cannot excerpt abstractions from the text and present
these as the author’s or the novel’s meaning. Rather, Merleau-Ponty describes
the novel on the level of more prereflective primordial sense: “The fact that
it contains, better than ideas, matrices of ideas—the fact that it provides us
with symbols whose meaning we never stop developing. Precisely because it
dwells and makes us dwell in a world we do not have the key to, the work
of art teaches us to see and ultimately gives us something to think about as
no analytical work can.”3 The novel returns us in a virtual way to our more
primordial level of exchange with the world, the level where the world and
others gesture forth their meaning to us. Its meaning, not easily grasped, is
128 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

communicated indirectly. As an expression of matrices of ideas that have sym-

bolic import, it is only by inhabiting the interrelations expressed in the novel
that we understand in an affective, imaginative, and finally more reflective sense
what has been expressed. The fact that Merleau-Ponty ends the Phenomenology
of Perception not only by quoting Saint-Exupéry, but by quoting a novel, is
indicative of the sense of meaning with which the reader is supposed to have
arrived by the end of the work.
It is rarely noted that the lines of the text from Pilote de guerre are
excerpted from pages of the novel that are interspersed with statements that
seem to have a quite different meaning from that of this embodied ethic.4
Ironically, in the passages from which Merleau-Ponty excerpts various sentences,
linking them together to construct the cited quotation, the protagonist pilot
makes statements such as “What is my body to me? A kind of flunky . . . ,”
“Your body belongs to you: it is not you . . . ,” “Your members? Tools . . . ,”
and “The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. . . .”5 The pilot is mak-
ing these statements as he faces imminent death, but is galvanized into feeling
an enmeshment with all that is around him and about which he cares in a
searing, visceral way. When he returns from the flight, however, he finds that
his way of perceiving has been altered, and that, in turn, he has changed his
feelings about many aspects of his life. These changes happen despite the fact
that the pilot has made these statements that seem utterly dismissive of the
role of the body in finding meaning in existence.
Merleau-Ponty is an acute reader who has comprehended the proper sense
of Saint-Exupéry’s text, as these utterances about the status of the body in the
context of the novel hearken back to the way the body is usually understood
in the Western cultural tradition, and thus the body is understood this way
by the protagonist. Yet, in Merleau-Ponty’s sense of embodiment, Pilote de
guerre is a powerful homage to the centrality of embodiment in giving oneself
over to the prereflective sensual, passionate, enmeshed interweaving with other
persons and with the physiognomies of the world to be inspired to go beyond
oneself and the concerns of the ego. The novel describes acutely the way the
pilot is transformed by this experience to finally inhabit his body in another
way—which opens him to a different sort of intertwining from which he had
previously been detached. The pilot comes to feel inspired to sacrifice for the
sake of a felt solidarity with the other pilots, who become like brothers. For the
first time, he also feels solidarity with the suffering civilians he sees from his
plane. Suddenly, he searingly feels as if they are members of his family. Coming
to inhabit his body, feeling emotions, and sensing silent voices also changes
the pilot’s relationship to the ethical imperatives with which he has grappled.
Before considering these statements denigrating the body, it is important
to look at the details of the description of the changes in the pilot in the novel
 An Ethics of Flesh 129

in order to see that the passage quoted by Merleau-Ponty at the end of the Phe-
nomenology of Perception does represent the message given in the Phenomenology
of Perception. Even though Saint-Exupéry lacks the philosophical vocabulary
to express embodiment in the way Merleau-Ponty has come to articulate it,
he does share the same insights as Merleau-Ponty. In explaining how one is
moved to sacrifice oneself for the welfare of others, the pilot declares, “In
that moment you exchange yourself against something else; and you have no
feeling that you lost by that exchange. . . . You exchange yourself against the
death of your enemy, the rescue of your child, the recovery of your patient,
the perfection of your theorem.”6 At this moment when seeming imminent
death has suddenly made the meaning of life effulgent, the pilot feels that
what matters—surging through every pore of his embodied self—are those
things with which he is enmeshed. He realizes his life, and any life, means only
those things to which people devote themselves in the community of work and
effort together in a historical context. The pilot has always thought that such
danger would enclose him in the body as an organism desperate to survive,
but instead it is the things we share with others that are lit up in the glare of
the anti-aircraft fire. The pilot in many ways is a man of solitude who prefers
to savor alone the silence of the night and the sky, but his boundaries with
others and with the facts of daily life, with which he has been distant, begin
to transform. He continues: “What matters is the notes, the child, the patient,
the theorem. Your true significance becomes dazzlingly evident. Your true name
is duty, hatred, love, child, theorem. There is no other you than this.”7 For
the pilot, duty summons him from within the context of the specific persons
to whom one is committed and with whom one shares a history. The context
also is comprised of the concrete works of others trying to better the lot of
humanity, push forward its knowledge, or create beauty. As a matter of fact,
duty is inseparable from the constellation of works and people that surround
one with open faces. It is because we are enmeshed with the world that we
must save the world and its excellence, its beauty, its goodness, because we are
it and not belonging to some other higher realm.
The passage continues with the pilot remarking that at the key moment
of acting, “man ceases to be concerned with himself: he recognizes of a sudden
what he forms part of. If he should die, he would not be cutting himself off
from his kind, but making himself one with them. He would not be losing
himself, but finding himself. This I affirm is not the wishful thinking of a
moralist. It is an everyday fact. It is a commonplace truth.”8 For Saint-Exupéry,
speaking as the pilot, it is because we live in intimacy and in solidarity with
each other, trying together to create meaningful things to help the community
of human and other beings, that we are called upon to aid from a passionate
love, a love of life itself. In this new face-to-face relation with others, each
130 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

has become intertwined with the other’s existence in such a way that the
isolated ego is ultimately unimportant. Our truest being cannot be lost by
death, because our true being is interwoven with all the people and things we
have worked on together, and not because our true being belongs in unity
with some other realm. The being of those who are part of the endeavor are
inseparable from those ongoing works and are immediately felt by others as a
presence, as indeed the pilot feels about those who have died already: “When
Guillaumet, the best friend I ever had, was killed in the course of duty, there
was no need for me to speak of him. . . . Guillaumet became one of the
companions of my silence. I am part of Guillaumet, and Guillaumet is part
of me.”9 What has been given to create a world together in sacrifice still reso-
nates in the physiognomy of those creations in such a way that its expression
contains the community of those who created it. The pilot experiences himself
as intertwined with those of the Group, his flying outfit.
The pilot says he is not speaking as a “moralist,” because he is not speak-
ing from a distance on the basis of higher principles, like those he and all
his compatriots may have held when they entered the war, like The Rights of
Man. He comes to feel the call to sacrifice in a new way, as a solidarity with
those around him, felt in his flesh: “To commune with them. To give and
to receive. To be more than myself. To possess this plenitude that swells so
powerfully within me.”10 The pilot has discovered hospitality and spontaneous
acts of sacrifice in the embodied experience that now fills him. The pilot and
his crew fly to Arras, knowing there is little chance of return, and then meet
a barrage of anti-aircraft fire and are hit, their tanks penetrated; they don’t
expect to make it back, but they do. The pilot expresses gratitude for having
gone into the fire because he has returned altered, a different person. He is
grateful that he has been a participant: “I am fed by the quality that resides
in those who participate with me. . . . Each of these men is a web woven of
his job, his trade, his duty. That smoking sausage, eaten in these circumstances,
is woven into that web. The presence of these men is dense, full of meaning,
and it warms my heart.”11 For the pilot, there is a woven web of the men in
their specific contexts, in their shared endeavor, and in the small things of
their shared world, like even this sausage they eat together. It all can have a
deeper meaning, if, as the pilot says, “I am able to sit with them in silence”
and take in the fullness of their situation and situatedness. In the silence, the
interconnectedness of the world is more effulgent.
The worth that radiates in the sense of community is not that of some
Infinite in a higher realm, but rather is a putting aside of their difference for
the everyday tasks necessary from each to achieve something meaningful in the
world together. The face-to-face leads them to the circuit of the world of which
 An Ethics of Flesh 131

they are part: “And exactly as, sitting with him at the table, I took pleasure
from the obligations of the craft that fuse us of the Group into a common
being. I love Group 2-33. . . . I love Group 2-33 because I am a part of it
and it is a part of me, because it nourishes me and I contribute to nourishing
it.”12 The pilot feels that he and those around him can sacrifice their lives for
each other and for the community that depends on their service because in the
silent communion of working together and facing death, they have come to
accept and cherish each other’s contingency. They have experienced the others
in all their peculiarities of background and context, and have overcome those
differences. The pilot states of his fellow crew member: “Gavoille exists. He
loves, hates, rejoices, complains. He is shaped and heightened by the strands
woven together and constituting his being.”13 Throughout the novel, the pro-
tagonist sees the peculiarities of each comrade, their being inseparable from
their differing contexts and contingencies, but he has come to love them in
sacrifice and release from pettiness for who they specifically are. The pilot says
of his feeling: “My love of the Group has no need of definition. It is woven
of bonds. It is my substance.”14 It is on this felt level that each has become
entwined with the other and a singular love emerges in which each would give
his life for the Group or for each other.
This transformation, which makes duty and sacrifice come alive in a
new way, has occurred for the pilot through surviving the barrage over Arras.
This experience kindled in him an openness to sensibility that he had never
experienced, or that had been dormant. His relationship to the community
at large also changed. Before this transformation, he had dutifully hoped to
save France, to serve its people, to fight for the Rights of Humanity against
oppression and violence, but he had done it dully, going through a ceremony
that was required of him by conscience and loyalty. It had all seemed empty,
especially since it was a pure sacrifice, not likely to do any good in a practical
way: the reconnaissance information would not be followed up by assaults,
since the French forces were too weak and outnumbered. Its meaning had to
come from the relationship of the pilot to the people for whom he would
sacrifice. After he gets suited up and ready for his flight, the pilot states: “I can
no longer see the cathedral in which I live. I am dressing for the service of a
dead god.”15 The Rights of Man, loyalty to France, and even obedience to God
are abstractions, principles. These great ethical principles have compelled him
into service and sacrifice, but they have not given his acts a sense of meaning
or purpose. He has done them dutifully, which here means emptily. After Arras,
however, he feels through his embodying being; there is an urgency and passion
to dwelling in the tie with others and the shared world. The utter distance
he had felt between his own being and his actions, and between himself and
132 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the community, gives way to a powerful sense of enmeshment. This feeling of

connectedness is so strong that he can feel it in seeing, from six hundred feet
overhead, the crowds fleeing the Germans:

Until I learnt what I learnt over Arras, I could feel no responsibil-

ity for this stream of refugees over which once more I fly. I can
be bound to no men except those to whom I give. I understand
no man except those to whom I am bound. I exist only to the
degree that I am nourished by the springs at my roots. I am bound
to that mob on the highways, and it is bound to me. At three
hundred miles an hour and an elevation of six hundred feet, now
that I have come out of the clouds, I have become one with that
mob. I, flying in the descending night, am like a shepherd who in
a single glance counts and collects and welds his scattered sheep
into a flock again. That mob is no longer a mob, it is a people.”16

The pilot tells us how first he had to allow to emerge his prereflective com-
munion with the world. The searing crisis at Arras forced him out of alienated
distance from his own embodying being. Once this happened, the overlap with
others through reversibility presented him with a felt sense of his responsibility
toward the refugees. Instead of the scattered others of his country, he sees a
people—a community bound together. The sense of personhood and mutual
responsibility has come alive through a fleshly connection within their com-
mon struggle, not through a set of principles. In face with death, the pilot’s
embodying being became awake to its ongoing sensibility, which gave the
ordinary things of life an effulgence of meaning.
Perhaps the most striking instance of this awakening to embodying being
is the transformation of his meals with the farmer’s family with whom he is
billeted. When he returns to the farmer’s table, the passing of the bread at
the meal has become a celebration, not just an empty repetition of “the same
household rite.” As he enters fully into its presence and their presence, he sees
that this sharing of bread can “bring the same glow into these faces round
the table.”17 Rather than as a common object, he sees the bread in a depth of
perception: “For the bread is like the oil of the lamp: its merit is in the light
it sheds.” As he looks at the faces around the table, as they hold the bread
they share, another glow is present in them. At such moments the things of
the world come to have a luminosity and a presence—or as Merleau-Ponty
would say, a physiognomy—that we can learn to recognize through a depth
of perception that brings us closer to them. For the pilot, and presumably for
Saint-Exupéry himself, these heightened perceptions were the lessons of the
embodied enmeshment with others through and among the simple things of
 An Ethics of Flesh 133

the world with which we make our homes and endeavors. The protagonist
states that in coming home from the sortie, there is a different quality to his
perceptions, which is a “silent reward. Its quality is unique, for it is the quality
of love. Love, when we ordinarily think of it, implies a tumultuous pathos.
But this is veritable love—a web woven of strands in which we are fulfilled.”18
What the pilot calls love is an appreciation of the embodying being and the
depth of the sensible—its affirmation. It is love in the overlapping of identi-
ties and worlds that has an impulsion to deepen and become more enmeshed,
as it opens one to sensing the value of worlds in which one can stand and
behold their meaning.
In another of Saint-Exupéry’s novels, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), the pilot
and his co-pilot do not return from their hazardous mail flight. In this novel,
it is their link with the natural world and the world of things in the human
community that is described as nourishing them with courage, wonder at life,
and willingness to sacrifice for others in making a better world. The pilot who
will not return, Fabian, is described in the midst of fighting to get above the
storm that in the end will defeat him: “And now a wonder seized him; dazzled
by that brightness, he had to keep his eyes closed for some seconds. He had
never dreamt the night clouds could dazzle thus. But the full moon and all
the constellations were changing into waves of light.”19 The pilot is filled with
light and wonder at the sky, the stars, and the villages below him. It is these
things that give him the strength to have the vocation of sacrifice that he has
chosen: to risk his life for the sake of creating a wider community that contains
the things that touch him. This contact with stars, moon, and the villages
below give him the courage to serve the progress that will hopefully lead to
a more connected world. It is not merely a job for him, as it certainly was
not for Saint-Exupéry when he flew these pioneering mail routes. The world
of the sky gestures to the pilot, and he feels as if moving “across a tranquil
anchorage . . . as in a harbor of the Happy Isles.”20
The land of the blessed as portrayed by Saint-Exupéry in this and other
novels is not a supersensible realm that inspires sacrifice, but rather the embrac-
ing world all around us. The Happy Isles are in the sky that echoes the beauty
and sensual wonder of this concrete world—a world of community facing a
definite history and its challenges. The love of this sensible world does not
have to be appropriative and egocentric, as Levinas describes it, but rather as
Saint-Exupéry expresses in Pilote de guerre: “Participated in building the same
structures. We’re of the same substance. Something of me died in him. . . . I
am part of Guillaumet, of Gavoille, of Hochedé, and they are part of me.
I am part of group 2-33, and it of me. I am part of my country, and it of
me. My country and I are one. All the men of group 2-33 are one with their
country.”21 The working together in the sensible world within a shared history,
134 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

creating shared structures, can be taken up in such a way that the visible world
contains the invisible world, that love, solidarity, and hospitality happen in
and by means of the everyday world. They happen, for Merleau-Ponty, in
taking in the physiognomies of all that is around us and of the faces of the
people with whom we are interrelated to enmesh us in a reversibility that is
made of difference, but also of a fellow feeling that is the deepest motivation
for ethical action.
These considerations equip us to return to the protagonist’s comments
in the novel that devalue embodiment, broached earlier. In his essay and book
on this topic, Bryan Smyth remarks that Merleau-Ponty’s work “concludes
with lines drawn from Pilote de guerre that express in an unmistakable way
Saint Exupéry’s self-sacrificial disdain of corporeality.”22 Smyth believes that
we should take the protagonist’s comments—such as that the body is an “old
crock”—to be definitive of the meaning of the novel. This would leave us in
puzzlement as to why Merleau-Ponty used this novel to conclude Phenom-
enology of Perception, since a valorization of disincarnation is at odds with the
phenomenological insights of the rest of the book, which argues that human
being is its embodiment. Smyth explains this seeming contradiction by assert-
ing this ending of the book is really the announcement of a certain political
agenda that is being forwarded by quoting Saint-Exupéry: “. . . contrary to
what is typically assumed, this perception is not informed in any way by
Saint Exupéry’s claim that ‘man is but a knot of relations,’ but rather is based
upon the dialectical sublimation of the radical disincarnation that is expressed
therein.”23 Smyth takes the statements of the protagonist as statements that
should be taken at face value, and furthermore attributed to Saint-Exupery
himself, as if the author’s beliefs are to be read within his character’s statements
and not as the character’s not knowing any other way to express himself. This
makes these lines of the novel, despite the character’s actions, experiences,
feelings, and developments within the story, to be assertions that can be read
as if they were part of a philosophical work. For Smyth this means that the
famous phrase, “man is but a network of relations” is not the summation of
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied being in the Phenomenology of
Perception, but rather the positing of a way of knowing as an ideal that would
be disincarnate as absolute.24
For Smyth, the fact that the quote comes from a novel should be dis-
regarded and it should instead be taken as a document about Saint-Exupéry
that has no phenomenological import as read within the context of the novel,
but rather is a statement about political theory: “It is thus problematic to
claim . . . that Merleau-Ponty invoked Pilote de guerre as a work of fiction. It
must not be overlooked that, however stylized it may be, at its core Pilote de
guerre is presented as based on actual experiences that Saint-Exupéry himself
 An Ethics of Flesh 135

had as a reconnaissance pilot. And this ostensibly non-fictional status was

crucial for Merleau-Ponty. For he invoked the lines from Pilote de guerre as
a quasi-phenomenological description of what radical reflection would (per
impossibile) disclose to the ‘hero.’ ” Smyth asserts that since the novel’s pro-
tagonist’s experiences were based on Saint-Exupéry’s actual experiences, the fact
that it is literature or fiction should be ignored. For Smyth this is helpful, since
true philosophical insight could not come from fiction or literature.25 Further-
more, the strategy of quoting these lines in Smyth’s estimation was really for a
specific purpose: “to offer men a perception of history which would continu-
ously clarify the lines of force and vectors of the present” as a kind of mythic
knowing that Saint-Exupéry presented as a limit toward which to strive.26 For
Smyth, this then serves the purpose of facilitating Merleau-Ponty’s political
philosophy by using this mythic sense of absolute knowing that admittedly
would be a limit to knowledge, but still one toward which one could strive.
This kind of knowing on the individual’s part is needed in order to justify a
Marxist reading of history, since there is no determinism in history that can
justify a simple reading of its telos.27
But as contrasted with Smyth, Merleau-Ponty would not denigrate the
value of fiction as compared to a “historical” or “biographical” account. To
the contrary, we have already discussed how Merleau-Ponty claims that a novel
teaches us to return to our primordial perceptual experience with the world
and opens the reader to new meaning in a way that no analytical use of prose
can. In addition to the passages discussed already, throughout his notes for the
1953 course at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty asserts that literature and
poetry capture the truth distinctively. In opposition to the tradition, he states:
“When lucidity passes a certain point, it becomes error. There is an error of
excess because of this lucidity. And there is not truth in the real insofar as
the real would be viewed as ‘objective,’ which would be a subtraction from
that which we live. The truth is an event of feeling, requiring that it be taken
out of the ‘real’ and that one let it develop its full inner sense, that is to say,
its imaginal sense.”28 As we discussed in the beginning of this book, Merleau-
Ponty saw the rational categorization of philosophical discourse as a problem
of “high altitude thought” that obscured our embodied access to the world.
The fictional and literary use of language throw the reader outside the confines
of customary language to live the world of the novel and apprehend through
the primordial contact of the sensual, felt and imagined.
Merleau-Ponty had already declared in March 1945, in “Metaphysics and
the Novel,” that “from now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no
longer be separated.”29 This is because, Merleau-Ponty explains, philosophy is
about bringing to expression that primordial contact with the world before
thought about the world. This means that in philosophical expression of this
136 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

contact, one “can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence
of expression.” Philosophical expression and literary expression have the “same
ambiguities” and “the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in ‘sto-
ries’ and, as it were, pointed at.”30 Rather than being something to be put aside
as merely literary, lacking philosophical value, the story expresses something
that allows it to go outside of language while at the same time bringing it into
expression within language—that is to say, bringing the underside of the silence
of the world’s gesturing into language. As we have seen throughout this book,
for Merleau-Ponty, the task of making contact with this silent primordial realm
and bringing it into expression in language is the primary task of philosophy.
Even when the protagonist is based on autobiographical experiences of
the author, the power of creative writing is its capacity to transform that prior
experience of the author into a new emergence of sense with insights that
could not be put into customary language. The ways that the author might
have represented these experiences previously is surpassed in a new under-
standing that the author struggles to grasp reflectively. Merleau-Ponty states:
“The writer does not write according to a universal, does not know what it
is that he writes, and would only in reading it. However, he could not read
himself, anymore that he could know thetically his voice or his gait. They are
distinctive without being able to be appropriated. Even if he could recognize
his phrases, he could not read himself, that is to say, like any other reader,
what is there is only possible.”31 The writer writes to express what cannot be
captured in categorical language as something already known, bringing forth
instead a distinctive sense that the author must discover as much as any other
reader—a sense that is always open to further interpretation. Merleau-Ponty
would certainly agree with Beardsley and Wimsatt’s essay, “The Intentional Fal-
lacy,” that any creative writer must try to discover in the work what the work
is saying, which is not necessarily what the author intended. So, whether it is
a matter of the character not having the right words to express Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of the lived body or the flesh, or if it is Saint-Exupéry who does not
have the philosophical language to express in his character’s mouth another way
of conceiving of the body, this is not indicative of what the novel expresses.
The novel stands as its own expression, and its meaning cannot to be taken
from Saint-Exupéry’s life. As a novel, a work of literature, Pilote de guerre has
its own distinctive meaning.
It seems far more plausible that Merleau-Ponty, the careful writer, ended
the Phenomenology of Perception with a statement that brought together the
insights of the preceding hundreds of pages in a way that the novel by point-
ing toward that moment of silent contact with the world that is embodiment’s
fruition. For Merleau-Ponty, as he writes in “Man, the Hero,” Saint-Eupéry’s
pilot has opened himself to the embodied intertwining with the world to real-
 An Ethics of Flesh 137

ize the freedom of plunging into the depths of the contingent sense of the
context within which he finds himself:

Saint-Exupéry plunges into his mission because it is an intimate

part of himself, the consequences of this thoughts, wishes, and
decisions, because he would be nothing if he were to back out. He
recovers his own being to the extent which he runs into danger.
Over Arras, in the fire of the anti-aircraft guns, where every second
of life is as miraculous as birth, he feels invulnerable because he
is in things at last; he has left his inner nothingness behind, and
death, if it comes, will reach him right in the thick of the world.32

It is in this singular experience that the pilot has awakened to his embodied
presence in the world. The pilot had all his reasons, the ethical imperatives that
crowded around him, which spoke of the Rights of Man and Love of Country
that were centered on patriotism, human compassion and fighting evil, but
they were abstract and empty. He felt empty. This nothingness has dissipated,
however, with his plunging into the world that gave him a sense of the miracle
of perception’s bringing the world into being anew at each moment, which is
our ongoing birth. His own life and mortality can no longer be separated from
those bonds that hold him in the “thick of the world.” Saint-Eupéry’s novel,
as well as his other novels, bring us to that knot or network of relations that
are felt, imagined, sensed, and remembered within the thickness of perception
that the Phenomenology of Perception has detailed.
By ending the Phenomenology of Perception with Saint-Exupéry’s state-
ments from Pilote de guerre, Merleau-Ponty may not be giving his readers “an
ethics” in the traditional sense, but what he is doing is showing that his analysis
of perception gives a needed missing basis for any ethics based on principles that
transcend the perceptible. One can only meaningfully apply principles of right
action or offer hospitality to another with whom one has felt an interconnec-
tion, about whom one has felt kinship, and about whom one has felt the spark
of care. This affective bond wells up in the depth of perceptual intertwining
with the world and others that Merleau-Ponty describes. If one offers hospital-
ity without this felt bond, both the giver and the recipient feel the hollowness
of the act. Done strictly from an abstract principle, such hospitality becomes
mechanical, empty. It is this grounding that Levinas lacks, as does most of the
history of Western ethical thought—with a few exceptions, such as Aristotle
or Kierkegaard in the philosophical tradition, and Saint Francis in the theo-
logical one. However, given the traditional philosophical notions that devalue
embodying being and its layers of sensual thickness, emotional response, and
imaginative expansion of sense, this shift to acknowledging the primacy of this
138 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

level of experience is difficult to make. We can see this difficulty evidenced by

a remark made by Bernhard Waldenfels in his essay “Responsivity of the Body,”
which largely supports and explains Merleau-Ponty’s approach. Yet, Waldenfels’s
comment regarding Merleau-Ponty’s use of Saint-Exupéry’s passage from Pilote
de guerre is, “[t]his passage may sound a bit overemotional to our ears.”33
Waldenfels writes this despite his understanding how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis
is vital to ethics in describing the kind of responsivity of bodily engagement
as it turns us toward others. The fact that Saint-Exupéry’s passage could sound
“overemotional” to Waldenfels and to other readers betrays the very problem
that Merleau-Ponty is trying to address in our cultural understanding of ethics
and existence.
For Merleau-Ponty, the embodied prereflective dialogue with the world
that is fundamentally felt through emotion is our primary way of understand-
ing space, time, and the world and our place within it: the initial response
to physiognomy that takes us into the depth of silent, perceptual sense is
emotional, or to quote Merleau-Ponty again: “As the thing, as the other, the
true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the
‘ideas’—the other’s and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy and of
our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.”34
Our embodied perceptual apprehension to the physiognomies of things, other
creatures, and fellow humans in emotional responses immediately draws us
into the specificity of their world and experience. In the “Space” chapter of
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty states, “In dreaming and in myth
we learn where the phenomenon is to be found, by feeling that towards which
our desire goes out, what our heart dreads, on what our life depends. Even in
waking life, things are no different.”35 We are truly located in a situation and
feel our belonging to that situation through these emotional ties. Our affective
directedness and connectedness to place is further described in Merleau-Ponty’s
addition of an anecdote of being on vacation in a village in Southern France
and becoming incorporated into its rhythms. The low level of the river or
the gathering in of the maize crop become important events in which he is
immersed like everyone around him who lives in the village. He feels as if he
belongs there. Yet, when he hears on the radio that war may come to Paris,
where his friends and loved ones are, then he feels as if he is in Paris and is
disconnected from where he is in objective space. His fear about their safety and
his love for them flaring up in the face of impending danger connect him
more forcibly to Paris, and he feels strangely “somewhere else” and “out of
touch with real life” in being in the village.36 Normally, our emotional immer-
sion in a place and our objective location coincide, or at least overlap, but
this example shows how it is the emotional pulse that connects us to where
we are, that locates us. In perception, in our waking life, we are located and
 An Ethics of Flesh 139

locate the things that matter to us through our emotional taking them in, and
have an immediate sense of what is threatening or essential in all the myriad
ways these qualities announce themselves to us in our emotional response to
them.37 This is vital to the physiognomy of things and to the regard given to
the other’s face.
For Merleau-Ponty, the emotional response to something is a response
to the world’s gesture, to the vectors of sense in the perceptual field, and its
becoming enveloped in an unfolding of meaning that draws together aspects
of the field prior to any reflection or categorization. Before we arrive at a
clear and distinct space of discrete objects, we are enveloped in a space “with
an existential tide running through it, or again the pulse of my existence, its
systole and diastole”38 These tides or trajectories of movement have an affective
or emotional sense to them:

Between our emotions, desires, and bodily attitudes, there is not

only a contingent connection or even analogical relationship: if I
say in disappointment I am downcast, it is not only because it is
accompanied by gestures expressing prostration in virtue of those
laws governing nervous mechanisms, or because I discover between
the objects of my desire and my desire itself the same relationship
as exists between an object placed high above me and my gesture
towards it. The movement upward as a direction in physical space,
and that of desire towards its objective are mutually symbolical,
because they both express the same essential structure of our being,
being situated in relation to an environment, of which we have
already stated that this structure alone gives significance to the
directions up and down in the physical world.”39

There is a significance to emotional apprehension that Merleau-Ponty

admits has elements of contingency and analogy comprising its sense, but there
is also an interplay of structures of human life and the world around us that
give phenomena an emotional sense that is revealing of a more fundamental
meaning. It might be that in some other cultural, historical, and personal
context “soaring above” might not mean exultation or happiness or feeling free,
or that feeling “drawn down to the ground and pinned by gravity” might not
mean being downcast or depressed or stuck, but the emotional sense is not
altogether malleable, either, such that they could easily be reversed, for example.
In the passage we cited earlier in terms of another point, when Merleau-Ponty
says of the scene depicted by Balzac between Felix de Vandenesse and Madame
de Morsauf that “Love is in the flowers . . . the flowers are self-evidently a
love bouquet, and yet it is impossible to say what in them signifies love,”40 he
140 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

is pointing to the fact that there is an emotional sense to the physiognomies

of things, expressions, events, and certainly the faces of others. There could be
some context in which the gift of flowers has another sense, but it certainly is
not the case that giving a smelly garbage bag could ever be a token expressing
love in a comparable way, except in some very peculiar context. The emotional
will always be indeterminate, yet can also be revealing in a searing and com-
pelling manner that reflective insight often lacks. The pilot has served others
from a sense of duty to higher principles, yet his serving seemed empty of
passion and engagement. When the emotional sensitivity to others is lacking,
following ethical principles from a rational duty may be essential to general
well-being. However, when one sees the horror of bombing victims crying over
their missing loved ones and takes them in an embrace, or when a child who
is starving looks at one with hollow eyes and emaciated limbs, and then one
smiles deeply into their eyes and sees a spark of smile kindled in their eyes
and face, something essential is added to the general principles of Good that
call for sacrifice. The principles of ethics become themselves transmuted in
their meaning and efficacy in the prereflective communication of the senses,
imagining, memory, and the other realms of being taken to heart in a fully
embodied way.
 VI
Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity
Kinship versus Substitution

The examination of something, of my silent and slippery connection with

him, perhaps should not be undertaken without examining the connec-
tions with the thing-world and the world-being.1

For Levinas, the call of the face-to-face to sacrifice for the Other moves one
beyond any immediate connection by family ties, ties of comradeship or friend-
ship or any other concrete relations, histories, commitments, or values, since
“the presentation of the face, expression, does not disclose an inward world
previously closed, adding thus a new region to comprehend or take over.”2 The
ethical meaning of the face for Levinas is not the pull into the depths of our
concretely felt entwining with others. The summons is not a lateral one into
a shared contingent world, but a vertical ascent toward a transcendent realm.
We are called beyond the sensible to a realm above ourselves as “the full light
of a public order,” and this is a realm of justice.3 Justice transcends concrete
historical circumstances, although it is then applied to them. For Levinas, the
call of the face is the summons of monotheism: “Monotheism signifies this
human kinship, this idea of a human race that refers back to the approach of
the Other in the face, in a dimension of height, in responsibility for oneself
and for the Other.”4 Our oneness with others for Levinas occurs within a higher
spiritual realm that calls us to our better than earthly selves. In an alienated
world in which perception is in thrall to greed, acquisitiveness, and yearning for
power, this call may provide a power to break out of these violating cycles. Even
in less dire but complacent circumstances, monotheism, fraternity, and the
asymmetrical stand before a higher power may be efficacious for populations
that regard one another as objects and use each other’s bodies as tools—and
indeed this thought returns us to Merleau-Ponty’s fear, with which we began,
that soon the world might think only in terms of “operational thinking” or

141
142 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

“problem-solving.” Certainly, the analysis of Levinas that the level of perceptual

immersion of the world is one of ego-oriented appropriation holds true of
much of our consumer-driven culture. In such an alienated context, in which
perception is not about the depth of the flesh, then being brought up short
by an alterity that refers to a transcendent power commanding respect and
welcome may be an essential break to pervasive consumption, even of other
human beings as mere tools.
Even though this approach to ethics—this call to rising above the con-
crete world to a higher spiritual realm—may have a needed efficacy in a state of
alienation, it may not be the right locus for an ethos of an open and responsive
embodiment of reciprocity and mutual sensitivity to the concrete situation of
others toward which we may aspire. In a situation in which we succeed in
being present to each other in the depths of embodiment, we would not have
to be commanded not to use the other for our purposes and be pulled out of
our world, but would instead dwell with the other person in a shared world
of feelings and apprehensions. With a cultivated sensitivity of perception of
the kind toward which Merleau-Ponty’s thought leads us, there would open up
many levels of understanding others and gaining a different understanding of
oneself through others on a prereflective, felt level. This embodied experience of
interdependence leads to a taking to heart of the plight of others as inseparable
from one’s own destiny. In the introduction to Signs, Merleau-Ponty quotes
Paul Valéry in saying that time is “the body of the spirit” insofar as within
time, the glance at the world that might have seemed to be my appropriation
of what surrounds me is transformed into a vision of “its incompatible and
simultaneous ‘faces.’ ”5 These faces seem to consist in a fire whose collective
presence “gleams elsewhere,” says Merleau-Ponty, yet also seems to indicate
one’s “twins.” They are absent from me, yet they are the presence of all the
other persons who also look at the world as part of a general power of vision.
The face-to-face of each person with all the faces of the world is immediately
present to me in the fabric of the perceptible world as all “the others who are
caught in it” with me.6 Then, when I actually encounter the other’s face turned
not toward the world but toward me, the other and I become “two mutually
enfolding glances, each alone in the world.”7 The lateral overlap recognized by
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is not a state of co-incidence with others, but one
in which we are inseparably bound with others yet also inevitably caught in
difference. Rather than these two paradoxical forces being contradictory, how-
ever, both aspects of lateral relations lead to solidarity among persons if the
depth of the flesh is heeded. We will have to see how both forces are needed
to achieve a meaningful solidarity.
The kind of solidarity that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh engenders is
one that emerges from within the midst of the world rather than putting some
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 143

essential dimension of human existence above the world, then returning to it

as commanded to enact a higher calling within the world. There is a dialogical
insertion in the encounter with the world, as expressed in The Visible and the
Invisible, in which the chiasmatic intertwining of embodying being engenders an
intimacy with the beings of the world that is one aspect of solidarity both with
the world and with others: “if it touches and sees, this is not because it would
have the visibles before itself as objects: they are about it, they even enter into its
enclosure, they are within it, they line its looks and its hands inside and outside.
If it touches and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible
and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because
each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs
to the order of things as the world is universal flesh.”8 Although asymmetrical
and incomplete, there is a mutual enfolding into each other of the perceiver and
perceived. In one of the infrequent passages in which Merleau-Ponty describes
human gazes encountering each other, in The Visible and Invisible he writes
of the intermonde [“inter-world”], “where our gazes cross and our perceptions
overlap”9; this lateral relation is identified as a centrifugal force that spreads
the being of the perceiver into the midst of others and further outward into a
horizontal shared plane. This is a prereflective felt encroachment or enfolding
among persons, things, and events in which there is “an intertwining of my life
with other lives, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my
perceptual with that of others, by the blending of my duration with the other
durations.”10 The faces of beings within the world are part of an enveloping
sense that I can enter, not as confronting “pure individuals, individual glaciers
of beings, nor essences without place and without date,” but rather as expressive
sites that “have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by
proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity.”11 Within the flesh of the world,
at the moment we are face-to-face with another, there can arise pure represen-
tatives of “naked humanity” because all the contingent aspects of their history
are not separable from who they are in that moment of primordial encounter.
We are encroached upon and crisscrossed by all our lateral relations within the
world, and this is the face we turn to others and the world.12
For an ethics to have efficacy, there must be a prior felt unity among
persons in order to even apply ethical principles to them or to feel called
upon to act in their behalf. Rachel McCann states this necessity for ethics
in her essay “A Sensuous Ethics of Difference” that “ethical encounter with
the other requires a consideration of both sameness and difference,”13 which
she finds uniquely in Merleau-Ponty’s embodied sense of intersubjectivity. By
finding the other in and through one’s mutual insertion in the flesh of the
world, there is the needed identity with others that makes us care about them
as a being like ourselves:
144 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Merleau-Ponty details how social interaction with human others

and sensuous interaction with material things are variations in a
single fleshly fabric, as he discusses our fundamental interdependence
with both people and things and the capacity of both to refigure
our horizons. Perceiving another human being interacting with the
world I sense (in Merleau-Ponty’s example, seeing a man pick up
a hat to shield himself from same sun that I feel burning my own
skin), I understand that he or she shares my same world, a field
the flesh structures as a general relational condition of which my
body, the human other, and material things are variations.14

By finding oneself and finding others through the world, and even in encoun-
tering the other in the midst of the world, there is an experience of the envelop-
ment by others as emerging from the same contingent world of interrelations.
Yet, since this unity is also of difference, the unity is one that challenges and
transforms each person continually, as McCann adds: “This relational field, the
flesh, is a milieu of constant, transformative exchange. Sensuous and spatial
things and places transform me moment by moment. . . . Interaction with
human others transforms me as well, as they present new possibilities for
interpreting and interacting with the world.” We are continually bound to
others by every percept, as well as by every perception of others, yet it is a
transformative unity, one that through difference pushes me to change my own
perspective in an ongoing way. It is not a static and formal unity that would
be once and for all, but an evolving unity that transforms with the contingent
events in the world. For example, as portrayed in Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945
novel, The Blood of Others (which also influenced Merleau-Ponty), the main
protagonists Jean and Hélène are called to question the one ethical precept
that seems unchanging: not to kill other persons. Yet, in felt solidarity with
the suffering of others, Paul wants to fight in the war, then later to lead a
resistance cell with the mission to kill German officers and soldiers in whatever
way possible to stop their slaughter of others. Initially, Hélène feels that Paul’s
sudden loyalty to the larger French community is an abstraction that jeopar-
dizes their life together, but through witnessing and feeling the suffering of
the Jews around her, she also resolves to join the resistance group to commit
acts of terror and killing against the Germans.
This solidarity is always fragile, open to the contingent events of history,
because of “the inevitable dissymmetry of the I–Other relation,”15 as Merleau-
Ponty calls it. Although there is intertwining, there is the écart, or gap, among
persons that always remains. Without the gap, there would be no solidarity,
which requires difference as the relational space in which encounter occurs.
Without difference, there would be a dimension of persons that comprised a
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 145

solid block of being without the distance needed to know other or self, nor
could self-understanding or understanding of the other be incomplete and,
therefore, inexhaustible. There would no outside perspective on self or other.
As Bernard Waldenfels says of the import of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s later
work: “As both seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, touching and
being touched, the body is no longer the corps propre (the body proper) but
now conceived as chair (flesh). The noncoincidence within coincidence ascribed
to the state of the body . . .”16 The flesh as the coming together of what is
riddled with gaps, fissures, differences, and even incompossiblity describes the
person as having to encounter endlessly aspects of self in a way akin to the
encounter with others, or as Waldenfels put it, flesh “has the effect that other-
ness penetrates into the heart of self-presence.” The primary way that the self
encounters these dimension of self and others is in the work of expressing and
articulating the prereflective lateral relations among the beings of the world, the
way they are implicated continually in each other’s becoming. It is within this
implication of each in all, which is what is meant by the lateral relatedness of
the flesh, that there is a latent unity of the primordial level of encounter that
persons must work to bring to expression.
In the next section we will explore the meaning and role of the gap
among persons, especially as offering another model of nonabsolute alterity;
for the moment, let us consider further this dimension of unity among persons
that the flesh manifests, and which, for Merleau-Ponty, comes about through
reversibility. This unity, a solidarity among differences and contingency, is quite
different from the unicity of persons in Levinas’s view of the face-to-face. As
he states: “In this welcoming of the face (which is already my responsibility
in his regard, and where accordingly he approaches me from a dimension of
height and dominates me), equality is founded. Equality is produced where
the other commands the same and reveals himself to the same in responsibil-
ity.”17 For Levinas, in answering the face by falling away from my self-in-the-
world, commanded to ascend above the earthly, the sameness of persons is
realized in their being responsible. They remain both within themselves and
with the other, paradoxically alone and together, utterly different and yet the
same. Levinas says, “my unicity qua I contains both self-sufficiency of being
and my partialness, my position before the other as face.” I have the unicity
of pure being and also my earthly perspective out of which I am taken. In
the encounter with the Other, “He and I do not form a number.”18 Levinas
states we are both same and different, but only in that our essential being
is the same as called to a higher realm and thereby able to be a substitute.
It is not by inhabiting the other’s circumstances that I come to sacrifice for
the Other, but by going beyond them in their contingency toward obligation
and guilt that must open to hospitality. The lateral relations among persons
146 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

must evanesce in the initial Saying of the ethical command in order for true
responsibility to come to birth.
In his comparison of the ethics of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, Thomas
Busch points out that for Merleau-Ponty there is always a dialogical relation-
ship with the world and others, and that in the face-to-face encounter for
Merleau-Ponty, the parties involved are immediately “collaborators in consum-
mate reciprocity” in which each person “lends” and “borrows” from the other.
Busch states that for Merleau-Ponty this encounter primordially occurs in the
prereflective envelopment among embodied persons, but that there is also a
“decisional recognition” of the other to bring this overlap to further expres-
sion.19 This means, as we acknowledged above, this solidarity is fragile and
needs to be deepened and worked on to come into its full ethical significance,
as will be treated in the next section. The contrast between the lateral relations
among self and others that for Merleau-Ponty takes us deeper into each other’s
situation in the world, opening us to mutual endeavor as solidifying this bond,
is in contrast to the nonreciprocal givenness of this bond from the vertical
heights in which Levinas sees it originating. Busch elaborates, quoting Levinas:

After reading Merleau-Ponty’s Signs, Levinas, while recognizing its

dialogical viewpoint was not impressed with its stress on a lateral
universality based on mutual understanding. ‘Universality,’ Levinas
wrote, ‘could only be according to Merleau-Ponty’s expression, lat-
eral. This universality would consist in being able to penetrate one
culture from another, as one learns a language on the basis of one’s
mother tongue.’ The image of the lateral contrasts with Levinas’
own image of height. There is no way, according to Levinas, that
a lateral dialogue could avoid cultural relativism.20

Levinas’s insistence on a higher realm that adjudicates among cultures is a rejec-

tion of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological remaining within the realm of expe-
rience. In contrast to what Levinas asserts, for embodied beings whose access
to reality is through the thickness of perception, there is an encounter among
persons and cultures in which I do understand others through the ways our
worlds overlap and that despite the many differences there are shared aspects
of situations that give a common ground to varying cultures. The dialogue
that emerges among differences will be relative to the parties engaged and their
worlds, but this does not leave us with mere relativism. Between the absolute
and the merely relative lies the rich ground of commonalities enriched by the
interplay of difference, the horizontal plane of lateral relations.
Returning to the power of the face-to-face encounter, one must ask
whether transcending the particularity of the one or the many whom one
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 147

faces is not itself a possible violence. This is a vital ethical question in our
world of colliding cultures; for Merleau-Ponty, “there is no essence, no idea
that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography.”21 Certainly,
there are many currently who are called to a transcendent, higher realm of
their respective religions. These religions might all insist on a universality of
humanity and hospitality toward others, and sincerely so, but that does not
obviate the clash of cultures, preventing their adherents from seeing members
of other cultures as equally one’s neighbor. As Merleau-Ponty continues, “the
space or time of a culture is not surveyable from above.” We encounter others
within an enmeshment of culture that consists of a unique spatial and temporal
context involving a myriad of relationships. For Merleau-Ponty this situatedness
cannot be overcome from a purported higher perspective. Despite our ethical
prohibitions and despite the calling to sacrifice for our neighbors, people are
not able to apply these principles to people of other cultures and creeds if they
are not able to form an embodied bond with them and laterally enter their world.
First, to transcend vertically to a higher realm where the historical and cultural
are not significant is problematic in that the primary identity of the other is
within their embodied context. Second, without being able to recognize and
enter the other’s world, one may not be able to apply these higher precepts
to that other, if that other is not recognized as a person precisely because that
other’s world seems so at odds with what one understands to be a human world.
In recognizing these barriers of culture, history, and geography, Merleau-
Ponty responds that a lateral overlap in the primordial face-to-face encounter
with another is always possible. Cultures for Merleau-Ponty may not share
their reflectively articulated ethos, but on the level of embodied being “the
communication from one constituted culture to another occurs through the
wild region wherein they have all originated.”22 To really break through the
barriers of culture and history Merleau-Ponty is asserting is to let oneself be
taken into that prereflective realm of lateral relations. So, for example, one
can find persons of differing religious faiths who feel sincerely that God as
understood within their tradition sees all humans as naked beings requiring
one to sacrifice for others as being neighbors, yet given their cultural training
they might not apply God’s love to persons of the other ethnicity or country.
It may be more powerfully transforming to have them spend the day playing in
the water at the beach together, giving themselves over to the waves together,
splashing each other, sharing smiles and embraces, as has been done with two
contemporary groups having difficulty understanding each other.23 These con-
nections felt at a prereflective, embodied level can break through cultural barri-
ers in these exchanges. Equally, it may be more helpful for cultures in conflict
to undertake common works to engage in, rather than to rely solely on the
power of abstract principles of conduct. It may also be the case that for the
148 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

transcendent principles of a religious ethics, or even a secular ethics, to have

a transforming power in a person’s way of life and relations with others, these
principles need to be forged in the kind of overlap of the flesh that Merleau-
Ponty describes for us, making it more possible for us to open a horizon of
future experiences. So, to finish our example, once two hostile ethnic groups
have engaged in working and playing together and experiencing the humanity
of the other group in a prereflective embodied way, then perhaps they could
apply successfully their religious and ethical principles to each other.
It is helpful to look at the critical power that is usually attributed to
reason, and to see that in the realm of ethics, especially, emotions may have an
equally critical role to play. It is not in doubt that the starting place of Levinas
is well founded: many in the thrall of their emotions and their desires, caught
up in the sensible world, are driven to violate others, to use them as objects
for their gratification, and certainly to overlook any calling to sacrifice for the
neighbor. Merleau-Ponty feared, as we have seen, that “operational thinking”
and the task-orientation of production and consumption would lead us to treat
others and even ourselves as mere objects to be used, occluding a more reveal-
ing meaning of existence. Levinas and Merleau-Ponty agree on this danger;
however, the latter also spent his life articulating a deeper way for embodying
being to fathom the world, one that would give rise to a fraternity of fellow
feeling such as Scheler’s more explicit emphasis. The feeling of solidarity is a
powerful way to awaken from this nightmare of reification. Operational think-
ing and consumerism block out the power of reversibility, and undermine the
felt upsurge of fellow feeling that can lead to moral respect among persons.
The moral power of reversibility has often been recognized and deliberately
subverted by those who wish to violate others. It is for this reason that Nazi
SS troops who were assigned particularly hideous tasks of aggression—such as
machine-gunning 40,000 Jews into a pit at Babi Yar—were given unlimited
alcohol to drink so their senses would be dulled and their compassion for
their victims blocked out.
A parallel point is made by Jonathan Bennett in his well-known essay,
“The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” arguing that Huck will be following
what he believes to be the godly and also civilly ethical thing to do if he turns
in the escaping slave, Jim, to the authorities. His initial feeling is that he must
turn Jim in to avoid hurting another and going against what is right in failing
to treat the elderly woman who “owns” Jim justly as a neighbor. These are the
feelings he has learned from his cultural context. However, as he spends time
with Jim and encounters him in the face-to-face, he discovers that he cares
for Jim and feels drawn to help him escape slavery, despite his initial feeling
that he is immoral in doing so. It is Huck’s deeper and more spontaneous
emotional response that allows him to critique the ethical standards he has
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 149

absorbed from his culture as potentially violating to others. Bennett sums up

this emotional safeguard for critically questioning morality that seems perfectly
rational because it has the status of a socially prescribed “ought”: “Experience
evokes feelings, and feelings force one to modify principles.”24 The experience
alluded to here, however, is one that comes from the face-to-face that is allowed
to reach greater depths of reversibility. Huck is open to a more primary level
of contact with Jim. There are times when established and accepted higher
principles need to be called into question. At these moments, we understand
something more deeply humane and interconnected with others through our
emotions: this can be a corrective to the principles we have come to believe,
even though traditionally this sort of critical power of correction has been
assigned solely to reason.
The question with which we are left is whether we must choose between
the laterality of relations of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology that has an ethical import
and the ascent of the vertical in the ethics of Levinas. Is it true that the reci-
procity of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is an insufficient basis for coming to an
ethical awakening that sacrifice is required for the neighbor? Merleau-Ponty’s
description of the intertwining of reversibility that provides a ground for a sense
of solidarity with others within a historical or social context may describe how
we can come to be so passionately engaged in the welfare of others, but it
does not offer any specific rules of behavior. Given traditional prejudices that
an ethics is, first and foremost, rules that prohibit certain behaviors and are
commands from a higher spiritual realm, it is easy to dismiss Merleau-Ponty’s
descriptions as laudatory but not ethical. Yet, it may be that without this fleshly
feeling of solidarity, no one would actually turn to the other or others in an
engaged way and apply either a religiously based or secularly based ethics of
“higher universal principles.” It may also be that an ethics of solidarity compels
people with a passion and felt identification for specific others in specific ways
that universal principles of duty can lack. The universal may be dutifully fol-
lowed, as for the pilot in the opening sections of Pilote de guerre, but without
that element of true encounter that touches the neighbor in need of help. As
Philip Hallie points out in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the deepest help for
those who become the targets of violence might be receiving from another a
caring compassion and hospitality to counteract the oppressors’ “crushing and
grinding of human dignity” of their victims. Even in the direst circumstances,
Phil Hallie felt the offer of shared feeling might be the help most crucial for
victims, not just aid in worldly matters.25
To return to Saint-Exupéry and the protagonist of Pilote de guerre, the
novel’s last chapter gives further suggestions about the resolution of the dif-
ference between Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. In the final chapter (the chap-
ter following the one quoted by Merleau-Ponty), the pilot ponders what his
150 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

transformed relationship to others through his greater attentiveness and feeling

of involvement with the world means to his ethical sense. The pilot reconsiders
the higher principles of his culture that set up a certain context of relations
among people: “This love of God founded relations of dignity between men,
relations between ambassadors and not between mere individuals.”26 Saint-
Exupéry can now see how the power of being called to a higher plane can
move people in their concrete relations with each other to have another sort
of respect for each other as embodying an intrinsic value. After his transform-
ing experience over Arras, he reexamines the principles that he had found
hollow and abstract in the early chapters of the novel. He now continues:
“I understand the origin of brotherhood among men. Men were brothers in
God. One can only be a brother in something.”27 The pilot now experiences
solidarity with others that he never experienced before; and, because of this
felt unity with others, the ethical principles he earlier felt were hollow now
have greater substance for him. Having this felt enmeshment with others, he
can then envision the belief in some higher spirit, expressible in concrete acts.
Like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, the pilot laments the turn of those in
his culture, including himself, toward materialism and a sense of the individual
as separate from other individuals: “Little by little forgetting man, we limited
our code to the problems of the individual.”28 The pilot had felt that modern
culture had proposed a belief in Humanism that presented people with a
higher purpose and dignity, but that this higher ideal had become lost in these
other pursuits. With this drift in values, the pilots mourns, “we emptied out
all warmth of that very fraternity which our civilization preached to us—since
we are brothers in something and not brothers in isolation.”29 Now, in the
last chapter of the book, the pilot having had a transforming experience that
opens him to the primordial level of perceiving the world and others, he feels
drawn toward the same higher principles that had earlier been empty for him.
He could now also see how these principles had become empty for so many
others. His renewal of belief first required his letting himself go into the fleshly
connection with all others in the tasks they shared, the dangers they faced, and
the quiet appreciation of the simple aspects of life together. The pilot thinks
over this process and relates: “I came back from Arras, having woven my ties
with my farmer’s family. Through the translucent smile of his niece I saw the
wheat of my village. Beyond my village I saw my country, and beyond my
country all other countries. I came back to a civilization which had chosen
Man as the keystone in its arch.”30 Enmeshment in the prereflective world of
fleshly engagement brought back for the pilot the spark and the glow that
enliven the higher principles of ethics.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought shows us the logic behind this transformation:
first one experiences the affective, sensual, imaginal, memorial, visceral, and
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 151

kinesthetic intertwining with the gestures of the world, and then a field of
further manifestation and expression of principles of solidarity makes sense as
founded on this prereflective experience. If one is to be called by the face to
substitute for the neighbor, commanded by a higher power as described by
Levinas, and to do so with full engagement, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy leads
us to see that first one must look at this face as a physiognomy. To look at
the face as physiognomy is to become drawn into the context of this person’s
relationships with the world, a history and a culture. Entering another’s life
of experiences and values within the spark of felt kinship is a different call; it
is a call that compels one in a shared passion, a solidarity resounding in one’s
marrow. This call to sacrifice and hospitality is an open-hearted current from
within the depths of the world, not merely a dutiful command. Feeling soli-
darity in one’s embodied being, the principles of a rational or spiritual realm
can take on new meaning.
There is yet another opportunity for transforming ethics that we are led
to by Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the importance of lateral relations instead
of vertical ones. Ethics from Plato to Hegel has been anthropocentric, giving
humans a responsibility to treat other humans ethically, since humans are
taken as the sole creature directly connected to this higher realm of spirit,
while allowing the animal and natural world to be treated in a destructive
and violating manner. In La Nature, Merleau-Ponty further articulates how the
intertwining of the flesh, of the visible and the invisible, and of the Ineinander
of the sensible is a chiasmatic relatedness to animality. There is a “lateral union
of humanity and animality.”31 The human being is human because it is also an
animal, and the animal others of the world enter into our ways of being in the
world.32 The human corporeal schema is seen as an incorporation of relations
with the world such that “I see through the eyes of the others . . . the world.”33
Here Merleau-Ponty means not only through the eyes of other humans do
I see the world, but through the eyes of the bird overhead and of the snake
slithering up to the water trough in the woods, such as discussed by Derrida
in his lectures compiled as The Beast and the Sovereign.34 Our perception is a
co-perceiving with the world that incorporates myriad beings, since as flesh
there is a “circuit of the visible and with the world.” This overlapping of the
animal, human, and even things of the world encompasses the way in which
the flesh of the world allows a perceiving of the world as if from all these
perspectives that comprise the matrix of sense on a prereflective level. Within
these lateral relations, our human being also expresses inextricably the animal
relationship to the world. Given this weight of the animal upon the human
sense of the world, for Merleau-Ponty the animal has a face.
For Merleau-Ponty, the face-to-face with an animal means that like the
face-to-face with other humans that we have explored through Saint Eupéry’s
152 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

novels, there can be a compelling sense of being enmeshed in a network of

relations, some of which are vital to our sense of self. The depth of self pulled
into a caring with and for others on the prereflective realm experiences not
only a kinship with other humans in our shared engagement in the world,
but also with those animals with which we share engagement in the world.
Merleau-Ponty describes how humans and animals enter an unfolding of the
world that has depths and dimensionalities wherein perception has an entwined
sense in which both contribute, whether in looking at the sky or at the forest,
and simultaneously hear the echoes and feel the rhythms of the animals that
perceive these beings in common with us. We inhabit their depths of sense. In
addition, in our encounter with the world, animals are part of the back and
forth of reversibility. In the next chapter, we will explore the imaginal or oneiric
dimension of the perceived world, which Merleau-Ponty sees as very much
entwined with the animal perception of things. As Merleau-Ponty describes
life on this planet, he does not do so on a vertical axis starting from the inert
matter reaching up toward a purely spiritual realm; rather, he begins with
the decentered horizontal swirl of animate and inanimate life within a dense,
plural matrix. Merleau-Ponty’s sense of transcendence in surpassing one’s day-
to-day understanding is not in being transported to a higher realm, but rather
in entering deeper within a circulation of sense of this world. He concludes
toward the end of La Nature that “the relation between humans and animals
is not a hierarchical relation but a lateral one,” and the outcome of seeing the
human body as insertion into flesh is to “see a relationship of intercorporeity
with the biosphere and all animality.”35 This is not only an epistemological
and ontological insight, but also a new sense of the human in relation to the
planet as part of a larger ethical community than the merely human. There is
a face-to-face with animals in which their relationship to the world as felt by
us in solidarity must be respected and calls to us to aid the overall becoming
of sense and the kinship of life as thriving.
The insertion in the flesh of the world, a prolongation of perception
having depths of feeling, imagining, memory, and so on, leads to a different
sense of kinship, one of compassion that speaks to us in our animality as
embodied creatures capable of spontaneous acts of graceful connection.36 We
feel within our embodied being what it is like for an animal to tremble in the
cold in fear of not having food that day, the panic in the face of a predator,
the light-heartedness of playfully rolling in the grass with other pack members,
and a myriad of other experiences of the animal belonging to its world. In
the face-to-face encounter with animals of varied sorts, we are ushered into
its world, just as in the face-to-face with another person in Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy we are ushered into the person’s contingent, historical context. As
David Morris has written, “An animal face is the face of a body, and expresses
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 153

the whole of that body. This is vivid in the human case: I face all of you in
your face. When I look at your face I don’t just see your face, I see you, your
feelings, your thinking, your attention, a further whole of you, shining in
your face. This is also the case with other animals.”37 Looking at the animal’s
face, the perceiver is drawn prereflectively into the felt context of that animal’s
being at varied levels of feeling and interconnection. The animal’s distinctive
way of being in the world is perceived, or, as Morris continues: “Indeed, in
faces we see something of an animal’s basic way of seeing, being seen by, and
being with, other animals. There are, for example, flock and herd faces, as in
fish, horses and cattle, and flocking birds, whose side-placed eyes are good
for seeing wingmates when moving together as a flock in face of the world.”
These different ways of being related to other animals and the world gives to
varied animals differing ways of encountering the world: “There are loner and
confronting faces, as in predatory birds, human and non-human primates, cats
and dogs, whose forward facing eyes are good for seeing prey or facing one
another. There are also swarm faces, as in insects whose compound eyes are
good for seeing in three dimensional swarms.” These differing ways of being
in relation with others in the world that can be read on the face of animal
other are also possible ways humans have of being in the world. The face-to-
face places me within the circuit of existence we share as being animals with
other animals, and we experience the kinship of interanimality in such a way
that we can begin to care about their well-being. At this prereflective level, if
we approach the animal face with an open sensitivity, the ethical treatment of
animals becomes a felt need. They are no longer strangers; they are kin of a
more distant sort than other humans, perhaps, but kin nonetheless.
Insofar we understand the world of lateral relations of the flesh, our sense
of ethics shifts from the primacy of acting out of the duty to a higher realm or
power toward acting with the spontaneity of felt solidarity among the creatures
of the planet. Part of the circuit we are entering in our interanimality is a
spontaneous acting on behalf of others that involves no thought or principles.
This spontaneous hospitality happens among animals, too. Whether it is a mat-
ter of dolphins surrounding one of their own to protect a sick dolphin from
harm, sparrows mobbing a hawk to save another sparrow, monkeys fighting
off an eagle to save a baby monkey, wolves going out hunting and bringing
back food for an elder infirm pack member, waxwings standing guard over a
stunned one until it recovers, African wild dogs attacking a cheetah to save a
pup, a group of chimpanzees leading chimpanzees from another starving group
to food, terns forming a cooperative line to carry another injured tern away
from the hunter who shot it, or pelicans and crows feeding and caring for
blind fellow crows and pelicans, there is a burgeoning list of acts of sacrifice
and hospitality undertaken in a spontaneous way among animals that is being
154 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

recorded by ethologists.38 The advantage of Merleau-Ponty’s sense of lateral

relations in his developing ontology and especially in regard to interanimality
is that it offers us a justification for treating the animal world that emerges
from a felt ethical obligation stemming from this solidarity with them that the
vertical hierarchy of much of the tradition of Western philosophy has denied.
The direct ethical obligation to animals has been denied by asserting that the
ethical community is comprised only of beings of rational thought or rational
souls.39 In addition, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of lateral relations also suggests
that animals can be seen to be moral themselves in their spontaneously felt
kinship with other animals.40 Instead of human morality being exclusive to
our species, if human morality is grounded in the felt solidarity not only with
other humans but with other beings of the world as well, such as the idea
of the flesh of the world suggests, then morality or ethics is part of a circuit
among beings within the world.41
To extend this thought one step further, it is also possible to see Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology as giving a basis for the even more radical stand of Aldo
Leopold that there is a face-to-face encounter with inanimate parts of the
world and an ethical call from them to us to sacrifice for their well-being.
In The Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, Leopold posits that there is
another sort of community—a “biotic community”—that leads us to a new
stage of ethics, which he calls “the land ethic.” Leopold states that in the earlier
stages of ethics, humans have considered the impact of their actions on other
members of the human community, but at this point in history, it is possible
to understand that “[t]he land ethic . . . enlarges the boundaries of the com-
munity to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land.”42
Leopold believes that our being is inseparably bound with the significant parts
of the biotic community around us. This would follow from Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology of lateral relations in which the flesh is the manifestation of the
“relationship of intercorporeity with the biosphere and all animality,” as quoted
earlier. Leopold does not call on a set of rational ethical principles or an iden-
tity of the biotic community with a higher vertical realm of spirit to make
an argument for the land ethic; rather, he says that “[i]t is inconceivable to
me that an ethical relationship to the land can exist without love, respect,
and admiration for land.” The call to sacrifice for the aspects of the land,
whether forests or water or soil, comes from a felt relationship to them that
gives humans not only a feeling of inseparable relatedness, but also of love
and admiration and respect, just as the pilot in Saint-Eupéry’s novel comes to
feel in the face-to-face encounter with the members of Group 2-33. Yet, from
the immediacy of this felt bond emerges, as Leopold finishes the thought, “a
high regard for its value. . . . I mean value in the philosophical sense.”43 By
this, Leopold means that these feelings of interrelationship within the biotic
 Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity 155

community give rise to an ethical calling in the same sense as philosophy has
understood the obligation to others’ well-being expressed in ethical doctrines.
If we look at Cezanne’s relationship to what he painted, as understood by
Merleau-Ponty, we might understand the parallel between looking at another’s
person’s face and at the face of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Cezanne painted
repeatedly over decades: “Other minds are given to us only as incarnate, as
belonging to faces and gestures. Countering with the distinctions of soul and
body, thought and vision is of no use here, for Cezanne returns to just that
primordial experience from which these notions are derived and in which they
are inseparable.”44 It is on the level of the prereflective or primordial experience
that the lateral relationships give rise to a solidarity on which other reflective
ideas, whether of epistemology or ethics, will be founded.
It seems that both approaches to the face, that of Merleau-Ponty and
of Levinas, and both the concomitant senses of enfleshed lateral relations and
transcendence to a higher vertical plane of Being have their historical place in
helping to achieve kinship on this planet and safeguard ethics. We can look
again at Saint-Exupéry’s pilot, who returned to an acceptance of a belief in a
higher principle to guide him, but only if it was forged in the intimate over-
lapping of sensibility with others in shared endeavor. The call to authority and
the sense of a vertical hierarchy are with us to stay for the foreseeable future
as pervasive forces in global culture. In addition, given the current dominant
ontologies embedded in cultures based on consumption and domination of
the environment and others, it is a necessary restraint on violation and also
a prod to more relational openness. However, it may be that, in the longer
run, it is necessary for the planet’s welfare and greater thriving to cultivate an
appreciation of the sense of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty articulated, for only
then can we enter into nonhierarchical and dialogical relations with all living
and even nonliving beings on this planet. I believe that there is something
wrong with an ethics that bases itself on the sense that we have a unique call-
ing above the destiny of the rest of the planet, and a falsity about its underly-
ing ontology. Reason is an undeniable excellence, but it does not endow us
with an exclusive status of spiritual worth represented by notions of soul or
personhood or intrinsic value. It is both a matter of rights for animals need-
lessly tortured, abused, or exterminated, for ecosystems driven to destruction
by our wasteful ways, and for rocks, soils, and water to retain their continued
existence undefiled, but also it is a matter that these other beings are the flesh
of the world, its depth of meaning, and its vitality in unfolding, and in violat-
ing them we violate ourselves by losing the depth of our being. Our depth
has its source in the reversibility with the beings of the world, and we need
to increase the openness to the lateral dimension of our being now, before it
is too late. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a constant process that he calls “the
156 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

experience of dis-illusion, wherein precisely we learn to know the fragility of

the ‘real.’ ”45 Through our embodying being, we are thrown into the depths
of the world and its inexhaustible sense, yet this access can be constricted to
the point that we seem locked into a nightmare from which we can’t awaken,
to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty’s words from the Introduction to this book. The
ethical call manifested by the felt solidarity of the lateral relations of the flesh
is fragile in that we can lose contact with it. For Merleau-Ponty, there is this
constant danger of misunderstanding with no absolute, permanent principles
to ensure we will do the best for each other, but there is always, despite disil-
lusions, the fact that we can find meaning that “lies always further on.”46 This
“further on” is to be uncovered through ongoing expression and action in our
encounters with others and lies in the depth of the world in its particularities
of history, culture, personal situation, institution, and the indirect voices of
the natural world.
 VII
The Ethical Alterity of Depth
of this World Rather than Absolute Height

Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or—

Transcendence is identity within difference.”
—The Visible and the Invisible (225)

The I-Other, an inadequate formula.

—The Visible and the Invisible (220)

On November 23, 1946, shortly after the ravages of World War II, with its
incomprehensible violence toward others, Merleau-Ponty addressed the Société
francaise de philosophie to present the main ideas of his work. What occa-
sioned this presentation, followed by a discussion, was the publication of the
Phenomenology of Perception. The purpose of the gathering was to provide
Merleau-Ponty a forum to answer questions and objections to the ideas of his
newly published book in order to clarify and defend its theses. His paper for
the occasion, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,”
presented a description of perception as distinguished from sensations, explain-
ing how the prereflective underlies but is also inseparable from the reflective,
and the nature of access to the “present and living reality” through the pri-
mordial level of perception. Merleau-Ponty ended the paper with a reflection
on both the possibility of ethics and also a statement of his stance toward the
idea that there is a transcendent spiritual realm beyond the contingent earthly
world. The paper states that these ideas about the primacy of perception lead
to certain conclusions about action and values; as an ongoing enmeshment in
the perceived world that is continually recreating itself, “morality cannot consist
in the private adherence to a system of values.” Merleau-Ponty then adds that
“principles are mystifications unless they are put into practice, it is necessary
that they animate our relations with others.”1 There are no free-standing fixed

157
158 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

or absolute of commands or ethical principles that can be appealed to that

would stand above the particularity of a historical and cultural situation, illu-
minating it with universal truth. The heart of morality is the way we attend
to others with animation—that is to say, with sensitivity and responsiveness,
and principles can augment the felt presence of those intersubjective relations.
Merleau-Ponty goes on to describe that any action occurs within a concrete
situation in which outcomes, differing perspectives, the need to be under-
stood by others, and other aspects of embodied interrelatedness with others
give rise to the meaning of one’s actions among others. He raises the specter
that some clashes of perspective are “irreconcilable,” especially among differ-
ing nations. These last considerations lead Merleau-Ponty to acknowledge the
contingency of ethics itself as a human endeavor: “nothing guarantees us that
morality is possible . . . but even less is there any fatal assurance that morality
is impossible.”2An ethical world is not guaranteed, but lies before us always as
a challenge. It may succeed, but only on the basis of the openness of percep-
tion forged in concrete situations.
Merleau-Ponty continues, describing ethics as an ongoing endeavor in
which “the perception of a thing opens me up to being,” as within the primor-
dial level of experience, and “in the same way the perception of others founds
morality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego, of a common situation, by
placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field
of another and of all others.”3The founding of morality lies in the face-to-face
with others, through which one enters an enmeshment with and openness to
others as overlapping in embodied perceptions. We open ourselves to the world
we inhabit in common as perceivers, but we are also left in solitude, unable
to reach the other in any absolute sense, only though an opacity of depth, the
inexhaustibility of perceptual sense. The practice of ethical behavior toward oth-
ers is an “institution” in Merleau-Ponty’s reconfiguration of this idea—one that
he will articulate more explicitly and increasingly utilize in his later writings.
For Merleau-Ponty, institution, or Stiftung, is a shared human endeavor that
opens up a certain dimension of a particular realm of meaning that expresses
the deeper sense of our embodied inherence in the world. This opening up of
a dimension of sense sketches forth a horizon of movement in which the past
history of this sense comes to be what it is only through contingent acts that
simultaneously create new futures.
As Merleau-Ponty comments at the end of his 1954–55 course, “Insti-
tution in Personal and Public History,” “everything hangs together, and yet
it would not be possible to say where it is going.” The realm of ethics as a
contingent and historical endeavor of institution comes to impass and seems to
take untoward directions, “but the new impulse allows the obstacle to be over-
come from another direction.” There is no separate realm in which enduring
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 159

absolute answers subsist to which we might appeal, or from which we might

receive salvation. Rather, we struggle together in concrete situations, and the
very things that seem to stand in the way of progress toward our original inten-
tion become the means of addressing the ongoing problems of the dimension.4
Given this idea of institution, Merleau-Ponty finds no need to invoke an ideal
world that gives structure to this one: “The series of ‘idealizations’ which makes
the whole number appear as a special case of a more essential number does not
set us up in an intelligible world from which it could be deduced. Rather the
series of ‘idealizations’ takes the evidence proper to the whole number, which
remains implicit. The historicity of knowledge is not an ‘apparent’ characteristic
of knowledge which would leave us free to define the truth ‘in itself.’ ”5 The
historicity of institution, working in and through the contingent, usually goes
unnoticed in our focus on what we want to achieve. Whatever the domain of
ideas, it misleadingly appears as if these achievements must have an origin in
a realm of intelligibility or pure spirit that sustains our temporal-contingent
striving while also belonging to a realm of absolute truth, due to the cultural
assumptions that the philosophical tradition from Plato through Hegel and
the monotheistic religious traditions have long asserted and disseminated. The
openness of continued institution, however, is produced from the complexity
and density of the situation, in which fidelity to the richness of perception
and expression allows answers to emerge from what Merleau-Ponty calls “the
common field.” Truth is not lodged in a higher realm, but in the shared sense
of this field of perception as it is worked through conjointly, despite—and by
grace of—its divergences.6
In closing his 1946 presentation, Merleau-Ponty assures his listeners that
the lack of any absolute foundation for truth or realm of pure spirit does not,
for him, inspire insecurity about the possibility of an ethical world: “Here, as
everywhere else the primacy of perception—the realization, at the very heart
of our most personal experience, of a fecund contradiction which submits
this experience to the regard of others—is the remedy to skepticism and pes-
simism.”7 It is in the fleshy perceptual depths of this world as inexhaustible,
and therefore always open to further discovery and transformation, that there
are ongoing possibilities to combat doubts about the continued ethical actions
of ourselves and others. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty admits that if our
communication with others and the search for moral truths happens only
through a disembodied reason, “then there is not much to hope for.” The
truth of the face-to-face for Merleau-Ponty can be found only within the
sensible, “at the very heart of our most personal experience,” and not in the
transcendent disembodied realm.8 He states that “history is other people” in
the sense that we have been exploring in this chapter, that is to say, “the
interrelationships we establish with them.” He did not think that a rationality
160 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

separated from experience will dispel the doubts that we all must feel in the
face of the world’s continual iniquities and failures to treat others with dignity
and hospitality. Far from asserting this other realm, he finishes his statement by
asserting that outside of these interrelationships, “the realm of the ideal appears
as an alibi.” It shifts the ground away from the embodied realm where we
are challenged to transform these concrete relationships in ways for which we
are responsible. In other words, the primacy of perception is not an ethically
neutral phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty eloquently phrases this insight: “If, on
the contrary, as the primacy of perception requires, we call what we perceive
‘the world,’ and what we love ‘the person,’ there is a type of doubt concerning
man, and a type of spite, which becomes impossible.” In other words, in the
felt kinship and the overlapping movement of the circulation of sense of the
flesh emerges a sense of community for which radical hate and violence toward
others becomes impossible, if in our sensitivity to these perceptual depths we
are open to transformation.
When Merleau-Ponty describes the love we feel when we perceive this
person, he is clear that this kind of perception does not give us “sensations”
that yield mere “qualities” of the person as the sum of these sensations. This
view of perception expresses a skepticism about the depth of perception that
he attributes, in this passage, to Pascal. It is through qualities, bodies, and
time that we may come to love someone, but this love extends beyond these
initial perceptions to another sense that is the “other side” of them. This, of
course, is what he will later come to call the invisible of the visible. Here,
in this presentation of 1946, he already expresses a similar idea—without yet
having the vocabulary of the flesh—by concluding in opposition to Pascal,
“The absolute which he looks for beyond our experience is implied in it.”
For an ethics to be possible, there certainly is needed a transcendence of one’s
immediate ways of being and the sense of oneself as an ego appropriating the
world according to need and desire, but for Merleau-Ponty, this transcendence
is not to another plane of pure being or God as absolute spirit and truth. It is
through and within the perceptible world that there is transcendence, another
sense of things that comes from these things around us, like the analogy he
draws of grasping as a deeper totality of all time as appearing to us through the
perception of this moment of time: “Just as I grasp time through my present
and by being present, I perceive others through my individual life, in the ten-
sion of an experience which transcends itself.”9 In the concrete situation with
others, I am drawn beyond myself through the particularity of the encounter
to transcend myself to overlap with others in a larger sense of the world and
within others’ situatedness, just as through the particularity of this moment
and being fully within it, I open myself to the depths of time.
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 161

In Retrieval of the Beautiful, Galen Johnson coins an apt term for describ-
ing the sense of transcendence that Merleau-Ponty found in the artists Cézanne,
Rodin, and Klee that resonated with his own sense of human transcendence.
The term is “trans-descendence,” which Johnson explains as a “horizontal tran-
scendence that draws us out of ourselves and into the things and the world.”10 It
is a transcendence on the prereflective plane that contains within it also “desire,
dreams, and eros,” as we have already explored in regard to the desire within
perception that draws us into depths, and will explore in the next part of this
book in regard to the imaginal. The term “trans-descendence” seems particularly
apt to describe Merleau-Ponty’s idea of going beyond oneself, since it is always
into greater depths of the world as perceived that the self is drawn. Johnson
states that “whenever Merleau-Ponty was drawn into speaking of spiritual life,
it was always a spirituality of this world of which he spoke, not a transcendent
world that is other and beyond.” Johnson then quotes Merleau-Ponty’s essay of
1952, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in which he remarks that
“transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged
bearer.”11 For Johnson this is further affirmation that in Merleau-Ponty, “tran-
scendence has to do with humanity’s own embodied incarnation and reaching
out toward the other and the world.”12 Within our mutual enmeshment in the
embodied world we are drawn into the place of others and reach toward them.
Yet, to return to Merleau-Ponty’s final flourish in his presentation on
November 23, 1946, he closes his presentation with stating straightforwardly
that any interpretation of God as residing in another realm apart from the
earthly enfleshed one must be rejected. Here and elsewhere, he states that for
him, Christianity and the Incarnation are an attempt to find another sense of
divinity than one this is a separated absolute. However, insofar as Christians
do interpret God as otherworldly or those of other religions take God as
supernatural, then Merleau-Ponty must disagree: “My viewpoint differs from
the Christian viewpoint to the extent that the Christian believes in another
side of things where the ‘renversement du pour au contre’ takes place.”13 True
being is not elsewhere, but is right here in the depths of the sensible world.
We do not need to posit that the truth of this world comes from above us
from another realm, but rather it emanates from within the interplay and
depths of this realm. The gesturing of sense in this realm reaches beyond itself
while remaining grounded in it. The Nietzschean echoes of the reversal of
“the true and apparent worlds” as the true world being the one that has been
called only apparent are meant to sound in the reader’s ears, as Nietzsche is
cited in the previous sentences. Merleau-Ponty states this in the next sentence:
“. . . in my view the ‘reversal’ takes place before our eyes. And perhaps some
Christians would agree that the other side of things must already be visible
162 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

in the environment in which we live.” This thought is taken up again later

in Merleau-Ponty’s passage cited by Johnson, in which Merleau-Ponty not
only rejects any notion of “vertical transcendence,” but insists that it is a
misunderstanding of Christianity to carry on this vision, since the “Christian
God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination.”14 For
Merleau-Ponty, this is the point at which we arrive in our thinking once we
embrace the ontology of embodying being, and he repeats this emphatically
and concisely more than fifteen years later in March, 1961, in the last working
note included in The Visible and Invisible: “Precisely what has to be done is
to show that philosophy can no longer think according to the cleavage: God,
man, creatures . . .”15 The spiritual is not a realm that can be separated from
our human intertwining, nor even from our intertwining with creatures and
the natural world. I believe that Galen Johnson eloquently expresses Merleau-
Ponty’s sense of how divinity and the spiritual are on this horizontal fleshly
plane of existence: “God and the immortal life are not so much above us as
before us and below us in the faces, bodies, and lives of those who are most
vulnerable: children, the ragged, the homeless, the sick—and also landscapes,
seascapes, mountains, valleys and canyons where there lives a sublime stillness
and wonder.”16 The flesh of the world not only folds back on itself in percep-
tion, but it has the power to summon its entwined members to compassion
and ethical response to preserve the intrinsic value of this earthly life.
In the intervening years, Merleau-Ponty has forged the philosophical
language needed to articulate his ontology of embodied being, centered on
the notion of the flesh of the world, and he uses this language to persist in
maintaining that there is no vertical ascent toward a separate realm of abso-
lute spirit or reason; this could never be what shows forth in the face-to-face
encounter for Merleau-Ponty, nor could it ever be the ground of an ethics.
Unlike Smyth, I believe that Phenomenology of Perception does lead to an ethics,
and this ethics is one of felt solidarity perfectly expressed by the phrases that
he carefully excerpted from Pilote de guerre to furnish its closing declaration.
This ethics gradually deepened and developed in the next decade and a half
as Merleau-Ponty increasingly articulated his indirect ontology of the flesh.
When in the working notes of November 1960, cited previously, Merleau-
Ponty denies there is a “problem of the other” as it is usually approached—that
is, as a confrontation between two subjectivities—he says that the relations
with others in this “intermundane space” come from above, below, and all
directions as “entwined,” and concludes that “the other is a relief as I am, not
absolute vertical existence.” Others are given with me in solidarity from all
sides and alongside me, like my shadow, the “other side” of myself, yet with
a separateness that cannot ever be fully fathomed. Within this plane of fleshly
solidarity, there is no revelatory insight of a plane of infinite height that Levinas
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 163

finds. This contrast is described between Merleau-Ponty’s earthly affirmation in

opposition to a Levinasian infinite ascent by Edward Casey: “For then I am
brought up against the Other not as a partner, a copain (i.e., a chum or pal
of equal standing), but as incommensurable, as towering over me, as absolute
in his or her “height.”17 Casey agrees that that the Levinasian interpretation
of the face-to-face encounter as the moment of being called by the Infinite
undermines the stakes between persons: “Neither freedom nor equality, nor,
for that matter, fraternity, is at stake as I encounter the other face to face.”
The call to the Infinite, rather than elevating the face-to-face encounter to a
spiritual epiphany, hollows out its fleshly, engaged significance.
The face-to-face does not bring an intertwining of presence among per-
sons for Levinas, but quite the opposite. As Schroeder puts it: “Ethics, the
welcoming of the Other by the self, is only accomplished through the recogni-
tion and maintenance of the radical disjunction of same and other, of subject
and object.”18 Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, throughout his work, it is a matter of
both fraternity and equality in the intertwining relations among persons, who
overlap in the world perceived despite difference. He expresses this thought
in the terms of The Visible and the Invisible: “It is through it [reversibility]
alone that there is passage from the ‘For Itself ’ to the For the Other. They are
each the other side of the other. This is why they incorporate one another:
projection-introjection—There is that line, that frontier surface at some dis-
tance. . . .”19 The founding of ethics comes from this overlap and dehiscence,
this complexity of recognition of another person on a felt level, in which I am
myself, but also the other. I can feel and dwell in the other person’s situation,
as co-presences, but from the distance of my experience.
The face-to-face encounter that would have an ethical power for Merleau-
Ponty is very much a perceiving of the expression on the person’s face, the
look in his or her eyes, and as we noted earlier, when citing Morris, it is
very much a perceiving of the whole person’s particular situation and history
through the face and body—a point also highlighted by Casey. The face-to-
face encounter for Levinas is not a perceiving of the Other’s facial expression
or any aspect of his or her concrete existence at all. As Schroeder summarizes:
“The look of the Other is therefore of no primary consequence, if one fol-
lows Levinas; the sensible face is the epiphany of an absolute alterity beyond
(not behind, or beneath) the image conveyed by the Other’s look, or even
the glance.”20 Schroeder explains that on the level of perception, for Levinas,
“the height that is invoked is of an infinite distance, such that the eyes fail
in their vain attempt to see the hidden face of the Master.” It is not the par-
ticular face of another encountered that has any ethical bearing, nor is there
any gestured communication between self and Other, but rather “the Master’s
voice is heard, and this is where the ethical teaching is encountered. This is
164 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the phenomenon of the ‘listening eye,’ the moment when vision is revealed
first of all to consciousness, to thought, as speech or discourse.”21 The face-
to-face is empty of ethical meaning as a perceptual phenomenon for Levinas,
whereas for Merleau-Ponty, in the face-to-face there is “realized on the spot,
by encroachment, thickness, spatiality—”22 in the recognition of the chiasmatic
relation with another and with others.23 Otherness is not absolute for Merleau-
Ponty, and there is not a rupture as for Levinas; rather there is a spanning,
a going-together of incompossibles that as we have seen is Merleau-Ponty’s
definition of depth, a logic in which same and other, identity and difference,
are simultaneously retained and collapse. Transcendence as horizontal, as flesh,
becomes a transcendence of depth.
This contrast in the meaning of the face-to-face for Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas may especially strike the reader in the opening pages of The Visible and
the Invisible, when Merleau-Ponty considers two people looking at each other’s
faces: “Here is this well-known countenance [Voici ce visage bien connu],24 this
smile, these modulations of voice, whose style is as familiar to me as myself.”25
In the first moment, Merleau-Ponty says we can just regard the other as a spec-
tacle. However, our perception may summon us to enter the other’s situation:

But should the voice alter, should the unwonted appear in the
score of the dialogue . . . suddenly there breaks forth the evidence
that yonder also, minute by minute, life is being lived: somewhere
behind those eyes, behind those gestures, or rather before them, or
again about them, coming from I know not what double ground
of space, another private world shows through, through the fabric
of my own, and for a moment I live in it; I am no more than the
respondent for the interpellation that is made to me.26

There is an openness within perception that takes in the shift away from the
norm in the other’s expression that calls me into his or her world through
the entryway of our shared world. This interpellation of myself through look-
ing at the other, especially in the face-to-face, may especially pull me out of
my normal frame of reference, dwelling in my own situation, when there is
something different or amiss with the expression of the other person, pointing
my perception toward his or her situation. In a way different from yet parallel
to Levinas, the face to face for Merleau-Ponty is not focused only on literal
facial expression, for the face may reveal the whole body’s gesture, its overall
relationship to the situation. The call of the specific changes in the other’s
situation is a pull to co-presence with them in their situation.
Casey, whose description of the glance draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ontol-
ogy of the body and flesh, also asserts the immediacy and particularity of
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 165

a perceptual summoning of ethical obligation in one encountering another

in need: “When I see someone in distress, in pain or suffering of any kind,
mental as well as physical? I feel instantly obliged. Obliged, first of all, to take
notice, and obliged as well to take action if this is pertinent or helpful.”27 The
glance takes in swiftly and prereflectively the sense of the other in situation
and perceives his or her distress, not as an object with characteristics to be
identified through reflection, but as a felt pull into the other’s feelings and situ-
ation. Casey’s idea of the face-to-face also opposes Levinas’s call to an absolute
realm of alterity. Casey gives the example of seeing a person with a crippling
disease struggling down the aisle on a plane and, in perceiving the expres-
sion of struggle in her face, feeling the impulse to offer aid. The frustration
and effort in her facial expression, gestures, and posture directly awaken one’s
own feelings of solidarity in embodied being and create an immediate echo
in one’s body. One may be led to muse on all humans’ shared fragility and
mortality, occasioning the thought of how we need help from each other, but
these thoughts come only after the immediately felt pull.28 Another of Casey’s
examples concerns people who don’t know each other: a person approaches a
couple involved in a fight from a distance, and sees that the man is striking
the woman. Even in a prereflective glance, the one approaching discerns that it
is two people who know each other, not a stranger mugging another stranger.
Casey relates how the person has an immediate sense that, by drawing near,
his action will embarrass the man, inhibiting him from continuing the assault.
Indeed, it works. In the exchange of glances, all parties immediately perceive
the situation through their own eyes and through the eyes of the others. The
situation is transformed by the entrance of a third person, giving the man a
chance to control his anger, breaking the rhythm and allowing him to see
himself with the eyes of a stranger. Of course, this is an unusual situation in
that the ethical intervention happens quickly and nonverbally. It is not unusual
in its site of encounter, however, as Casey declares: “Ethics, then, resides in
the face to face encounter, in its unguarded openness and transparency, in its
abrupt actuality.”29 In the prereflective perceptual contact, the actuality of the
other’s situation strikes us, since perception is open to what emerges and the
perceptual is transparent in that we take in immediately at multiple levels the
sense of what we perceive.
Casey’s point is consistent with the argument in this chapter that ethics
is at first the prereflective pull to aid another’s well-being because we have
connected with that person, overlapped with his or her situation, and taken to
heart what is happening with that other. If we hesitate from giving immediate
response, we may reflect further, deliberating whether to act and in what way,
pondering ethical principles. But Casey, in emphasizing immediate perception
of distress in another as a call to help, is offering an explicit criticism: “How
166 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

much of ethical life pivots on this pristine perception of distress is rarely dis-
cussed by ethicists, who tend to regard it as a merely preliminary moment, a
prelude to proper action, something that precedes principled conduct: a matter
of mere ‘apprehension’ and not to be confused with the ‘comprehension’ that
being an ethical person entails.”30 The point being, it is not only Levinasian eth-
ics that places priority on the call of another realm, or at least the call to reflect
on ethical principles, as the source of our obligation to others; this approach
to ethics has been dominant in Western cultural and philosophical traditions.
Given our Cartesian sense that we are first of all minds, turning us away from
the rich sense of embodying being, the ethical pull that occurs in immediate
perception is discounted in favor of a reflective grasp of the situation.
Alternatively, even if the felt level of ethical pull is acknowledged, it is
seen as the intuition of an intelligible meaning originating from another sphere
that is its true origin. Casey remarks on this reflective dislocation of the ethical
sphere: “We presume that the real action resides elsewhere: e.g., in consider-
ation of principles, memory of past actions, and in the future action that is
being called forth.”31 The ethical pull of felt solidarity is dismissed as being
“mere feeling”; it is assumed that ethics consists in deliberating on principles
and applying them to past and future experience. Certainly, the longstanding
Western tradition of distrust of bodily feeling, desire, and emotion as forces
that undermine ethical behavior is the source of this tendency. This tradition,
from Plato onward, asserts that bodily experience must be extirpated or at least
subdued, as reflected in Plato’s image of bodily feelings as unruly steeds that
must be restrained on the path to the good (Phaedrus 245c–254e). Levinas
stands firmly in this tradition, for as David Kleinberg-Levin states, we can
understand Levinas only if it is recognized that for him ethics begins with the
moral law coming into conflict with the “biological nature of the flesh,” since
“it is in the nature of the body to oppose and resist the moral law whenever
the law calls for inhibition of its impulses and desires.”32 This distrust of
the nature of embodiment is precisely what is overturned by Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology of the flesh in its demonstration that the depth of the perceptual in
feeling, emotion, and imagination can lead us to a deeper sensitivity to the
nuances of our relationship to the world and others.
Much of this chapter has emphasized the power of the overlap of worlds
in face-to-face perception, yet Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions throughout his
work, leading into his late writings on the ontology of the flesh, always preserve
the other pole of the tension that is necessary for the face-to-face to have an
ethical dimension: the pole of alterity. For the ethical call to occur, one can-
not merely assimilate the other person to one’s world and projects, but must
be pulled outside oneself into inhabiting at least partially the other’s differing
world.33 Perception of any being for Merleau-Ponty irremediably encompasses
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 167

both aspects of this tension: “The world is what I perceive, but as soon as
we examine and express its absolute proximity, it also becomes, inexplicably,
irremediable distance.”34 The perceiver enters into things and their sense, and
yet at the same moment each being is opaque, an unfathomable mystery as an
inexhaustible depth. Merleau-Ponty likens this openness, yet obscurity, to how
when we look upon the face of the world, it opens to our gaze and simultane-
ously withdraws from us: “Everything comes to pass as though my power to
reach the world and my power to entrench myself in phantasms only came
with the other: as though access to the world were the other face of withdrawal
[l’autre face d’un retrait] and this retreat to the margin of the world a servitude
and another expression of my power to enter into it.”35 The relationship of
becoming open to the world is a kind of “servitude,”36 Merleau-Ponty states,
because what confronts us in perception seems to be a threshold of openness,
yet is so only because it is a displacement into a depth that cannot be mastered.
Perception cannot master its depths, yet “it is necessary that the perception
maintains in its depths all their corporeal ties.” The perceiver’s intertwining is
never liquidated by an absoluteness of distance, but is rather prolonged into
the depths. In other words, the price for the openness to others and the world
is always to be drawn beyond oneself into depths that are not fathomable, yet
are the inextricable “other side” of one’s situation.
When I am drawn into the other’s situation through the interworld we
inhabit, the tension between “this side” and the “other side” only deepens,
or as Merleau-Ponty observes: “At the very moment that I think that I share
the life of another, I am rejoining it only in its ends, in its exterior poles.
It is in the world that we communicate, through what in our life, is articu-
late. . . . The intervention of the other does not resolve the internal paradox
of my perception.”37 The perceiver is other to herself—both within the world
and returning to herself from the world. Being drawn into the life of the other
is not a matter of joining the other’s life at its center, but rather its “exterior
pole,” just as the other person returns to himself or herself from the world
as opaque. Otherness becomes deepened by returning to oneself through the
world as perceived and shared with others. The other perceived as coming from
the inexhaustible depths of the world is in relation with me in such a way
that there can be “no question of a reciprocal relationship between me and the
other, since I am alone to be myself,”38 especially “when one thinks of the mass
of contingencies that can alter both,” drawing me into deeper unfathomability.
Renaud Barbaras describes this alterity of the depths of the world that is also
the alterity of others: “The other is itself only if it borrows from the world its
alterity, if it proceeds from the world’s depth.”39 The other is inextricably part
of that larger circuit within the world’s depths to which the perceiver returns
with a sense that there is always more to explore.
168 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

That each percept is both an opening and a withdrawal, and therefore

inexhaustible, having ever more depths to fathom, is essential to Merleau-
Ponty’s thought. There is an opacity that does not allow union or coincidence
of perceiver and perceived, and our understanding of the other will always be
partial, or as Merleau-Ponty notes, “what is proper to the visible is, we said,
to be the surface of an inexhaustible depth.”40 The surface of the perceived
opens into a depth from which it is inseparable; in this way, the surface of
a being that is perceived is physiognomic or expressive of its way of being
in a situation that shows forth its sense, but its depths can always be further
entered into by following the trajectory of perceptual faith. The overlapping
of self and other in perception doesn’t yield a simple unity, but rather a dis-
junction or dispossession—much as in vision, where in “the kinship with the
visible, the vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively.”41 The
relationship is not one of beings that merge but rather of “two circles, or two
vortexes, or two spheres” that move about each other, and are “concentric when
I live naively, and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly decentered
with respect to the other.”42 The perceiver and perceived may share a center
for fleeting instants of prereflective experience, but with greater awareness and
reflection are realized to be decentered with respect to each other. Perceiver and
perceiver are always divergent, even when overlapping, and their divergence is
lodged in the depths of the world in which each is nested.
In the face-to-face between persons for Merleau-Ponty there is yet a fur-
ther decentering of each person from all others and from himself or herself in
the depth of the world. This decentering does not derive from anything like a
Sartrean confrontation of objectifying consciousnesses, and nor does it devolve
from the face as trace of the Infinite, whose imperative finds me subjected to
the Other in sacrifice. To cast this in Merleau-Ponty’s own words: “For the
other to be truly the other, it does not suffice and it is not necessary that he be
a scourge, the continued threat of an absolute reversal of pro and con, a judge
himself elevated above all contestation without place, without relativities, face-
less like an obsession.”43 This absolute would amount to a “faceless” rendering
of the face-to-face, since it leaves behind the particularities of the perceptual
and physiognomic sense. In this passage Merleau-Ponty is undoubtedly think-
ing of Sartre, but the logic of his objection also fits the portrayal of the face-
to-face by Levinas, and indeed any philosophy in the Plato-to-Hegel tradition
that takes the perception of others to inaugurate a metaphysical confrontation
or to occasion an appeal to a supersensible transcendent as resolution among
persons. The idea of the self-Other opposition is a mistaken formulation for
Merleau-Ponty: “The I-other problem—a Western problem.”44 The more apt
response would be to transform this dire scenario into that of self and many
others engaged together in the world. Rather than seeing this sort of absolute
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 169

alterity in the face-to-face, “it is necessary and it suffices that [the other] have
the power to decenter me, to oppose his centering to my own . . . that the
other’s body which I see and the his word which I hear, which are immediately
present in my field, do present to me in their own fashion what I will never
be present to, what will always be invisible to me, what I will never directly
witness.” The other’s presence to me throws me into the depths of my field
of perception to confront an absence, but it is not an absolute absence or
otherness; rather, Merleau-Ponty describes it as more “a difference in terms of
dimensions which are from the first common to us.” In the depths of the world
as incorporating incompossiblities there is a depth that affords an alterity, but
one that is bridgeable in a way that is conducive to an ethics of deepening
solidarity in the world.
Rather than the face-to-face with another being the encounter of self and
Other, the persons are “not two contradictories, but rather the reverse of the
other,” seeking to fathom each other by delving more deeply into the shared
world they inhabit. Others in their depths are invisible to me, but only as the
invisible of this visible world, not as belonging to an absolute and utterly sepa-
rate dimension. We are invisible to each other “only because we are moments of
the same syntax, we count in the same world,”45 and this paradox of depth is
our both our relatedness and distance from each other. This sense of the alterity
of others, as an alterity of depth as opposed to an absolute alterity, allows for
an essential dimension of ethics to emerge—that ethics is about gaining deeper
self-understanding and not just following imperatives. I need to be open to the
give and take with others to see the ways in which my perspective is closed
to the perspective of others of differing cultures, beliefs or situations. Rachel
McCann articulates this aspect of the depth of the flesh: “As an element of the
flesh, human alterity is also a form of participatory exchange, one in which
we resonate particularly deeply with the flesh’s interrogative ‘opening itself to
the experience of its own difference.’ . . . For in relating to a human other,
we experience another style of being radically like our own yet manifestly an
equal interlocutor with divergent desires, and every human encounter thus
becomes an opportunity for self-understanding alongside the opportunity to
understand the other and the very structure of the flesh.”46 The ethics of the
flesh is not imperative so much as interrogatory—just as the ontology of the
flesh ultimately culminates in interrogation, not assertion. It is a participatory
exploration in which all parties are coming to a deeper sense of themselves as
well as the others with which they are enmeshed. Even if we obey an ethical
imperative to refrain from violence against others or to shelter them from
harm and distress, we will not forge a long-term hospitable relationship with
them until we begin to dissolve our own prejudices, understand ourselves bet-
ter, and become open to understanding others in a new way. This can lead
170 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

to an ethics’ greatest achievement: a transformation of the person through

self-understanding and through give-and-take with others. When ethics is not
transformative in this way, the parties involved find themselves continually
verging on the moment of conflict, or on the threshold of transgression of
the other’s well-being.
If ethics is to be guided by a set of imperatives that are absolute and
unchanging, then it becomes problematic in considering how to apply them
to an ever-changing world of new conflicts among people. New ways of being
hospitable and of defending victims as well as new ways of violating the vul-
nerable arise that are visible only by inhabiting the other person’s or people’s
world and situation. In addition, if ethics is to be guided by imperatives that
remain as originating in one group’s perspective in claiming to have an access
to an absolute realm that supersedes all differences, then not only will continual
conflicts arise among differing cultures, religions, and types of beings (e.g.,
humans versus wolves), but there will be little possibility of negotiation and
mutual learning from each other. A clash of absolutes often leads to the use of
force and violence. A claim to absolute revelation precludes an openness to radi-
cal self-examination and openness to others’ claims to truth. Merleau-Ponty’s
ethics of fleshly solidarity whose alterity is one of the depths of intertwining
and continual transformation allows for the kind of dialogue that is needed
from an ethics. Helen Fielding expresses this strength of an embodied ethics:

If an ethical position becomes reified into one perspective, it then

becomes detached from reality, and its ethical power is actually lost
because it no longer touches upon the embodied and hence shared
space of the in-between. This does not mean we end up with a
relativistic ethics, because what is essential to an embodied ethics
is that there is a real world that we can see, touch, hear, and point
out to one another, that is, a common world. At the same time,
phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in
terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations
and meanings.47

When one culture sees another culture’s way of life as revealed by an absolute
standard to be immoral or decadent, and reciprocally the other culture sees
the first as violating and barbaric, there can be a contest of whose revelation
of the absolute is right, with neither side convincing the other. Alternatively,
abandoning absolute claims, there can be a fleshly attempt to feel, imagine,
and sense the other’s world and find ways to meet creatively and avoid vio-
lent conflict. In the alterity of depth there is always some common ground,
as well as differences, that can be explored by embodied beings occupying
 The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height 171

the same planet. Fielding gives voice to this power of ethics: “An ethics that
denies incompossibles, the coexistence of multiple perceptions of reality, risks
becoming an ideology, cut off from the movement of life. Depth provides for
an openness that allows me to move around and to see things from different
perspectives precisely because it is inexhaustible rather than infinite.”48 Ethics
must be able to provide a place of movement, a place of development from
stalemates, especially in today’s global interchanges among radically variegated
cultures. This can happen in the face-to-face encounter that moves into the
depths of the world. Otherwise, what is seen as a certain revelation of the
absolute by one culture is a dogmatism or even a fanaticism from the perspec-
tive of another culture with a radically different history and situation.
An ethics that sees alterity as absolute and open to the imperatives of
the infinite takes each person as the same in his or her essence before a
higher power, an idea Levinas reworks in his idea of substitution where in
the face-to-face of becoming hostage to the other. This means that “I” find
what Bettina Bergo calls an “other-in-the-same,” as “I” am now a “me” that is
“for-the-other,” but not through any identification of the particularity of the
Other, but as assuming an ethical responsibility common to all.49 In contrast,
an ethics that sees the alterity of others as emerging from the depths of a
common but fissured world is an ethics that like the dynamics of perception
in perceptual faith is always going forward to plumb more sense from the
inexhaustibility of what is encountered. As Helen Fielding notes, this gives a
flexibility to an ethics that otherwise would be lacking: “An ethics that does
not take embodied relations, that is reality, into account—and that allows for
only one perspective, though perhaps originating from embodied perception,
since all new acts do—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, for open-
ness to others, and for being part of a common and shared reality that opens
up possibilities for the future.”50 If Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh is
correct, then ethical revelations that claim to be revealed as absolute do not
come from a separate realm of the infinite or pure spirit, but emerge as the
invisibility of this visible world that we inhabit together as inexhaustible in its
depth. Openness to this sort of depth is on openness to the otherness of the
other, yet also embodies the vitality of seeking the deeper sense of a common
world.51 It is this continued seeking of deeper senses of this common world
that itself is an ethical practice that engenders the transformation of selves
with and through others.
 Part III

The Imaginal, Oneiric Materiality

and Poetic Language
 I
Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination

The imaginary has no depth.

—Phenomenology of Perception (323)

Incomprehensible in a philosophy that adds the imaginary to the real . . .

—The Visible and the Invisible (262)

A vital dimension of the depth of perception as articulated by Merleau-Ponty is

the world as revealed through imagination. Yet, we will see in this first section
that Merleau-Ponty continually deepened his articulation of imagination from
his treatment of the subject in his earliest to his later works, as is suggested by
the juxtaposed quotations above from 1945 and 1964, respectively. There are
differing modes of imagination, and only gradually did Merleau-Ponty come
to focus on the imagination that lines the depths of perception and to dem-
onstrate how perception’s fuller sense is only possible as thoroughly wedded to
imagination, how the imaginal is as central to being as is the perceptual, and
finally how an ontology of the flesh can only be articulated with the use of
imagination—or in other words, as a poetic ontology. It is necessary to point
out that the term imaginal has been used throughout this book instead of the
more familiar term imaginary (which is also the more traditional translation of
l’imaginaire) because the English term imaginary already has many associations
that separate the sense of what is revealed through imagination and diminish
the role of how imagining reveals reality. These associations would negate the
ways that Merleau-Ponty articulates imagining as part of the “thickness” or
depth of perception that gives us access to the being of self, others, and the
world.
Imagination’s central role in our perception of ourselves and the world has
not often been acknowledged in the traditions of Western culture or philoso-
phy. This is yet another way that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied being,

175
176 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

perception, and eventually the ontology of flesh provide a new direction for the
Western philosophical tradition.1 If the perceptual has often been discounted
as our access to being by being reduced to mere sensations by empiricism or
to chaotic inputs of sense needing mental ordering and construction by intel-
lectualism, then the imaginal has been doubly disregarded by most Western
philosophical and cultural traditions as being part of our access to meaning
and truth. For empiricism, at least important factual value is given to sensa-
tions,2 but imagination is taken to be merely their decaying sense, revived and
recombined, which by itself offers no key insight into the nature of existence.
The imagination has often been portrayed by idealism as the mind’s fanciful
contents unfettered by any necessary fidelity to the world, or perhaps more
importantly as a mediating tool of sensation and intellection. Culturally, the
imagination has often been linked to “make believe,” a childish foolishness
suited to entertain at best, at worst perhaps the mark of decadence or mal-
functioning of mental capacity in hallucinations. As Edward S. Casey notes
in the beginning of his Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, “The first fully
articulate theory of imagination in the West, that of Plato, placed imagination
in the lowest rank of mental faculties.”3 This original conception of imagina-
tion did not bode well for the way it was to be assessed in the later history
of philosophy, as Casey remarks: “Thus the course of philosophical theorizing
about imagination is launched in a highly critical vein.”4 Setting forth from
this inauspicious beginning, Western philosophy continued to overlook imag-
ining’s power within our perceptual access to self, others, and world. Casey
shows how those traditions that either subordinate imagination to other ways
of apprehending the world, or make imagining a mediating link between dif-
fering faculties of apprehension, or make imagining superordinate to other
faculties in reaction to this denigration (like the Romantics, for example, who
make imagination the only true access to reality), all displace imagination
from its enmeshed role with other ways to fathom being.5 In contrast to these
traditional ways of seeing imagination, Merleau-Ponty increasingly articulates
how the imaginal is at the heart of perception of the real.
Given this philosophical and cultural context, it may not be surprising
that attention has only recently been turned toward Merleau-Ponty’s insistence
that imagining is central to perceiving the world. In his essay “The Texture of
the Real: Merleau-Ponty on Imagination and Psychopathology,” James Morley
notes, “Though Merleau-Ponty is well known for his thesis of the primacy of
perception and the introduction of ‘embodiment’ to philosophical discourse, he
is less known for the theory of imagination contained within, and generated
by, his understanding of perception.”6 Of course, it is also true that Merleau-
Ponty’s ideas about the imaginal are scattered throughout his works and notes
and have to be brought together for a sustained treatment of the topic. This
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 177

makes it easier to avoid confronting Merleau-Ponty’s rather radical position

on the imaginal. Finally, since Merleau-Ponty turned his attention increasingly
toward the imagination as he developed his philosophy, especially his ontology
of the flesh, one must follow the progression of his thought to understand
how he sees the imaginal. Phenomenology of Perception contains only early hints
about the dimension of the imaginal and how vital to both perception and
the ontology of the flesh it is to become.
The crucial role of the imaginal that Merleau-Ponty will explore in his
later writings is only adumbrated in the Phenomenology, yet this text lays out
important beginnings for understanding the role the imaginal plays in percep-
tion. Annabelle Dufourcq, in her Merleau-Ponty: An Ontology of the Imaginary,
addresses this issue in Merleau-Ponty’s early ideas of imagining: “The notion
of the imaginal is right away widespread in the early philosophy of Merleau-
Ponty, but it is not thematized in the Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-
Ponty employs abundantly a set of terms associated with the imaginal, not to
challenge the particular kind of representations and behaviors that one cur-
rently calls the imagination, but to describe perception, the lived body and the
life-world.”7 This is the situation in which one finds oneself in describing the
imaginal in Merleau-Ponty. One must start with the descriptions of perception,
the way the body engages the world and the structure of the surrounding world
of the perceiver, to see what Merleau-Ponty is articulating about the imaginal
in Phenomenology of Perception. There is no explicit description of the way
imagining lines the perceptual, or how each is necessary to the other. Dufourcq
says of this lack: “Phenomenology of Perception does not circumscribe a specific
domain of the imaginal or a concept of the imaginal.”8 For this reason, we
will proceed in this section by looking at Merleau-Ponty’s own realization that
much more needs to be described in terms of the imaginal, and that what
he says about the perceptual faith, the gestures of the world in movement,
physiognomic perception, and the perception of space are rich beginnings of
a theory of the imaginal and its sources.
If we return to Merleau-Ponty’s address to the Société française de philoso-
phie in 1946, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,”
to elaborate on and clarify the ideas expressed in Phenomenology of Perception,
we find the discussion afterward ending on a rather contentious note. Jean
Hyppolite presses Merleau-Ponty to acknowledge that there must be a realm of
ideality that founds meaning. Merleau-Ponty in response says that certainly he
has more to say about ideality—not as a separate realm, but as enmeshed with
perception—which he will come to describe later in his work as the invisible of
the visible. In making this reply, however, he suddenly turns to the imaginal.
First, he states that his work in describing perception has as yet only opened a
territory for phenomenology: “Certainly, there is much to be added to what I
178 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

have said. On the basis of what I have said, one might think that I hold that
man lives only in the realm of the real. But we also live in the imaginary, also
in the world of ideality. Thus it is necessary to develop a theory of imaginary
existence.”9 Merleau-Ponty is here admitting that Phenomenology of Perception
can easily be misread as focused on a narrow definition of the real, whereas
he knows that much has to be added to show that embodied existence is also
very much about dwelling in the imaginal. He then makes a second remark,
which makes even clearer that he feels more remains to be said about the
capacities of imagination within the perceptual: “The same creative act which
is at work in imagination and in ideation is present, in germ, in the first
human perception (and I have obviously been incomplete on this point).”10
Merleau-Ponty’s interlocutors do not pick up on his remarks about imagina-
tion, and Jean Hyppolite does not seem to grasp the idea of an ideality within
perception as its “other side.” Jean Beaufret, however, who speaks after Hyp-
polite’s somewhat obtuse reply, understands that Merleau-Ponty’s work already
has an ontological import and is able to demonstrate that the phenomenon
goes beyond itself without needing another realm of ideality in opposition to
perception. He disagrees that these ideas have gone “too far,” and instead says
they are “not sufficiently radical.”11 Both in terms of ideality and in terms of
the imaginal, Merleau-Ponty will indeed become increasingly radical, until he
arrives at the ontology of the flesh in his last writings.
What is most informative about this interchange, however, is that Mer-
leau-Ponty himself, right after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception,
recognized that he needed to articulate the role of imagination in perception
much more fully and describe the imaginal within the world more completely.
Merleau-Ponty is right about this need, but he is also correct in that his descrip-
tion of perception with regard to the imaginal is not totally lacking but is
rather incomplete. There are many undeveloped sketches in the Phenomenology
of Perception that open the central place for imagination within the perceptual
world. In the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty mentions
the imagination in an equivocal fashion as both “not incompatible with the
context” of perception and also as “figments” of imagination that dissipate as
perception resolves. These two modes of imagination are not clearly distin-
guished at first. It is only later that this distinction will emerge as Merleau-
Ponty develops his theory of the imaginal in opposition to Sartre’s well-known
theories of the imaginal as expressed in L’imaginaire, published in 1940.
In these first pages of the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty explains how
the field of perception is not structured “from above” by judgments and cat-
egories, but instead occurs on a prereflective level that is self-organizing. One
aspect of this auto-organization pointed to by Merleau-Ponty is the imaginal:
“Equally constantly I weave dreams around things. I imagine people and things
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 179

whose presence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in fact
involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary.”12 The
imaginal is a thread of what Merleau-Ponty goes on to call, in that famous
phrase in the next sentence, the real as “a closely woven fabric.” The imaginal
is woven around things, sometimes loosely, sometimes more tightly, with the
other dimensions of the perceived that weave together to form the real. In some
cases the imagined is incompatible with the rest of the perceived context, in
other cases it emerges as incompatible later, and in yet other cases the imaginal
is that which increasingly deepens and confirms the originally perceived sense.
In the former case, Merleau-Ponty continues to describe how immediately, on
a prereflective level, before we can render any judgments, the “most plausible
figments of our imagination” are dispersed and eliminated because they are
not resonant with the unfolding of perception. Already there is implied what
Morley calls the “imaginary-real as an open-ended continuum.” At one end of
this continuum would be those pure figments of imagination that are utterly
at odds with the perceived world and point to what is “pure fantasy,” as we
say, or as Coleridge would say, mere fancy, and at the other end would be
those images, sounds, and feelings that seem to line percepts and give them
sense, vitality, and depth.
These two poles of imagining can be seen to be representative of Sar-
tre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s increasingly different approaches to the imaginal.
In calling them poles on a continuum, however, it is necessary to stress that
any one instance of imagining probably entails a mixture of both aspects of
the imaginal, and neither can be attained in an absolute sense: there is always
some grounding in the perceived world for an imagining, even one that is
quite fantastic; and, correlatively, no matter how much an imagining seems
to bring together, intensify, and deepen a percept, there is never a coincidence
with an essence apprehended, since the real is inexhaustible. For Sartre, who
is interested in detailing bad faith, alienation, and the futility of the project
to be, the imaginary is the unreal, the presence of the absent or to the absent.
As the unreal, the imaginary can be clung to as a way of ultimately avoiding
the dynamism and engagement of the real, as in his example in Being and
Nothingness of the woman who imagines that her fiancé, who abandoned her
decades ago, might still appear at their designated meeting place, and so she
comes to sit on the appointed park bench day after day. This is an empty
imagining: an imagining the woman knows is unreal on some level, a pure
fantasy, but she has convinced herself to believe that its unfolding within reality
is imminent. By contrast, however, there is a necessary imagining that “fills
in” the reality of the perceived world—as happens on one’s actual wedding
day, when fleeting images of one’s soon-to-be-spouse, about to walk down the
aisle, give palpable sense to one’s own walking down the aisle, adding to the
180 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

excitement, deepening the meaning and giving unity to the unfolding scene.
The perception of the scene would have no sense without this sort of imag-
ined lining to what is happening, in concert with myriad other imaginings
of countless couples being wed, images of love and commitment, and so on,
which are the background meaning to this ceremony.
For Sartre, two dimensions are separate: the being of the world as per-
ceived and capable of further exploration, and the unreal of the imagined,
which is a nonbeing and has no more content than what one projects into it.
As Kearney colorfully states it: “Sartre’s investigations open up a whole new
world of existential ‘unreality’—what he calls the imaginary life. . . . The real
and the imaginary are always separated by the Chinese wall of le néant. ‘The
world of the imaginary is completely isolated,’ writes Sartre. ‘I can only enter
it by unrealizing myself in it.”13 Sartre’s characterization of the world of the
imaginal is unreal, nonbeing, at odds with perception. In many ways Merleau-
Ponty seems to agree with Sartre’s characterization of imagination, which can
be perplexing for the reader, yet at other times he seems to be suggesting
another idea. James Steeves, in Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
of Imagination, states that “at first Merleau-Ponty appears to be on the side
of Sartre.”14 Steeves points to supporting evidence: Merleau-Ponty’s glowing
review of L’imaginaire, his echoing of Sartre in The Structure of Behavior—in
which he seems to affirm that perception and imagination are two different
modes of consciousness—and to many statements in Phenomenology of Percep-
tion. Steeves suggests that for unwary readers, “It seems in these early texts by
Merleau-Ponty that he agrees with Sartre’s belief that the image is a mode of
consciousness,” and furthermore, “Merleau-Ponty also seems to adopt Sartre’s
belief that the imagination and perception are radically different and incom-
mensurable modes of consciousness.” Yet, as a consequence of his careful read-
ing the Phenomenology and the work on imagination that is to follow, Steeves
understands that Merleau-Ponty does not find the imaginal to be the product
of consciousness, or “mental contents,” nor does he consider perception and
imagination radically different.
When Sartre distinguishes the imaginary as a realm of nonbeing, as not
having depth to be explored, he is focusing on a particular kind of imagina-
tion that has too often been taken as the paradigm of the imaginal by the
dominant philosophical and cultural tradition, and as such has reinforced the
ongoing opposition of the imaginal to the real. This sort of imagination is the
act of returning to perceived contents, often images, and recombining them
to create representations of new fictive events or beings. It is the “free play”
or even “idle play” of the imagination—what we commonly refer to as “make
believe.”15 This fancy—preoccupied with combining and associating images that
do not capture the deeper meaning of existence—is what Coleridge wanted
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 181

to distinguish from the serious writer’s use of imagination. He admonished

writers not to be fooled by the fact that fancy and imagination seem to be
similar: “A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment;
each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and
different.”16 In so admonishing, Coleridge attempted to guide writers away
from fancy toward imagination proper. It is to this type of imagination that
Merleau-Ponty is referring in the passages of the Phenomenology in which he
seems to be agreeing with Sartre. Merleau-Ponty agrees that this sort of fan-
ciful conjuring of the imaginary creates a phantasm: “The imaginary has no
depth, and does not respond to our efforts to vary our points of view.”17 Such
a phantasm has been created by a deliberate or reflective act of consciousness
that does not necessarily emerge from prereflective dialogue with the percep-
tual face of the things we encounter. This use of imagining, which is “thin”
in content, says more about the experience of the one who indulged in this
creation than it does about the world.18 Merleau-Ponty contrasts this sort of
meaning from the sort gained through perception when he writes, “[t]he real
lends itself to unending exploration, it is inexhaustible.”19 In perception as an
ongoing process, there are always more facets and more senses to uncover.
The phantasm, by contrast, is an act of imagination that does not emerge
from within the trajectory of perceptual faith that seeks a deeper sense of the
percept; it is not part of the world we face, but rather “glides over time as
it does over the surface of the world.”20 It does not emerge as the lining of
the perceptual, the material, the factical, or the historical, and cannot return
to inhabit them or add to the internal interplay of their sense. In describing
how one perceives “in the full sense of the word” as fully immersed in the
prereflective, Merleau-Ponty parenthetically calls this immersion “the antithesis
of imagining,”21 which undoubtedly refers to the phantasm of fancy. It is rather
is a creation of arbitrary freedom of sense-making that is at odds with the real
world in just the way Sartre sees as paradigmatic of imagination.
The seeming confusion in Phenomenology of Perception about the status
of the imaginal is the result of Merleau-Ponty’s describing differing modes
of imagining.22 Sartre’s paradigm for imagination fits the fanciful mode, and
he emphasizes its power to detach one from enmeshment with the prereflec-
tive embodied world with others in the service of an attempt to achieve an
unlimited freedom—and also to deceive oneself and others in bad faith. For
Merleau-Ponty, however, starting out from the silent, primordial world of pre-
reflective perception and its physiognomic beckoning to the perceiver, there
is another type of imagination that is inseparable from perception itself. This
type of imagination is not a product of the ego, but emerges from the world
in dialogue. In Phenomenology of Perception there are only initial sketches of
what this other mode of imagining would be like in the descriptions of the
182 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

prereflective presentation of physiognomy, gesture, and space, in which the

imaginal is present as a dimension of the depth of sense of these phenom-
ena. We will look at Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions insofar as they comprise
an implicit theory of imagining that is, nevertheless, as he himself realized,
“incomplete.” For Steeves, it seems there is a lack of clarity in the Phenomenol-
ogy about imagination: “Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty is not always clear in
Phenomenology of Perception about which mode of imagining he is discussing.
For example, while at times he seems to treat the imagination and perception
as polar opposites . . . at other times he claims that they are simply different
modes of presenting objects of consciousness (and thus not necessarily mutually
exclusive of each other, as Sartre would say).”23 There is a moving back and
forth between both sorts of imagining in the Phenomenology. Steeves realizes
that Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of imagination that seem to be like Sartre’s
can be seen as phenomenological description of fancy: “Even the statement
above that the imagination and perception are opposed to each other could
be taken to mean only that a kind of imagination is so opposed to percep-
tion, namely fanciful thinking, in that it approximates a Sartrean negation of
reality.”24 If these descriptions of imaginings are indeed products of fancy that
are dispersed within the perceptual world and become resolved with further
perception or only linger as part of an act of bad faith or manipulation, then
indeed they have a place within a phenomenology of perceptual experience.
Steeves later affirms that embodied being is the “pivot” between fancy and
an imagination more deeply grounded in perception.25 If Merleau-Ponty is to
provide a thorough phenomenology of embodied existence, he must include
both modes of imagination in his text.
Since both fancy and the deeper imaginal both are part of our embod-
ied experience, it may be that there is a lack of clarity in the way Merleau-
Ponty moves back and forth in the Phenomenology between the two modes of
imagining—or it may be that he is making a point about a lack of clarity in
the prereflective world of perception. Depth, as we have seen throughout this
work, is comprised by the juxtaposition of beings that are incompossible. As
we have noted, perception moves between two poles within a continuum of
imagining and is always to some degree a mixture of both. Just a few pages
after contrasting the inexhaustibility of perception and the real with the lack
of depth in the fanciful use of imagination, Merleau-Ponty states: “The world
is still the vague theater of all experiences. It takes in without discrimination
real objects on the one hand and individual and momentary phantasms on
the other—because it is an individual that embraces everything.”26 The world
perceived is ambiguous and embracing, not clear and distinct. It forms a gestalt,
occurring within a horizon that incorporates the interplay of many kinds of
sense, which is its depth, as an inexhaustible reserve of further sense that can
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 183

emerge from this ongoing interplay. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty continues, “To

have hallucinations and more generally to imagine, is to exploit this tolerance
on the part of the antepredicative world, and our bewildering proximity to
the whole of being in syncretic experience.” It is on the level before reflection,
before predication and language, that this entwined sense emerges: between
the real and the unreal, between the perceived and the imagined, between
the present perception and the weight of the past, and what is to be further
unfolded. The key, notes Merleau-Ponty, to seeing this level of sense is “remov-
ing apodictic certainty from perception and full self-possession from perceptual
consciousness.”27 It is the open-endedness and incompleteness of any perception
that allows it to gain the depth of being interwoven with all these other ways
the world can appear
It is the power of imagination as fancy to weave imaginary aspects around
things we perceive even if within the unfolding in time of these images, feelings
or possibilities, they show themselves at odds with the sense of the perceived
context. They do not form relationships rhythmically and in flow with the
unfolding of the phenomenon perceived that “fit” or “add to” the emerging
sense, as does the other mode of imagining that is the lining of perception.
For the pilot returning from Arras in Pilote de guerre, for example, the image
of receiving a powerful hug or witnessing a jump for joy in facing his com-
mander, Alias, in returning miraculously from his mission and sitting down
at dinner, may flit across his visual field or within his feelings like an ephem-
eral spark. This is not Alias’s manner, however, and despite no doubt being
overjoyed at the appearance of the overdue pilot, he just stares at him with
his noodles hanging out of his mouth and makes no other gesture.28 When
they sit down together at the mess, such imaginings disperse, but are part of
the momentary flow of perception. Merleau-Ponty says that such imaginings
are soon pushed aside or fade away given the self-organizing of the emerging
gestalt of perception. Given Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the self-organization of
perceptual phenomena, their autopoeic nature or the autochthonous forma-
tion of gestalts, as the perceived unfolds on the prereflective level, figments
of this sort of fancy disperse as the other elements that interplay with each
other continue to interweave to deepen the emerging sense. As an aspect of
the overall flow of phenomena, such phantasms are part of a phenomenology
of perception and embodying being.
This is not to say that these products of fancy cannot also at times and
under certain conditions have a power to haunt us in ways that alter the
sense of the whole for us. To take another example that was important to
Merleau-Ponty, when In Search of Lost Time, the narrator imagines to himself
obsessively that the young Gilberte misses seeing him in the park and will
certainly appear tomorrow, or when he is at home, pining for her presence as
184 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

if they had another sort of relationship despite all the perceptual and other
evidence to the contrary, the narrator allows himself to be obsessed by these
imaginings. Even the most arbitrarily constructed fantasy can assume power
in our lives. The same is true for collective phantasms, as history has repeat-
edly demonstrated. The word “allows” seems telling in this context, because
the narrator is in some sense manipulating himself into a small, fantastically
imagined corner of his world, rather than rejoin the larger interplay of percep-
tions, thoughts, emotions, and so on, that would dispel his obsession. This
would force him to take responsibility for areas of his life that he would rather
not face at the moment, indulging what Sartre would deem as bad faith. If
he were to do this, he would discover these phantasms have “no thematic or
explicit meaning and that it dissolves under objective thought,” but neverthe-
less one can narrow one’s focus to live prereflectively in this smaller horizon
populated by one’s fancies, like persons with schizophrenia, as Merleau-Ponty
discusses in the Phenomenology. Given that even the most fantastic imagin-
ing has some ground in the perceived world, these phantasms can be clung
to, since, as Merleau-Ponty concludes, these “phantoms are fragments drawn
from the clear world and borrow from it such standing as they are capable of
enjoying.”29 The fantastic is only such because it is a fragment of the whole,
but the whole with its interplaying and unfolding parts forming a Gestalt is
the real, and instead these phantasms are islands of escape.
Most of Phenomenology of Perception, however, draws on an implicit
sketching out of the imagination that is the “other side” or “lining” of per-
ception. If in perception we are drawn into a give-and-take with the perceived,
such that beings, events, qualities, relations, and contexts are given to us in
their sensuous appearance, there is an inseparable aspect of imagining that
carries forward the unfolding and deepens the significance of this appearing.
Before examining what implicit ideas may be present in the text that will lead
to a fuller idea of the imaginal in Merleau-Ponty, I believe it is helpful to look
first at some specific characteristics of imaging. Both Edward S. Casey’s and
Jean-Luc Nancy’s descriptions of the imaginal are helpful as guides. In Casey’s
analysis of imagining, he isolates several traits that are distinctive of the way
beings are presented through imagining. First, he says, there is a spontaneity to
imaginal contents of sense and meaning that is experienced “as if they thrust
themselves” into one’s sense of their presence. This, I believe, can be likened to
an intensifying quality of imagining. However, Casey says this characteristic is
paired at the same time with a sense of creativity, namely an idea that moves
in the opposite direction, that the imaginer is always active in shaping the
experience.30 If both are true of imagining, then there is a heightened sense
of the give-and-take of reversibility in imagining, something that is reported
continually by artists and noted by Merleau-Ponty several times in later essays.
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 185

Casey then states there is something in the scope and manner of being given
in imagination that the sense that emerges has an unmistakable quality about
it—that it is “just what it presented itself to be.” In other words, there is an
aspect of the imaginal such that its presence is gathered into itself strikingly
as appearing to be just what it is. Finally, Casey describes the openness and
indeterminacy of the imaginal as opening up possibility in a unique way as
having the felt quality of being possibly developed in various directions.31
Taken together, these aspects of imagining would allow what is presented in
perception to come into presence more fully as what it is, manifest more its
possible unfolding, intensify the sense of reversibility with the perceiver, and
yield an open indeterminacy and thrust forward.
These qualities then would be the properties manifested by the image,
which Casey defines as “the mode of presentness pertaining to the total imagi-
native presentation.”32 Casey adds that this presentation through imagining
is marked by types of clarity, a textural quality, and a degree of directness.
Imagining comes forth in an image, which visually oriented Western culture
tends to think of as a visual image, like a picture in some sense, yet as Jean-
Luc Nancy reminds us, “Indeed, the image is not only visual: it is also musi-
cal, poetic, even tactile, olfactory or gustatory, kinesthetic, and so on.”33 He
adds that the image brings to the fore an intimacy of what is presented “that
reaches me in midst of intimacy—through sight, through hearing, or through
the very meaning of words.” The image manifests in myriad modes of becom-
ing present in an increased intimacy with what we experience in encountering
the world; it is not suspended before us at a distance, but rather reaches the
perceiver in a place of intimacy.
The way the image brings a person into an encounter with the world
is distinctive, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s descriptions in The Ground of the Image
dwell on the qualities of this encounter and the power of images. The image
as Nancy considers it comes about only through imagination: “The image
must be imagined.” To be presented with an image of something through
imagination differs from other ways of a being becoming present. Rather than
merely appearing before the person to whom a being is present, the presence
of an image of something in imagining comes forth differently, or as Nancy
states: “The image is outside the common sphere of presence, because it is the
display of presence. It is the manifestation of presence, not as appearance, but
as exhibiting, as bringing light and setting forth.”34 The imagination makes
the presence of something become displayed. Presence becomes illuminated
and brought home to the person imagining. This brings something forth that
is not normally brought forth in the day-to-day perception of things, if its
becoming manifest lacks this imaginal dimension. The way that the image
works, for Nancy, is that “it must extract from its absence the unity of force
186 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

that the thing merely at hand does not present. Imagination is not the faculty
of representing something in its absence; it is the force that draws the form
of presence out of absence—that is to say, the force of ‘self-presenting.’ ” The
imaginal, as Casey notes, is “thin” in comparison to perception, and Nancy
makes the same point in saying that the image is “distinct” in that it “stands
apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability.”35 The
image is not something of practical use in the way things are, as normally
presented to us in mundane perception; this is its “thinness” or distance, yet
at the same time this is a drawing forth of the presence of things. The loss
of practicality is a gain in the light thrown on presence. In terms of the pre-
vious chapter, this means the image makes the face of things shine forth in
presence—a force that is a self-presenting. It also marks the opposite moment
of experience to where this book began with Merleau-Ponty’s dire warning of
becoming lost in operational thinking in a nightmare in which the presence
of the world is dim and vague. There is a unique kind of force to imagining,
one that is contrary to the prejudice that sees it as impotent. In this way,
the imaginal is the contrary of high-altitude thought that reduces the world
to things-in-general and for which things “are emptied of their content and
wither away.” This makes it vital to Merleau-Ponty’s aim in the Phenomenology
that “the first philosophical act would appear to be the return to the world of
actual experience which is prior to the objective world.”36
Perception plunges into its world and what it perceives. Part of this
motive force comes from the imaginal dimension of perception’s thickness, for
as Nancy says, when the imaginer has an image, “he penetrates it, is penetrated
by it.”37 It is as if instead of being entertained in some mental theater of the
mind, I am touched by and touch the image: “The image touches me, and,
thus touched and drawn by it and into it, I get involved.” The image inhabits
its contents and they become part of the imaginer. Nancy also explains that the
image is not an atom of input. The image detaches itself from its ground in a
way the things caught in the practical nexus of tools and projects do not, due
to their immersion in the hodological space of the perceiver; yet paradoxically
the image bring its ground into presence as the ground passes into the image
itself and then is brought forward to the imaginer. It is as if the image becomes
the physiognomy not only of an object or event or person but of its context
or history or life, which is there in the expression of the “face.” The image of
bread passed around the farmer’s table in Pilote de guerre, for example, evokes
the presence of the family ties, the sacrifices they are making to house the
pilot, the love they share, and so forth, just as the image of Gavoille brings
forward, as part of the image, the sense of his personality, the import of his
deeds, his place in Group 2-33, and so forth. In being taken into the image,
and through the image into its ground, the imaginer is involved with the
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 187

unfolding of what has had its presence highlighted by the imaginal lining of
the percept. The imaginer comes to inhabit the context of the image.
Nancy contrasts the sense of identity of the imaginal with the sense that
comes from an intellectual grasp of things or from naming things by means
of concepts. He states: “The image is the nonlinguistic saying or the showing
of the thing in its sameness,”38 which is the particular force or a power of the
image. The sameness that emerges in the intellectual grasp of beings, or in
their being asserted in propositions of language, is one that bleaches them of
their particularity and their lived relationship to the person, or as Merleau-
Ponty states in the opening of the Phenomenology, as “devoid of instinctive
and affective meaning,” lacking “that vital communication with the world.”39
The sameness that emerges within the force of the imaginal is one of inten-
sity, a kind of physiognomy, an attraction that draws the embodying being
into an intimacy that entwines the being of the imagined and the imaginer.
This dynamic and fleeting image, which has been seen as inessential to the
reality of the word in much of philosophical and cultural tradition, is that
which allows the perceived to take on vitality and a kind of mattering which
is the mark of the real and of having presence. Again, Nancy phrases this as,
“[o]ne could say that the image—neither world nor language—is a ‘real pres-
ence.’ . . . This presence is a sacred intimacy that a fragment of matter gives
to be taken in and absorbed.”40 The materiality of the world as lined with
the imaginal is what draws our embodied beings into interrelationship, such
that the presence of beings is not merely arrayed before the perceiver, but is
webbed in indeterminate though possibly branching out meanings that have
an attraction for the perceiver who has perceptual faith.
The imaginal as this highlighted presence that is continually “gathering
itself together in its intensity” draws one along in the desire that we have
discussed as the heart of perceptual faith. One prereflectively seeks more sense
from what is presented in perception that can become unfolded only by pro-
ceeding into temporal thickness and the depths of the world. The distinguish-
ing mark of the image, according to Nancy, is to be the source of this desire:
“The image is desirable or it is not an image.”41 As we have stated before,
however, this is not the desire to possess or even the desire to be something,
which Sartre would have us believe is at the heart of all desire. For Nancy,
the power of attraction of the image is a force, a lighting up the presence of
what is imagined. This is what embodied being desires on this prereflective
level of taking in the world: to become intimate and involved with the image
as “this pressure, this animation, and this emotion.”42 Ultimately what we seek
in perception as embodied beings is to be taken into the world as alive and
meaningful. The imaginal is the gateway to this sense and depth. It is also
true that while bringing forth the ground within the image, the imagination
188 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

also brings us into a kind of unity with the world that is unlike the distant
unity of conceptual synthesis. The power of the imaginal displays presence
and open possibilities, so that we enter into the vitality of the world in which
such openings to depths emerge, yet we are pulled out of the sort of everyday
immersion that is a dimly lit taken-for-granted amalgam of interlocking proj-
ects. This is the force of the imaginal to draw us into a world, but one that
highlights presences, which are made to stand out, such that, as Nancy writes,
“Force itself is nothing other than the unity woven from diversity.”43 Imagining
brings beings forth to display their presence in a singular manner, effecting a
diversity of the imagined. As both Nancy and Casey describe the imaginal, it
comes forth with a sense that the context of what is imagined is integrated
into its imaginal face, thus illuminating the connection with other beings.
Drawing on what we said in the first two parts of this book, this description
of the power of imagining means that in shining forth the simultaneous unity
and difference of beings, imagining opens a depth that is the coming together
of what should not go together; this is the distinctive alterity of depth, which
is a matter of what can be entered only as inexhaustible.
The Phenomenology of Perception demonstrates how the world as it comes
forth in perception is “the core of reality,” such that “a thing is a thing because,
whatever it imparts to us, is imparted through the very organization of its
sensible aspects.”44 Its perceptual unity is such that as Merleau-Ponty describes
each percept—the color of the carpe, for example—is inseparably related to
its wooly texture and also with a certain tactile value, as well as to a certain
muffling of sound and so forth. We stand face-to-face with the beings and the
world, and we recognize their physiognomy. Yet what is given to us in percep-
tion is not a closed set of relations, but an open one, partially obscure, that
the perceptual faith follows in seeking more sense: “It is thus of the essence of
the thing and of the world to present themselves as ‘open,’ to send us beyond
their determinate manifestations, to promise us always ‘something else to see.’
This is what is sometimes expressed by saying that the thing and the world
are mysterious.”45 The perceived being is just like the face, as Merleau-Ponty
again compares them, in that what lies within that expression is always open
to further exploration and is an “opaque structure.”46 This mystery of the
perception is one that the perceptual faith enters in going into the depth of
the inexhaustible. Merleau-Ponty then continues in the text to contrast this
perceptual exploration with the appearance of phantasms and hallucinations
that do not fit the fabric of real, that is to say, do not fit in with the con-
text and are at odds with the revelation of the interrelated nexus of qualities
perceived. Even though Merleau-Ponty doesn’t yet point to another mode of
imagination identified as such, he does point to the nature of the interrelation
of the qualities of what is perceived as a result of the power of symbolism:
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 189

“There is a symbolism in the thing which links each sensible quality to the
rest.”47 The way the qualities are linked is through their symbolic value as part
of the distinctive style of a thing, the way its silent gesturing or physiognomic
expression communicates with the perceiver. This suggests that further opening
up of this sense can occur by the exploration of this symbolic sense through
the power of an imagining that deepens and expands the implicit meaning of
the percept in need of further exploration.
Perceptual faith impels perception toward the greater unfolding of what is
perceived as the forward movement of a desire for sense; yet if the imaginal is
the opening-up of possible sense of a being—as well as the sense of the inter-
relatedness of qualities—then it is also part of the motive force of perceptual
faith. James Morley interprets the “tolerance for ambiguity” as a “preconceptual
acceptance that the world can never be absolutely divided between the imagi-
nary and the nonimaginary.”48 He locates this tolerance at the center of percep-
tual faith, in which perception proceeds from a partial sense to an increasingly
greater sense of what is perceived. Morley points out that the quality of faith
in giving ourselves over to belief in an imaginal presentation is not different in
kind from the sort of belief Merleau-Ponty describes throughout the Phenom-
enology as necessary for perception, but it is less explicit and takes more inter-
rogation of perception to be seen.49 To affirm that imagining takes the initial
percept and allows it be deepened and explored would also be consistent with
Nancy’s conclusion: “Thus the image is essentially ‘monstrative.’ ”50 The image
shows forth what is contained. In the instance of the percept, the contained
is what has not yet unfolded in time and is still in the depths of what has
been perceived. Again, Nancy expresses this power of the image: “The image
is what takes the thing out of its simple presence and brings it to pres-ence,
to praes-entia, to being out-in-front-of-itself, turned toward the outside.”51 It
is imaging, bringing forth into an image, which turns the perceived being to
face the perceiver so that its sense becomes more manifest and less obscure.52
Previously, we looked at Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of Schneider, the
war veteran for whom “the world no longer has any physiognomy,” whose
perception is no longer directly carried into movement, who cannot grasp the
sense of a story unfolding rather than being “a succession of facts to be noted
one by one,” and who can’t apprehend other’s people’s feelings or attitudes
toward him through their expressions and gestures. Now, it is important to add
that Merleau-Ponty also sees as central to these deficits that “[t]here is in his
whole conduct something meticulous and serious which derives from the fact
that he is incapable of play-acting. To act is to place oneself in an imaginary
situation. . . .”53 The lack of seeing possibilities and the depths of meaning
in a situation are aspects of the loss of the imaginal. Schneider’s inability to
inhabit his perceptions, to enter into the world and its unfolding, to see the
190 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

emotional sense of people’s gestures and to follow a story is partly a failure

of imagining to open up the percept as unfolding and to follow its trajectory
toward an intimacy with the world. Schneider stands outside his world. It has
lost its physiognomy for him, as have the faces of other people, because of a
loss of imagining. Schneider perceives as a recording device would, being unable
to inhabit the situation and explore possibilities other than the most literal
and instrumental. Schneider’s predicament helps demonstrate by implication
that normal perceiving has the capacity for a greater depth and development,
becomes nuanced and symbolic in another way for most perceivers because it
is lined with the imaginal. Schneider can’t imagine himself into the context of
a story. Yet to perceive fully is to enter a story, an unfolding drama of sense.
Another description of an aspect of perception that involves an implicit
sketch of the power of the imaginal in the Phenomenology of Perception is the
link drawn between physiognomic perception and another kind of knowing
found in the body’s movements in its everyday dealing with the world. Merleau-
Ponty’s emphasis on a new kind of meaning was implied in our treatment
of the how the world speaks in indirect voices as movements experienced as
gestures. Movements in the world and movements in response to the world
have traditionally been seen as empty motion, having no meaning in them-
selves, whether in the view of Western science, philosophy, or culture. Yet, for
Merleau-Ponty, movement is not dumb, not a matter of blind forces interact-
ing, but is gestural.54 Movement is perceived within the dialogue with the world.
In his chapter “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility,” Merleau-
Ponty stresses the give-and-take of gestural sense of hodological space—space
as a network or matrix of practical relations—as not merely an imposition of
projects from the perceiver onto the objects that surround him or her, but
that the things of use solicit us in trajectories of expressive motion. It is as if
we are gestured to by lines of force radiating from their physiognomy: “When
I sit at the typewriter . . . there do not occur perceptions which stir up rep-
resentations, but patterns are formed as I look, and these are endowed with
a typical or familiar physiognomy.”55 This physiognomic motor meaning is a
sketching of the possible between perceiver and perceived: our response to the
movements solicited by the face of the typewriter brings forth possible com-
munications given our desires, or, to use another of Merleau-Ponty’s examples,
the keyboard of the piano gives rise to possible musical melodies answering
our desire and readiness to make music.
When we first introduced the idea of physiognomic perception, we saw
how Merleau-Ponty noted that this kind of felt beckoning and embodied
sense was missing in Schneider. Merleau-Ponty suggests that “the whole ques-
tion is how a certain physiognomy of ‘visual’ patterns can evoke a certain
motor response” is answered by the fact that the body incorporates into its
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 191

own sense of embodiment these objects around it through the birth of motor
meaning—they are incorporated into the body schema as prolongations of our
embodying being. Merleau-Ponty wants his reader to realize this is not just
a way of performing deeds but is another sort of meaning: “To sum up, what
we have discovered through the study of motility, is a new meaning of the
word ‘meaning.’ ”56 Rather than meaning being a product of consciousness
as dictated by our Cartesian and rationalist tradition, Merleau-Ponty declares
that “bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning
which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning
which clings to certain contents.”57 Merleau-Ponty is emphasizing that the
felt sense of motility expresses a “motor meaning” as a prereflective response
and dialogue with the physiognomic structure of the things that surround us
and we use. The body in its movements is expressing meaning: “The body is
essentially an expressive space.”58 The body weaves together the context and its
sense. These movements are a response to a solicitation from what surrounds it
in physiognomic perception, as we discussed in the previous chapter.59 Part of
this weaving is the power of the imaginal as it brings forward the connections
of qualities and the belonging to the world within an intimacy of meaning.
This emergent prereflective and perceptual meaning that “clings to certain
contents” might be as simple as the color blue, to which Merleau-Ponty turns
in his chapter, “Sense Experience.” He says that blue has a felt effect on the
perceiver such that “[b]lue is that which prompts me to look in a certain way,
that which allows my gaze to run over it in a specific manner. It is a certain
field or atmosphere presented to the power of my eyes and of my whole body,”
quoting Goldstein and Rosenthal, Gestalt psychologists.60 Merleau-Ponty also
quotes the artist Kandinsky, who says of green’s restful quality that “it makes
no demands on us and does not enjoin us to do anything” and Goethe,
who says of red that it “invades the eye” whereas blue “seems to yield to our
gaze.” Merleau-Ponty also quotes several Gestalt psychologists’ clinical subjects
concerning the different ranges of affective sense, kinesthetic sense, and bodily
responses evoked by different colors, such as the “rending” effect of red and
the “stinging” effect of yellow. Merleau-Ponty again cites Goldstein to say that
in the case of red and yellow, we have the “experience of being torn away,
of a movement away from the center,” whereas blue and green lend a sense
of “repose and concentration.” Merleau-Ponty’s overall point is that there is a
“motor basis” of qualities, a felt “vital significance,” and before we see a color
we have already apprehended its sense through “the experience of a certain
bodily attitude appropriate only to that color.”61 In terms of the characteristics
of the imaginal that open and deepen perception, these seem to be movements
toward intensification, making more present, bringing into connection with
other qualities, having the context infiltrate the focus, creating a felt intimacy
192 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

in one’s embodying being. It may be that Merleau-Ponty is giving us a unique

phenomenology of how the imaginal is dovetailed with the perceptual.62
Merleau-Ponty’s description of how an organist comes to be able to play
on an unfamiliar keyboard gives us another example that may show more
explicitly the link between motor meaning and the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty
draws the scene of the organist sitting down at the keyboard, feeling the seat,
working the pedals, pulling the stops, and in general making the organ an
extension of his body, that is to say, incorporating it into his body schema.
What the organist is doing is described as opening up a space of possibilities
in which the music can come to appear through the medium of the organist’s
body as entwined with his instrument. At this point then, the parts of the
organ and the gesturing organist’s hands “are given to him as nothing more
than possibilities of achieving certain emotional or musical values and their
positions are simply the places through which this value appears in the world.”63
The music, which the cultural and philosophical traditions have tended to see
as conjured forth mentally, as an ideal entity, is rather gestured forth through
a bodily intentionality that brings forth expressive possibilities without any
recourse to thought. Merleau-Ponty continues, “Between the musical essence
of the piece as it is shown on the score and the notes which actually sound
round the organ, so direct a relationship is established that the organist’s body
and his instrument are merely the medium of this relationship.” The move-
ments or gestures made by the hands in response to the call of the organ and
the music running through them both are tracing a meaning or sense of the
music that are imaginal presences. It is a highlighting of the sounds themselves
and their qualities, and the interrelation with other sounds and their qualities
to create new ones. It is making the listeners and the musician intimate with
these presences in a new way. The gestured sense of the music as it gets pro-
duced follows a structure that is the face that this musical piece turns toward
the world. It seems that this mode of imagining that makes the implicit senses
of perception be sketched out in their possibilities and become illuminated in
their presence as they form an intimacy with those to whom they are made
present might best be called the physiognomic imagination.
In taking in the trajectories of sense from the world in perception, there
is a synchronizing that already sketches out paths for a deepening of that
meaning. This synchronization means that the physiognomic imagination is
dialogical—equally a gesturing forth by the world as much as by the imaginer.
In describing how the organist “tries out” the new organ in the rehearsal and
gets the sense of the possible musical expression that can be made with it,
Merleau-Ponty describes that “[i]n reality his movements during rehearsal are
consecratory gestures: they draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources,
and create a space of expressiveness as the movements of the augur delimit
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 193

the templum.”64 Like the augur within the sacred precinct of a temple, the
organist in service of art and music draws out a space with the movements of
his hands that are gestures sketching out trajectories that move us emotionally
and imaginatively. The image of the temple augur makes us think of the many
possibilities his or her gestures bring forth: perhaps sketching forth a space for
the celebration of nature’s fecundity and beauty, or for confronting the dread
and terror of facing death, or for humble supplication and reverence for divini-
ties, or appreciation for the beauty of the surrounding landscape the divinities
inhabit. The augur was guided by the surrounding world by listening to the
flights of birds. Like the augur, who responds to trajectories already inscribed
in the space to which he or she responded, the organist is in dialogue with
the ways in which this keyboard beckons to be traversed and hovered over
for unique expressive possibilities in the context of this musical piece. In a
much more muted and scattered way, in our gestures toward the things of the
world and other humans and creatures, we create a set of imaginal vectors in
space responding to the situation. Sometimes, however, when we are present
with care and attention, our everyday gestures have as much signifying power
as the augur or organist, such as when the farmer in Pilote de guerre breaks
the bread and passes it around the table, gesturing forth a momentary haven
of peace and familial and fraternal love. This space of peace is an imaginal
drawing forth of one possibility for those people sitting together amidst the
ravages of war, one that plumbs the latent depths of their warm feelings. The
war will shatter it soon after, but momentarily, it was a sacred space.
Finally, the most explicit sketching forth in the Phenomenology of Per-
ception of how the imaginal is contained within the perceptual can be seen
in the “Space” chapter. In describing the perception of space, Merleau-Ponty
asserts, “The phantasms of dreams reveal still more effectively that general
spatiality within which clear space and observable objects are located.”65 This
is a surprising and powerful statement that turns upside down both cultural
commonsense and the philosophical tradition. Dreams, which are taken to
be the “mind on a holiday” or merely the imagination untethered to reality,
are given the role of founding our sense of space. Only within this oneiric
spatiality does clear and distinct space find a horizon of sense. There is an
underlying sense to what we perceive as space and in space—a more general
spatiality—that has an imaginal sense inseparable from its perceptual sense. In
this section of the chapter, Merleau-Ponty has a long discussion of the sense
of “rising” and “falling” in space and of the directions “up” and “down.” He
suggests their co-presence in myths, poetry, and dreams is vital to the overall
coherence of our sense of space, which we will discuss in the next section. It
is noteworthy, however, to note that all three of these are dimensions of sense
associated with imagining. Merleau-Ponty also delays the discussion of dreams,
194 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

myth, and hallucination for a moment by saying that they can’t be understood
in how they operate in their particular spheres until “we endow the body, even
in the waking state, with an emblematic value.” That is to say, the percept is
an emblem or symbolic. In other words, the percept has an imaginal lining
to its sense. The directions in space of “up” and “down,” and the sense that I
am “downcast” or feeling “elevated,” for example, Merleau-Ponty explains, are
not connected through analogy, through reflective attributions of resemblances,
or some similarity of the kind of relationships among objects and emotions,
but rather (to return to Merleau-Ponty’s statement we looked at previously in
looking at the dynamic nature of space): “The movement upwards as a direc-
tion in physical space, and that of desire towards its objective are mutually
symbolical, because they both express the same essential structure of our being,
being situated in relation to an environment, of which we have already stated
that this structure alone gives significance to the direction up and down in the
physical world.”66 Whether it is the emotional sense of our perception or the
directions of space, both are linked and turn toward each other and toward
the perceiver as present through a symbolic meaning. In other words, it is an
imaginal sense that presents their shared structure. It is an imaginal lining of
the percept that can be brought forth more fully as we enter its depths, and is
a “direction of significance” that runs through various spheres. Merleau-Ponty
concludes that images “really contain their meaning,”67 not as attributed to
them, but as emerging from within a direction of human existence confront-
ing a world. The existential background of concerns is inseparable from the
perceptual sense of space.
Space is populated with the tracings of images, both the residues of past
images and the latent sense of the perceptual lodged in its depths that can
be drawn out by a prereflective imagining—what I have called physiognomic
imagining—which Merleau-Ponty will also locate in myths, hallucinations, and
dreams as the discussion continues. This dimension of the imaginal, he says,
“has a non-thetic or implicit meaning, and this is not a lesser meaning, for
objective thought itself draws upon the non-reflective, and presents itself as
an explicit expression of the non-reflective consciousness. . . .”68 The prere-
flective latency of perception in the imaginal arises in our dialogue with the
world as a depth of sense that gives to the perceptual its vitality, interrelated-
ness and deepening quality of forming a story about something or someone.
Casey briefly notes that this sort of imagining in perceiving as “the kind of
imagination that such an imaginary would require is (like Bachelard’s material
imagination) one which seeks to penetrate the perceived and to transform it
from within.”69 Casey contrasts this notion of the imaginal with understanding
the imagination as merely representational and states that “this deeper type of
imagining would bring us back to the pre-representational, to a primordial
 Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination 195

level at which the perceived and the imagined are not yet distinguished.” This
lining of the perceptual that Casey adds “must function at a strictly pre-objec-
tive level of human experience” is uncovered as Merleau-Ponty articulates the
gestural, physiognomic, and spatial dimension of the prereflective perceptual
apprehension of the world through embodying being because they are insepa-
rable. However, what we have called the physiognomic imagination, this deeper
imagination, will become further formulated as Merleau-Ponty lectures and
writes about painting, film, children, literature, poetic language, and finally our
interanimality. First, however, it is helpful to see that there are more sketches
of the imaginal in Merleau-Ponty’s early writings.
 II
Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth,
Film, and Children

And it is not a question of subordinating waking life to oneiric life. It

is simply necessary to understand that they communicate . . . [t]he idea
that dreams are topical regression, not the equivalent of sensorality. Rather,
they are regression to mythical consciousness.
—Institution and Passivity: Course Notes (155)

Before leaving the Phenomenology of Perception to consider Merleau-Ponty’s

increasing emphasis on the physiognomic imagination in his radio interviews,
courses, unpublished material, and later texts, it is important to note Merleau-
Ponty’s comments on myth, dreams, and hallucination that follow after his
comments on the emblematic and symbolic nature of perception. The themes
of the mythic and oneiric will continue to be prominent in his work. The
themes of rising and falling that Merleau-Ponty discussed at length as directions
and rhythms within space that we identified as being lined with the imaginal
were identified by Merleau-Ponty as themes “so frequently met with in dream,
as indeed in mythology and poetry.”1 He finds that rising and falling, as we
already noted, run through all the spheres of meaning through which the world
can be significant to us. Given the shared response to physiognomies, move-
ments, gestures, and space, Merleau-Ponty states that in other cultures that
are more aboriginal, more aware of this primordial dimension of sense, since
it is less obscured by the glut of rational constructions and communications,
there is a sense of direction and place within a wider and more many-layered
primordial space. This space has a collective dimension such that “there is
mythical space in which directions and positions are determined in it by the
residence of great affective entities.”2 Space is not only crisscrossed by imaginal
directions and locations, but as mythic is an expression of a more primary level
of our shared experience, of a collectively felt and imaginal structure of space

197
198 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

in its orientation, connectedness, and directedness. Merleau-Ponty stated our

more modern cultures had lost their sense of the primordial and the “concrete
physiognomy of things,”3 and therefore live with an experience of space as a
homogeneous containing dimension. By contrast, for cultures that live within
a mythic structure, the space consists of distinct places and also of things
whose meaning is effulgent, adding to space a further sense of being myriad
places. He gives the examples of the prereflective orientation toward where
the “home encampment” is located for aboriginal peoples, describing “it is to
tend towards it as towards the natural abode of a certain peace or a certain
joyfulness.” Another example he offers is: “For the augur, right and left are the
sources of the lawful and the forbidden.”4 These senses of space are not sepa-
rable from a matrix of history, culture, and imaginal mythic tales. If this sort
of apprehension—in which the perceptual is registered more openly as vertically
arrayed with affect, kinesthesia, memory, and imagination—is a deeper sense of
space, then, for Merleau-Ponty, it is also true that the mythical apprehension
and expression of the world is a deeper dimension of the sense of the world,
unnoticed and obscured by our rationalized culture. Yet this can’t be utterly
the case, for the mythical world even underlies the hodological postmodern
space in the sense that the space of motor physiognomy is made possible by
a more primary sense of the face of the world. If, for example, I have the
project to climb a rock face, my hand incorporating the memory of rock in its
body schema reaches knowingly for the crevices and the ledges in order for my
swinging body to lean into it, but this habit arose from an initial encounter
in which the solidity and tranquility of the rock revealed in its physiognomic
perception a more mythical sense of the massiveness of rock. There still survives
the sense of Old Man Mountain in many locations in regard to mountains as
site of power or home of divinities or the sense of mountains as slumbering
giants of the Earth that persist in the deep background of perception. The trust
of rock that makes the motor project of easy grabbing for possible handholds
stems from a more ancient and indirect dialogue with the world as mythical
than the merely practical and rational reckoning with the world.
Cultures that live or have lived in a world of myth have an acuity
for putting into story an attention to a level of perception that is open to
the physiognomic sense of things. We might as easily say this the other way
around: the acute perception of the physiognomy of things, creatures, and other
humans promoted by myths throws the people of these cultures into a level
of prereflective openness to a deeper felt sense of time, space, and identity.
The mythic is still alive in any culture, but may be suppressed by the rational
reconstruction of the world as a realm of distant, discrete entities externally
related only through cause and effect and manipulation. Toward the end of
the “Space” chapter, Merleau-Ponty—right after claiming that perception can-
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 199

not be separated from myth, dream, the imaginal, or the experience of altered
perceptual states of the person with schizophrenia—declares that “we have no
right to level all experiences down to a single world, all modalities of existence
to a single consciousness.”5 He suggests that the mythic might be a perceptual
depth that could give greater sustenance to our everyday experience. Drawing
on concrete examples of myth from the writings of Cassirer, he describes the
sense of myth:

The myth holds the essence within the appearance; the mythical
phenomenon is not representation, but a genuine presence. The
daemon of rain is present in each drop which falls after the incanta-
tion, as the soul is present in every part of the body. Every appari-
tion (Erscheinung) is in this case an incarnation, and each entity is
not defined so much in terms of ‘properties’ as of physiognomic
characteristics (des caractères physionomiques).6

The world of myth is a world in which the sense of an entity is inseparable

from its face-to-face expression in an encounter. The fluidity, the sustenance,
the threat, the quicksilver, and all qualities of water are manifest in the mythic
drop, filling the world with its presence. It is not interpreted, inferred, but
rather experienced in the texture of perception as threads or streams of energy,
sense, and image running through it. As Nancy articulates, the imaginal dis-
plays the presence of a being in such a way that its qualities become animated
and infused with emotional sense: we are both penetrated by them and pen-
etrate into them, and they become intimate. Merleau-Ponty sees this imagi-
nal force in the mythic presences that are apprehended and responded to by
embodying being affectively, with the force of presence displayed and brought
into intimacy. The daemon is effulgent in each drop of rain, and the mythic
element is not “added on” to the appearance as a reflective interpretation, but
actually confronts us face-to-face.
As Merleau-Ponty has suggested with his example of sleet, the world may
gesture forth varied senses, such as, for example, perhaps a “driven quality” in
such a sleet storm. In myth, however, there is an intensification of both the dis-
play of presence and in the felt quality of this presence. Within myth, as well as in
the child’s experience, Merleau-Ponty states, “things are taken for the incarnation
of what they express, and because their human significance is compressed into
them and presents itself literally as what they mean.”7 Meaning seems packed
into the figures of myth such that they are compressions whose density renders
them the paradigm of the vision, sound, color, and shape of what they mean.
Merleau-Ponty discusses how in childhood, there is this kind of sensi-
tivity akin to that found in myth, before it is covered over. This sensitivity
200 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

exists in heightened psychological states of various altered perceptions that we

deem pathological, as in schizophrenic perceptions, but is also found within
indigenous cultures: “A shadow passing or the creaking of branches have each
a meaning; everywhere there are warnings with no one who issues them.” The
shadow is not just a shadow; it is the presence of shadowy being, whether of
evil or of mystery, the frightening unknown. The creaking branches become all
things that move in ways that are inexplicable, that move outside the expected
order of things to frighten us. This is an imaginal lining that is possible in
many percepts. For the child, for those in mythic cultures, and perhaps for all
of us in dreams or in the dreamlike state of certain imaginal experiences, like
literature, the world becomes an amplification of sense that directly touches
us, approaches us, and presents itself face-to-face. For Merleau-Ponty, there is
a kinship among the experiences of the mythic, the hallucinatory, the imagi-
nal, the dream, and the world of the child. All these experiences belong to a
primordial level of space and the world that are present in all our experience,
but for most of us in contemporary culture are pushed into the background.
In the Phenomenology of Perception, a patient with schizophrenia is walk-
ing in the mountains, and suddenly “it is as if a second sky, black and bound-
less, were penetrating the blue sky of evening. This new sky is empty, ‘subtle,
invisible and terrifying.’ Sometimes it moves in the autumn landscape and at
other times the landscape too moves.”8 This suddenly appearing “sky within
the sky” with its fear-inspiring presence is not an alien experience but dwells
within the depths of the sky that everyone sees: this is an imaginal drawing
out of the sense of the sky that anyone could experience. For Merleau-Ponty,
all these experiences are possible for anyone, but most persons keep to a certain
structure of space that keeps senses like the threatening black sky at the margins
of experience: “What protects the sane man against delirium or hallucination,
is not his critical powers, but the structure of his space: objects remain before
him, keeping their distance.”9 In contrast, the person with schizophrenia dwells
within the narrower confines of the imaginal, not entering the wider horizon
of the perception of the world. The black sky no longer is made to correlate
with the larger perceptual expanse in its unfolding that “fills out” the per-
ceptual sense and pushes such phantasms to the margins. Instead, the person
with schizophrenia remains in this limited horizon, allowing the intimacy of
the threatening imaginal presence to become overwhelming.
Merleau-Ponty explains that the patient with schizophrenia has ceased to
inhabit the common space, and what distinguishes these people is not that they
can experience this black threatening sky behind the blue sky, but rather that
they have come to retreat to that space: “. . . this second space . . . becomes
dissociated from the objective world, and no longer gets as far as the geographi-
cal space.”10 Merleau-Ponty borrows a term from Erwin Straus and says that
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 201

this “landscape space” is impoverished as cut off from the interplay with all
the facets of our wider shared space. Merleau-Ponty also says there is a com-
mon feature that marks the hallucinatory, the imaginal, and the mythic: “What
brings about both hallucinations and myths is a shrinkage in the space directly
experienced, the overwhelming proximity of the object, the oneness of man and
world, which is, not indeed abolished, but repressed by everyday perception
or by objective thought, and which philosophical consciousness rediscovers.”
There is a different, closer proximity in myth, hallucination, and the imaginal
than in perception.11 There is also a different, narrower horizon of vision for
these ways of taking in the world as distinct from the so-called “normal adult”
who loses this intensified relation to the world in their expanding involvement
in so many projects—having a “widened” but “flattened” vision—keeping the
world at a greater distance for increased manipulation. This closer proximity
can also become a retreat for those who no longer feel as if they can live in the
mundane world, but as Merleau-Ponty demonstrates by citing several patients’
conversations, they can still distinguish this space in which a brush leaves the
windowsill and enters his head or the space of the black sky or the space of the
haunting figure outside the window as not being the same space shared with
their interlocutor.12 However, the point of this discussion in the Phenomenology
of Perception is to arrive at the conclusion that the real is not clear and distinct,
but is ambiguous, as is the imaginal or the mythic or the hallucinatory, such
that they can co-exist: “If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the
apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object.”13
If the real were clear and distinct, these other levels of meaning and ways of
encountering the world wouldn’t have the “room” to infiltrate and permeate
the world. Merleau-Ponty will continue to develop this theme throughout his
writing, but his insistence will remain constant that the spaces of the real and
apparent—and the realms of perception, imagination, myth, childhood, and
aboriginal experience—are interwoven, and none is absolutely foundational.
Although there is an oneiric—or dreamlike—lining to all perceptions,
such that in the background of all perception is an entwining with emotional,
imaginal, and memorial meanings that are not logically connected per se to
what is perceived, it is also true that these other spaces are equally anchored
in the shared space of clearer and distinct perception and conception. Once
again, there is a relationship—in using Merleau-Ponty’s later terms—we would
call chiasmatic:

Mythical or dream-like consciousness, insanity and perception

are not, in so far as they are different, hermetically sealed within
themselves; they are not small islands of experience cut off from
each other, and from which there is no escape. We have refused
202 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

to make geometrical space immanent in mythical space, and gen-

erally, to subordinate all experience to an absolute consciousness
of this experience, a consciousness which would assign to it its
place in the general scheme of truth, because unity of experience
thus understood makes its variety incomprehensible. But mythical
consciousness does indeed open upon possible objectifications.14

The sense of things that appear in clear perception, the mythical, dreams, and
the hallucinatory are contexts or worlds that feed into each other in such a
way that none is the source of the others and all require the others to have
their sense. To deny the different ways of the world appearing, for Merleau-
Ponty, is to make its myriad senses incomprehensible. A sky that could not
be imagined to have a black interior of dreaded contents would not also be a
blue clearly understandable sky. That black sky only has meaning as the lining
of the mundane blue sky. The myth is a way of making sense of daily life and
mundane happenings, and Merleau-Ponty explains at length how even in an
aboriginal culture where myth is evident in daily existence, it takes place only
within lives of fishing, hunting, and interacting with other sorts of nonmythic
cultures in ways that grasp the world clearly.15 Yet these mundane tasks do
not disperse the mythic, either. Even dreams and even hallucinations have the
same chiasmatic relationship with the clear and distinct world: “During the
dream itself, we do not leave the world behind: the dream space is segregated
from the space of clear thinking, but it uses all the latter’s articulations; the
world obsesses us even during sleep, and it is about the world that we dream.
Similarly it is round about the world that insanity gravitates.”16 The clear and
distinct world is the world that most of us inhabit when engaged in daily
tasks. The imaginal and mythic give this world other depths, but they are all
co-present. It is vital, however, to note that all of these spaces open unto each
other and enrich each other, and none is the unambiguous truth of the others.
Given these early hints about Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the imaginal in
the Phenomenology of Perception, we can add some more detail by looking at
his remarks in the seven lectures for his appearances on the 1948 French radio
show, “The French Culture Hour.” In the third lecture, when he is describing
the nature of sensory objects, he again avoids speaking of imagining, since
his point is clearly to make an impact on the public’s idea of perception.
However, if one looks in detail at what he says, he is laying the groundwork
to see imagining and perceiving as inseparable. After showing in his previous
lecture that “[w]e can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space
and the things that occupy it,” Merleau-Ponty turns to Cézanne and paint-
ing to show how the qualities of an object, such as its color, shape, and in
general, its “physiognomy,” appear only in “relation to neighboring objects”
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 203

as grasped by our bodies in situation.17 However, they can be understood in

this way only by seeing the emotional sense as correlated with these other
qualities.18 He then goes on to explore concrete examples, such as honey and
lemon as described by Sartre (as part of his “existential psychoanalysis”),19 rock
gardens as described by Claudel, and water as described by Ponge. Whether
it is the honey’s qualities of slow, sly docility that then clings, or the bare
dryness and openness to death of the rock garden, or the passivity in fluid-
ity of hysterical submission to gravity of water, Merleau-Ponty takes up the
description of these qualities as “symbolizing” different ways to be that are
suggested in a latent way within perception and only brought forth to fuller
expression by the painter, philosopher, or poet.20 Merleau-Ponty says of our
close relationship with things that “each speaks to our body . . . clothed in
human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely
they dwell within us as forms of life.”21 These qualities and the way they
are intertwined with other qualities of things with which they interrelate in
perception are also imaginal lines of sense, which can be drawn out by the
poet or artist, but also by the philosopher who learns from the poet and artist
about the nature of expression. Right after this, Merleau-Ponty says that this
sort of analysis is akin to the sort of analysis “to be found in the series of
works by Gaston Bachelard on air, water, fire and earth.”22 These works, of
course, are the series of Bachelard’s explorations of the “material imagination,”
which we will discuss in relationship to Merleau-Ponty’s developing idea of
the imaginal in a later section.23
In the next lecture, Merleau-Ponty starts by saying that we need to rec-
ognize that we perceive in a “world in which every object displays the human
face it acquires in a human gaze.”24 Immediately in describing this “transfigured
world,” he points to how normal perception overlaps with “animals, children,
primitive peoples and madmen,” who either have been his examples in the
Phenomenology of Perception of those for whom the imaginal comes to the
fore or who will continue or come to be themes of his lectures in the coming
decade concerning their immersion in the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty then speaks
of seeing the perception of even a line or lines as ways of experiencing differing
rhythms of living movement, because a line that has the perceptual sense of
“crawling” is a “virtual substance”—a percept that is inseparable from its ima-
ginal underside.25 Even though Merleau-Ponty will not explore interanimality
for some time, he also speaks of how animals “give shape” to their worlds in
ways with which we seem to identify in dreams, myths of aboriginal peoples,
children, and different cultures. The fact that imaginally we seem to identify
with the ways that animals make sense of existence and that animals inhabit
“the secret reveries of our inner life,”26 seems a foreshadowing of Merleau-
Ponty’s description in the lectures at the Sorbonne a decade later that animals
204 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

live in a continuous world of “oneiric perception,” a perception like that of

our imaginally saturated dreams.
Finally, in his next to last lecture, Merleau-Ponty turns even more fully
to the arts and their particular way of arresting our perception and interrogat-
ing it to reveal objects in the “very secret of their substance” and show them
as standing “bleeding” before us (Gasquet’s term quoted by Merleau-Ponty).27
Merleau-Ponty moves from considering painting as a “pictorial event,” taking
the term from Braque, as a way to indicate that painting is such that “at no
stage are we sent back to the natural object,” but rather we move deeper into
the sense, feeling, and structure of what was expressed by the painter. The
result is that “painting does not imitate a world, but is a world of its own.”28
The painting does not imitate some so-called “naturally given” set of objects,
but opens a world in which all the expressed objects are interrelated in the
depth of the imaginal. This kind of imaginal sets the perceived into the type
of motion of a motion by vibration. Similarly, as Merleau-Ponty continues in
his lecture, a film is not about portraying a story, but rather strives to create
a “cinematographical rhythm.” This rhythm of the perceived scenes of the film
progress and draw us into their texture until “a radiant image with a particular
rhythm” emerges.29 He says this rhythm cannot be grasped as an idea nor can
it be schematized, but that nevertheless it forms an image able to illumine what
has been presented by perception. Cinema, he adds, will always be this sort of
experience that is a matter of perception drawn out into this sort of rhythmic
image. He compares this aspect of film to music as forming an image from
the rhythm of its sounds and the texture of its temporal phrasing, forming
larger wholes, until it casts a world. This world is not one of nonbeing or
make-believe, but the sense of the world cast in a certain tonality as coming
from the “universe of possible music.”30 This particular imaginal possibility,
however, Merleau-Ponty emphatically distinguishes from personal “memories
and feelings” of either the listeners or the composer, and is more like listening
to “the things themselves,” insofar as this is the kind of physiognomic imaginal
that is the drawing out of perception’s sense.31
Merleau-Ponty concludes by discussing poetry, and claims the poem
expresses the essential structure of the thing such that it “accordingly forces
us to enter into that thing.” The use of language as imaginal brings us to an
intimacy with the world. This quality of language is described as coming as
close to becoming silent as language can be. Merleau-Ponty says that Mallarmé
agreed that poetry is not a straightforward reference to the world as given, or
to reason, or to truth in the usual sense. Rather, it brings to the reader not
only what is presented, but also the way that it presents itself to the perceiver is
made apparent. This language use seems to Merleau-Ponty to be also employed
in the novel, where ideas that are either presented or not, not for their own
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 205

sake, but instead to create a progression of images so the reader embraces their
“particular rhythm,” and is left with “the emblem and monogram of those
ideas.”32 This is similar to film. Even though Merleau-Ponty does not name
this as the imaginal dimension of art’s power, it encompasses what we have
said of the physiognomic imagination that coupled with perception gives the
perceiver a greater intimacy, an “entering into,” a highlighting of the details of
presentation, a deeper tie with the emotional sense, and a bodily joining-up
with the rhythms of the world’s presence.
The other aspect of the material presented in the radio lectures that add
to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the mythic and the imaginal is his insistence on
how we perceive the emotions of others as a sense we “read” on their face as
part of what we perceive prereflectively. By taking in the face, what is meant
here is a sense of not only specifically facial expressions, but, as we have said,
rather an entire bodily expression of the concrete situation. There is a reso-
nance in this description of emotion’s immediate presence in perception with
the description of the perceptual sense of films in the “The Film and the New
Psychology,” which was first given as a lecture on March 13, 1945, at the
l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and later published in Sense and
Non-Sense. In explaining that “[a] film is not thought; it is perceived,” since
“the film does not mean anything but itself,”33 Merleau-Ponty attempts to shift
his reader away from the idea of human emotions being private inner states
to describe how instead they are physiognomic appearances. He then expands
that notion of physiognomies to apply to any objects or events appearing in
the world of film.34
Merleau-Ponty describes emotions as expressions visible on the face and
through gestures such that “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. They exist on this face or
in these gestures.”35 In watching the film, we are not told about the character’s
anger or delight, but rather we see these emotions manifest on their physi-
ognomy and become intertwined in an embodied way with their experience.
The film “means itself,” according to Merleau-Ponty, because “the meaning of
a film is incorporated into its rhythm just as the meaning of a gesture can
immediately be read in that gesture.” A gesture expressing an emotion is a way
of sketching out a meaning that draws together aspects of the context that
are manifest, such that the new constellations impart a sense to us. Yet, this
lining of perception with emotion is here also imaginal. Despite a film’s “basic
realism” of shots, Merleau-Ponty says that like the arts of poetry or literature,
“the function of the film is not to make these facts or ideas known to us,”
but rather is about making the presentation of something more palpable. In
the flow of images on the screen, we live in a heightened embodied sense of
206 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the texture of the being-in-the-world expressed by the film that is not like the
“real world” of everyday perception, but is “more exact.”36 What Merleau-Ponty
means here by “more exact” is not that the world of the film is perceived as
more clear and distinct, but rather that there is a sense of heightened present-
ness. This is the power of imaginal presentation in the image.
It is for these reasons that Merleau-Ponty concludes that in film, as in the
other arts, “understanding serves the imagination.” The filmmaker takes what
is shot by the camera as “an opportunity to seek out their palpable symbols
and to trace out their visible and sonorous monogram.”37 In presenting us with
these images on the screen, the film takes the perceiver into a “finer grained”
presentation that makes the viewer more aware of the “aesthetic value of the
tiniest perceived thing.”38 This imaginal sense of intensifying the texture of
the presence of the perceived and increasing intimacy with the world is what
Merleau-Ponty is indicating when he likens film to poetry’s ability to put the
person in a “poetic state” (état poétique).39 This finer grained presentation of the
world by film is also the presentation of the emotional sense of the perceived in
which the sense of the “inner” becomes palpable as the “outer,” and vice versa.
These observations correlate with what, in his fifth radio lecture, Merleau-Ponty
vividly describes as a moment of apprehending emotion: “I could not imagine
the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent’s looks separated from
his gestures, speech and body. . . . It really is here, in this room, and in this
part of the room, that the anger breaks forth. It is in the space between him
and me that it unfolds. I would accept that the sense in which the place of
my opponent’s anger is not the same as that in which, in a moment, tears
may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may harden on his mouth.
Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple
cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice.”40 The anger bursts forth in all
these sensible qualities that fill the space between the two people. Its reality is
effulgent. The passages cited from Nancy and Casey indicate these qualities as
increased in their presentness as the work of the imaginal—encountered in a
heightened manner and a greater intimacy. Film, like the mythic and the arts,
expresses the physiognomic imaginal within the perceptual to make qualities
more present that are passed over in everyday perception.
Another important statement of the central place of imagination in
Merleau-Ponty’s early thinking occurs in regard to the child’s experience of
the world. In the 1949–50 Sorbonne lectures on “Structures and Conflicts in
Child Consciousness,” Merleau-Ponty denies the assertion of the “classical” idea
in both philosophy and psychology that a perception of the objective world or
“the real” precedes any imaginal sense of the world. Then, it is also mistakenly
thought that images of this real follow after this initial encounter. Merleau-
Ponty attributes our looking at the child’s experience through this lens because
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 207

“[t]he idea that images are the same as enfeebled perceptions seems natural to
us.”41 Given the traditional ontology, objectivity is primary, and other senses
of the world are succubae. Merleau-Ponty realizes that the child’s experience
doesn’t follow this preconceived model and will cause us to reconfigure the
sense of the imaginal: “If we reexamine the child’s relations with the real, the
notion of the imaginary will have to be reconsidered as well.” If we continue
to think of the imagination as an after-product of perception or as a mental
fabrication, even one that is not fantasy and pertains to the world, we will not
see the imaginal, and a new way of conceiving it is necessary.
To commence with this reconsideration of the imaginal, Merleau-Ponty
begins with the declarations that “the image is not an enfeebled perception”
and that “the image is not an ‘interior’ or ‘psychic’ thing.” In contrast to either
the empiricist approach of imagination as derivative or the mentalistic approach
to images as unreal constructions, Merleau-Ponty starts with the idea that the
imaginal is a relationship to the world and that there is a mode of the imaginal
that works within and at the heart of perception. Throughout the lectures on
child psychology, he will also give a place for modes of imagination that have
aspects in common with traditional psychology or Sartrean philosophy, but he
is most interested in describing how for the child, and then also for the adult,
the imaginal works to bring perception into the world: “Imagination always
concerns itself with the perceived object; to imagine is not to contemplate an
image. The imagination always refers itself to a unique object.”42 Not only is
the image always rooted in the perception of a unique object, but perhaps
more important, Merleau-Ponty adds, “[t]o imagine is to stretch out toward the
real object.” Imagination, like perception, is not a retreat from the world, but
a way of moving further into it. However, insofar as one thinks of the image
in Sartre’s sense, this reaching will be in vain. It is Merleau-Ponty’s bringing of
imagining back into embodying being by grounding it in “affective and motor
intentionality”43 that will allow him to start to reconfigure the imaginal. He
states that imagining will only be truly understood by first becoming more
precise in how one understands the emotions and bodily gestures.
In examining the emotional enmeshment with the imaginary, Merleau-
Ponty discusses several psychological theories and also Sartre’s The Emotions:
Outline of a Theory that describe emotion in terms of behavior and meaning,
and in that regard are on their way to better understanding emotion. Sartre’s
idea of the emotions, however, as “magical solutions” to obstacles in the world
still renders these meanings as “illusory” or unreal. This freedom to depart from
following out the perceptual implications of the situation does describe an
aspect of both imagining and emotion, but leaves them largely as “deceiving”
powers, as ways to “de-realize” the world.44 Certainly, imagining and emotion
can lead us or be manipulated in this direction, but that does not exhaust
208 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

their possibilities.45 At this point, Merleau-Ponty draws the line distinguishing

his approach to the imaginal from Sartre’s: “Sartre’s absolute distinction does
not suffice to resolve the problem of the imaginary.”
The distinction between the imaginary as unreal and the world as real
would leave out the perceived world, which is the horizon in which both
appear. Merleau-Ponty continues, “In order for the imaginary to be capable of
displacing the real, we do not need to consider them antinomies, as different
as day and night. In such a conception, there would be no room for myth.
Myth belongs in this third oneiric order . . . between waking perception and
the ‘fiction’ of the sane adult individual.”46 The reason that we can move from
the real into the imaginal stems from the fact that the perceived world is more
open than either and contains both. Since imaginal and real are entwined, we
can move between the two. The dimension of myth is the lining of the per-
ceptual world and also straddles this division, allowing us to move from one
context to the other. Merleau-Ponty suggests that what is most interesting in
Sartre’s analyses of imagination is not his opposition between the real and the
unreal that is explored throughout the book, but rather the late passages in
which he seems to be suggesting a kind of apprehension of the world that is
between the real and the imaginary: an oneiric order. This third possibility of
“the between” of the oneiric is not only the realm of the child, however, but
is a dimension of experience in the adult, too. It is also the realm of myth. If
indeed, there are levels of significance in which reality and the imaginary are
intertwined in such a way that the sense we have of the meaning and identity
of things, events, and people is akin to that of a dream, then we are drawn
along in vectors of movement within perception that are far less reasoned than
we would like to think.
This idea of an oneiric order within perception leads Merleau-Ponty to
further articulate his increasing disagreement with Sartre’s theory of imagina-
tion. At several points, he takes issue with Sartre’s sense of the imaginary as
disjunct from the real as not allowing us to enter into the child’s experience of
the world. The child’s experience differs from Sartre’s description of imagina-
tion: “The child does not live in the ‘bipolar world’ of the adult, but rather he
inhabits a hybrid zone of oneiric ambiguity.”47 The adult may draw a boundary
between the real versus the imaginary in his or her reflective consideration of
experience, but the child does not. For Merleau-Ponty, there is another experi-
ence that fits neither model of clear and certain consciousness nor the model of
the imaginary cut off from the real, not only for the child, but for everyone:
“The true distinction between the real and the imaginary stems from the fact
that both are ambiguous forms of consciousness.”48 If clarity and distinctness
are assumed as the hallmarks of the real, then we may well abandon explor-
ing the world’s greater depth. This, in turn, would mean that we would lose
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 209

a vital aspect of the sense of the perceived world, given the entwining of the
real and the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty makes this point by discussing a man
who is held back in his love by the power of the imaginary: “The distinction
between the real and the imaginary is dialectical, such that one can desire the
real in a certain way as find oneself lacking.” This man may try to limit his
love to what is rational in a reflective sense, but “real consciousness is never in
full possession of what it posits.” If the imaginal lines the perceived world with
a sense that gives it greater depths, one might not be able even to recognize
one’s own desire, if one expects to limit its contents to the clear and distinct
world. This man may never be able to reconcile the fact that real and imaginal
co-exist, and instead will insist that one is really only dealing with what is clear
and distinct. Much that this man loves in this woman may never be able to be
grasped clearly and distinctly, but this does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Yet,
he may discount dimensions of the person he loves. Merleau-Ponty cautions
that love may require this embrace of ambiguity: “We must grant perception
of others this feature and assume the risks of what this may enclose within the
unknown. . . . A dialectic as well as an ambiguity, exists between the real and
the imaginary. No rationality is possible other than the one that accepts the
irrational frame of life and perception.”49 In this sense, the perceived world only
unfolds in an interplay with the imaginal, where there are always ambiguous
depths within this dialectic.
These passages in the course notes of 1949–50, despite beginning to
mark out a distinction with Sartre and the philosophical tradition that focuses
on the fantastic mode of imagining as paradigmatic of imagining, still seem
to be tentative in presenting another mode of imagining as essential to our
perceptual access to the world. However, in the 1951–52 course, “The Expe-
rience of Others,” Merleau-Ponty returns to a discussion of myth and the
imaginal which is enigmatic, but even more highly suggestive of the power of
the imaginal to open the real. Merleau-Ponty seems to be groping for a way
to explain that those who live in a mythic culture are not just entertaining a
make-believe at odds with their reality, but rather are enmeshed in a way of
being such that “the mode of expression becomes a mode of feeling.”50 The
roles of people and events within this context—say, for example, enacting a
ritual—are not assumed as external to them, but as “lived within the myth.”
This transformation of their world seems akin to that “in-between” third order
Merleau-Ponty discussed two years previously as the experience of the child,
which still remains within all adult experience at times. In a way parallel to
the third oneiric straddling the objective and the more imaginal, he says within
this realm of living the myth: “There is no longer an opposition between the
natural and the cultural.”51 By “throwing” themselves into the rite in follow-
ing their feelings, persons in a mythic culture embody its sense of the world.
210 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

These emotions are experienced as natural given the cultural context, but this
enmeshment happens only through the imaginal gesturing forth of its sense.
In entering the ritual, Merleau-Ponty states that “[t]he ritual is assumed posi-
tively and the subject uses it like an art form.”52 The power of the mythic
context, which makes the rite possible, emerges more fully in the prereflective
giving over to the rite. The rituals are an “emblematic language,” as well as
their gestures being “symbolic,” as ways of bodying forth the imaginal, which
transforms the meaning of the world.
Merleau-Ponty, at this point, makes another connection in claiming that
this type of mythic experience is akin to the experience of those within his
own culture and other similar cultures in experiencing the realm of theater. Just
as the myth allows the people within its orbit to enact the connectedness of
nature and culture and open up the bonds among them through their mutual
participation in the ritual, so the imaginal world of the actor allows him or her
to bring together the spectacle and the audience into an oneiric world. This
immersion in this imaginal realm deepens their daily experience. In launching
into this notion, Merleau-Ponty states that “imagination brings about a kind
of distension of my relations with the world.”53 The imaginal takes us deeper
into our network of cultural relations with the world in such a way that “all
consciousness is thus necessarily imaginary consciousness.” This means that
the example of the theater has far wider implications for existence in general:
the theater is a more apparent instance of what all persons must do as part
of a culture. Everyone takes up roles within the culture, since “all life is the
invention of a role.” Merleau-Ponty in making this statement is again thinking
of Sartre and the different idea of imagination at which he has arrived. The
famous example in Being and Nothingness of taking up a role is that of the
waiter who is trying in vain to inhabit the role in such a way as to express
himself authentically, but always finds himself at a distance from what he is
doing. Sartre also invokes the imagining of the presence of an absent friend,
but finally, there is no way to bridge the gap between the real and the unreal
of the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty responds that “to live is not to derealize in an
imaginary role.” He asserts that for Sartre one never truly leaves self-presence,
which continually yields a gap between experience and oneself in which “I am
nothing.” It is consistent in all of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that there is no
“inner” psychic realm at odds with the world, but rather only an emergence
from our interrelatedness with the world. The imaginal, too, can emerge only
from our engagement with the world.
In order to distinguish his emerging idea of the imaginal from Sartre’s,
Merleau-Ponty here makes a distinction with Sartre’s type of imagination as
derealization or fantasy. He states that “[t]he imaginary has two sorts, two
phenomena of different orders.”54 What we have called the “physiognomic
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 211

imagination” is described as a differing mode of imagination from the imagi-

nation at odds with the perceived world. Merleau-Ponty describes this second
mode of imagination as “such as in the hidden aspects of a real landscape that
I have before my eyes, on the one hand, and, on the other, the evocation of
an absent friend. On the margin of what I perceive, a quantity of elements
of the nonperceived world exists, but they are taken in the context of existing
things, this zone of marginal perception makes a whole with the perceived
zones.”55 In other words, the perceived is only partially given through its sen-
sual presentation and there are other aspects that are presented imaginally,
but only through their resonance with what has already been perceived, and
as being drawn out further in making the perceived more of a whole. Once
this unfolding occurs, the sensual presentation and the imaginal dovetail or
become enmeshed to offer us what is perceived. Annabelle Dufourcq expresses
this idea in Merleau-Ponty by saying, “The real, the world, others and the
inexhaustible source of sense are always ‘present’ right within the imaginal
that seems, however, to extend quite specifically from them.”56 The example
offered by Merleau-Ponty in this lecture of a landscape with extended, latent
imaginal aspects echoes a passage from more than a half-decade earlier, in the
Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty writes, “Although the land-
scape before my eyes may well herald the features of the one which is hidden
behind the hill, it does so only subject to a certain degree of indeterminacy:
here there are meadows, over there perhaps woods, and, in any case, beyond
that near horizon, I know only that there will be land or sea, beyond that
either open sea or frozen sea, beyond that again either earth or sky and, as
far as the limits of the earth’s atmosphere are concerned, I know there is, in
the most general terms, something to be perceived.”57 The perceived cannot
be taken in prereflectively without this imaginal lining of what possibly will
unfold as a fuller presentation of what has been encountered. This dovetailing
of perception and physiognomic imagination is how we “co-exist with all the
other landscapes which stretch out beyond it.” A landscape can only be given
as situated among all sort of other possible landscapes, of which some follow
more closely the possible aspects indicated by its initial presentation and are
essential to its perceived sense.58 In discussing this example of the co-givenness
of other possible indeterminate unfoldings of the landscape, Merleau-Ponty
asks rhetorically: “Also, doesn’t this case exactly blend into the definition of
the imaginary?”59 We must respond that “yes, it does”—an elaboration of pos-
sible appearances, giving a fullness to myriad present aspects and a trajectory
to perceptual faith.
To conclude this discussion of the role of the imaginal in the experience
of others, Merleau-Ponty suggests that in taking up roles within a culture, one
is fitting into one’s past experience of others to both amplify what one has
212 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

learned about one’s own sense of self and one’s sense of the others with whom
one is related. As the actor gestures forth an imaginal realm that becomes a
site of an oneiric surround that moves between and brings together the given
and possible, so we in our societal roles take up the context within which we
have been in a certain way until then and plunge further into self-expression:
“With certain events from his past, the individual uncovers a meaning that
favors something that surges within or around him.” The imaginal allows for
this moving forward which is our self-expression: “Thus, our self-expression
is an exchange between what is given and what will happen.” Without the
immediate co-presence of other senses into which we might move, we would be
stuck in the “actual” (although pure actuality could not be within the percep-
tual world). The imaginal is key to moving us forward not only in perceptual
faith’s exploration of the world, but also in our continued self-expression.
To formulate the role of the imaginal in this way, however, leaves out a
vital dimension, as Merleau-Ponty interjects: “When it is about expression in
life, expression must take account of other people.”60 In interpersonal percep-
tion, the imaginal comes to the fore. Merleau-Ponty points out that if Sartre
were correct about the nature of imagining, then in loving another person, one
would be loving one’s fabrications of aspects of them, which really would be
only a reflection of one’s own creation. If this were true, we really would just
love certain supposed qualities of the other, and love would never become a
process of communication and learning about the other and oneself. Merleau-
Ponty surmises that the despair about the possibility of love as portrayed by
Sartre under the sway of the “project to be” is also evident in his idea of the
imaginary, for it leads to the conclusion: “The ‘I love you’ has no meaning;
one cannot give oneself to another by oneself.” If imagining cannot be a way
of returning to the world and here, more specifically, to the openness of unex-
pected unfolding of the other in the reality of ongoing perception of shared
experience, love collapses into an ego-centered transaction.
In distinction to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty finds that the perception of
another person has an imaginal dimension that is necessary to moving oneself
further into relation with the other and is a receptivity to the other. Merleau-
Ponty states, “When I perceive someone, my perception affirms itself in such
a way that it can be revealed as illusory or valid.” When I perceive the smile
on another’s face, for example, there is an immediate perception of the feel-
ing of friendliness or happiness or amusement and imaginal horizons that
might point toward the nature of this person’s cheerful disposition or their
ongoing warmth toward me or the possible joy in the situation. The possible
unfolding of these imaginal horizons are necessary constituents of the initial
prereflective perception that require further exploration. To enter the depths of
the percept is to encounter these possible unfoldings. Without these imaginal
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 213

aspects of perception, Merleau-Ponty points out, there would be no passion,

only a registration of certain objective qualities. Anabelle Dufourcq describes
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the imaginal in this context: “The same for love, this
encounter with the other that is so tight that we form a unity, could not be
given as other than imaginal: if the fusion of ideal love were to become a posi-
tive reality, there would be no gap, no more consciousness, no more person
to delight in this love.”61 The imaginal is what extends out from perception
and emerges from its latent depths such that there is always a gap between
the two persons that offers more to explore and discover, and means that each
has their own world and existence despite the overlap. In the silent world
of gesture and bodily intertwining in perception, these trajectories are traced
out. Merleau-Ponty continues by saying, “To perceive is already to anticipate
something and, in a sense, each form announces a development. An avowed
love becomes bodily.”62 This silent intertwining has a momentum that quickly
carries it toward language, and there the imaginal moves into the mythic:
“Our words construct a myth of myself that develops as I am myself am the
expression.” One finds love through the aspects of oneself and the other that
are grounded in perception, but must be imaginatively brought into discovery
and expression. The aspects of both persons emerging through the perceptual
and expressive interchange with the other give rise to the myth that traces out
a shared destiny.63 This myth allows us to care, to confront, and to discover
together the creative possibilities of how we may bring ourselves to mutuality.
Merleau-Ponty concludes that the imaginal is essential to the unfolding
of self-expression after moving from the topics of myth, theater, and then to
the necessity of roles to engage the world of others. These bring together the
natural and the cultural, as well as the past and the future. This is far from
the Sartrean emphasis on the imaginal as the unreal and magical escape from
responsibility that is often the cornerstone of bad faith. For Merleau-Ponty,
“Self-expression is comparable to the behavior adopted in playing a role.” The
difference is that, for Sartre, consciousness is self-contained in playing a role,
unable to surpass nonbeing or the unreal;64 whereas, for Merleau-Ponty, in the
sense of physiognomic imagining—as we have called it—there is the power of
moving out into the world: “Through such a behavior, I notice an initiative
in the process of creating connections.” Roles can be a way of moving into
the world to forge relations with others and uncover aspects of one’s experi-
ence. However, it must be emphasized this is not true of all imagination, but
rather it is true when one sensitively works with the physiognomic imagina-
tion in creative moments: “Only in fertile moments do I have the impression
of perceiving not only a role, but that I am in the presence of someone, the
manifestation of an other. The perception of others is that of a freedom that
takes place through a situation. One does not only love qualities, but one loves
214 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

through qualities.”65 The imaginal taking-up of a role can at times be a way of

getting beyond oneself and opening avenues of encounter.
At these fertile moments—moments of imagining creatively and sensi-
tively—one can enter the initially perceived qualities of the other and further
inhabit his or her situation, giving rise to an intensified revelation of the
person. This is how one loves through qualities, instead of halting at admiring
objectified qualities themselves.66 For an example of this, we can return to Pilote
de guerre to consider the pilot’s opening to other people and his subsequent
love for them after he returns from his mission over Arras. The pilot now
feels as though he is present in his perception in a new way after his escape
from death over Arras. He relates: “When I came back from Arras, having
woven my ties with my farmer’s family, through the translucent smile of his
niece I saw the wheat of my village. Beyond my village I saw my country, and
beyond my country all other countries.”67 This shift in relations between the
pilot and others is not a reflective one. Having entered his embodiment and
perception, he sees details of others, feels acutely the emotions contained within
these perceptions, and also imaginally inhabits their situation in connecting
with them on a deeper level. He does not take the farmer’s niece’s smile as an
objectified quality of having a pleasing personality or the attractive feature of
a pretty girl or as a passing gesture of geniality, but enters her smile to imagi-
nally and feels her courage and care in offering friendship and continuing her
life’s activities under the burden of bombing and warfare. Similarly, the pilot
imaginally inhabits the lives of those people on the muddy roads fleeing in
terror or staying to farm or tend to livestock amidst the fighting in the village.
From there, he imaginally inhabits the lives of those throughout the country
courageously sharing bread or consoling each other, holding children to their
breasts at night, and finally to all of humanity in myriad scenes of struggle
and hope. These flashes of inhabiting these lives are myriad, sketchy, mobile
imaginings that later can be elaborated more reflectively, but they pass in an
instant of new horizons opening to him.
Merleau-Ponty also recognizes the danger of this sort of imaginal path
in entering into relations with others. If not continually brought back into
relation with the details and depths of perception, and if not continually
moving and developing further in an ongoing sensitivity, such imaginings can
easily become Sartrean images of a bad faith toward others as stereotyping
them: “But then others, as living human beings, are always menaced by the
possibility of stereotyping that encloses their roles.” This is how imagining has
often been seen in the cultural and philosophical tradition, as a flight from the
patient encounter with the details of the behavior of others to instead create
oversimplified and often unjust stereotypes of them. An equal danger of such
imagining is the creation of romanticized images of others or aspects of the
 Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children 215

real. Then, as Merleau-Ponty says, “It is possible to disappear and leave only
one’s role,” both in regard to the perceiver and the perceived, such as when
one identifies oneself as a “hater of such and such group,” and the group itself
as “those horrid people in such and such ways,” or equally as an idolizer of an
overblown image of someone. The point of this analysis, however, is despite this
danger of the misuse of fantasizing imagination, without a creative and sensitive
entering of the physiognomic imagining of others, our ability to inhabit the
world of others and to fathom them as persons, to love them truly, will be lost.
 III
Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas,
and Proustian Sensitivity

Vision assumes its fundamental power of showing forth more than itself.
And since we are told that a bit of ink suffices to make us see forests and
storms, light must have its imaginaire.
—“Eye and Mind” (178)

Perception is our access to the world and to the real, but the real is not
separable from the imaginal, nor is perception separable from imagination.
The opening to others and to the depths of the world through physiognomic
imagining becomes increasingly apparent in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures and later
writings. It also becomes entwined with other topics that emerge as vital to the
articulation of the indirect ontology of the flesh, such as institution [Stiftung],
sensible ideas, and oneiric materiality. In his 1954–55 lecture course, “Institu-
tion and Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty begins by addressing something that he has
been exploring throughout his writing: the sense of time that is the other side
of institution. He reiterates there are no “instants,” nor a succession of such
“instants,” nor an idealized unity of these instants, but rather a “thickness” of
time and the sensible.1 There are depths of time that emerge from a past that
is constantly being transformed in becoming present in light of a future of
which one can never be sure as to where it is going. He continues: “Time is
not enveloping and not enveloped: there is from me to the past a thickness
which is not made of a series of perspectives or of the consciousness of their
relation, which is an obstacle and a liaison (Proust).”2 By this, he means that
the past of time is not a given dimension that we are we somehow “within”
as a containing being, nor is it constituted by us in our relationship toward
it, both of which ideas block us from a deeper sense of time. He next says
that “[t]ime is the very model of institution: passivity-activity, it continues,
because it has been instituted, it fuses, it cannot stop being, it is total because

217
218 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

it is partial, it is a field. One can speak of a quasi-eternity not by escaping of

instants towards the non-being of the future, but by the exchange of my times
lived between the instants, the identification between them, the interference
and static of relations of filiation . . . Lateral kinship of all the ‘nows’ which
makes for their confusion, their ‘generality.’ . . .”3 For Merleau-Ponty, time
is a field, it is our enmeshment with the world in such a way that there are
moments that resonate with each other in identifications of sense that gives
rise to exchange with other moments, adding to the depth of time and its
sense, and are not locatable within a schema of a succession of instants of
time. There are also dissonances and interference among moments that bring
them immediately together, sometimes making them more obscure or confus-
ing, sometimes opening up new vistas of sense, but again from within a depth
of time, not a succession, but an emergence from filiations. Also, eternity is
not the sense of an infinity or a possible totality of moments moving ahead
successively, but rather is the unfathomable depth of these possible exchanges.
It is a meeting and reversible intertwining of person and world, perceiver and
being, and not the work of a constituting consciousness or a brute givenness
of the real.
Although there is much in these statements about institution to be
explored regarding the nature of time, to which we will return, in this section
it is most important to understand how this might be tied to the imaginal.
In Merleau-Ponty’s idea of institution, events occur, such as his examples of
the “Neolithic Revolution” of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution. They
are not mere events, however, but rather as he calls them, “event-matrices”
(événements-matrices).”4 They open up new fields of meaning. These openings
transform the past in such a way, for example, that the planting of emmer
or barley transforms history to open the possibility of agriculture, or the first
smelting of metals makes possible the appearance of new sorts of weapons:
suddenly there is cast a field of possibilities for the future that had never been
until these event-matrices occurred. Merleau-Ponty colorfully expresses this
notion at the end of the prior part of the lecture: “The instituted will change
but this very change is called for by its Stiftung. Goethe; genius [is] posthu-
mous productivity. All institution is in this sense genius.” What had seemed
settled as a given history suddenly takes on a sense, opening a new direction.
It creates after its seeming demise, because suddenly the latent depths of sense
emerge to change what it was. So, in exploring Merleau-Ponty’s example, to
start planting crops in the Paleolithic Revolution in a way never foreseen opens
up the field of possible dwellings in a stable environment, even making the
first cities possible or making the domestication of animals possible. Yet, the
field of possibilities is never foreseeable until it emerges and changes what had
thought to be its historical basis into something else. This is why Merleau-
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 219

Ponty says that “institution is the recentering of all of that around a new pole,
[the] establishment of a system of distribution of values or of significations.”5
What has seemed a way to stave off starvation, for example, becomes a way to
inhabit a place or erect permanent structures. Merleau-Ponty compares these
event-matrixes to a new formulation in language as being in a parallel fashion
an expression—through action—that similarly opens horizons. He says in the
case of institution, however, the opening is “deeper.”
We find in the notion of institution as explained in these lectures an
important clue to the way that the imaginal moves us forward, but also has
the ability to ground us more deeply within the latent sense of the embrac-
ing context in which we find ourselves—cultural, personal, and temporal. The
institution of sense within the Paleolithic, the Industrial Revolution, a new
school of art, or personal feelings, like falling in love, and other examples of
institution discussed by Merleau-Ponty open up horizons of sense, and part of
these horizons are latent perceptual depths that emerge, decenter, and trans-
form the whole as the working through of the imaginal. Anabelle Dufourcq
particularly focuses on this aspect of institution, saying that institution frees
us from seeing images as disconnected events: “The Merleau-Pontian theory of
institution permits us to escape this drifting off course: that all that is to be
an image signifies fundamentally that all is symbolic, its obscure sense is not
sufficient but is a calling for further revelation. Certainly, one can only search
for this sense in new images that on the one hand, each new image is to be
seized only as a deepening of the preceding images, but on the other hand is a
quest initiated by one image that I strive towards in the others.”6 Within the
idea of institution is a notion of the power of the imaginal to move us forward
by continually grounding us in the past, but it is a past that had latent depths
that emerge through the symbolic. Images do not emerge atomistically and
without a context. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this: “Institution in the strong
sense [is] the symbolic matrix that results in the openness of a field, of a future
according to certain dimension and from the result we have the possibility of
a common adventure and of a symbolic matrix that results in the openness
of a field, of a future according to certain dimension and from the result we
have the possibility of a common adventure and of a history.”7 In a parallel
fashion to how the imaginal can manifest the latencies of personal perception,
so also a collective institution is a symbolic matrix, which through the imaginal
brings forth the latencies of its history to give possibilities for new endeavors,
as it simultaneously establishes a shared history.
As we have described on an individual level, imaginings can develop in
a way at odds with the perceived world and become mere fancies. This turn
can also occur in the collective imagining of shared institutions giving rise to
a constellation of imagined possibilities “that forms a cosmos” at odds with
220 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

other constellations that even though “are assembled do not form one.”8 If a
cosmos is formed by the intertwining of these new formations emerging from
the event-matrices, then the whole shifts. If these symbolic matrices give rise
to new possibilities that draw out the latent sense that was in the thickness
of the founding event, then institution can be seen in its deepening of the
temporal horizon such that these symbolic matrices not only open a future, but
also allow a particular past to emerge, as exemplified by the emergent horizon
of agriculture or industry or Swann’s love of Odette in In Search of Lost Time.
These were histories with latent depths of sense that had not yet become to
be. The imaginal of institution makes them become manifest. In its deepest
aspect—a topic to which we will return in our concluding section of this
book—the power of the imaginal allows institution as it develops in Merleau-
Ponty’s philosophy to encompass time as a horizon reaching an immemorial
past. This deepest past is described by Dufourcq:

Therefore, Merleau-Ponty clearly affirms in The Visible and the Invis-

ible that the solidity of institution is myth. Myth is an ensemble of
particular events, situated, as one might say, in an immemorial past,
always beneath them, sources of inspiration for each new situation
and only existing like a haunting of these concrete transpositions.
The myth is more trans-temporal than atemporal, it is the symbolic
power that is possessed by the particular events.9

The imaginal of the perceived as part of the real fuels not only our belonging
to new constellations of things and events as a transformed context, adding to
the movement of perceptual faith, but also is a key to the ever-deepening of
time—as a becoming of “what was to have been.” Institution, as Merleau-Ponty
summarizes, is “a simultaneous decentering and recentering of the elements of
our own life, a movement by us toward the past and of the past reanimated
towards us.”10 The imaginal elaborations from within symbolic event-matrices
give the past a reanimation that continually transforms the situation, history,
and possibilities.
In beginning the passivity lectures, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the world
can only act on our understanding of the world at a level “below” knowledge or
self-consciousness. Our individual histories cannot be explained either as “my
past explains me entirely”—as a givenness imposed upon me—or by “I create
the sense of my past ex nihilo”—as an identity constituted by consciousness.
Either pure passivity or pure posited as the source of our personal identity
or the world’s identity are both “madness.”11 The fact that human being is
an activity and a passivity in understanding the world’s sense is inseparable
from the way that perception is lined with the imaginal. It is this inseparabil-
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 221

ity that is at the heart of institution, which is not only the way that being
continually becomes, but is also the way that our collective sense is entwined
with the world’s history in such a way that there is a reversibility. Reversibility
defies being dichotomized: “There is a passivity of ‘humans’ and an activity
of ‘things’ because there are symbolic systems and a record, at their levels
of everything that happens. This ‘record’ is neither external causality, nor a
reference to a meta-history created by the human will, but rather a reference
to an imagination of history that is the truth of symbolic matrices.”12 Rather
than the opposition of natural being and psychical being that has plagued
traditional philosophy, Merleau-Ponty increasingly envisions fields or regions of
sense that circle about each other, overlapping and separate: “fissured wholes.”
An integral part of this interplay among differences that both conjoins and
disjoins is the work of the imaginal within the perceptual. Symbolic matrices
open up possibles as the manifestation and transformation of sense and the
world, but other possibles become foreclosures that veil the coming forth of
sense. In this way, Merleau-Ponty says we get beyond history as objective and
lifeless and see the desire—the “urges” impelling what emerges—that infuses
a “wild history.”13 This also renders the truth of history as not an adequation
with facts, but rather as the openness that allows greater movement and inte-
gration of varied senses.
Later in the lectures on passivity, Merleau-Ponty contrasts the distinction
between perception and imagination by Sartre with his growing sense of the
inseparability of imagination and perception. Merleau-Ponty turns to interper-
sonal perception and states, “Our real life, inasmuch as it is addressed to beings,
is already imaginary.”14 He gives as an example perceiving another person in
which there is “the impression that someone gives us in an encounter,” in regard
to the other person’s feeling or thinking, but as Merleau-Ponty says there is no
certain way to verify this sense of the other and it is not self-evident—even to
them—by any means: it is something we must explore from the imaginal lining
of perception. Merleau-Ponty does not see clear boundaries among perception,
imagination, and even the dream in encountering the world and others: “Thus,
there is an oneirism of wakefulness and, conversely, a quasi-perceptual character
of dreams—the mythical.”15 Put in the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s later philoso-
phy, it could be said that perception and the dream are chiasmatic to each
other. If perception is oneiric in this way that all beings can only be under-
stood through an imaginal elaboration, then perception itself—and certainly
the deepening of its sense—is an art that can be achieved to a greater or lesser
degree. Richard Kearney sees Merleau-Ponty opening this depth dimension of
perception through the imaginal: “The image for Merleau-Ponty is not just a
ruse for making the absent present, it is unique mode of expressing the hidden
logos of lines, colors, gestures and textures which elicits our vision—much in
222 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the same way as marrow elicits the growth of a bone. And, in so far as he is
successful, his act of imaginative disclosure is reciprocated by an objective act
of epiphany.”16 Imagining opens a “hidden logos” within perceptual depths
of the nuances, elaborations, and kindred senses that are lodged within the
depths of the world, and can be brought forward only through this sort of
creative exploration.
Yet, perception has traditionally been seen to carry its own evidence that
is then structured by reason with the goal of achieving an adequation between
subjective representations and objective states of affairs. This schism is still
assumed by Sartre’s characterization of the retreat to the imaginary in bad faith
that is at odds with the objective world. Merleau-Ponty makes clear that both
the traditional philosophical dichotomy and the newer Sartrean version are
descriptions from which he seeks to distance himself: “The ‘perceived world’ is
not adequation, nor is the ‘imaginary world,’ thus bad faith. There is no bad
faith except by contrast with adequation.” The attempt to distill perception
into the clear and distinct representation of objective states of affairs in the
claim of adequation is itself a form of bad faith. It is bad faith, because we
understand prereflectively that we would not know anything of other people
or even of the things around us only through a perception whose “structura-
tion which is by no means without gaps.”17 We understand on a prereflective
level that we could not perceive without the gaps that can only be filled in
through imaginal aspects of their presentation that are not accessible in any
other way. Yet, in trying to reduce perception to adequation with objective
states of affairs, we sense this is false, but in insisting on achieving objectivity,
we choose to believe in its possibility. Yet Merleau-Ponty admits that it is often
the case that we desire to believe a certain determined picture of myself or
of the other person, and admits that this sort of imaginal exists all too often.
Sartre’s analysis does capture this aspect of interpersonal life.18
Certainly, if any aspect of the imaginal has been cast as a separated
realm from the real by the Western philosophical and cultural traditions, it is
the imaginal world of dreams. Yet, even here, Merleau-Ponty does not draw
a clear divide between the waking grasp of the world and the life of dreams.
The imaginal in dreams is symbolic, but as we have seen, the perceptions of
wakefulness have a symbolic import that in certain ways is necessary for percep-
tion to have any sense. What Merleau-Ponty calls the “oneirism of wakefulness”
is “the deployment of perceptual ‘beliefs,’ the flux and reflux which bear our
acts and our abstentions, our speech and our silence.”19 So, for example, one
could only accept the bread from the farmer’s daughter’s hands by flashes of
“beliefs” in the imaginal fleshing out of familial loving feeling as part of “the
flux and reflux” of the felt closeness, or hear about one’s brave comrade flying
over a German anti-aircraft battery with flashes of felt “beliefs” as “fluxes” of
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 223

imaginings of steely determination and perseverance of the comrade in the

midst of violent chaos. Without these flashes of imagining, then the gesture
of the farmer’s daughter or the report of the comrade would have no compel-
ling meaning.
The symbolisms, however, in the field of the imaginal and the perceptual
are different, and yet enfold each other. The imaginal is a kind of structuration
of the world that is different from perception, but both are part of the real
and the unfolding of the world: “The imaginary-real relation is not [between]
the empty and the full, unobservable and observable, two incomparable uni-
verses . . . but entirely different species of structuration.”20 For example, in
Saint-Exupéry’s famous quote used to end the Phenomenology of Perception,
one would certainly be caught within the “flux and reflux” of imaginal flashes
of one’s son’s fear or panic caught in the burning building that would “bear
out” the act of running into the building and would give a structure to the
sense of the need and urgency of rushing inside to save him. Yet the differ-
ence between the imaginal and the perceptual would become quite evident in
regard to their different structures and qualities of sense were one to suddenly
hear screams of terror from the building, instead of this imagined possibility
being only part of the felt background of the situation.
Merleau-Ponty describes the way that the imaginal intersects with other
senses of the world such that the imaginal is a field of apprehension, like “the
sensory field,” “ideological field,” “mythical field,” “practical field” and “sym-
bolic field.”21 The imaginal—as the ongoing presence of this field intersecting
with the others—is such that “Oneirism [is] just beneath the surface of all
waking life.”22 If the imaginal is a field intersecting the field of perception,
then there are unique ways in which the imaginal interplays with other sorts
of apprehensions. It is a necessary part of the background against which the
perceived appears. James Steeves expresses this constant interplay of the per-
ceptual and imaginal in the play of foreground and background of what he
has called the “virtual,” indicating the imaginal that surrounds each percept:

Qualities can serve as a figure or a background of an experience:

the red of the carpet beckons the body to engage with its synes-
thetic quality, its unique sound and touch, which is only tacitly
and vaguely present in the form of a background. This means that
the perceptual appearance of the object requires more than simply
the presence of a set of sense qualities, but the elusive presence of
a background of sensation that is as much absent as present, as
much invisible as visible. There is a reversibility between the roles
of the figure and background that is essential to seeing each sense
quality as being part of a single perceptual Gestalt.23
224 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

If this oneiric dimension is beneath the surface of all life, then the perceived,
the gestured, the spoken, and all our expressions and apprehensions have an
underside of more open sense than we tend to recognize. This underside of the
imaginal is essential to the possible expansiveness and depth of sense.
It is due to his increasing appreciation of the power of imagining as
intertwined with perception that Merleau-Ponty is led to turn to the art-
ists and writers to bring out dimensions that we repress from our awareness
either individually or collectively.24 The importance of these more irrational
connections that are more open to the interplays of sense within perception
is something that Merleau-Ponty took to heart from the surrealists. In the
1948 radio lecture when he pointed to Bachelard’s influence, he also credited
the “surrealist experiment”25 and mentioned André Breton, Paul Claudel, and
Francis Ponge as adding to our knowledge of how the things of the world haunt
us in symbolic ways to be explored imaginally.26 Furthermore, in pointing to
the surrealist influence, Merleau-Ponty is emphatic that the imaginal is essential
to the identity of any object encountered in perception. His extended example
of perceiving honey ends by saying its qualities “can only be understood in
light of a dialogue between me as an embodied subject and the external object
which bears this quality.” Yet the quality may “symbolize an entire pattern of
human behavior,” just as “the things of the world are not simply neutral objects
before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolizes or recalls a
particular way of behaving.” Merleau-Ponty gives examples of how the lemon’s
sourness, the Chinese rock garden’s sparse dryness, or water’s infiltrating fluid-
ity cannot be perceived as mere objective properties, but are inseparable from
latent, possible elaborations of bitterness, bareness, and restlessness as realms
of human feeling and values that are imaginal fluxes and refluxes of the lining
of perception.27
To return to the passivity lectures for a moment, Merleau-Ponty’s claim
that the “oneirism of wakefulness” is an ongoing presence “just below the
surface” of the perception of things asks us to think of perception not as a
grasping from a distance, but more as a touching and moving in rhythm with
the movement of the world in order to enter the dimension of the interplay
of senses.28 Even if the perceiver attempts to categorically grasp the world in
a later reflection upon the initial silent encounter with the world’s gestures,
this is not the basic mode of relation to the world of perception: “Perception
is not therefore categorical subsumption.”29 In shifting our sense of perception
to an incorporation of the oneiric, Merleau-Ponty describes the perceived in a
manner that will later reoccur in his description of the artist’s greater openness
of perception’s depth in “Eye and Mind”: “Thus, each perception is a vibra-
tion of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes
in all my being in the world, it is super-significant—As particular, it would
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 225

be not knowing, existing in its particularity, its particularity is only what it is

lacking in order to be everything in the world.”30 Each perception as being a
vibration is something that gives sense in an oneiric fashion31—as expansive
and connected to other things in the world—as a touch between the perceiver
and world in a gesture that shapes trajectories of affect, of sense, of ideas, and
so on, but does not reach closure. In the example right before this statement,
Merleau-Ponty is contrasting the look of love or the look of kinship with that
of the glance at someone in order to categorize them. He states that there is
in primordial perception an overabundance of sense, such that we don’t just
see a “visible carapace,” but rather perceive all the concretions of the things,
events, and other beings to which something is related. The oneiric aspect of
the imaginal permeates the background of perception and connects to the
meanings of the beings of the world, yet remains accessible in the depths of
the sense of the percept. In this way, Merleau-Ponty says, “the perception of
each identifiable ‘this’ flees, therefore and leads toward the whole, though it
is gathered into itself and precisely because it is a ‘this, for I never have the
whole world in front of me.”32 Each percept has within its depths this inex-
haustibility of sense stemming from these myriad relations that potentially
reach throughout the world. They will be partly explored in further sensible
presentations, yet much of their connection with the sense of other beings is
oneiric, imaginal. James Steeves makes the same point: “There is an essential
virtuality without which all qualities would lack their significance as qualities
of an object.”33 The imaginal lining to the perceptual is essential to its sense
and to its depth of possible meaning.
In the last parts of the lectures on passivity, there are again references
to Proust and In Search of Lost Time as having articulated another sense of
memory, perception, and embodying being that expresses the passivity of our
activity or “the invisible lining” of phenomena. Merleau-Ponty tells us to turn
to Proust to see the articulation of the way “surroundings inhabit” the body
and infiltrate its hold on the past. He says that the sort of memory expressed
in Proust’s texts is not that of recollection, but is the “memory of the body
based on what is a type. It holds the past not as a chronology, but across
qualitative regions.”34 A “qualitative type” is the sort of sense that lies between
abstract ideality and the sensible, similar to the way sensible ideas will be later
articulated.35 Merleau-Ponty explains how water’s fluidity, or a madeleine’s taste
or aroma, or the patterns of movements of trees give us access to an “authentic
memory,” because there are marginal preobjective senses in the perception of
these things that connect to other beings through linkages of sense. These link-
ages also work across seemingly separate times as existing both in the past and
present simultaneously.36 In these comments, we already see a sketching-out of
what Merleau-Ponty will call “sensible ideas” in The Visible and the Invisible,
226 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

and where he repeatedly refers his readers to explore Proust’s works in order
to see the best articulation of the ways “sensible ideas” emerge and give us
access to the world in a unique way. The “sensible idea,” as he describes it,
is the way through perception we have a sense of what is perceived that goes
beyond its sensible presentation, or, as we called it previously, an overabundance
of perception. It is an apprehension of a deeper and more complete sense of
a percept that is not yet an abstract idea of reflection, but rather is a more
bodily engaging and compelling presentation of what an abstract idea would
only suggest. Although ideality and imagining have been opposed throughout
much of the Western philosophical tradition, the sensible idea as the underside
or latent depth of the perceived that reaches beyond itself to other connec-
tions of sense, time and possibility in the world indicates that it contains an
imaginal component; there is a chiasmatic relation between sensible ideality
and imagining. In addition, there is an affective and memorial dimension of
sensible ideas.
In a working note of May 1960, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-
Ponty says “that to see is always to see more than one sees,” and he adds, not
in a contradictory sense of two entities, but in the sense of that “visibility
involves a non-visibility.”37 Perception goes beyond itself in its depths. The
sensible pivots around other dimensions of apprehension. His first example of
this “more than” is in the perception of another person: we have a sense of who
they are inseparably from our perception of them that is “not defined”—but,
like his use of the notion, “ray of the world,” this sense touches and overlaps
with other aspects of the world whose affective sense or sensible configuration,
or imaginary elongations, or memorial echoes, have affinities with the prereflec-
tive perceived sense. So, for example, looking at Gavoille might fleetingly and
imperceptibly touch on other stoic presences of the pilot’s acquaintance, or the
history of famous pilots enduring enemy fire, or fictional accounts of characters
who endured the pitfalls of war wordlessly, or myths like that of Philoctetes.
These imaginal presences may be only an invisible flickering that plays across
and beyond the visible face in front of him, almost like the play of light and
shadow. The love inspired in the narrator in daily witnessing Gavoille’s stoic
heroism is a dimension of the sensible idea of Gavoille. This way of being
struck by Gavoille surpasses the sense that an abstraction could capture. These
imaginal senses are there within perception, but not in a determinate way, as
the pilot, for example, looks at Gavoille’s face at group 2-33’s breakfast table.
In describing the idea of sensible ideas, Galen Johnson says, “love, beauty, color
and music are sensible ideas, they are a level or dimension of life and world,
invisible of this world that inhabit it, sustain it, and render it visible, its own
and interior possibility.”38 The sensible idea augments the visibility of things and
their felt sense. They are meanings that go beyond the literal sense of a thing,
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 227

and yet they are not at the level of an idea, adds Johnson, indicating they are
not abstract and separable from the context and the sensual presentation of
a thing. Yet at the same time they constellate the felt senses hovering about
the face of this being to indicate something more general, open to interrelated
senses. We enter into a stream of sense as a dimension—as possibility. This
elongation of sense is the power of the imaginal.
The most sustained discussion of the sensible idea, which Merleau-Ponty
deems “the most difficult point,” is in the last pages of the chapter, “The
Intertwining—The Chiasm,” of The Visible and the Invisible. He starts the
discussion by stating, “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the
relations between the visible and the invisible, that is its lining and depth.”39
The reader who enters the world of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time enters a
world where each sensible percept is shown to have depths of the imaginal,
the memorial, the affective, and the sensible that spin with latent nuanced
senses like the spinning lantern light in the narrator’s room as a child early in
Swann’s Way. The lantern’s lights and shadows project presences into the room
that seem to be the embodiment of knights and warriors that whisper mythic
tales, cultural memories, heroic feelings, and other sensible presentations. Yet
Proust’s text is full of other sorts of sensible ideas in varied presentations.
Merleau-Ponty adds to the description of Proust: “For what he [Proust] says
of musical ideas, he says of all cultural beings, such as the Princess of Clêves,
and also of the essence of love that the ‘little phrase’ not only makes present to
Swann, but communicable to all who hear it, even though it is unbeknownst
to themselves, and even though later they do not know how to recognize it
in the loves they witness.”40 Proust articulates how perception extends beyond
sensed presences to a larger and deeper world of sense that, without being
recognized as such, plays with us and is communicated by us. It marks out,
for example, the trajectory of love as felt and experienced by Swann, but as he
conceived it. Love appears as recognizable through the sensible presentation of
the musical theme of the five-note phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata that for Swann
embodies his love for Odette. Jessica Wiskus describes this power of sensible
presentation of something that goes beyond itself and opens a dimension of
sense: “Rather, it could be said that the musical idea expressed through the
‘little phrase’ brings this love into being. Thanks to Vinteuil’s sonata, not only
does Odette appear in a new light; for Swann, the ‘little phrase’ (through
expressions ‘of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity’) makes possible
his very ambition of love.”41 The musical phrase brings into an enhanced sense
these qualities as felt, experienced, and leading to further possibilities, which
is the action of the imaginal in augmenting perception. Indeed, it is further
testimony to the power of the imaginal to bring out these latent depths that
even the reader experiences through Proust’s words the ability to enter into the
228 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

fictive world of Swann and Odette with a transformative effect. For sensitive
readers, dimensions of their own reality (as co-imaginers) come forward and
open up to possible extensions of sense and action.
The power of sensible ideas, intertwined with the imaginal, touches us
in the core of our being in such a way that the world is not conceived differ-
ently, but rather opens up with new felt paths of possible behaviors, ways to
be, and ways to encounter other beings. Wiskus expresses the power of sensible
ideas to move us to realizations, which are not reflective, but have the power
to transform us and our sense of the world: “They work from the ‘heart’ of
the sensible not only because the realm of the senses offers the chance of their
articulation, but because their very power of affectivity—a power that prompts
Swann to change the trajectory of his entire life—springs from the performa-
tive, dynamic realization.”42 By performative, Wiskus means to describe how
the sensible idea is not an entity, nor static, but a process of entering into
the world as illuminated, sustained, as something become perceivable that by
nature would not appear in a concrete sensible guise, whether love, friendship,
or kindness becoming distilled in the bread being passed around the farmer’s
table where the pilot is billeted. It is an enactment that brings to presence
unseen depths. This is certainly the work of the physiognomic imaginal. Wiskus
states there is a “penetrating force” of the sensible idea that moves into depth
and shadow, and this is the lining of the imaginal of the perceived that can
be sensitively drawn out. This means, says Wiskus, that unlike the light of
illumination of abstractions that highlight the clear and distinct, this sort of
illumination makes the shadows, the hidden, and the invisible be experienced
as what they are: remaining shadowy and hidden, but open as fissured, leading
into labyrinths of further sensible interconnection. It is because, as Merleau-
Ponty says, they are not present, but are an invisible lining not really there that
“they possess us” or are more like “open vortexes” into which we are drawn.43
There is a gravitational pull of what is withheld, the “hollow” as Merleau-Ponty
repeatedly calls it, or not yet there.
The fact that Merleau-Ponty also locates the happening of sensible ideas
within the arts points to the chiasmatic entwining between sensible ideas and
the imaginal. He finds in the arts and their practices of augmenting the power
of sensible surfaces or the face of the world that there is a truth that rivals
that of the abstract disciplines: “Literature, music, and passions, but also the
experience of the visible world are—no less than is the science of Lavoisier
and Ampere—the exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a world
or a universe of ideas. The difference is simply that this invisible, these ideas,
unlike those of that science, cannot be detached from the sensible appearances
and erected into a second positivity.44 The sensible idea is inseparable from
the sensual appearance in which it is manifest. It is not that this sort of idea
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 229

could be unmasked or is just hidden and can be uncovered. It is not as though

the sensible was just an instance or an occasion for sensible ideas to appear.
Even though the sensible reaches beyond itself, it also stays within itself as
the sensible idea: “. . . it is that they owe their authority, their fascinating,
indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are a transparency behind
the sensible, or in its heart. Each time we want to get at it immediately, or lay
hands on it, or circumscribe it, or see it unveiled, we do in fact feel that the
attempt is misconceived, that it retreats in the measure that we approach.”45
The idea is not separable from the sensible in this case—they are wedded in
depth. The attempt to render the sensible idea into an abstract idea dissipates
the thickness of the flesh within which it is held and becomes manifest.
Rather than throwing the sense of the world into clarity and distinctness,
sensible ideas such as love, friendship, beauty, courage, and the host of other
sensible ideas that line the perceived world to which we are related retain a
density and darkness. Merleau-Ponty explains: “It is essential to this sort of
ideas that they be ‘veiled with shadows,’ appear ‘under a disguise.’ They give
us the assurance that the ‘great and unpenetrated discouraging night of our
soul’ is not empty, is not ‘nothingness;’ but these entities, these domains,
these worlds that line it, people it, and whose presence feels like the presence
of someone in the dark, have been acquired only through its commerce with
the visible, to which they remain attached.”46 The sensible idea holds its mys-
tery of sense that nevertheless is a powerful force in guiding us through the
paths and choices of the perceived world, and is the ballast of its value for
us. Merleau-Ponty offers an example after this description of the veiled nature
of the sensible ideas, pointing to Valéry’s image of the secret blackness at the
heart of the whiteness of milk, accessible only through its sensible whiteness.
This recurring image in literature—of the blackness at the heart of the white-
ness of milk—is discussed by Bachelard in his explanation of the nature of the
“material imagination,” an idea that parallels Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of
what we have called the physiognomic imagination, a parallel we will explore
in a later section.47 Bachelard says that this phrase, “the secret blackness of
milk,” indicates a “perspective of depth.” This depth emerges in imaginings
plumbing the latent qualities of what is perceived: “the imagination wants to
take hold of all the real and finds more reality in what is hidden than in what
is shown.”48 For Bachelard, there would be a direct connection between this
image as a “sensible idea” and the capacities of imagining. Perhaps even more
to the point of establishing the connection between this image and the sensible
ideas of Proust is Rajiv Kaushik’s comment that in citing this image Merleau-
Ponty is agreeing with Proust that “there is the text of the book that serves to
confer the sequence of images, the imaginary journeyings or overprintings from
the original event onwards; but this highlights that, for Proust, the text of the
230 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

literary work is itself an image insofar as it renders the indeterminate itself.”49

The relation of what is brought forward in Proust’s “journeying sequence of
images” is a distinctive sense that moves on from what is perceived, and yet
also reveals what is at the heart of the sensible, just as the image from Valéry
suggests with its blackness at the heart of whiteness. The image does not lose
its indeterminacy in bringing forth the depths of the perceived, since the
image’s marrow is a matrix of sense. Although what is being conveyed are
sensible ideas, their power of propulsion and penetrating into the invisibility
of the visible—as entering the dark and hidden in an indeterminate way that
can branch in many directions—is the action of the imaginal.
Merleau-Ponty’s working note of April 1960 expresses one more connec-
tion among his notions of institution, the temporality that is a depth tempo-
rality intertwining with its past in chiasmatic (nonsuccessive) ways, sensible
ideas as expressed by Proust, and the imaginal. In this note, Merleau-Ponty is
exploring another notion of the past than the traditional sense of being “further
behind” in a series of instants that provides a background for the present. He
says the notion of institution and past time as ever-changing and yet always
present simultaneously with the present—“where the past is ‘simultaneous’ with
the present in the narrow sense”—can only be understood when we do away
with the idea of “common idea of time as a series of Erlebnisse” (experiences),
and with the concomitant notion of “interiority” and ego-centeredness. On
the prereflective level we have been exploring since the opening of this book,
embodying being is of the world and is a taking-in of the world’s indirect
voices in gesture. At this prereflective level, Merleau-Ponty asserts, we are open
to an underside of the perceived world that has a differing depth of time and
sense. Here he turns to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time again, stating: “There is
an architectonic past, cf, Proust: the true hawthorns are the hawthorns of the
past,” and adds that we must “restore the life” of this level of the real.50 For
Merleau-Ponty, this underside of the invisible of the visible means that there
is a sense in which there is an ever-present time of certain key events in each
person’s existence or in the life of a culture that he calls “Existential eternity.
The indestructible, the barbaric Principle.”51 This depth of time in which one
understands “time as chiasm,” such that one finds “in the present, the flesh
of the world (and not in the past) an ‘ever new’ and ‘always the same’ ” is
explained by Merleau-Ponty as simultaneous presence within an event of events
of the past.52 So, for example, for the pilot in Pilote de guerre, the night over
Arras and his encounter with certain death whose grasp he eluded will always
be present in each moment of the rest of his life—whether at the table of the
farmer, sitting with group 2-33, or looking at the fleeing masses below his
plane. To return to the working note of April 1960, this invisible lining of
sense that is the ever-present hawthorns of Proust’s narrator’s life belongs to
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 231

the realm of myth: “This ‘past’ belongs to a mythical time, to the time before
time.”53 The depths of this time are partly imaginal, not in the sense of mere
fancy, but rather in that they are event-matrices, mythic movements, holding
an overabundance of meaning that gives them the substantiality and the force
that makes the present as meaningful as it is in its inexhaustibility. This “other
side” of what stands before us has a hidden face of what the past continues
to mean and become for us.
Yet there is a reason that Merleau-Ponty turns repeatedly to Proust to
express this related series of notions of sensible ideas, institution, another sense
of the past (or barbaric time), and the mythic as concomitants of embodying
being. We have mentioned several times how Merleau-Ponty says that Proust
is the one who best expressed this imaginal and oneiric sense of the perceived,
so it may be helpful to take an example or two from In Search of Lost Time
to understand Merleau-Ponty better. This is the narrator’s first experience with
the sight of the hawthorns:

I found the whole path throbbing with a fragrance of hawthorn-

blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were
no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped
upon their altars; while beneath them the sun cast a checkered
light upon the ground, as though it had just passed through a
stained-glass window; and their scent swept over me, as unctuous,
as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before
the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out
each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an absent-minded
air, delicate radiating veins in the flamboyant style like those which,
in the church, framed the stairway to the roof-loft or the mullions
of the windows and blossomed out into the fleshy whiteness of
strawberry flowers.54

The narrator immediately experiences the sensible presentations of the varied

aspects of the hawthorns as entwining with his felt sense in church of the
sacramental dimension of existence. He sees the hawthorn blossoms welcom-
ing and sheltering him. The fragrance is like the rich fragrance in church that
permeates our being and has the power to uplift us from everyday concerns.
The light passing through the hawthorns has that gentle and yet quietly efful-
gent sense that is like the light coming through stained glass windows in the
church, which both adds to the stillness we have of belonging to this earth and
also to the sense of the glory of our everyday lighting that we barely notice.
The colors, shapes, and curves of the flowers are like the decorated interior
of the church, which again is an attempt to show the jewel-like preciousness
232 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of existence, as well as the embracing sense of its rhythms. The hawthorns

gesture in their silent beckoning and communicating both as a result of the
narrator dwelling in a certain cultural and historical context and because they
are emblematic of a shared perceptual sense, such that we can feel those vibra-
tions in our imaginal life by following the character’s described experience.
Not only can we understand in a way that is visceral, felt, and sensed in
the specifics of the perceptible aspects of what he describes, but in following
what the narrator says in the text, these senses become possible experiences in
encountering hawthorns like these. Notice, also, how themes that might seem
at odds otherwise, such as sprays of flowers as only natural beings with no
specific meaning, are brought to juxtapose—but also to constellate with—the
interior and holy purpose of church. In this felt coming-together, each adds
to the meaning of the other.55 This is the power of the imaginal: to line the
sensible with myriad possible senses and to connect divergent beings of the
world. This is how the artist gives a greater depth to the things we perceive,
because the linkages are not purely arbitrary, and yet are not obvious. Yet, they
“work” in their juxtaposition to form something else that is more than their
mere combination, as each intensifies and augments the sense of the other.
Despite whatever explanatory gloss we give to their juxtaposition and linkage
in abstract rational terms, it will not capture the full sense of the hawthorns.
Only in the sensual encounter of perception will the full sense of the haw-
thorns be announced with its imaginal “other side.” Yet, if words or colors
can convey a portion of this sense, it is the poetic, the literary or the painted
expressions of the poet, writer, or artist that can bring us back to the world
of silent gestures and indirect dialogue—a topic to which we will soon turn.
In Merleau-Ponty’s reading notes on Proust gathered for the passivity
lectures, there is a quote from Swann’s Way about the central roles of the
Méséglise and Guermantes ways that grew from simple perceptual experiences
into unacknowledged central symbols for the narrator of possible directions
in life. They fit Merleau-Ponty’s sense that in the imaginal lining of the real
there is an oneiric quality of aspects of reality that is like unattainable sources
and goals like those that seem to be at the center of the dream life.56 That
the two paths might structure or frame an entire life, or an entire culture,
is the sense the reader discerns from the opposition of the Guermantes way
and the Méséglise way in the narrator’s life. In Merleau-Ponty’s notes, he has
copied this line from the text: “But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer
of my mental soil, as the firm ground upon which I stand, that I regard the
Méséglise and Guermantes ways.”57 Yet, for the narrator initially these were
merely two country footpaths that led out from the narrator’s childhood home
as two different walks the family took on differing occasions. In a way that
can never be specified, however, they haunt the narrator like the oneiric poles
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 233

that pull one in directions so that one is never sure what they are or what
they mean. The narrator’s first sense of these paths is in a literal topographic
opposition: “For there were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we
used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we
would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we
had chosen.”58 However, these mundane perceptions soon become something
oneiric and imaginal, as the Méséglise way was not a very long walk and not
too far from home, but ran past Swann’s house, a world of which the narrator
was not a part and didn’t think he would be, such that the “Méséglise was
something as inaccessible as the horizon . . . during the whole of my boy-
hood.”59 It was the horizon of a life he could not attain. The other path is
longer, such that the “ ‘Guermantes’ way,’ when one took that walk . . . one
could never be sure what time one would be home,” so once one took that
path, it was going be a journey. For the young narrator, the “Guermantes way”
meant the ultimate goal, “ideal rather than real,” as a pole of his life giving
a direction, but no specific goal.60 It was a journey that he was never sure he
could complete.
Although these sensible ideas with their imaginal dimension seem to
frame the narrator’s life, a similar sense seems to be shared by his family. In
the discussion of sensible ideas in the last pages of the Chiasm chapter of The
Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty says of these sensible ideas that underlie
the more self-aware ideas of reflection that we do not know “by what miracle
a created generality, a culture, a knowledge come to add to and recapture and
rectify the natural generality of my body and the world,” and suggests there
are these senses that “stream forth” on the underside of the sensible that have
no exact equivalents in abstract ideality. These generalities of culture stream
alongside the underside of perception in ways that Merleau-Ponty says are
shown to us by Proust. They are ways of sense-making that lead their “shadowy
life” in undergirding the shared “junctures of the visible world.”61 So, these
imaginal linings of the landscapes are open to others, but only within a shared
context and not to an objective observer. The narrator, for example, realizes
that his father has played a role in these two paths taking on the oneiric sense
they have for him:

Since my father used always to speak of the “Méséglise way” as

comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and
of the “Guermantes way” as typical of river scenery, I had invested
each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct enti-
ties, with that cohesion, that unity which only belongs to figments
of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me
a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole,
234 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one
or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set
down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape,
were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen
playgoer and lover of the dramatic art, are the little streets that
run past the walls of the theater.62

Objectively, these two paths could be seen as quite inconsequential, but for
the narrator they are not just things in the world—two paths for walking. In
his world, they are guideposts. They are two ways in life that grow out of the
difference between rivers and plains and their suggestive sense, as well as long
versus short, as well an unattainable social level versus the path of the more
common social set, such that he can never clearly grasp their meaning but
feels their presence in his world. Their difference, although not definable, is
deeply experienced and deeply meaningful: “more than mere miles separated
one from the other.”63 The narrator says he could never think of going from
one path to the other. The fact that the Méséglise way goes past the home
of Swann—who at this point is no longer part of his family’s universe, since
they see Swann as disreputable because of his marriage to Odette—and also
that along this path are those things of almost seemingly infinite value to the
young narrator, such as the sight of the hawthorn blossoms or the sight of
Gilberte—removes it from being a plausible way of proceeding. This gives each
perceptible aspect of the path another unattainable imaginal sense.
Merleau-Ponty feels that Proust has shown how both personal and cul-
tural senses may emerge from an unnoticed imaginal level of perception. A
love may be pursued, or wars may be fought, a person feel unsatisfied, or
populations oppressed, and other personal and social upheavals occur on the
basis of oneiric cultural “paths,” “barriers,” “destinies,” “lines of affiliation,” and
so many other ways we perceive other individuals’ or groups’ actions and goals.
When we are certain our vision of goals and values are objectively right we are
often under the sway of the imaginal. Emmanuel Alloa takes Merleau-Ponty’s
idea of the imaginal to describe a kind of theater that presents us with pos-
sibilities of seeing ourselves, and then of transforming ourselves: “Although the
virtual scenes or stages that then arise are indeed virtual, this does not mean
that they are illusory, they are not so much unreal as they tend as it were to
‘superimpose’ themselves on what is given. Far from simply transcribing the
given, term for term, the virtual stage allows us to see that which within the
given was previously unseen by ‘positing as possible that which was supposedly
impossible.’ ”64 If we can probe the imaginal lining of the perceived world,
new senses can emerge that did not seem to be present even through reflec-
tive assessment. Alloa sees how this aspect of the imaginal if utilized in theater
 Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity 235

allows us to free ourselves from what had seemed to be obvious as our personal
or shared identity: “The stage de-identifies subjects with their actual attributes,
and reconfigures the figure of the visible by disfiguring the resemblance of
the identical to itself.” We are not identical to ourselves as long as we can
plumb the physiognomic imaginal, for then we can become or move into the
dynamic process of branching into the myriad other senses that conjoin with
what seems to be merely given. Alloa concludes this thought by expressing
the freedom that comes from this sort of imagining—that of transformation:
“In this way, theatre and politics sketch a certain convergence and reveal a
stage that is one of irreducible imminence, a stage on which the modalities
of what is ‘to come’ appear in such a way that they cannot be deduced from
any pre-text and whose open future does not preclude prolongations. Such
openness is perceptible, in an inchoate form, in Merleau-Ponty.”65 Without
the physiognomic imaginal, perception would remain without dynamic ways
to access its depths and transform the present into the promise of the past
that had never been until this moment of creative intervention. The meaning
of institution, sensible ideas, and the writings of Proust as they became more
articulated by Merleau-Ponty brought him to focus on the key role of “imaginal
being” at the heart of his new indirect or fleshly ontology.
 IV
The Later Writings
Toward an Imaginal Ontology

All ontology is a type of imagination, all imagination is an ontology. There

is an imagination which is in no way a nihilation (position of the unreal
as unreal) which is a crystallization of being.
—unpublished lecture notes on Descartes1

In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty continues to elaborate what we have called

the physiognomic imagination until he comes to articulate it as essential to
Being itself. Richard Kearney discusses this development of the ontological
import of the later writings:

Each realm of being is marked, for Merleau-Ponty, by a chiasmus

of visibility and invisibility. These chiasmic poles are not mutually
exclusive in the way being and nothingness are for Sartre. For though
they may be said to constitute the unique worlds of perception
and imagination, they remain at all times founded in a dimension
of Being more fundamental than both—and in the light of which
both are seen to correspond.”2

This ontology, of course, is at odds with much of the philosophical tradition

that precedes Merleau-Ponty, but is the result of following out carefully how
our access to being emerges from the primordial level of perception. If on
the most primordial level of the prereflective encounter with the things of
the world is a response to the beckoning of the physiognomic—the “look” of
things, events, creatures as gesturing to us—that is lined with an oneiric and
imaginal dimension that fills out perceptual sense, gives density and dynamism
to time as institution, and is generative of sensible ideas, then the imaginal

237
238 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

is essential to Being. As Kearney continues, “In other words, the imagination

addresses an invisible meaning in the world in the visible world and the world
responds only because both participate in a common core of Being.” As the
imaginal participates in the core of Being, it is not merely the apprehension
of the artist, but as Merleau-Ponty first suggests in the early writings and then
explicitly states in the later writings, it is equally essential to the apprehen-
sion by science of the real. This stance runs counter to the Western cultural
and philosophical prejudices that the scientific (or mathematical or rational)
approach to the objects of perception is the recognition of formal and abstract
characteristics of rationally graspable states of affairs in which the imagination
would be a distraction, while asserting by contrast that the artist works with the
sensible and the imaginal in a creative manner at odds with scientific inquiry.
Merleau-Ponty describes the initial grasp of the rational structures of the
world in quite a different way from either traditional empiricist accounts of
registering sense data or intellectualist accounts of ordering a sensuous manifold
by categorical schema. Instead, even a rational abstraction of form from percep-
tion can emerge only from an initial encounter with the face of the world. In
the beginning of the Phenomenology of Perception, in the first chapter, in the
section “The Phenomenal Field,” Merleau-Ponty states that rationality emerges
from within a Gestalt formation of the varied aspects of a situation. What
appears scientifically “is not the external unfolding of a pre-existing reason”3
arising as formal dimension of ideas abstracted from the sensible. Rationality
can arise only from the sensual encounter of perceiving the face of beings, a
physiognomy. For example, Merleau-Ponty says there is no initial rational grasp
that recognizes a circle by any formal or objective characteristics, but rather
initially we perceive the distinctive “look” of the circle’s face it turns toward us:
“The Gestalt of the circle is not its mathematical law but its physiognomy.”4 The
scientist, like all perceivers, starts from the prereflective dialogue with the world
that draws him or her into its appearance and context by its look or manner.
However, this means that science or any attempt to follow a “purely” rational
method is enmeshed also with what it perceives in a creative and expressive
way. Merleau-Ponty says the “return to a universal reason” is such that “we
must regard it as a creative operation which itself participates in the facticity of
that experience.”5 Reason emerges within a creative operation of perceiving and
bringing forward into expression, based on a sensual dialogue with the things
perceived. There is an imaginal unfolding through attention and sensitivity to
what is perceived that is as true for the scientist as for the artist, despite their
divergence in what they ultimately wish to express about what they perceive.
They both begin with the physiognomies of the beings of the world.
The flesh of the world is inextricably a dialogue of perceiver and per-
ceived. In their reversibility there is an emergence of sense that is the work of
 The Later Writings 239

co-naissance—a knowing though each other.6 Like the work of the artist, even
the geometer’s work is an expression within a context and inseparable from it:
“geometry is never a natural phenomenon like stones and mountains. It exists
only in the ‘space of humanity.’ ”7 Geometry has sense within the human-world
dialogue—not for some worldless mind—just as Merleau-Ponty claims, “the
subject of geometry is a motor subject.”8 Engaged in a back and forth with the
world that is kinesthetic and gestural, perceivers have a sense of trajectories and
patterns that sketch a certain physiognomy. In response to this beckoning of
the world in its indirect expression, our gestural replies continue to sketch out
and open up this motor space of implicit sense.9 Merleau-Ponty returns to this
example of the circle’s physiognomy in his late working notes in considering
how conceptualizations of the mind arise from the perceptual experience of the
world, and how existence is “vertical”—that is to say, is manifest in distinct
layers or levels or dimensions that are nevertheless one single depth of being.
In a note of December 1960, he says of recognizing a circle:

In fact the circle exists and existence is not man. The circle exists,
inexplicable, as soon as I take into account not only the circle-
object, but this visible circle, this circular physiognomy which no
intellectual genesis nor physical causality explains, and which has
the very properties which I do not yet know.10

The being of the circle is neither a physical given in a causal chain nor is
it constituted by an intellect ordering chaotic sensory inputs, but rather it
emerges in the way the perceiver enters into the unfolding depths of the
perceived through its physiognomy. This is to enter into the matrix of sensual
appearance, gesture, habitual, imaginary, historical, and other fields in interplay.
This is why the physiognomic character of the circle cannot be explained by
the mathematical characteristics and laws of the circle or by physical causality,
since it is the crystallization of myriad senses contained within the depths of
perception. The prereflective encounter that takes in the look of the circle is a
sensible presentation with inexhaustible depths, which as a process and a verti-
cality invites us to continue exploring it. Even less law-like properties that are
nevertheless rationally determinate are first approached through physiognomic
perception: “For example, at the level of the human body I will describe a
pre-knowing, a silent knowing . . . sense of the perceived; ‘size’ before mea-
surement, the physiognomic size of the rectangle, for example. . . .”11 There is
the silent world of gesture in which the face of things already imparts a sense
that can be appropriated by varied branches of inquiry into Being. The scien-
tist begins with the same prereflective dialogue with the world in perception,
with the same physiognomic recognition, and imagination, emotion, viscerality,
240 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

kinesthesia, and other bodily apprehensions as inseparable from the perceptual

access the artist will express.
It is through the contrast of what the sciences describe as the being of
the world with what the arts express—or with a philosophy that would heed
the articulations of the arts—that aspects of the imaginal are dismissed as not
ontologically relevant. However, if scientists and artists both explore the latent
depths of perception, Merleau-Ponty will turn the comparison around: “By
principle science is not an exhausting, but a physiognomic portrait.”12 Science
has no more purchase on what is than does the philosopher or the artist. It
only articulates the being of the world in a different context. Science cannot
reach closure any more than art or philosophy, since the characteristics that
it elucidates are not reality unveiled; rather, they are called by Merleau-Ponty
“hinges.”13 By calling them “hinges,” Merleau-Ponty means to indicate that
these characteristics described by science are aspects of an unfolding reality
that link to other aspects and thereby open up fields. Science, too, gives rise
to new connections, kinds of motion, and holds varied beings together—but
like art—does so in an oscillating way. This dynamism can always lead to
further avenues of disclosure. Rather than standing apart from the world, for
Merleau-Ponty, science is rendering more explicit the inner structures of the
perceived world as already enmeshed within it as an “inherence of the subject
and the object of science in preobjective Being.”14 Rather than getting “above
the world” and viewing it as a distant object, science, too, has its enmeshment
in the oneiric universe in which things become through deepening the interplay
among the imaginal, emotion, mythical, historical, and other linked fields. The
human being is part of these fields. Science, insofar as it reveals what is, does
so also by exploring what is presented as inextricably linked with the imaginal.
This insight about the common ground of the arts, philosophy, and sci-
ence means they could become a possible force in alleviating the dire modern
situation of operational thinking’s foreclosing culture’s ability to discover deeper
meaning—Merleau-Ponty’s lament that we cited from the opening of “Eye and
Mind” at the beginning of this inquiry. Despite Merleau-Ponty’s apparent pes-
simism about science’s contemporary role in culture, insofar as science has been
swept along by technology to become increasingly a problem-solving tool, later
in the essay Merleau-Ponty envisions a science that would stop to wonder at
the “obscurity of the ‘there is’ ”15 and become a more complementary enterprise
to the arts and philosophy.16 He leaves this thought undeveloped, since to
propose how this might happen is the job of science, but nevertheless, he sees
the possibility for science to become more ontological. Merleau-Ponty, in this
essay, gives his most emphatic declarations about the power of the imaginal
to explore perception’s latent meaning. If there is indeed a possible common
ground with the arts that science could explore more deeply, this might entail
 The Later Writings 241

science to wondering about the dense meaning of the “there is,” and science
may acknowledge the imaginal dimension of the perceptual. Rather than the
fanciful use of imagining being its paradigm for imagining, science might have
to take seriously that another imaginal is inseparable from all we experience
through perception.
In focusing on “Eye and Mind,” we will see how Merleau-Ponty’s more
implicit ideas of the imaginal culminated in his final articulations of its power
in his later writings and in regard to his indirect ontology. This will also allow
us to compare in the next section these ideas with the kindred formulations
of Gaston Bachelard’s “material imagination” in order to see how both think-
ers came to an idea of an oneiric materiality. Both thinkers also shared in the
conclusion that science had drifted into abstracting away from the depths of
the material world, instead of following on another possible course in which
the scientific exploration of materiality might have been a parallel inquiry to
the painter’s, poet’s, and other creative artists’ explorations of these depths
through the physiognomic imaginal. For both Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard,
the artist, the poet, and the creative writer are engaged in exploring the sense
of the materiality of the world in its rhythms and qualities firmly located with
a human–world dialogue in a way that is more of an open exploration into
the truth of the “there is” than science pursues in the sway of technology.
Both sought an inquiry that would avoid the dislocation from a primordial
contact with the world by relying on a constructed framework of measurable
external relations as foundational that science had almost exclusively pursued in
modernity. Both turned to the arts rather than to current science as revealing
the way to a more inclusive and depthful ontology, although both remained
interested in many aspects of scientific inquiry.
At the start of his remarks in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty begins his
articulation of the painting’s lessons for philosophy by quoting Valery’s decla-
ration that “[t]he painter takes his body with him,” and then adds that this
means that the painter is sensitive to “that body which is the intertwining of
movement and vision.”17 In introducing embodying being as the intertwining
of movement and vision, Merleau-Ponty is immediately invoking the revers-
ibility of the perceiver and the perceived, and also how movement is itself a
sketching forth of sense that permeates the world, as he has articulated in the
lectures of the 1950s, especially in the 1953 course, Le monde sensible and le
monde de l’expression. However, this is also the consolidation of the ideas that
were first expressed in the Phenomenology of Perception in regard to the silent
encounter with sleet, insofar as Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that there
is a mutual gesturing of painter and world: the world silently gestures through
the artist, who “lends his body to the world” and paints through gestures, yet
“those gestures, those paths he alone can trace and which will be revelations
242 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

to others . . . — to him they seem to emanate from the things themselves, like
the patterns of the constellations.”18 The indirect voices of silence first hinted
at in the Phenomenology of Perception in the exchange in perception of gestures
with the world is used to explain the reversibility of flesh. The painter is not
opening himself or herself to the world as perceived “matter,” in the sense of an
“in-itself,” but rather to a materiality that “enters into” a dialogue. The things of
the world “are an annex or prolongation” of embodying being and are “encrusted
into its flesh.”19 In other words, there is a circulation or circuit of sense between
humans and the world to which the painter opens himself or herself.
In an unpublished note in preparation for the manuscript that was to
be published as The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty states there is “a
reciprocal implication of the things in my body and my body in the things:
show that all this brings us to recognize the flesh.”20 He then continues: “I
demonstrated in the Phenomenology of Perception the correlation of thing-my
body,” but he also says that what he didn’t show was that this was a site, a
“here,” in a larger winding that is both “the Ineinander of the subject–object”
and that “the phenomenal body is equivalent to the ‘crystallization’ of the thing,
i.e., the telescoping in itself of the incompossibles.”21 The body as enmeshed
in dialogue or communion with the things perceived was sketched out in the
Phenomenology, but in the later writings embodying being is articulated as the
open site within the interplay of the fields of sense that in a perception come
to be crystallized as a depth, an enjambment or telescoping of incompos-
sibles. In an attempt to explain what this might mean, Merleau-Ponty gives
the example of viewing the paintings of animals on the walls of the caves
at Lascaux and says the animals are not there on the walls in the same way
as the fissures and limestone formations, but spread outward from the wall
in such a way that “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting
that I am looking at.” These animals can’t be located at a certain place in
an objective system of spatial coordinates insofar as they enter into the seer–
seen intertwining, but rather the painting becomes an entranceway such that
“[m]y gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say
that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.”22 In seeing the animals
on the wall, the perceiver–perceived have been taken up into an interplay
of fields that are a depth entered in a time-space-sense that brings disparate
beings, senses, times, and places to stand together in a nonlocatable place that
is nevertheless inseparable from those markings on the wall, but not limited to
them. It is a dimension of sense in which the perceiver dwells at the moment.
We see according to them, because these images on the cave wall are direc-
tions of force to get beyond the sensibly visible to the invisible sense that still
never leaves the sensible surfaces behind, but, as Merleau-Ponty says, become
more like “halos”—hovering in an indeterminable region we come to inhabit.
 The Later Writings 243

In traditional cultural and philosophical parlance this site is called an image,

the happening of imagination. The site where the flesh the world is gathered
in a perception is inseparably of the imaginal.
Merleau-Ponty realizes that in pointing at art’s power as tied to the
image, he must fight against the traditional interpretation of this term: “The
word ‘image’ is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a
design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was
such a design, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is
nothing of the kind, then neither the design nor the painting belongs to the
in-itself any more than the image does.”23 The painting or the design is not
a copy of anything, is not a presence in–itself, but is a way of being ushered
into a depth of sense, as is also the image. They are processes of the unfurling
of flows of sense that we enter, as well as being drawn into their trajectories
and intertwinings among the beings of the world. What emerges transforms
the perceiver within these vibrations of sense. The circulation of this sense is
intensified and woven by the imaginal. Merleau-Ponty adds that rather than
think of the images as things, they “are the inside of the outside and the out-
side of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and
without which we would never understand the quasi presence and immanent
visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.” Imagining in
this context is the way there is a winding-about of the felt sense of things with
the sense of felt embodying being. We enter a quasi-presence as a shimmering
enveloping sense, but not as a brute presence of a thing. We take in what the
world means without reflection at this moment by feeling and sensually mak-
ing our way into the world such that there is a resonance or winding around
one another in a chiasm of “inside” and “outside.” We experience how these
rhythms and gestures of the world having already infiltrated our lived sense of
embodying being-in-the-world can be newly expressed through the gestures of
the artist or imaginer, or as Merleau-Ponty expresses this, “for the imaginary is
much nearer to, and much farther away from, the actual—nearer because it is
in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal
obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the first time.” The perceiver’s
embodying being as of the flesh has a hold on the world’s meaning through
its own rhythms and felt sense that are brought into the illuminating power
that Nancy, Casey, and at this point, Merleau-Ponty attribute to the image.
These felt senses are given sensual form and exposed to our view and noticed
for what they are. They had been latent, hidden in depths. The imaginal of
the flesh comprises movement from world to self and from self to world,
circulating and winding about one another in a depth of sense. This gives the
imaginal the power that Merleau-Ponty asserts in the next sentence, in quoting
Giacometti, “to discover more of the world.”
244 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

The power of the imaginal as expressed by the artist leads Merleau-Ponty

in “Eye and Mind” to make his most emphatic and detailed assertions about the
nature of the physiognomic imaginal. In traditional assessments of the imaginal,
its seeming distance from the real as being nonsubstantial is what was most
emphasized in describing its nature, whether as a reason to discount its impor-
tance because it could not be placed in a chain of cause-and-effect material
interactions with immediate practical import or romanticized as sense coming
from some other realm from beyond mundane existence. Merleau-Ponty sees
that as the transforming force of the depth of perception, the imaginal is in
some sense distant, yet equally it is in some sense nearer to us than the usual
sense of the world: “And the imaginary is much farther away from the actual
because the painting is an analogue or likeness only according to the body;
because it does not present the mind with an occasion to rethink the constitu-
tive relations of things; because, rather, it offers to our sight [regard], so that
it might join with them the inward traces of vision and because it offers to
vision its inward tapestries, the imaginary texture of the real.”24 What appears
to the mind in reflection is given a place deliberately within the context of
our existence as a noticed and determinate site within our day-to-day world.
The imaginal of physiognomic imagining is felt within embodying being in
its tracing and bridging with the world perceived. It is felt, and we follow its
trajectory and sense, but without noticing it as such, but just living it within
our perception as a latency. The artist brings it forth into the illuminating
power of the imaginal. Yet, what is brought forth is a key to discovering the
depths of the world as being the inward tapestries of the real. The tapestries,
however, are present only as a texture, a felt phenomenon, as now turned
outward toward others within the artist’s expression.
The power of the imaginal to express and deepen the sense of the way the
“inward” and “outward” wind around each other in a chiasm allows embodying
being to be “caught in the fabric of the world” and “holds things in a circle
around itself.”25 This dilation of Being doesn’t occur through causal interactions,
but through co-naissance: the knowing of each other through each other and
being born through each other of the perceiver and world. As for what is seen,
Merleau-Ponty says that “vision happens among them or is caught in, things”
in a way that intensifies that “spark lit between sensing and the sensible,”
which Merleau-Ponty defines as the nature of sensibility.26 Vision unfolds at
a site within the flesh of the world, within a process between the person and
world. The artist—reports Klee, as quoted by Merleau-Ponty—experiences a
burning as if there is a fire running up the arm of the painter from the world
into or her vision and back out in to the world, completing a circuit.27 This
sensibility is likened to “an ongoing fire,” as being a glowing, moving, and
consuming interpenetration between different beings that does not occupy a
 The Later Writings 245

determinate space but that runs through the world by combining explosively
with the marrow of other beings to bring light and blazing transformation.
The enigma of perception and the body is intensified in how the painter
gestures forth on the canvas the world. Merleau-Ponty says this enigma emerges
from the fact that the body and world are “made of the same stuff” and
therefore can be a circulation of energies and sense, of the body and things,
such that “their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret
visibility.” As a chiasm of “inside” and “outside,” then all we perceive, such
as “quality, light, color, depth” has “an echo in our body.” This means for
Merleau-Ponty—as it meant for Cézanne, whom he quotes as saying “Nature
is on the inside”—that the things of the world are also circulated within me
in their rhythms, gestures, qualities: “Things have an internal equivalent in
me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence.”28 In this expressing
of the inward sense, the painter is able to bring forth “the imaginary texture
of the real” in such a way as it comes to the notice of others. What comes
to be expressed and perceived by others looking at the canvases is closer than
the real because it is brought home to embodying being as an ongoing gen-
esis,29 that peculiar power of the imaginal to give life again to what has been
sensed—not by copying it, as some have claimed, which would be a diminu-
tion of the original strength of presence—but rather by adding the spark, the
fire of intensity and interconnectedness. This is why Merleau-Ponty says of
Cézanne, “His Mont Sainte-Victoire is made and remade from one end of
the world to the other in a way that is different from, but no less energetic
than, that of the hard rock above Aix. Essence and existence, imaginary and
real, visible and invisible . . .”—a painting mixes up all our categories in lay-
ing out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute
meanings.”30 The mountain is this shower of energy stored within its being for
those who can attain the vision of the artist31 where only within a certain kind
of vision there is expressed and experienced this mixing of the imaginary and
real, visible and invisible, such that the materiality of the world holds within
its perceived depths a kind of explosive meaning that can remake the world
from one end to another.
This kind of expression throws us into a different realm within the world
not locatable on a Cartesian grid of objective space. It not anywhere specific,
not “in” the painter, not “on” the canvas, not at the geographical location
of Mont Sainte-Victoire, not at the time he painted it, nor at the time each
person looked at the painting, but in an unlocatable time–space interplaying
among all these appearances. Of course, in some way, the expression of the
mountain and Cézanne’s encounter with it is at all those locations and at all
those times and also at a myriad of other ones, but it is exclusively at none.
It is in their circulation among many ways of being present in perception that
246 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

comprises the oneiric underlying of the world. Like within a dream, where a
time is both a certain time and yet also not that time, and a place is a place
and also not that place. Within the dream, each time and place is in some
way many other places and times as well as being itself. This power of the
dream draws on the imaginal’s interrelating of different senses, objects, persons,
and events. As the lining of the material, the physiognomic imaginal adds this
dreamlike sense that differs from other fields of apprehension and expression
within the perceptual. Yet the sense of Mont Sainte-Victoire being made and
remade from one end of the world to the other is only an expression that
all of existence has a lining of dreamlike depths that potentially interconnect
in transformation and contribute to its identity as much as the more stable,
determinate properties articulated by reflection. Merleau-Ponty comments how
Descartes in emphasizing these objective or primary properties missed a “deeper
opening upon things given to us by secondary qualities” and then would have
been forced to recognize a “conceptless universality” like sensible ideas and a
“conceptless opening upon things” like the silent prereflective encounter with
the world that has been our focus in this meditation.32
We do not live merely in a world of “matter” and determinate causal
relations, but equally in a world of oneiric materiality lined with the dreamlike
and imaginal. So, Merleau-Ponty says that a Descartes who let himself explore
the secondary qualities “would have been obliged to find out how the inde-
cisive murmur of colors can present us with things, forests, storms—in short,
the world; obliged perhaps, to integrate perspective, as a particular case, with
a more ample ontological power.” In other words, all the perceptual qualities,
whether indistinct and seemingly minor, especially within the gestural expres-
sion of the artist, can open up imaginal realms of sense for us, and further,
they possess “ontological power” that adds to the ongoing becoming of the
world. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this point by stating, “Vision assumes its
fundamental power of showing forth more than itself. And since we are told
that a bit of ink suffices to make us see forests and storms, light must have
its imaginare.”33 So, the simplest percept, and its different aspects, such as the
lighting, all have a lining of the imaginary. Each quality—like the simple red
of the dress we discussed in the passage from the “Chiasm” chapter of The Vis-
ible and the Invisible, or the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea of In Search
of Lost Time—has myriad latencies, some of which are memorial and senso-
rial but others that are the amplification, intensification, and interconnection
of aspects of the world of Combray that are the imaginal lining of that lost
perception that the narrator can now open more fully in his musing medita-
tions. What Descartes and all those ontologies that ground themselves in matter
as substance with determinate properties that exhaust the true parameters of
Being, or as Merleau-Ponty calls it, a “positive being,” are missing is latency
 The Later Writings 247

and depth, and they have “no true thickness.”34 The thickness of perception
and the world can be understood only if our apprehension of the world has
“in its center a mystery of passivity.”35 It is this mystery of passivity we have
been tracing throughout this meditation, moving from the hearkening to the
silent gesturing of the world, the encounter among faces of people and things
and among persons, and the latent depths communicated in perception that
are its imaginal lining and sensible ideas.
Once Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire with an energy and inter-
playing sense that could transform the sense of the world, there was unleashed
an invisible of the visible accessible in a level of experience that is latent but
capable of changing one’s experience, just as the notes from Vinteuil’s sonata
could change Swann’s sense of his life in Proust’s novel. In that way, art can
transform the way we experience the world, as evidenced by Merleau-Ponty’s
remark in the Phenomenology of Perception: “Van Gogh’s paintings have their
place in me for all time, a step taken from which I cannot retreat, and even
though I retain no clear recollection of these pictures which I have seen, my
whole subsequent aesthetic experience will be that of someone who has become
acquainted with the painting of Van Gogh.”36 So, for example, having taken
in the impact of Van Gogh’s paintings, one may see an energy, vitality, and
spirituality in the night sky pouring down on the earth and being answered
by trees and human dwellings dancing in tune with its rhythms because of
seeing “Starry Night,” or feel an intensity of color and texture that is almost
pulsating in flowers and plants after viewing “Irises.” The particular intercon-
nections of sense, emotion, and value in the expression of the physiognomic
imaginal offered by the artist becomes an energy field of sense that will there-
after intersect the other fields within one’s perception of the world. Once the
latent depths of the oneiric have been expressed, the sense of the world has
been added to and altered.
The question arises about what is different in the way the painter encoun-
ters the world, such that these latencies are drawn forth in physiognomic
imagining in a way that does not happen with others. Merleau-Ponty seems
to offer an answer in asserting that “[t]he painter lives in fascination.” To be
fascinated by the world means to be taken into its spell, for we have seen in
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis that we are all under the spell of the world. It unceas-
ingly beckons to us, and we respond by perceiving it to a greater or lesser
extent. We do it unknowingly and sporadically, whereas the painter or other
artist lives in fascination as his or her vocation, practicing and developing their
capacity for greater letting-go into the sensual depths of the presentation of
the world. The difference is one of degree, however, since the artist in aban-
doning himself or herself to this beckoning of mountain, sky, water, color, or
light highlights the dialogue with the world that most ignore: “The actions
248 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

most proper to him—those gestures, those paths which he alone can trace
and which will be a revelation to others . . . to him they seem to emanate
from the things themselves, like the patterns of the constellations.”37 There is
a meeting of gesturing between perceiver and perceived, such that both the
sensual and the imaginal are vectors within perception that draw us beyond
ourselves. It is an apt image used by Merleau-Ponty to liken this reversibility
to the beckoning of the patterns of the constellations. In many cultures, the
constellations have been experienced as the ultimate inscription of some other
nonhuman source of meaning in the world, as if written in the heavens above
it as also being suspended in unfathomable depth. It is not only Cézanne or
Valery, whom we have already cited, but many creative artists who feel as
though they are merely tracing out or writing down what the mountain or
the forest or whatever face within the world has already expressed to them,
and they are its mere conveyance. Merleau-Ponty again evokes this reversibility
by citing Klee’s remark: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was
not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking
at me, were speaking to me . . . I was there, listening . . . I think the painter
must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it.”38 Listening
or hearkening happens within the opening to the physiognomic imaginal that
traces out the perceptual. We should note that this is the opposite feeling one
has of imaginative fancy where the person somehow mimics an unfettered
creative power, and where human genius is celebrated and presented as the
source of expression and paradigm of the most creative use of imagination.
We have said in the first chapter that the hearkening to the world of
silence was returning to a primordial level of expression, as if things were
coming forth for the first time and with them, the perceiver. This is the way
Merleau-Ponty describes the painter’s way of entering vision: “The painter’s
vision is a continued birth. . . . This prehuman way of seeing things is the
painter’s way.”39 There is a transformation of both the painter and the world,
and if attended to with sensitivity by the viewer of the artwork, it is as if the
world in these very qualities that were submerged in the background or in
the “hiddenness” of being, the other side of the sensible, which comes into
being for the first time; so, does the perceiver, too, as having a new relation-
ship with the world. This means the imaginal is vital to an ongoing birthing
of the world and ourselves—a far cry from cultural prejudices attributing a
frivolous nature to the imaginal. The power of the painting, often not seen
in its transformative power, shifts us into another sort of experience in which
imaginary and real turn about one another. The world of silence we explored
in the first chapter gestures to us in painting’s imaginal power, and blurs and
mixes our usual categories of keeping things clear and distinct, augmenting
the emergence of this other sort of field or context where the looks of things
 The Later Writings 249

and creatures, their hauntings and behaviors, can interplay on another stage
of sense that adds to the world another depth. Even a simple percept like an
inkblot is oneiric and in the imaginal unfolding of its lining reverberates with
the atmosphere to locate us differently, taking us from the surface of things
and the world into its depths.
In the painter’s embrace of the oneiric lining of perception there is a
reconfiguring space from that of the empiricist vision that lives outside of
things in a space of external relations to instead experience a space that “I
live . . . from the inside.” The space in which we live in primordial experience
is a space in which myriad senses are felt and move us in perception, not yet
expressed but within the thickness of perception. This sense of space emerges
when one opens things to their imaginal such that one is able “to make space
and light, which are there, speak to us.”40 It is from the depths of the visible
that invisible trajectories of a movement by vibration are brought forth, such
that a line no longer records or copies the visible but rather “renders visible,” as
it “corrodes prosaic space,” and sets up a “certain disequilibrium” that expresses
embodying being’s “active–passive” relationship to the world. Light is given a
voice that speaks indirectly and silently of certain senses within the sensible
that had been latent, waiting for the artist to express them. Merleau-Ponty says
that rather than representing a world, the painter is the one “to whom the
things of the world give birth by a sort concentration or coming-to-itself of
the visible.”41 However, this happens in a space that is a “pre-given spatiality,”
the kind of space that opens when the bread passed around the table opens
another sort of connection among the members at the table or when suddenly
the space between the pilot and the refugees below his plane is not measurable
by a certain number of feet but has collapsed into a proximity closer than
that with his goggles on his face, to offer two examples from Pilote de guerre.
This space has a depth that also is more primordial, which Merleau-
Ponty describes as the “first dimension” from which other senses emerge in
this coming together of what would otherwise be different. He points to how
each thing can be a site from which all else is interconnected—“everything at
the same place at the same time”—as if it were a “voluminosity” or the kind of
“global locality” that is indicated “when we say a thing is there.”42 For example,
from the hawthorns, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds present in an
enjambed volume the beauty of the natural world, a sense of spirituality, his
childhood experiences, the qualities he seeks in the objects of his love, the thrill
of certain places to which he desires to travel, and a myriad of other senses of
events, objects, people, times, and so on. Merleau-Ponty describes the things of
the world, as each one being capable of an unfolding of sense that might be
a kind of vibration with a whole surrounding world or cosmos, an idea that
was central to Bachelard’s oneiric materialism and poetic reverie. The power
250 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of the imaginal that the painter brings forth from the depths, that invisible of
the visible, is a movement by vibration that expresses the connections within
the opening of space in the prereflective perception in the silent dimension of
the world’s gestures: “Just as it has created the latent line, painting has made
itself a movement without displacement, a movement by vibration or radia-
tion.”43 The visible line is merely a mark extended across linear space, but its
invisible depth is a trajectory of movement in a certain direction, a conjoining
with myriad other senses of related beings, a certain rhythm, a certain disequi-
librium, certain tensions, certain gestures, and other possible invisible senses.
As we have discussed, the image is not a thing, but rather a process, both a
moving and an opening that trace connections and transformations of what
had been latent. The artist by expressing this primordial sense of the world
sets into play this movement by vibration or radiation.
It is in the late characterizations of the imaginal and the power of paint-
ing in “Eye and Mind” that the ideas of Paul Claudel seem most evident
in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, even though we know Claudel’s ideas had long
inspired Merleau-Ponty, and only one phrase of his is quoted in the essay.
In 1934, Merleau-Ponty discovered Claudel’s l’Art poétique, first published in
1913. It seems to have been well read and annotated by Merleau-Ponty.44 In
the Phenomenology of Perception, when alluding to how art expresses an “ani-
mation” of poetic and creative action that draws the reader or viewer into an
“origination” of new sense from the perceived, he quotes Claudel.45 The idea
of “co-naissance,” to which we have alluded, was Claudel’s term, which both
captured the idea of the subject and the sensation both being active and pas-
sive at the same time as well as of there being a co-existence of the perceiver
and what is perceived, whether natural object, person, or God, in such a way
that each knows through the other and also each gives birth continuously to
the other.46 This second beyond knowing of ongoing mutual birthing of the
perceived and perceiver, as the French implies when broken up by a dash, is
also echoed by Merleau-Ponty’s description in “Eye and Mind” that we just
quoted of the “continued birth” of the artist through the world painted.47
However, beyond these overlaps, if we briefly look at the “Discourse on the
Affinity with the World and on Oneself,” in Poetic Art, the parallels with the
characterizations of the power of art and the imaginal in “Eye and Mind”
become more striking. A few pages before this essay, Claudel had used the
image of a flame burning within us that is the source of our constant percep-
tion of the world.48 The main idea throughout the work is that each being can
be envisioned as a vibration that impacts all other beings in the world coming
to shine forth and be known.49 Claudel says that in some way all things are
co-knowledge of each other. Here is a typical assertion from the text: “Indeed,
blue knows orange, the hand knows its shadow on the wall, really and truly,
 The Later Writings 251

the angle of a triangle knows the other two in the same sense that Isaac knew
Rebecca.” He explains this co-knowing is the result of the fact that the traits
of each thing appear only in relation to all other things.50 He explains that
we misunderstand matter as a solid thing rather than seeing materiality as an
ongoing force that interacts with other beings to take on a sense or form. This
force is a vibration among things that is a reaching-out and an imagining that
links things and gives them sense.51 It is in the constant interplay with other
beings that is both eccentric and concentric, moving out and moving in, that
the “animated being” continually takes on differing forms and knowledge into
its being, which is “hollow.” This movement by vibration is at the heart of
our existence and the way we find ourselves among the beings of the world:
“The vibration through which we realize the existence and limitation of our
person is the same one which has created and continues to maintain it.”52 Of
course, Claudel’s descriptions are highly poetic, yet there is a resonance with
both Merleau-Ponty’s ideas and terms, especially in the later writings. It is
perhaps not surprising that one of the courses Merleau-Ponty offered in 1961
was entitled “The cohesion of Being and simultaneity: Claudel.”53
Merleau-Ponty, toward the end of “Eye and Mind,” describes the painter’s
continued birth or prehuman way of seeing things as being able to extend
the sensual and imaginative connections that exceed the perceptual given. He
says the artist can look into the waving leaves of a row of cypress trees being
played upon by the light and can “see” within them a vision of water’s rip-
pling in the play of sunlight upon it. He says that this ability of the artist to
prereflectively move along trajectories of differing but overlapping senses is a
certain quest: “This internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the
painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color.”54 This statement
echoes Claudel’s use of the ideas of animation, radiation, and depth, but is
Merleau-Ponty’s extension of these ideas in his articulation of the ontology
of the flesh. Merleau-Ponty says that if one is open to the connections and
overlaps of qualities as movements and vibrations that have a distinctive sense,
one is led into a depth of a space of dynamic qualities, just as he pointed to
Cézanne in bringing together the real and the imaginal bringing the rock face
of Mont Sainte-Victoire to reverberate throughout the world. Even more than
in Claudel’s evocative but sketchy descriptions, the sense of the reverberation
throughout the world bringing forth the latent imaginal sense of physiognomic
perception moves Merleau-Ponty further into an overlap with Gaston Bach-
elard’s ideas of the elemental aspect of becoming, “oneiric materiality,” and a
nontraditional ontology.
Merleau-Ponty concludes his analysis of the painter’s special relationship
with perception by stating that we need to realize that the painter’s kind of
vision is “the means given for being absent to myself, for being present at the
252 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

fission of Being from the inside—the fission at whose termination, and not
before, I come back to myself.”55 The painter’s or the artist’s kind of vision
or expression is a letting-go into the perceived in such a way that as Richard
Kearney says of Merleau-Ponty’s description of the artist: “. . . it is by reach-
ing beneath the visual givens that the imaginative painter opens himself to the
in-visible dialectic of Being.” By becoming open to this dislocation into the
fission of Being from the inside, “the painter awakens those powers dormant
in ordinary vision.” The imagining of the artist is not an act of creation per se,
but rather is an opening to the activity/passivity that is needed to be exposed
to the ontology of the flesh. Kearney continues describing Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of the power of the imaginal for the artist: “The artist breaks the skin
of existence in order to lay bare the generating axis of its becoming. And, in
so far as he is successful, his act of imaginative disclosure is reciprocated by an
objective act of epiphany.”56 The imagining that follows the contours of percep-
tion into its depths is the way the world is to enter the ongoing becoming
that unfolds in a reversibility of perceiver and world and achieves a revelation
of becoming, the disclosure of the invisible of the visible.
Insofar as there is achieved this type of letting-go into the depths of
the perceived, we are propelled into the latent sense of the world, and from
which we come back to ourselves as having seen in the manner of the painter.
At this depth, the imaginal blossoms and takes root, not as nonbeing, but as
what is inseparable from the inexhaustibility of these depths. Merleau-Ponty, by
tracing out this direction of the senses, has expressed an imaginal in a manner
quite unlike the traditional imaginary “lacking depth,” as viewed through the
paradigm of fancy. This depth is an expanded spatial dimension as part of the
play of latent senses. When the imaginal emerges from the perceptual, then as
Merleau-Ponty states, “what vision teaches us: namely that through it we come
in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once, and that
even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—‘I am in St. Petersburg in my
bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun’—or to intend [viser] real beings wherever
they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it.”57 Merleau-
Ponty is suggesting the imaginal lining of perception can unfold in an act of
imagining in a fictive realm that truly expands our world, if it is able to draw
on the “imaginary texture of the real” in perception. We can see distinction
made by Proust in looking at our ongoing example of the narrator in In Search
of Lost Time: at the end of Swann’s Way, he has been fervently imagining what
Florence might be like without ever having been there and admits he is left
with two kinds of imaginings about Florence. One is like a “fresco,” which is
composed of general features like some inaccessible ideal, and flits through his
mind, and is more of an act of fancy. However, the other set of imaginings
he explores “as a real and enveloping atmosphere into which I was about to
 The Later Writings 253

plunge . . . which I enclosed in them gave to the most material pleasures, the
same attraction they have in the works of the Primitives” and which includes
details with which he is intimately familiar, such as certain fruits, a flask of
Chianti, and heaps of jonquils, narcissi, and anemones piled on the Ponte
Vecchio (SW 555). With these details drawn from perception, these images
haunt him, even though admittedly “unreal,” they were “filling my days and
nights, differentiating this period of my life from those which had gone before
it.”58 The imaginal can gain an ontological weight from drawing on perception’s
rich co-presence of so many details that allows the imaginal as an entwining
with a distinct perception to draw forth “imaginary texture of the real.” Again,
to quote Kearney’s assessment of Merleau-Ponty: “He sought to establish the
real and the imaginary as two separate but corresponding realms: separate on
the level of ordinary being, but corresponding—though never identical—on
the level of fundamental Being.”59 Kearney aptly describes this articulation of
imagining as “dialogical,” a back and forth with the world, such that there is a
revelation of the formerly hidden. This, Kearney adds, “is the common source
of Bachelard’s and Merleau-Ponty’s refutation of Sartrean theory—imagina-
tion is dialogical.” For Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty the imagination is part
of the reversibility of our apprehension of the world, and opens us to being,
is inseparable from ontology, whereas for Sartre, imagining only reveals the
consciousness that projects the nonbeing of the imaginary.
The ontological significance of the imaginal for Merleau-Ponty in his later
writings is evident in the working note of November 1960 that serves as one
of the epigraphs of section I of Part III: “Incomprehensible in a philosophy
that adds the imaginary to the real—for then there would remain the prob-
lem of understanding how all that belongs to the same consciousness. . . .”60
Merleau-Ponty’s increasing articulation of the imaginal has come to locate it
at the heart of embodying being’s apprehension of the world as essential to its
depth and also to the depth of reality. He adds as a note to himself: “under-
stand the imaginary sphere through the imaginary sphere of the body—And
hence not as a nihilation that counts as observation but as the true Stiftung
of Being of which the observation and the articulated body are special vari-
ants.” The imaginal is born of the flesh and of perception, the way the body
is among the visible and is a folding back of the visible upon itself, and as
such, the imaginal has the ontological power to be of the instituting of being
as the ongoing generating of the sense of the world through its exploration
and expression, rather than as Sartre and the tradition took the imaginal as
some sort of copy of reality or nonbeing that was analogous to reality but had
no ontological import.
Finally, suggesting how central the imaginal had become to Merleau-
Ponty’s later formulations of the ontology of the flesh, there is the statement
254 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

found among the papers of Merleau-Ponty that he had written down in prepa-
ration for his end of the course of 1961, “The Cartesian Ontology and the
Ontology of Today” (L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui): “All
ontology is a type of imagination, all imagination is an ontology. There is an
imagination which is in no way a nihilation (position of the unreal as unreal)
which is a crystallization of being.”61 To articulate being is to articulate the
depths of the perceived world as well as expressing the invisible of the visible,
but as we have seen, to achieve this, it is necessary to embrace the physiognomic
imagination. Ontology, then, would not be possible without the imaginal,
which opens the depths of being and is not a phantom floating over its surface,
as Merleau-Ponty once called fancy in the Phenomenology, as we have discussed.
In considering this quotation from Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
also points to how it also expresses Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that “ontology
cannot be cut off from non-philosophy in general and literature in particular,
which will be on contrary, an essential ground for his quest for being. Being
is fundamentally oneiric. . . .”62 As Saint Aubert reminds us, perception is
not a neutral, mechanical recording of the world, but a desiring for meaning,
and as we have already discussed, literature for Merleau-Ponty in many ways
explores the symbolic matrices that are the latent sense of the perceived world,
so literature is indeed vital to ontology. The turn to literature and to poetry
is also essential for Bachelard’s ontological explorations.
 V
Bachelard’s Material Imagination
and the Flesh of the World

Being and the imaginary are for Sartre “objects,” “entities” . . . For me,
they are “elements” (in Bachelard’s sense), that is not objects, but fields,
subdued being, non-thetic being, being before being—and moreover
involving their auto-inscription their “subjective correlate” is part of them.
—The Visible and the Invisible (267)

Merleau-Ponty’s later articulation of the imaginal as bringing forth the lin-

ing of the sensible whose participation in the Being of the world is essential
shares many ideas and its overall ontological perspective with Gaston Bach-
elard. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges this overlap of ideas with Bachelard in a
working note from April 1960. He links his sense of the imaginal directly to
Bachelard’s conception and opposes it to Sartre’s descriptions. Merleau-Ponty
states, “But this visible not actually seen is not the Sartrean imaginary: present
to the absent or of the absent. It is a presence of the immanent, the latent,
or the hidden—–Cf. Bachelard saying that each sense has its own imaginary.”1
Merleau-Ponty recognizes that his notion of perception as it developed through
the indirect ontology of the flesh has come to share much with Bachelard’s char-
acterization of the senses and the imaginal. The deeper sense of the imaginal
for both thinkers is the “other side” of the sensible—the invisible, the latent.
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert’s examination of the unpublished notes and
manuscripts informs us that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Bachelard’s work was
first aroused by Bachelard’s 1942 publication of Water and Dreams.2 Indeed,
in the 1951–52 lectures on “Method in Child Psychology,” when Merleau-
Ponty is attempting to describe the child’s experience of the senses as a more
encompassing and felt contact with the world as distinguished from the adult
perceptual experience with its sedimented overlay of reflection, he turns to
Bachelard’s work as having explored this dimension of perception: “The sen-

255
256 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

sory is implied by a relation with the world that is not a sensory relation,
but is a total and affective relation with things. The qualities of perceived
things (the various functions called sensory) are particular modalities of this
contact with the world . . . any quality (e.g. hot, cold, humid, etc.) reveals
a certain mode of the incarnate subject’s synchronization with the world (cf.
Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of water and air).”3 Already in these early lectures,
Merleau-Ponty is acknowledging that to gain access to the depths of the per-
ceived—which is not just a matter of “sensory aspects”—one must turn to the
type of imaginal, affective, literary, and indirect explorations that Bachelard
has undertaken in his analysis of the elements of water and air. Saint Aubert
relates how Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Claudel, Breton, and the surrealists
was mixed with his interest in Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the elements—air,
earth, water, and fire—and each had suggestive ontological import for his
work. His unpublished notations about Bachelard continue until 1953, then
wane for a number of years, but pick up again after 1957 in regard to his
indirect ontology. At that point, there are several unpublished notations that
are similar to this statement written in April or May 1960, for preparation
for the proposed manuscript, Être et Monde: “The imaginal as sensible ‘hol-
low,’ [creux] it is not ‘illusion,’ but an ontological trait of being-seen.”4 The
latency of perception, its “hollow” or what is not manifest, can be brought
forward through the imaginal. The sensible and the imaginal are part of the
chiasmatic structure of the flesh.
Looking at some of Bachelard’s primary discoveries about the material
imagination, as he called it, highlights a significant overlap in Merleau-Ponty’s
and Bachelard’s articulation of the imaginal and its ontological import. We
will limit ourselves to showing the resonance in their ideas of the imaginal,
its place in perception, and its ontological importance in Bachelard’s Water
and Dreams and Air and Dreams (published in 1943), and then also how
Bachelard characterizes his own ontology in The Poetics of Reverie (published
in 1960), especially interesting since it is close to the time Merleau-Ponty is
writing “Eye and Mind” and working on the manuscript of The Visible and the
Invisible. We have seen how Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception only
implicitly contrasted two different modes of imagining—the fanciful and the
exploration of the depths of perception—but increasingly came to distinguish
what we have called “physiognomic imagining” from the use of imagination
to create fictions at odds with the perceived, which was so important to Sar-
tre’s analyses of bad faith and an individualistic freedom from the restraints of
the world. The development of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the physiognomic
imagination allowed him to break from many of the traditional prejudices
about the subordinate place of imagining in our understanding of the world
and to restore its ontological weight. The articulation of the same distinction
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 257

in terms of two modalities of the imaginal is also the lynchpin of the success
of Bachelard’s exploration into the deeper significance of the imaginal.
Bachelard’s Water and Dreams opens with the sentence, “The imagining
powers of our mind develop around two very different axes.”5 Bachelard goes
on to describe the two different sorts of imagining: one is the formal imagi-
nation that seeks novel constructs and uses the forms of things or residues of
perception in order to combine them into in new constellations, and the other
is the material imagination that “plumbs the depths of being” and returns to
the “primitive” dimension of existence. The perception of things, events, and
creatures for Bachelard is, as it is for Merleau-Ponty, an opening to the world
awaiting further elaboration and deepening, primarily through the material
imagination. Bachelard begins by noting that the material imagination has
been pushed aside by the history of philosophy and psychology, since the
formal imagination lends itself to verbal articulation in an easier fashion and
lends itself to a rationalization of experience. Bachelard tells us immediately
that material imagining involves “images of matter, images that stem directly
from matter. The eye assigns them names, but only the hand truly knows
them . . . these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They
have weight; they constitute a heart.”6 From these opening statements, we can
see that Bachelard pursues in this book—and in the eight others of which it
is part of a series of studies—the way in which perception enters into the
materiality of things that present an imaginal sense. This sense is akin to the
sense that permeates objects and events in dreams. For Bachelard, this sense
is primordial to experience—“weighty, a heart.” Bachelard says the material
imagination is known “by the hands,” or in other words, by embodying being,
and is equally an emotional depth of sense. Although, it is implied that the
way of access to this immediacy of experience is through embodying being,
this is not articulated as extensively as in Merleau-Ponty’s texts. The similarity
of approach is striking in that the truly revealing use of imagination is the
unfolding of the initial sense of things in perception, which is incomplete or
has hidden depths.
However, like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard acknowledges at once that this
sort of meaning is opaque or obscure or at a distance, despite the intimacy of
imagining: “. . . in the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation;
black flowers bloom in matter’s darkness.” Bachelard also recognizes there is a
hiddenness to the imaginal that is in the depths of materiality that will require
the maintenance of an “open imagination” to become visible. Yet he also prom-
ises that in seeking a depth of meaning, another sort of sense emerges, one
more of “individuality in depth” that comes from the manifestation of intercon-
nectedness.7 There is a uniqueness to the senses that emerge, even if they are
indirect or not adequately graspable. Bachelard also—like Merleau-Ponty—tells
258 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

us the openness to these meanings comes about only prereflectively, before ideas
and rational categories.8 This greater openness to the world through imagina-
tion is an openness that draws on an acquisition that we owe to childhood
perception, which stays alive within us. In The Poetics of Reverie, written much
later, Bachelard says, “By certain of its traits childhood lasts all through life. It
returns to animate broad sections of adult life.”9 This is a similar assertion to
the one we quoted from Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology, where
he notes the similarity to Bachelard and is also mentioned in the conclusion
of “The Child’s Relations with Others.”10 Bachelard sees the child as perceiving
the material world around him or her as alive with deeper senses than those
on the surface or involving utility that unfold in a spontaneous imagining
that he calls reverie: “the child’s reverie is a materialist reverie. The child is
a born materialist. His first dreams are dreams of organic substances.”11 The
material world is elemental, has within it dimensions of meaning hidden in
its depths. So, for example, the child may be taken with the water’s dynamism
or the way it dissolves things or the way it moves in an upward surge that
is life-giving.12 This is almost an identical attribution of the imaginal within
the perceptual in the artist’s vision that Merleau-Ponty’s describes in terms
of elements and objects in the radio lectures “The French Culture Hour”
that we previously discussed.13 For both thinkers, too, the child has an open
imagination, which wanders further into the imaginal sense of the things that
he or she has perceived. Even in just considering the opening pages of Water
and Dreams, the parallels with Merleau-Ponty are strong: the imagination of
the body in perception has depths to be uncovered that enrich the perceived
and also hearken back to childhood experience of the world on the level of
prereflective apprehension and expression.
An immediate objection that might be raised to making this comparison
between Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard could point to Bachelard’s explicit refer-
ences to the status of perception in his ontological explorations. If one reads
Bachelard’s comments throughout his work about perception too quickly, one
might mistakenly take him to forsake perception for a world of the imaginary.
For example, when summarizing the approach to philosophy he has developed
over the years of undertaking his imaginal studies, Bachelard declares in The
Poetics of Reverie: “the phenomenology of perception must stand aside for the
phenomenology of creative imagination.”14 Although, Bachelard often seems
to speak disparagingly of perception, when one has read his work in context,
one realizes in remarks like these that he is making a critique of traditional
philosophy’s categorizing of perception. He is not disparaging perception itself
in its interconnection with imagination. His disagreement with the history
of Western philosophy is the same as Merleau-Ponty’s: the imaginal lining of
perception as well as the full significance of the sensible will be discovered only
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 259

by hearkening to a more primordial level of perception than that considered

by the empiricists, scientists, and philosophers of science that Bachelard stud-
ied early in his career. It is that sense of perception articulated by empiricism
to which he objects. Actually, far from seeing perception and imagination
in opposition, Bachelard says of perception in his first chapter in Air and
Dreams: “If imagination’s function of openness is insufficient, then perception
itself is blunted. We must find, then, a regular filiation between the real and
the imaginary.”15 Like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard finds that a certain use of the
imagination, the material imagination, opens up and gives a depth of meaning
to what perception uncovers that would be lost without the imaginal.
Bachelard clarifies a little later in Water and Dreams what he feels is
missing in the traditional cultural and empiricist way of considering percep-
tion and “the sensory”:

This density, which distinguishes the superficial from the profound in

poetry, is felt in the transition from sensory values to sensual values
[on l’eprouvera en passant des valeurs sensibles aux valeurs sensuelles].16
I believe the doctrine of imagination will be clarified only by a
proper classification of sensual values in relation to sensory ones.
Only sensual values offer “direct communication.” Sensory values
give only translations. Confusing the “sensory” and the “sensual,”
writers have claimed a correspondence among sensations (highly
mental data) and have therefore failed to undertake any study that
considers the poetic emotion in its dynamics.17

For Bachelard, as for Merleau-Ponty, there is no such thing as a sensation, at

least not as being the source of our prereflective perceptual experience. Rather,
a “sensation” is a construction resulting from a certain interpretation of a per-
ception that takes it out of its lived context or, in other words, deconstructs
the Gestalts of perception, and then constructs this “data” as being the source
of perception, when it is only an abstracted outcome of analysis. As we have
already discussed, this is an example of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “experi-
ence error”—taking the result of rational abstraction and construction, and
then positing it as the source of the experience to be explained. The term
“sensory” refers to this supposed source of input from the world. This is why
throughout this book, the word “sensual” has been used in lieu of the word
“sensory,” when referring to the texture of perception. For Bachelard, like
Merleau-Ponty, there is a sensual experience that is inextricably bound up with
emotional senses, imaginal senses, memorial senses and so forth, in a rich context
of life before reflection that is at the heart of our insertion in the world and
is the source of a deeper imaginal.
260 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

In trying to tease out the sense in which these sensual experiences are
also oneiric—that move in the “in-between” of perception and the imaginal
and other modes of appearance (or what Merleau-Ponty would call chias-
matic)—Bachelard develops his method of “poetic reverie.” In the Poetics of
Reverie, Bachelard describes the method used in his explorations of the ima-
ginal, stating it is a “phenomenology” that “returns to putting the accent on
the original quality” contained in an image “independent from any antecedent
being” or, in other words, as spontaneous.18 Poetic reverie proceeds by using
imagination to focus on the oneiric dimension of the sensual apprehension of
the world, so that it becomes more condensed and apparent. This calls for what
might be called an “active passivity,” which opens access to a larger context
of meaning.19 In using poetic reverie, the poetic use of language returns us to
what Bachelard calls “the primal,” in such a way that there is an “awakening”
and an “adherence to the invisible.”20 Certainly, the idea of “awakening” to the
“primal” sense of perception as the site of an “activity/ passivity” in which the
oneiric can bring forth the sense of the “invisible of the visible” are ideas shared
by Merleau-Ponty. Also, in a parallel distinction to that of Merleau-Ponty, in
order to achieve this sort of active passivity, Bachelard is careful to distinguish
this modality of the imaginal from the usual sense of reverie, which “is a flight
from out of the real.”21 By contrast, Bachelard’s use of “poetic reverie” as an
expression of “reverberation” is revealing of the deeper sense of the real. He
explains that reverie in being guided by the poetic allows a kind “of falling
into place” and synchronizing with the world: “All the senses awaken and fall
into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the
senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it. The poetic image . . . is
‘spontaneous creation’ [Schelgal’s phrase]. It is such élan of the imagination
which the phenomenologist of imagination must try to revive.”22 Poetic rev-
erie brings together an attentiveness with an immersion in the prereflective,
such that its depths are sounded and amplified, and through their interplay
or polyphony new senses emerge. Bachelard calls reverie an “ever-emanating
universe, a fragrant breath that issues from things through the dreamer.”23
The reverie is not solely of our doing: it is an encounter with the senses that
emanate from the things like a fragrance. Bachelard is attempting through the
method of poetic reverie to hearken to the indirect voices of the things per-
ceived, to restore to them their vitality, and to take up an inscribed trajectory
toward a context of greater meaning. These, too, are goals of Merleau-Ponty’s
exploration of the physiognomic imaginal.
Another characterization that seems a common theme with Merleau-
Ponty is Bachelard’s insistence that in following out this deeper level of sense,
the experience of poets and artists testifies to their sense that the world itself
manifests a power of vision that enters into their own vision. In Water and
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 261

Dreams, Bachelard says, “It then seems as though contemplated nature helps
in the contemplation, as though it contains within itself the means for con-
templating.”24 In this sort of imaginal, there is the sense as if the apprehension
we have of something contains an apprehension of us from its perspective.
As Bachelard says, in passing by a lake, it stops us, and asks to be seen.
Merleau-Ponty would say the percept beckons to us. There is a sense of being
seen in seeing the world and then incorporating this vision into our own, a
phenomenon Bachelard calls “pancalism”: “This pancalistic union of the visible
and vision as has been felt by innumerable poets; they have lived it without
defining it. It is an elementary law of the imagination.”25 This description
aims at the same point as Merleau-Ponty’s description of reversibility: it is not
that the poet and the lake become one or coincide, but rather it is the case
that across their differences, which make the desire to describe and commu-
nicate all the more fervent, there is this coming-together of vision and visible.
This coming-together means that the poet gets to see the world through the
body of flowing or calm water, for example, and that a fluidity of regard gets
transmitted from the lake to the poet. Bachelard calls this “the ambivalence
which plays about the two participles seen and seeing.”26 Within perception,
there is this counter-movement that makes something able to perceive and be
perceived. Richard Kearney expresses this aspect of Bachelard’s treatment of the
imaginal by calling it an “audition”: “Bachelard conceives of the imagination
not as privation but as audition—an acoustics of other than self. His poetical
model of imagination is two-dimensional: at once a giving and a taking.”27 In
other words, the poetic exploration of images is a waiting for the silent voices
of the world to elicit further sense in a dialogue with the imaginer. The world
whispers within the back and forth of perception/imagination.
We have seen how for Merleau-Ponty the imaginal is uniquely an avenue
to the expression of the invisibility of the visible, or again to cite Kearney’s
words about Merleau-Ponty: “imagination may, he believed, boast of a privi-
leged access to the hidden dimensions of Being—what in his later writings he
terms ‘the invisible. The invisible, he says, can be imagined but it cannot be
seen.”28 Everything that is perceived has an invisibility or imperception that is
its deeper sense. This sense, for Merleau-Ponty, can come into expression only
through imagining: “Every visible dimension of being is for Merleau-Ponty
correlatively connected to an invisible or imaginary dimension.” The invisibility
of the visible as imaginal calls on the perceiver to be a co-knower with the
perceived and bring forth what is really there, even though latent. Bachelard,
too, in explaining how it is that the world doubles back upon itself, how the
sky is like an eye looking down upon the lake that forms a circuit into which
the human joins to bring forth these depths of sense, states this can only
happen because of the “union of the visible and vision.”29 Lake and sky are
262 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

perspectives upon one another, and the perceiver-imaginer enters into this mir-
ror play between them to poetically and imaginatively bring what goes beyond
the mere visibility of these objects. Bachelard, in another context, states that
each thing can be the starting point for an imaginal elaboration that brings
forth something essential about it that would otherwise remain hidden, and
this is experienced as entering a dialogue with the world: “How many times,
at the edge of a well, with its old stone covered with wild sorrel and fern,
have a I murmured the names of distant waters, the names of a world buried
in water. . . . And how many times has the world answered me . . . Oh my
things! What conversations we have had!.”30 The murmuring of the world for
Bachelard is parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s voices of silence. Both are part of a
reversibility with the things perceived that brings out the invisible lining of
the visible—the imperceived of the perceived.
Like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard cites the poet Claudel as inspiring many
insights about the reversibility between the perceiver and the perceived, and
between the expansive world in imagination and the imaginer. He quotes
Claudel as saying, “Thus, the water is the gaze of the earth, its instrument
for looking at time.”31 Bachelard says that to understand a statement like this
wherein we start to think about the way our existence would appear in the
gaze of the world, or here, in the gaze of the fluid water regarding the pas-
sage of the things of the earth within time, we can do so only through the
material imagination; however, in doing so, we may learn about a depth of the
sense of the world that would otherwise go unnoticed. Bachelard also calls for
a hearkening to silence as allowing the material imagination to flourish and
give rise to the “indirect voice” of the element he is considering: water.32 Like
Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard describes how reversibility augments within time,
that the inquirer moves from a series of scattered imaginings to a greater
density and continuity, as if the element studied—such as water—becomes
a “mainstay,” and as such: “a mainstay that quickly becomes a contributor of
images, a founding contributor for images.33” The dialogue across difference
requires “giving the imagination time to work upon its matter.”34 This is simi-
lar to our previous discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s account of Cézanne sitting
in silence for hours waiting for the landscape to indirectly speak its motif as
emblematic of reversibility.35
Yet another area of similarity between Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard is
that Bachelard is also able to see that the things of the world have physiog-
nomies. At one point early in Water and Dreams, Bachelard states that, “If the
look bestowed by things is rather soft, graceful, and passive, then it is the look
of water.”36 In this remark, Bachelard seems to be saying that not only is there
a reversibility with the things perceived, but also that each type of thing has
its unique “look” and its unique style. In addition, Bachelard’s studies of fire,
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 263

water, air, and earth demonstrate that the way that each of these traditional
“elements” has a distinctive set of qualities that are “murmured” by these ele-
ments in their interactions with the perceivers who are able to enter the oneiric
interplay of reverie with them. Each element has a definite style. It is this aspect
of Bachelard’s philosophy of the imagination that is first commented on in
the 1948 radio interviews, when Merleau-Ponty cites Bachelard for articulating
this oneiric dimension of various qualities. He particularly points to Bachelard’s
description of how certain individuals are drawn to a certain element, such as
air, earth, fire, or water, whose style structures their style of experiencing and
acting in the world.37 For Bachelard, people are drawn toward a “fundamen-
tal oneiric temperament” that synchronizes with one of the elements of the
world.38 In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, each person has a “style” of interacting with
the world that seems most akin to one of these elements and is informed by
the communion with this aspect of the world. This means that qualities and
ways of gesturing of the four elements are resonant with the styles of various
people in their apprehending of the world and expressing its sense.
In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, we might say this oneiric temperament
described by Bachelard is the chiasm between the person’s style and the style
of one of the elements. The style of the element and the person’s way of exis-
tence differ in ways, yet nevertheless play off one another to mutually bring
each other forth. There is both a resistance offered by the elements as described
by Bachelard that make them difficult to fathom but also a possible harmony
or reverberation with them. Saint Aubert makes this comparison between the
key terms of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh and Bachelard’s idea of the ele-
ments: “Said otherwise, the four elements in this oneiric dimension in which
Bachelard has so much worked imply the Merleau-Pontian drama of encroach-
ment. And if the Bachelardian approach belongs to the ultimate definition of
the flesh, the exchange between the inside and the outside is also the heart
of his definition of desire.”39 The sense of the self ’s finding its identity for
Bachelard is this continual entwining of inside and outside, the murmurs of
the world taken to heart, allowing an even greater attunement to the kindred
dimensions of the world. This is the desire of Being that Bachelard repeatedly
says is at the heart of the poetic discovery of the world.
Merleau-Ponty, too, continually seeks to describe the way that forces of
affiliation arise among disparate things, events, and beings with the perceiver
in a way such that a point of contact is felt and expressed prior to any acts of
categorization. Merleau-Ponty appropriates terms from Husserl and phenom-
enology, and reconfigures them to apply to the more contingent and sensual
unities with which he is concerned. Some of these terms are, for example,
“dimensionality,” which for Merleau-Ponty can indicate how each thing in its
qualities can become a way of recognizing other things of similar qualities as
264 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

belonging to an unfolding sense of being; or “rays of the world,” which in

Merleau-Ponty’s usage indicates that there is a sort of pulsation of the desire
within perception whose beckoning aligns by similarities in aspects of their
sensual appearance; or even “horizon,” which again Merleau-Ponty points to the
way that seemingly incompossible aspects of the world become a background
of appearance even though they are a fissured unity. “Element” is another term,
stemming from the Presocratics that offers a way to articulate an underlying
unity to perceptual experiences that does not posit a ground like the traditional
idea of “substance” nor an abstracted rational essence, but rather finds a unity
in the way the sensual presentations of aspects, events, or beings share a style
in a set of palpable qualities that only emerge dynamically in a becoming.
Both Merleau-Ponty’s style and Bachelard’s oneiric temperament, of
“inside” and “outside,” or rather their chiasmatic winding around each other
in Merleau-Ponty’s parlance, or of the “dialectic of inside and outside” in
Bachelard’s, only occur dynamically in time and activity.40 Bachelard states that
the imaginal gives us “a schema for coherence based on mobility.” The mate-
rial imagination for Bachelard can never be “inert,” but rather keeps unfolding
through sounding the sensible presentation. In “penetrating” into the depths of
what has been perceived, the imaginal is “materialized.” It takes on a density
of sense, but not as a static substance or essence. Bachelard says, “Such is not
the case, because not one of the four elements is imagined as inert. On the
contrary, each element is imagined with its own particular dynamism.”41 It is a
certain style of happening through unfolding. Bachelard also adds, important to
an element is its duality, that it is comprised of opposing forces and qualities:
“profound and lasting ambivalences are bound up in them.”42 The dynamism
of an element betrays the duality that is embodied in an element. They may
have one recognizable face or identity, but it is one that emerges through an
ongoing process. For each element, the tensions and opposing forces within
it interplay in a unique manner that manifests the style of that element. For
example, the rhythm of movement within the element of air with its quick
shifts up and down, or swirls and puffs, is distinct from an analogous but quite
different rhythm of movement displayed by water or fire or earth.43 An ele-
ment comes forth in its sense only when there is a great constellation of these
senses or images.44 What is most important about the dimension of process
within the elements, however, is what Bachelard calls its “transcendence”: that
in unfolding its imaginal sense, it goes beyond itself toward further horizons.
There is a trajectory toward joining up with a more encompassing background.
These characteristics of the Bachelardian articulation of the elements
seemed to Merleau-Ponty to match his idea of the flesh. One of the frequently
cited descriptions of the flesh by Merleau-Ponty is a passage in the “Chiasm”
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible. In trying to find a term that will evoke
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 265

sensual presence beckoning the perceiver into unfolding depths of unity and
also difference, a continuity riddled with gaps and fissures, and a materiality
that goes beyond itself toward a surplus of meaning, Merleau-Ponty turns to
the idea of the element, citing Bachelard’s use of the term:45

The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate

it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was
used to speak of water, air, earth and fire, that is, in the sense of
a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and
the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being
wherever there is a fragment of that being. The “flesh” is in this
sense an “element” of Being.46

The flesh of the world is a phenomenon akin to Bachelard’s analyses of the

elements in his studies on material imagination: something that falls between
the immediate particular and a general category, inner and outer, and percep-
tion and imagination, that offers a sensible face and a distinctive style—offering
possible journeys of development and articulation. However, Merleau-Ponty
not only finds the idea of element congenial for describing the flesh, but it fits
other phenomena that he seeks to describe, especially the imaginal. In another
working note that is the epigraph to this section he explicitly credits Bachelard
with this use of the idea of element in opposition to Sartre: “Being and the
imaginary are for Sartre ‘objects,’ entities . . . For me they are ‘elements’ (in
Bachelard’s sense), that is, not objects, but fields, subdued being, non-thetic
being, being before being.”47 This is the most important similarity between the
thought of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard: ontology must articulate the realm
of “being before being,” that is to say, the initial contact with the sensible
world—the realm that we have called the silent gesturing of the world. Central
to this articulation is the imaginal.
In the passage we quoted from Water and Dreams, in which Bachelard
says water speaks in “indirect voices,” he follows that sentence with “Nature
resounds with ontological echoes.”48 For Bachelard—as it is for Merleau-Pon-
ty—the natural world is interwoven with the cultural context and is a dominant
voice in the silent dialogue with the world. Human being and the being of
the world can be fathomed only within this dialogue. The polyphony of the
senses, expanded by the imaginal, is called by Bachelard “ante-perceptive,” or
as Merleau-Ponty would put it, prereflective—or as just cited, “being before
being.”49 Bachelard states that this attention to the ante-perceptive guides us
toward “states which are ontologically below being and above nothingness.
In these states the contradiction between being and non-being fades away.”50
This exploration of what is called by Bachelard an “antecedence of being,”
266 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

leads him to a “penumbral ontology.”51 What Bachelard means by penumbral

ontology is what I have called a “fragile ontology” in an earlier work in trying
to describe the unique character of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to ontology.52
Bachelard seeks to articulate—like Merleau-Ponty—structures of emergence
that are dynamic and continually transforming, and yet have ontological weight
as the way existence continually becomes. The constant transformation calls for
a different language use to articulate this penumbral ontology that catches and
amplifies these echoes of Being or “halos of Being” (les nimbes d’Être).53 They
can be sketched out in language in ways we will explore in the next section,
but they are not as graspable by traditional concepts. Bachelard’s metaphor of
“penumbral ontology” points to a region of phenomena and structures of sense
that Bachelard seeks to articulate, which dissipate under the glare of a harsh
illumination. The attempt to bring totalized Being into the circle of light has
been the hallmark of the Western quest for the knowable as the clear, distinct,
and permanent. However, the dynamic and latent phenomena that Bachelard
explores are disclosed by looking into the shade, because they are “shadings,”
or nuances. They are like the kind of phenomena that Merleau-Ponty seeks
to articulate through an “indirect” expression.54 Yet the nuanced and indirect
can disclose vital senses that shape an existence or the life of a culture. In the
opening chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty calls for us to
“learn to know the fragility of the ‘real.’ ”55 In another passage, Bachelard calls
this exploration “gentle ontology.”56 Fragile or penumbral ontology embraces
the fleeting and the changeable: it is satisfied with glances at that which is
latent and emerges in a shining forth that may evanesce. Despite the tradi-
tional philosophical prejudices, permanence is no guarantor of deeper sense
and often belies what is constructed or abstracted. Despite its dynamic and
transitory quality, the fragile may have a meaning and impact sufficient to
transform existence.
In the Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard explores what sort of vision is implied
by the power of the material imagination in poetic expression in a way parallel
to Merleau-Ponty’s asking about the nature of the painter’s or artist’s vision in
“Eye and Mind.” The eye that Bachelard seeks through his use of the method
of poetic reverie is an eye that “sees with another vision” in order to open up
another sort of “understanding,” a “communication” with the world that allows
an “inhabitation,” an “immediacy,” and an “intimacy” with the perceived—all
turns of phrase in common with Merleau-Ponty.57 He contrasts this with the
“fragmentary” and distanced world of perception that is the world of perception
as conceived by the empiricist. Furthermore, this traditional empiricist vision
of perception, he likens to a vision “constituted with leftovers”—that is, with
the merely reproductive circulation of what has already been categorized in the
reflective taking stock of the perceived. Bachelard states the kind of relationship
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 267

with the world for the person using material imagination in poetic reverie is
one of “communion,” the same description used by Merleau-Ponty to describe
the relationship of the perceived and perceiver in the prereflective enmeshment
of perceiving.58 The relationship developed through material imagination to the
world allows the disclosure of the ontology that Bachelard seeks to articulate,
which he realizes is at odds with the philosophical tradition. By practicing his
method of poetic reverie, Bachelard claims one can develop “within us a sort of
oneiric organ. The objects privileged by reverie become the direct complements
of the dreamer’s cogito. They value the dreamer; they hold the dreamer. In the
intimacy of the dreamer, then, are the organs of reverie.”59 The unfolding of
the imaginal allows disclosure of what is brought into an intimate relationship
with the perceiver through the sketching out of the perceiver’s hidden ties to
other beings. The process of material imagining allows what is dark to be seen,
or in Merleau-Ponty’s words, the invisible of the visible comes forward as the
imaginal process functions like a new sense organ. Again, this is same turn
of phrase used by Merleau-Ponty when he says of the creative writer that the
process of his or her imaginal expression “brings it to life in an organism of
words, establishing in the reader or writer as a new sense organ, opening a new
field or a new dimension to our experience.”60 In these penumbral structures
of being, Bachelard claims that a differing sense of one’s being and the being
of the things, events, and creatures of the world emerges. He feels that this
difference would be “denounced” by the philosophers who seek “the strong
ontology”—that is to say, the enduring structures of existence that are clear,
distinct, and permanent. In contrast, Bachelard calls this a “dispersed ontology,
which attaches itself to details, perhaps to accidents and which believes it is
multiplying its proofs by multiplying its points of view.”61 Bachelard’s material
imagination has led him to an ontology that articulates the contextual, the
historical, and the contingent through an interplay of the imaginal nuances of
the perceptual that is rich in meaning, but ambiguous—an ontology very much
like Merleau-Ponty’s “indirect ontology” or “ontology of the flesh.” Bachelard
declares that his method of poetic reverie has opened an “ontology of the
imagination” that is revealing of the world that “echoes within us.”62
The kind of disclosure that Bachelard seeks is a hearkening to things,
such that their qualities become also our qualities through a “reverberation”
that he distinguishes from “resonance.”63 In his introduction to The Poetics of
Space, where he outlines his distinctive phenomenological method, he states
that reverberation takes one to the level of being, whereas resonances are about
sentimental associations and interpretations. Bachelard is seeking reverbera-
tions, not resonances. Reverberations yield the “intimacy” with things about us,
and when expressed in a poetic language are tracings through which the image
has a movement that flows in a way like the movement of our inhabiting the
268 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

world. A rhythm or line moves through the verse, like the line of the painter,
“as though the imagination created a nerve fiber” that reveals these nuances of
sense. Like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard turns to creative artists to find expres-
sions of this penumbral ontology, for him most often poets, but also recognizes
that the work of imagining being done is very much akin to that achieved by
painters. Bachelard quotes J. H. Van den Berg: “Poets and painters are born
phenomenologists,” and explains that this is so, because they hearken to the
way “that things ‘speak’ to us.”64 Through this hearkening to the way things
speak, the poet and painter are able to achieve “a contact with things.” These
descriptions constitute for Bachelard neither a psychology nor a psychoanalysis,
but an ontology: “This ontology is what I plan to study.”65 In the intimacy
of the kind of reverie upon which Bachelard’s phenomenology pivots, there is
a “faithfulness” to objects, an openness to how things “hold” us, and a kind
of slowness that strikes us as “things do not go so fast.”66 Toward the end of
The Poetics of Space, when trying to address the false dichotomy of inside and
outside fostered by the categorical and reifying thought of traditional Western
philosophy, Bachelard returns to this intimacy and slowness in undertaking an
ontology as the way of allowing to emerge the sense of how the inside and
outside are not oppositions and closed boundaries. Instead, they are seen as
aspects of our spiral being with the world.67 To have access to the depths of
being requires a dwelling with things rather than continual frenetic activity.
This approach requires taking to heart the qualities we sense in order to
dwell and inhabit them in intimacy, which would reveal their being and our
overlapping in another way: “If we multiply images, taking them into domains
of lights and sounds, of heat and cold, we should prepare a slower ontology,
but doubtless one that is more certain than the ontology that reposes upon
geometrical images.”68 What emerges is the quality, the object, or the aspect of
the other as “its nuance of being” in an “ontological amplification” in which
the dialectical relationship between inside and outside, human and world,
could be articulated. This dialectic of inside and outside, and of human and
world, can emerge only when allowed the time of a slower pace of a poetic
articulation. The slowing down allows the latent dynamism of the perceived
to show forth. In following his method of poetic reverie, Bachelard states that
he is articulating “differences in the tonality of the being. At the level of the
tonality of being, a differential ontology then can be proposed.”69 Bachelard’s
poetic gathering in reverie of the tonality of being traces out the way that
something has a rhythm, style, and embodies varied feelings and is akin to
Merleau-Ponty’s attempt at the beginning of the Phenomenology to heed the
tonality of a landscape or a person or a city that is “ ‘gay’ or ‘sad,’ ‘lively’ or
‘dreary,’ ‘elegant’ or ‘coarse.’ ”70 Both Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard are offering
a contrast to the empiricism that disdains the ontology of these qualities. Bach-
 Bachelard’s Material Imagination and the Flesh of the World 269

elard states that in his “differential ontology,” there is a more obscure sense of
self-identity and the identity of the things of the world, and there is an “inva-
sion” between person and world—what Merleau-Ponty calls “encroachment.”
Given this sense of enmeshment between perceiver and world, or imaginer and
world, Bachelard asserts the importance of the emotional undertone and the
rhythm of the interconnectedness among beings. That is the cornerstone of the
sense of a circulation of felt being that he seeks to tease out. He even uses a
phrase that calls to mind one of the most famous quotes from Merleau-Ponty,
when he (Bachelard) states that the material imagination he envisions is going
“beyond reality, which sings reality.”71 As we have discussed, for Merleau-Ponty
the underside of language expresses the emotional attunement to the perceived
in a way that “sings the world.”
Bachelard contrasts the dwelling with things in their imaginal depth with
the manipulation of the world by science and culture insofar as they are under
the sway of a metaphysics that turns the world into geometric relations and
things with static concepts “cast in the mold of linguistic fossils.”72 In draw-
ing out this threat Bachelard turns to interpreting a poem by Henri Michaux
entitled “The Space of Shade” (L’espace aux ombres). Bachelard warns that in this
world of geometricized relations, there is “a fall from the being of its shade” to
a dislocation in a noisy, confusing hum of activity. In that realm human being
loses its “being-there” [être-là]. It finds itself in a situation in which it “cannot
be located.” Those who live this way have a strict borderline between inside and
outside that fortifies their sense of reality, which causes them pain and drains
the world of the possibility of being explored in its imaginal depths. These
thoughts remind us of where this book commenced—with Merleau-Ponty’s
warning at the beginning of “Eye and Mind” that the reliance on operational
thinking will leave us dislocated from our rootedness in our situation in such
a way that we might fall into an “endless nightmare.” His sense that we might
become prey to an “absolute artificialism” matches precisely Bachelard’s con-
cern. Bachelard says this process of geometricizing the world and erecting a
strict boundary between inside and outside has a dire result: “being is slowly
digesting its nothingness.” Although he doesn’t brandish the idea of an endless
nightmare, as Merleau-Ponty does, Bachelard’s warning that being’s dynamic
process is being reduced to nothingness that will “last for centuries”73 has the
same emotional import, as does his lament that “the soul . . . suffers from a
deficiency of material imagination.”74 For Bachelard, as for Merleau-Ponty, the
turn toward another sort of ontology, one of latencies, nuances, and possible
deeper sense, midwifed through the power of a certain mode of the imagin-
ing, was a vital matter for contemporary Western culture. This ontology would
make possible the rediscovery of a rootedness in the natural world and the
community offered by the world in its silent, gesturing voices.
 VI
Toward a Poetic Ontology

The justification of poetry rehabilitates the whole of language.

—Themes from the Lectures (16)

The meaning of philosophy is the meaning of a genesis. Consequently, it

could not be summed up outside of time, and it is still expression.
—“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (82)

The primordial world that Merleau-Ponty sought to express philosophically

could be conceived to be ineffable and inexpressible. Instead, he understood
it as present in the myriad mundane perceptual details of the world. This way
of seeing the most mundane beings in a way that reveals their latent sense
brought him to explore the labor of expression of this realm of the painter,
the novelist, the poet, and other artists. Their calling is to achieve this trans-
formative task. If the world’s silent gesturing sense present in the latent depths
of perception is to be expressed, it requires expression that breaks free of the
reflective use of everyday language that is content to refer to itself and the
stock of well-worn categories. This language is used to represent experience,
but fails to rekindle the inexhaustibility of its originary perceptual contact. If
that primordial dialogue, called in “Eye and Mind” the “deflagration” (étincelle
bondissante)1 between perceiver and world, is to be relit or reborn from the
latent depths of perception, it will require the physiognomic imagination that
opens us to that level of contact with the world. Jessica Wiskus phrases the
problem in its most straightforward terms: “But how might one bring silence
to speak without destroying silence itself?”2 It is not—as we have discussed
previously—a matter of preserving a literal absence of sound or an absence
of language, but rather a matter of reestablishing contact with a primordial
exchange with the sensible world.

271
272 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

For Bachelard, the answer to this problem is his method of poetic reverie,
which is a use of language that transcends ego, representation, and atomiza-
tion of experience to achieve a spontaneity, primal contact, and a reverberation
with the things of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the answer is also in the
power of poetry and the poetic use of language that, unlike the everyday use
of language, is not just a tool used to “say something.” In his summary of the
course, “Studies in the Literary Use of Language,” he responds to the problem
of how to establish “a new signification in a linguistic apparatus constructed
with old signs.” Merleau-Ponty states: “Moreover, there was at least one form
of language which one could not reject precisely because it did not pretend to
say something—namely, poetry. Now, upon examination it became clear that
the reason why poetry does not convey signification by effacing itself before
what it says, like a plain statement, and is not detached from its words is not
simply because poetry is like a song or dance of language, nor is it from wont
of signification, but it is because it always has more than one signification.”3
Poetry is not a settled use of language that gives itself out as a tool to achieve
a specific reference, but is rather an openness to many meanings. How this is
the case for Merleau-Ponty is explained through his theory of language use,
and we will briefly describe its relevant features to the description of how the
poetic use of language rekindles that primordial deflagration of sensibility. Then
we must see how poetry draws on the physiognomic imagination to make
possible an indirect ontology of the flesh.4
In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty begins with making the dis-
tinction between two ways of expression through language: “Let’s speak of
two languages: the language after the fact, the one which has been acquired,
which disappears before the sense which it is conveying,—and the one which
creates itself in the moment of expression, which makes me glide from the
signs towards the sense—the language that has been spoken and the speaking
language.”5 Merleau-Ponty uses this distinction between the established lan-
guage, “the language which has already been spoken” (le langage parlé) and is
circulated, and a more expressive language, the language that gets us beyond
the past conceptions of things and reawakens a more primary sense of what
the words are expressing—“speaking language” (le langage parlant)—in much
of his discussion about language.6 In this passage Merleau-Ponty is exploring
the process of reading a book and trying to establish how language can say
something that makes us understand something about the world or ourselves
that we have not understood before reading it. The experience he is discuss-
ing happens when one becomes “engrossed in a book.” At that moment, the
speaking language (langage parlant) has captured the reader in its expressiveness,
but part of its power to give the reader a new sense of the world is by being
opaque in such a way that the text calls attention to itself as an expression at
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 273

the same time that it creates a movement of sorts. This deflection from being
utterly focused on “what is said” is a directing of our attention outside of
language as a sign system toward the world about which it speaks.
Merleau-Ponty describes how if the book is genuinely expressive, “sud-
denly, a few words move me, the fire catches, my thoughts are ablaze, and
the fire feeds off of everything I have ever read. I am receiving and giving in
the same gesture.”7 The blaze of the book is both a consuming of the old for-
mulations and an illuminating, moving me as the reader beyond the stock of
notions I brought to the book. However, new senses of the world can be taken
up only on the basis of “my whole experience of others and everyday events
with all the questions they left in me” that I had before reading the book. The
senses that are engendered by the creative expression of the novel move out
into connection with the entire context of experience that the reader brought
to the experience of reading the book—then the whole is transformed. It is too
striking not to notice that this is the same image of a blaze or a catching on
fire that will open a depth and encroach upon seemingly unconnected senses
now brought into interplay that Merleau-Ponty will use almost a decade later
to describe the primordial level of perception and also the painter’s inspira-
tion in “Eye and Mind.” Also, having discussed the power of physiognomic
imagination at length, we cannot help but note that the action of creative
language to forge connections among varied “movements by vibration” within
the perceiver’s lived context and propel them into further transformed senses,
matches exactly what we have described as the action of physiognomic imagi-
nation in bringing forth the latencies of perception. Merleau-Ponty says that
in reading Stendhal’s novels, words are given a “new twist,” “cross references
multiply,” and the reader is “brought within the imaginary self and the internal
dialogue Stendhal held with it.”8 This is the work of creative language to reach
the underside of language in perception’s being lined by the imaginal or what
Merleau-Ponty here calls the “language before language.”9
Merleau-Ponty also discusses this transforming power of the expressive
language in reading a book in the “Institution and Passivity” lectures. Once
again, he is discussing the power of writing or reading a book: “Insofar as
the book advances we discover things that are consonant. This is because the
partial view was a total view. But this silent project is known only through its
partial realizations (in some such chapter). A book is a series of institutions.”10
In other words, the book, as an expressive use of language, moves us beyond
where we started in our notions already articulated, and moves us beyond our
partial views with which we started as inhabiting a perspective. Yet the book
uses those previous views in their own transformation: they become what they
have never been, but were possibly. Part of expressive language’s work is to
undo, to deviate, or to deform, as Merleau-Ponty will often say, the established
274 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

language and its accepted notions, the accepted formulations. In other words,
the expressive writing of a book “is open, because of its divergence in rela-
tion to a norm of sense, difference. It is this sense by divergence, deformation,
which is proper to institution”11 The book must continually go beyond itself,
break with the established language use, and transform the sense with which
it started as its basis, which had more to express in its latent depths. The
expression of new sense moves between the old sense and the newly expressed
sense. It reverberates in this new space between the established language and
its divergent new use opened up by creative expression. The book creates a
newly opened creative space of sense for itself.
Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point in the opening of his essay “Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence” when he states that language “is much
more like a sort of being, than a means, and that is why it can present some-
thing to us so well.” We encounter other beings who impact us and transform
our experience: so it is with language. Language has powers of presentation that
surpass mere communication as similar to the case when “a friend’s speech over
the telephone brings us the friend himself.”12 The creative use of language shows
itself, and in doing so is not seamless as is the empirical language, which is like
a tool that disappears in being taken for granted or like a “worn coin placed
silently in my hand” (an image from Mallarmé that Merleau-Ponty borrows).13
We come to a face-to-face encounter with the words in creative speech. They
bring us to a sense of presence of whatever they express, like the sense of the
presence of the friend whose voice we hear through the telephone. Further-
more, to think of language as a being, rather than as a thing or especially a
tool, is to see that language has its own life, a dynamism within its turns of
phrase, its rhythms, its melodies, its juxtapositions, its pauses and pacing that
pulls us along with it, which are capacities to midwife things into being and
transform aspects of the world. Language manifests; and the call from one’s
friend is not just a communication of ideas or information or even of feelings,
but an encounter with another being.
Merleau-Ponty also says in this passage that within expressive language
there is a “meaning that is a total movement,” that it is like a gesture that
points beyond itself to what it might convey. It is also said to be opaque with
“its obstinate reference to itself.” Like another person, language can gesture
to the world, but stands face-to-face with us in a way that we can never fully
fathom, drawing us along in its wake. However, these dimensions vanish in the
usual way of using language—the empirical use—which Merleau-Ponty calls
both derivative and a failure to become “authentic speech”: “The empirical use
(l’usage empirique) of already established language (du langage déjà fait) should
be distinguished from its creative use.”14 “Empirical language can only be the
result of creative language,” because creative language does not seek closure
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 275

and to pass along counters of sense. In a creative use of language, “there is

a power of words, because working against each other . . . they evoke their
meaning in this tumult.” There is the clash of incompossibles that—as we
have seen—opens onto depth and a multiplicity of senses and possible rela-
tions. This clash within expression is evident on its face, which is obstinate
or opaque, because it is a presence and a pointing beyond itself. By contrast,
Merleau-Ponty says that speech in the sense of empirical language—that is,
the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign—is not speech in respect
of authentic language (du langage authentique).15 Language used as if it is the
passing back and forth of signs of preestablished meaning and nothing more
(the definition offered here of “empirical language”) is not authentic and sig-
nifies parasitically, feeding on the deeper meaning of a creative use of speech.
This leads to the task of the creative writer, whether the novelist or poet or
other imaginative users of language, which is that the creative writer “destroys
ordinary language, but by realizing it.”16 The creative writer destroys empirical
speech, but does so again in that strange temporality of institution and depth,
whereby what has come to be expressed was not yet present until this act,
but was latent in prior speech. This is a kind of liberation, a moving beyond
the widespread threat of operational thought locking Western culture into the
alienation described by Merleau-Ponty in the introduction to “Eye and Mind.”
This alienation certainly proceeds by continual use of empirical speech.
Creative writing undermines the distance of the reflective stance towards
the world and moves us to another sense of space, the space of interconnected
relations. Merleau-Ponty says the creative writer “transports us . . . from the
world of established meanings to something else.”17 We are transported from
the everyday hodological space of tasks to a prereflective experience of the
world of silent voices and gestures that we described in the first chapter, which
first gives rise to a dialogue as the continual birthing of sense. This kind of
speech “brings to the surface all the deep-rooted relations of the lived experi-
ence wherein it takes form, and which is the language of life and of action
but also that of literature and of poetry,” says Merleau-Ponty in The Visible
and the Invisible.18 This use of language found in literature and poetry “lives
only from silence,” Merleau-Ponty says right before this, but in being between
language and silence, it makes visible the latent or invisible relations at the
depths of the perceived. The reader is pulled into a virtual space of the entwined
nexus of relations latent in perception. These relations might in the field of
action suddenly become effulgent and pull us out of our everyday selves, like
the moment of racing forward to save one’s son from a burning building, or
becoming part of the fraternity of those refugees below and trying to help
them. Yet, language in its creative expression in literature and poetry can bring
forth this effulgence, too. We have seen that the simplest percept, such as the
276 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

example of the red of a dress, is actually a “straits gaping open” within a nexus
of relations, vibrating among fields of red clay, the Russian Revolution, the
costumes of bishops, and so forth. Creative language, especially poetry and
literature, can bring this to the surface. It can do this by breaking outside
the circle of well-worn reference where “the sign has meaning only insofar as
it is profiled against other signs”19 to enter the silent world that is beneath
language. The poetic metaphor is itself a bringing into relation of what had
not seemed previously to be related.
For Merleau-Ponty, the genesis of sense is always starting anew, as if at
the first day of one’s existence, as if at the first day of humanity’s expression of
the world. To return to the lecture course about the literary use of language,
Merleau-Ponty says, “The poet is comparable to the man when he created
language.”20 Merleau-Ponty continues by citing Valéry’s picture of the poet as
drinking at the sources of language and inventing verse in the same way that
primitive humans invented words, or perhaps even more aptly put, the poet
invents “the ancestors of words.” More aptly, because poetry hearkens back to the
expressive source of words—that first exchange of sense with the silent world—it
allows us to return to the ongoing birthing of new meaning. Throughout his
notes for the course, Merleau-Ponty sees literature and especially its poetic basis
as entering a realm of expression that is deeper and closer to truth. Several times,
he seems to agree with the writers he discusses that “the truth is poetry, because
poetry is truth.”21 The truth that Merleau-Ponty is discussing is the openness to
the sense of things that comes from the world in its silent gesturing to us. In
his preparatory notes for discussing Valéry, he underlined all the passages taken
from Introduction à la Poétique that describe the way that as the poet enters
the silence of experience, the things inform the poet as to what about them
needs to be expressed, and not vice versa. What comes forward into sense is
the way that there is a nexus of interrelatedness that we have called the oneiric
or imaginal latent sense that is at the heart of the way perception takes on
its meaning within the context of the world. Poetic speech brings this depth
forth. In explaining the power of poetry for Merleau-Ponty, Jerry H. Gill in
Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor states that “[t]he basic idea inherent in the concept
of relationality is that everything, in both its being and its knowing, as well as
being known, is intricately connected with everything else. This suggests that
metaphoric speech, as a dimension of human embodiment must be understood
as integral, not only to our prehension and understanding of reality, but to its
very being and nature itself.”22 Poetic speech in literature and poetry reveals the
nexus of relations that comprise the world, and in doing so, participates in the
ongoing transformation of the world as augmented in Being.
The creative writer who uses poetic speech is gesturing to others—not
passing along information about the world. The poetic text addresses itself to the
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 277

embodying being of the reader. In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,”
Merleau-Ponty states that creative speech is able to “free the meaning captive in
the thing,” because it “is only silence in respect to empirical usage.”23 Instead of
settling forth the “common name” of things or events, it uses language in such
a way that it takes us back to that silent encounter with the world’s gesture
in the same way the painter passes along to the viewer his or her responsive
gesture, such that the viewer or reader will “take up the gesture which created
it . . . to rejoin . . . the silent world of the painter henceforth uttered and
accessible.”24 The poet and the painter in the silent encounter with the world’s
gesture incorporate its sense into their own responsive gestures, sketching forth
a primal meaning from the encounter. This gesture is passed along through
the poem or painting to others who receive it in their own embodying being.
In the poetic openness that is part of its expression, there is the ontologi-
cal transformation of entering into a relationship in which the world’s gesture
becomes an extension of the perceiver’s embodying being, such that the per-
ceiver and world become interwoven: “the ontological milieu is not thought
of as the order of ‘human representation’ in contrast with an order of the in
itself—It is a matter of understanding that truth itself has no meaning outside
the relation of transcendence, outside of the Uberstieg toward the horizon—
that the ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘object’ are one sole whole, that the subjective
‘lived experiences’ count in the world.”25 Our trajectory into the depths of
the world, or to “go beyond” (Uberstiegen) toward the horizon, comprises
part of the sense of the world as well as that which in the world beckons to
us. It is within this interrelation that is comprised the field in which Being
is revealed. There is nothing outside this relationship, which is an ongoing
trajectory toward a whole of sense that is never attained. Thus, Merleau-Ponty
ends the thought of the working note by reminding us that it is in entering
into that reversibility of human and world that this unfolding of sense can
start to be articulated: “It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives
itself yonder—it is not we who speak, it is the truth that speaks itself as the
depths of speech—Becoming-nature of man which is the becoming-man of
nature—The world as a field, and as such is always open.”26 Our perceptions
take up of the expressions of the world—a conjoint role—which is not the
role of being the source and owner of speech. We join up with the silent or
indirect voices, or gestures of the world, encountered in what we have perceived
in the realm of pre-meaning.
The going beyond ourselves in expression in such a way that the things
and the being of the world can announce themselves within that expression
happens most powerfully in poetry. Merleau-Ponty specifies throughout his
writing that poetry is most truly the power of speech-before-speech. In “Indi-
rect Language and the Voices of Silence,” he states:
278 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Since perception itself is never complete, since our perspectives give

us a world to express and think about which envelops and exceeds
those perspectives, a world which announces itself in lightening
signs as a spoken word or as an arabesque, why should the expres-
sion of the world be subjected to the prose of the senses or of the
concept? It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken and
recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things said or seen.”27

Poetry is the way of breaking open empirical language and our habitual half-
perception of the world in a perception that fails to linger and explore the
depths of the world. Poetry is a language of awakening. The empirical language
that masquerades as having a complete grasp on the world blocks us from
experiencing the inexhaustibility of perception. To presume to have a complete
grasp of the world would obscure the primordial condition of language as seen
by Merleau-Ponty: that “all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you
wish, silence.”28 It is the Western philosophical cultural heritage’s mistaken idea
that a language that could completely express that about which it speaks or
writes would arrive at truth, when in fact such an impossible situation would
occlude an open encounter with the world in the silent realm of mutual gesture.
Overestimation of language’s possible grasp works against it expressiveness. If
we could realize that language’s expressive power comes from the fact that it
is allusive, that it pushes us beyond the literalization of words to encounter
aspects of the world that are interconnected and only partially fathomed, then
we would see that poetry—which highlights the process of dialogue with world
such that it throws us outside of language to experience other relationships with
the silent world—is at the source of language’s expressiveness. Poetry would be
understood as central to language’s expressive power, rather than being seen
as a frivolous and inessential use of language. It is poetry that Merleau-Ponty
declares awakens us to perception. He states in one of the radio lectures, agree-
ing with Mallarmé, that “the poet . . . replaces the usual way of referring to
things, which presents them as ‘well known,’ with a mode of expression that
describes the essential structure of the thing and accordingly forces us to enter
into that thing. To speak of the world poetically is almost to remain silent.”29
Poetry is that use of language that allows us “to enter into things” because it
takes us beyond well-worn categories to return to the sensual physiognomy
of what we encounter.
If we are return to the primal experience of things, we need to find the
gaps in empirical language, since its self-enclosure blocks access to primordial
experience.30 Poetry leaves in its saying deliberate and highlighted gaps and
pauses, so that it presents a surface not as a seamless and blank physiognomy,
but rather one that is highly figured and rather markedly gropes. The words
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 279

cast about in their noticeable gesturing. Merleau-Ponty’s description of truly

expressive speech is that “it gropes around a significative intention.”31 The
poet or creative writer does not take language as a ready-made tool, but turns
it over and over, looking at its texture, listening to its rhythms, hearing its
sonorous tones in such a way that the usually hidden openings become appar-
ent. Merleau-Ponty has a wonderful image that expresses this process: “Like
the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material.”32 Creative
writing handles the words, feels their textures, and sees each detail of their
features, unlike empirical language use that looks right through them—like
unnoticed furniture—to their conventional meaning. The poet looks away
from this horizon to savor and study the textures and patterns of the weave
of words. He or she notices the sensual and emotional texture of words and
their new effect in joining with other words and images. The poet seeks the
ways to discover new patterns in a language use that will throw us outside
the normal round of linguistic signs pointing to other linguistic signs. Poetry
opens us to this gesture of the world that can allow us to rejoin this ongoing
unfolding of sense, echoing its deepest meaning, while bringing a new birthing
of meaning. Poetry does not operate on the level of reflective categories and
self-consciousness, but goes beneath everyday language to both recapture and
push forward the articulation of the indirect voices with which we are conjoint
in the perception of the world.
The perceiver caught in a world of distance that Merleau-Ponty invoked
as a never-ending nightmare, by breaking the normal word usage and finding
the sonorous and sensual feel to be expressed, can break out of the operational
stance toward the world and move into another relationship of exchange,
where sound and feeling find reverberations of sense. Merleau-Ponty in reading
Proust not only experienced this poetic movement but also found in its pages
a description of the power of poetic language. The narrator of In Search of
Lost Time describes his ongoing sense of being at a distance from the richness
of perception: “And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess,
in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible
even when I looked at what went on outside. When I saw an external object,
my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, sur-
rounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching
its substance directly; for it would evaporate before I could make contact with
it.”33 For the narrator, there has always been a distance or a veil of the spirit
between him and the perceived world. What breaks him out of this kind of
distance is the literary and poetic power of language, his immersing himself in
reading, especially in the works of Bergotte, whose passages “filled me with a
joy . . . a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more integral
part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been
280 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

swept away . . . [and] had added a kind of density and volume by which my
own understanding seemed to be enlarged.”34 Through the narrator’s read-
ing, the creative use of the language has swept away the barriers to his fully
experiencing. In becoming open to a more complex relationship to things, the
narrator finds that both the world and himself have taken on volume, new
sense, and a substantial vitality. The opening to the depths of the perception
through the imaginal of the novel has connected its movement by vibration
to many aspects in his ongoing perceptual world and allowed them to gain
an intensity and detail of presence.
The power of the literary use of language is that it often points away
from what it wants to signify. The relations it establishes are lateral, or as
Merleau-Ponty says similarly of his approach to ontology: it must be expressed
indirectly. It depends on the interplay of images and of phrases, like the way
an artist uses colors that only gain a certain hue through their playing off the
other colors in the canvas—the depth and presence that Cézanne understood
so well.35 Merleau-Ponty makes this point by looking at Stendhal’s novel, The
Red and the Black:

But Julien Sorel’s trip to Verrières and his attempt to kill Mme de
Rênal after he has learned that she has betrayed him are not as
important as that silence, that dream-like journey, that unthink-
ing certitude, and that eternal resolution which follow the news.
Now these things are nowhere said. There is no need of a “Julien
thought” or a “Julien wished.”36

The novel’s creative use of language evokes an oneiric atmosphere in which

emotions swirl, sensual experiences collide, memories play off of each other
discontinuously, fragmented phrases echo, and images stream in varied tempos
and rhythms. This language use becomes a gesture toward the embodying being
of the reader. In this kaleidoscopic interplay and kinetic collisions of trajecto-
ries, enveloping meanings are suggested, but are indeterminate. This is how the
creative use of language works: it doesn’t directly describe, but rather is a mov-
ing body itself that gestures, sketches, and whose physiognomy displays certain
expressions. Of this part of the novel, Merleau-Ponty concludes: “The desire to
kill is thus not in words at all. It is between them, in the hollows of space, time,
and signification they mark out. . . .”37 The hollows are that space of intercon-
nection, of nexus, of the “between” of language and world. Renaud Barbaras in
The Being of the Phenomenon describes this idea of poetic language as a being:

The novelist’s task is not to expound ideas or even to analyze char-

acters, but to depict an inter-human event, ripening and bursting
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 281

it upon us with no ideological commentary, to such an extent

that any change in the order of the narrative or in the choice of
viewpoint would alter the literary meaning of the event. A novel,
a poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings
in which expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed,
their meaning accessible only through direct contact, being radi-
ated with no change in their temporal or spatial situation. It is
in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is
the nexus of living meanings, not the law of a certain number of
invariant terms.38

Just as the world gestures its meaning indirectly and through the encounter
with its physiognomy, so the poetic use of language takes on a life as if a
being that has the power to gesture and has a face, which returns our regard
expressively and invitingly, if approached with sensitivity. This means that the
poetic vision looks at the world caressingly in such a way that vision takes
on a possibility of the embracing caress of reciprocal expression. This is the
opposite of a vision that seeks to possess, which is the driving force of empirical
language, as well as that of the traditional gaze or the Sartrean embrace, which
in its purposive activity misses the depths of sense that can open up through
poetry and the arts. As Patricia Locke says about the narrator of In Search of
Lost Time insofar as he becomes open to taking in of depths of perception after
his reading Bergotte and encountering the arts: “Marcel has to relinquish the
gaze of capture to be absorbed in the surface as depth.”39 Now, the narrator
can allow the world to touch him in a different way. It takes another sort of
stance toward the world, an openness of regard that can be expressed in poetic
and literary language that allows reversibility to come forward, so the reader
can be taken into the world’s nexus and depth.40
Even in the Phenomenology of Perception there is a description of the
power of poetry that often goes unnoticed, because of the emphasis on the
phrase within the passage that asserts language is a way of “singing the world,”
a metaphor so striking it is often the focus of interpretation. If we return
for a moment to the entire passage, an aspect of the statement that may be
overlooked is the importance of the role given to poetry or poetic speech in
regard to language’s ability to express:

If we consider only the conceptual and delimited meaning of

words, it is true that the verbal form—with the exception of end-
ings—appears arbitrary. But it would no longer appear so if we
took account of the emotional content of the word, which we have
called above its “gestural sense,” which is all important in poetry, [my
282 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

emphasis] for example. It would be found that the words, vowels

and phonemes are so many ways of “singing” the world, and that
their function is to represent things not, as naïve onomatopoetic
theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because
they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence.41

Poetry enacts a gestural sense that is comparable to singing, and is an expres-

sion of the affective sense of what is presented. The movement of language—its
melody, tone, rhythm, and pace—do not mimic the literal sounds of the world
onomatopoeically, Merleau-Ponty asserts, but rather poetry brings into expres-
sion and recognition the emotional essence of things. In his course, “Studies on
the Literary Use of Language,” when Merleau-Ponty is exploring this moment
of expressiveness in Valéry’s poetry, he points to the poet’s belief that one must
encounter silence to find the object of poetry. Valéry says that in this encounter
with silence, poetry restores through language that which is expressed within
cries, within tears, within caresses, within kisses and sighs. The words—like
these expressive gestures—bring forth the emotional sense of life around us.42
Jessica Wiskus stresses that what Merleau-Ponty learned from Mallarmé’s writ-
ing to which Merleau-Ponty refers in The Visible and the Invisible (and which
also is present in the passage quoted above from the Phenomenology) is how
poetry’s repetition of sound and word, its rhythms, have the quality of song.
Its rhythms are an “ongoing, dynamic process . . . with words turning back
upon words to disclose what had remained silent between them. In speech, it
is arguably the rhythmic quality of language . . . that offers the best possibil-
ity for leaping into song”43 This moving-being of the words is a gesture that
expresses the things of the world through rhythm and sonorous shifts com-
municating the tone, nuance, and felt quality of their affective relationship to
us and the felt quality of their relationship to the rest of the world.
The idea that in its “musicality” or “rhythmicality” (as Wiskus calls these
qualities), poetic language can gesture forth the latent emotional sense of the
world was strongly reaffirmed by Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Proust. The nar-
rator of In Search of Lost Time expresses how the words of literature and its
poetic turning of language can bring emotional life from dormancy to vital-
ity. Marcel finds that as a young person he has turned from his overprotected
existence with its claustrophobic affective life toward literature, which:

seemed to me entrusted with the secret truth and beauty, things

half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of
which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts. Next to
this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly
reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 283

discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action

in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These
were the events taking place in the book I was reading.44

The creative use of language can bring openness to the emotional vectors that
orient our lived space by immersing us in this space of expression where the
emotions are highlighted in moments of encounter. The narrator is emphati-
cally expressing that in the spell of creative language, there is a heightened
sense of reversibility with the world—the inside turning about the outside and
the outside turning about the inside. The poet and philosopher Matt Harrison
says of the poem: “It is a free movement, a freed-up place, permanently linked
into the movement of time and traversed by perceptions, details, events and
transitions. Poetry carries out a tracing of things in their context of active per-
ception and engagement.”45 Space for Merleau-Ponty is a space of pulsations,
of affective vectors that are emblems of the affective trajectories of life, as we
discussed in an earlier chapter. Poetic speech is a way of entering into that
dimension of space and bringing forth its emotional tracings that are part of
its latent sense. Also, in the beginning of this book we pointed to Merleau-
Ponty’s complaint that empiricism has drained away the life of the world by
subtracting its felt qualities that give it a depth of sense. Instead, we might
have said empiricism has outlawed the poetry of creative language from being
taken as an expression of the truth of the world. If the silent encounter with
the world is first of all a recognition of what Merleau-Ponty pointed to in
that passage about the qualities that empiricism denies, such as “the anger or
pain which I . . . read in a face, the religion whose essence I seize in some
hesitation or reticence, the city whose temper I recognize in the attitude of a
policeman or the style of a public building,”46 then it has made us unable to
recognize not only physiognomies, but also unwilling to take seriously their
poetic expression as bringing forth aspects of the core of what is.
If we return to The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty specifies several
aspects of the creative use of speech that give it this power of bringing us
into a more open encounter with the prereflective world. First, Merleau-Ponty,
as we have said, likens the poet to the painter, and asks what is it that they
are trying to express to the reader or viewer: “How could the painter or the
poet be anything else than his encounter with the world?”47 No matter what
the poem may describe or the painting portray, it is the encounter of the art-
ist and the world that is being expressed. It is not just what things are “in
themselves” that is expressed, but the manner and the movement integral to a
kind of meeting and coming to dialogue with the artist that is presented in the
poem or the painting. In reading a poem or viewing a painting, it is essential
284 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

to comprehending the sense of the piece that we experience that it is this

artist’s particular encounter with what is expressed in the piece. In looking at
“Eye and Mind,” we noted the unusual location to which this expression of
encounter transports us. We are not taken directly to Mont Saint-Victoire by
Cézanne canvases nor to Cézanne’s “inner psyche,” nor are we taken to the
literal location of Combray by Proust; rather, we are taken to a place that
is not a locatable point on a Cartesian grid of space. We enter the place of
encounter between the artist and what is expressed, which, as we have said,
also includes all those others who participate in the work through entering its
spell. To arrive at this place, we have already said the poetic use of language
must break the conventional use, but we need a description of how it does
this. Merleau-Ponty says, “Poetry melts ordinary language. But in the case of
works that one likes to see or read again, the disorder is always another order.
It is a new system of equivalences that demands this upheaval”48 Poetry undoes
the structure of conventional language and thereby “melts” it, whether it is in
disrupting syntax, word order, the usual references of words, by gaps, tenses,
or by strange juxtapositions.
Whereas empirical language has an order derived from customary usage,
poetry creates disorder in the expected language use. As Merleau-Ponty sug-
gests, the order in conventional language is rooted in a set of equivalences
between its structure and usage and a certain order of experiencing the world.
The shift that poetry creates in that order is also a shift in the sense of the
world’s order. The poet—like the painter as described by Merleau-Ponty in
“Eye and Mind”—expresses from his or her body “a diagram of the actual,
with all its pulp and carnal obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the
first time,” such that it expresses the inward traces of perception, “its inward
tapestries,” as “the imaginary texture of the real.”49 What is expressed then, as
Merleau-Ponty says, is “the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside,
which the duplicity of feeling [sentir] makes possible.” This reversibility or
chiasm between artist and world derives from the power of the imaginal. The
conventional order of experience reflected in conventional language is not just
melted into nothingness by poetry or the poetic use of language, but is replaced
by a chaos that has within it a new order of experiencing the gestures of the
world. Merleau-Ponty says that in creating this disorder, and then allowing a
new order of words to emerge, there is a manner of letting-be of words that
carries the author and the reader: “letting the words and the means of expres-
sion of the book be enveloped by that halo of signification they owe to their
singular arrangement.”50 In being carried to a new order, the reader discovers
the new arrangement is itself an emergent “halo” of sense emanating from
its configuration. It is a new illumination. This is particularly the case with
“works that one likes to see or read again,” since this process requires both
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 285

deep engagement from the reader or perceiver and also a commitment to a

length of time for both the old order to dissipate and for the chaos of the
new to form another order.
In Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty also describes a heightened sense of
reversibility experienced by the creative writer and the poet. He says: “A poet
has received, once and for all, the task of translating these words, this voice, this
accent whose echo is returned to him by each thing and each circumstance.”51
There is a particular intensity to the experience of reversibility for the poet
or for the painter as described later in “Eye and Mind,” such that there is a
heightened hearkening to the “echoes” or indirect voices of each thing and
situation such that the nuance or particular inflection of their style is expressed
in the words’ composition. It is this hearkening, remarks Merleau-Ponty, that
makes Dostoevski, in writing The Idiot, change certain plot details or a painter
rearrange objects on a canvas. It is not about the plausibility of the plot or
the capturing of the semblance of the reality of the scene painted, but rather
increasing the expressive value set up by the interrelations within the con-
text of the work. Merleau-Ponty concludes the discussion with this statement:
“Henceforth everything has a value, and the uses of objects count less than
their capacity for composing all together, even in their intimate texture, a valid
emblem of the world with which we are confronted.”52 The relationships among
the characters and their world, the things described in a poem, or the objects
in a still life, in the pattern of their interconnections are an emblem formed
from a constellation of relations in perceptual experience, such that they stand
in for the sense of the world being expressed in the poem, novel or painting.
The reader is brought to this chiasmatic space between the world of
objects or events and the imaginal equivalents of the texture of their context,
which expresses that first perceptual contact with the world of silence in which
the world gestures to us. It is from this space that the poet or creative writer
works: “We simply do not write in an object-space with an object-hand and
an object-body for which each new situation presents problems. We write in a
perceived space, where results with the same form are immediately analogous—
if we ignore differences of scale—just as the same melody played at different
pitches is immediately recognized. The hand with which we write is a hand-
spirit [main-esprit] which, in the formula of a movement, possesses something
like a natural concept of all the particular cases in which it may have to be
operative.”53 The creative writer may focus on certain objects before he or she
writes, but in writing them, there is a shift to that silent space where gestures
of the world are taken up into the body of the writer and flourished forth in
a way that has a structure like the world’s gesture but in a different key. The
hand that writes now is an expressive hand, a “hand-spirit,” sketching figures
in a space of the “between” that pulls readers into its rhythms and shaped
286 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

semblances drawing out the depths of the perceptual. The writer and the
reader also have this awareness when they read. They know they have entered
this in-between space, this chiasm between the imaginal and the world that
expresses the prereflective encounter with the world, since literature and poetry
thrive in this delimitation, or as Merleau-Ponty phrases it: “As for literature, it
is ordinarily more resolute in accepting that it can never aim at being total.”54
So, in this acceptance of delimitation, the poet or the novelist does not have
the pretension of writing “the book”—the book that would adequately express
reality—but rather knows he or she is opening up language to renew a vital
contact, but it is a task never fully achieved.55 An oneiric dimension is opened
in which the latencies of perception can enter this halo of poetic expression,
but it is an expressive path without end or final closure. It does not pretend
to totalize the real.
The poetic use of language or the literary use of language brings into
the foreground the way in which the sense of beings overlap in the flesh, as
Merleau-Ponty writes about in his summary of the course on the literary use
of language. Poetry “inserts itself ” into the flow of our experience such that
the way the promiscuity among the sense of things in the world is registered
with us in an intensified way. It is the “prelogical” sense of the world that is
expressed:

Just as the painter and the musician make use of objects, colors,
and sounds in order to reveal the relations between the elements
of the world in a living unity—for example, the metaphorical
correspondences in a marine landscape—so the writer takes the
everyday language and makes it deliver the prelogical participation
of landscapes, dwellings, localities, and gestures, of men among
themselves and with us. In literature, ideas, as in music and painting,
are not the ‘ideas of the intellect’; they are never quite detached
form what the author sees; they are transparent, as unchallengeable
as persons, but not definable. . . . For this reason, the writer’s work
is a work of language rather than ‘thought.’56

In the poetic use of a language, the words are not as detached from perception
as in their customary use, but have the roots and foliage still clinging to them
of sensual presence: they leave us in some “in-between” of signification and
perception, and their effect is to heighten our felt connection among beings. It
is a prelogical realm. So, to expand on the example offered by Merleau-Ponty
of a marine landscape, let us envision that each part of this landscape becomes
inseparably linked to other parts and becomes an eloquent gesture to something
beyond itself. For example, a poetic image of a Yellowhead Jawfish—which
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 287

stays with its head just peeking out from its burrow in the reef with its body
hidden, waiting for its prey to come along as it hides from enemies—might
render the fish as an emblem of other beings. The image may become insepa-
rable from how those affected by it come to experience someone they know
as having become someone who spies on others while staying remote or not
available. It, too, may become an emblem of readers’ perceptions of the wider
world on a prelogical level—that humanity itself has taken on the being of the
Yellow Jawfish in becoming remote, preying voyeurs. The meaning of images
and metaphors within the poetic use of language is indeterminate and may
take on other meanings. The expressed images overlap emblematically with the
rhythms, gestures, and styles of other beings in the expressed context.
In his lectures titled “Institution and Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty describes
how “oneiric consciousness” expresses “cores of existences, imaginings, sense
instituted by events, talking seaweed,” such that a protagonist holding the
seaweed can be the emblem for his having drowned. 57If in the marine world
as oneiric landscape opened by poetic language, seaweed can be conjured forth
as talking or held as a sign of events that have occurred, then the metaphor
can reach into another region of being and provide an emblem or image of
another “core of existence” in a structurally resonant relationship. Seaweed can
even become the voice of the depth of nature or psyche, or even, as Merleau-
Ponty suggests in his example, the whisper of death. It is this sort of power
of the poetic image drawing on the imaginal sketching forth of primal con-
nections in the prelogical perceptual world that also allows the hawthorns of
In Search of Lost Time to “whisper” prayers to the narrator in a fashion that
he experiences as a blessing more powerful than the those given by the clergy
in church. The hawthorns are prelogically the narrator’s true clergyman—the
giver of blessings. Perhaps this idea of sketching out a world in the allusive
way as the power of literary language appealed to the young Merleau-Ponty,
before he decisively cast his lot as a philosopher. The possibility has been
recently discussed that under the pseudonym Jacques Heller, the twenty-year-
old Merleau-Ponty wrote a novel entitled North: Tale of the Artic [Nord: Récit
de l’arctique] in which he attempted to sketch out the sense of existence of
the people of the Artic world.58
When Merleau-Ponty claims that language can through its poetic power
or the “occult trading of a metaphor” present the world in such a way that
we get beyond “the manifest meaning of each word,” and instead express
“the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and
exchanges,”59 he is bringing together the idea of metaphor and that of the
chiasm.60 If we understand the structure of metaphor, its fittingness to express
the sense of the flesh of the world is evident. Paul Ricoeur explains in his
essay “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling” that
288 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the metaphor is a use of language that has the structure and capacity to
achieve a “predicative assimilation.” Ricoeur means by this term that within the
metaphor there is a bringing-together of descriptions of two aspects of things,
which are from differing regions of being, yet are brought into a relationship
of similarity without doing away with the distance between them. This means
that a metaphor is that power to set up a tension between incongruence and
congruence—remoteness and proximity—that breaks conventional language
use and opens new meaning.61 Metaphor is a language that establishes the
tension-filled interrelation between two beings in the world that are both same
and different. The metaphor holds them simultaneously in juxtaposition and
overlap—infusing energy and mystery in their sameness yet difference. The
two beings brought together gain a deepened sense through each other. This
idea of the metaphor is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s sense of depth in
general as the bringing together of incompossibles.
Depth, as we have discussed previously, is key to Merleau-Ponty’s articu-
lation of the notion of flesh and key to his indirect ontology. Barbaras, too,
comments on the connection of the idea of the flesh to the working of meta-
phor: “Every being could be accentuated as an emblem of Being, and metaphor
reveals the well the co-belonging of every thing at the world.”62 This bringing-
together of incompossible things as dimensions or as emblems of Being is what
Merleau-Ponty would recognize as the opening-up of depth of the flesh of the
world. Poetry expresses the envelopment or promiscuity of things as being
what they are through their relationship to other beings—this is the work of
metaphor. Barbaras recognizes that the structure of metaphor fits both the idea
of the chiasm and of depth in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology: “And it is because
metaphor establishes identity in the heart of difference that in metaphor the
chiasm of the things and the world shows through. Every spoken word is still
perception, enrooted in a mute world.”63 Since metaphor brings two differing
beings into a relation where the sense of each is altered by this relation to the
other, a depth beyond the usual round of language is opened to its source in
the silent gesturing of the world. This opening onto the primordial contact with
things as the latent depth of perception is essential to the ongoing illumination
and manifestation of the being of the world. This means for Merleau-Ponty, as
Barbaras recognizes, that “there is a truth of metaphor over instituted language.”
There is a truth of metaphor because it opens a dimension of sense in which
reversibility with the world is heightened and physiognomic imagining is able
to weave new connections of sense that had been latent. As Merleau-Ponty
affirms in the institution and passivity lectures, following out the threads of a
new philosophy on the basis of perception leads to another sense of truth than
the traditional sense: “Perception as revelation of a new sense of truth, not as
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 289

adequation, which suppresses the plurality of subjects and of perspectives, but

as the movement toward integration, openness.”64 Once we understand this
reconsideration of truth, poetry and the physiognomic imaginal are vital to
truth as the opening of dimensions of sense.
Jerry Gill suggests that the same image of a glove that Merleau-Ponty
uses as an image for reversibility in The Visible and the Invisible—“Reversibility:
the finger of the glove that is turned inside out”65—is an image that would
equally convey the sense of metaphor: “this image of the chiasm is especially
appropriate to the metaphoric mode, since they both embody notions of duality
within unity and reversibility. A metaphoric image means two things at once,
depending on which way it is being read. Like the finger of a glove, metaphor
can be read from the ‘outside’ literally, or from the ‘inside.’ ”66 Like the chiasm,
the two beings brought together in the metaphor are both distinct and now
have a new sense inseparable from the other, and like the glove’s finger one
can be the inside of the other, and yet is made of the same fabric. Equally,
the outside of the finger is distinct from the inside and yet is the same piece
of fabric, but could always be turned inside out to reveal the other side. So,
if we apply Merleau-Ponty’s explanation to his own metaphor of “hand-spirit”
that we just cited, the hand can be seen as having qualities formerly attributed
only to spirit, such as an illuminating power or transcendence, and the spirit
can be turned inside out to reveal this embodied lining. Yet, the spirit can be
seen as having qualities like a hand that gracefully moves in a certain space
in a gesture or has material solidity, and by the logic of the metaphor, the
spirit is inseparably of that fabric, too, and can be turned inside out to show
it. Metaphors enact the reversibility of the chiasmatic dimensions of the flesh
by expressing them as inseparable in their difference.
Renaud Barbaras entitles one section of The Being of the Phenomenon,
“The Metaphoric of the World,” and asserts how central to Merleau-Ponty’s
thought is metaphor: “Merleau-Ponty’s reflection is animated in its entirety
by the question of metaphor.”67 Barbaras takes the original and insightful tack
of considering how the world must be structured such that metaphor is pos-
sible. His answer is that the world must be the way that Merleau-Ponty has
described it in terms of the ontology of flesh and the importance of depth
to this ontology. One way to understand Merleau-Ponty’s description of the
world is to see how it unfolds from the nature of the metaphoric dimension
of the being of the world: “Ultimately it is a question of considering the
world on the basis of the possibility of metaphor and, therefore, of grasping in
metaphor the attestation of a signifying depth that its classical descriptions do
not restore. It is a question of conceiving of ontology as the making explicit
of a transcendental of the metaphor.”68 The poetic use of language and the
290 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

nature of metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s sense is inseparable from his idea of

depth as the going-together of incompossibles that opens up dimensions of
sense and being; and, also of the idea of the chiasmatic nature of the flesh in
which dimensions that could be taken as opposed are instead strands wind-
ing about one another in such a way that they retain their distinction, but
only as inseparable from each other and transformed by each other. Barbaras
points to how metaphor combined with the ideas of flesh and depth alters
the nature of the being of the individual in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology: “The
possibility of metaphor attests to the ontological mode that is irreducible to
that of a determinate individual, the subject of predicates; it is based on the
dimension, proceeds from the axis around which thing are constituted as vari-
ants.” The idea of metaphor that Merleau-Ponty employs is resonant with a
world in which each being is a dimension, like the red of the dress in the
“Chiasm” chapter that we discussed, which is implicitly and prereflectively
enmeshed with the robes of bishops, the Russian revolution, the flames of hell,
and so on. Each sensible being is inseparable from a matrix of relations that
are internal to each being’s identity. The individual is a dimension stretching
out in space-time in such a way as to gather together a multiplicity of beings
that are internally related to each other through the sense of their perceptible
qualities that become what they are only through this nexus of interrelation
at the heart of embodied perception. This is far different from the traditional
idea of metaphor that assumes one meaning of an object is substituted or
transferred onto another to create a comparison between the two, but this is
merely a “subjective” consideration brought to bear upon two discrete entities.
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the metaphor is as the expression of the dimensionality
of all beings that is a manifestation of their interconnectedness.
Poetic metaphor is central to the ontology of the flesh for it expresses
the promiscuity of being that comprises the flesh. If one is to express the
ongoing encroachment of each being with each other, a use of language that
draws on the physiognomic imaginal to bring forth this nexus in the depths
of each being is essential. A language that presents an atomistic view of being
may have practical uses, but it is not the language of a chiasmatic or fleshly
ontology. Barbaras eloquently describes this connection of metaphor and ontol-
ogy: “Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed, things
proceed from a general ‘metaphoricity,’ from a universal participation that they
concretize or crystallize in order to be constituted into things. The dimension
of sense, at once figurative and figured, is the truth of sense itself.”69 This meta-
phoricity of beings is their being of the flesh, such that they are manifest only
within this encroachment of one upon the other, as a chiasmatic relation of
varied—some allied and some opposing—senses. This means that the dualistic
 Toward a Poetic Ontology 291

and objectified philosophies of the tradition phrased in the usual categorical

philosophical terms are ways to use language that cover the truth of the way
being comes forward.
The metaphor expresses the structure of the ways things are a part of the
flesh as bringing them forth still trailing their roots in the silent interplay of
their originary gesturing. It is not as though language has a meaning that poetic
speech reinterprets in an “artistic” manner for achieving beauty or entertain-
ment, but rather poetic metaphor allows the full being of the world to become
manifest and unlocks the manifesting power of language. Emmanuel de Saint
Aubert describes Merleau-Ponty’s idea and use of metaphor as flesh as differ-
ent from the traditional idea of metaphor as being a linguistic expression that
brings to one’s attention an analogous state that can be seen to exist between
two beings. The traditional sense makes metaphor an aesthetically pleasing
flourish or an intellectually interesting comparison. Rather, Saint Aubert sees
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of metaphor as essential to the manifestation of the flesh:
“Therefore, in the world of the flesh, metaphors are less ‘metaphors’ than
‘metamorphoses,’ the transfer is less transposition than ‘transubstantiation.’ ”70
In other words, metaphor brings together two beings or aspects together in
such a way that both become altered as becoming more of what they are in
the wider nexus of the encroachments of the flesh. Their being within the
interrelated world becomes manifest.
For Merleau-Ponty, poetic metaphor brings forth the latent sense of per-
ception in a way that is at the heart of institution that transforms and transub-
stantiates what had been before this expression. Rather than a mere comparison
of established senses, it is the movement of becoming.71 Barbaras also states
that the expression of metaphor does not just manipulate and juxtapose given
meanings, but is a deeper manifestation of the being of the world: “Thus
the metaphorical expression should be conceived not as a relation between
terms whose meaning is given elsewhere, but as the attestation of an ultimate
reality.”72 With this articulation of the flesh, we can see why Merleau-Ponty
claimed a decade earlier in his radio lecture that metaphor and poetry can be
explained as forcing us to enter into things and is closest to remaining silent,
and yet revitalizes language. To express the primordial perceptual contact with
the world is to open access to the silent gesturing of the world and to “join
the wandering hands of nature” in a reciprocal gesture, to paraphrase a quote
from Gasquet that Merleau-Ponty cites in “Cézanne’s Doubt.” The sense of the
silent gestures that are the other side of language proliferates in physiognomic
imagining when poetic language opens us to the face of the world where myriad
meanings crisscross and ensnare us into their spell. Barbaras sums up this sense
in saying, “The world is the place of metaphor or the metaphor as place.”73
292 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

In a way that liberates us from the rule of operational thought and instituted
language—the specter of Merleau-Ponty’s warning of an “endless nightmare”
with which we began this book—poetic language—metaphor—can allow us
to inhabit the world in a face-to-face intimacy open to greater depths of sense
in our existence by manifesting the enmeshment of beings in the world in a
larger, denser effulgent space of interconnection.74
 VII
A Poetics of Philosophy

There really would be indirect language. The one which would not try to
objectify the Gesagte [“the said”], but which gives it through gestures =
poetry—And we could generalize: history, life, Passions.
But then ψ [“philosophy”] replaced by art, poetry, life? No, because they
only speak silently. ψ [“Philosophy”] as the thematization of this speak-
ing silence.
—Course notes, 1960 course on Husserl’s
“Origins of Geometry,” Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (49)

The insight that poetic language is at the heart of the expressiveness of all
language use has implications for the practice of philosophy that Merleau-Ponty
increasingly draws out in his work. Merleau-Ponty felt that poetic language
is vital to the thinking and writing of philosophy—a key point of his work
that has been overlooked, theoretically and practically, by many of those who
claim to understand his philosophy. There is a reason why Merleau-Ponty’s
key passages throughout his work contain startling and powerful metaphors
and poetic phrases. In the “Interrogation and Intuition” chapter of The Visible
and the Invisible, as we discussed in the beginning of this book, not only does
Merleau-Ponty call philosophy’s seeking to grasp the world through language
in an attempt to coincide with its essence “a power for error,” but also calls
for the philosopher give up the false idea of coinciding with things through
language, as well as asserting that philosophy must stop opposing language
to silence. The philosopher has to start over again [recommencer] in the use
of language, so that it would be a different sort of hearkening to the things
themselves in accord with the way things speak—which, as we have seen, is
silently. This does not mean that philosophy itself is reduced to silence, but
rather that it would start again with another relation to language. It would
be the realization that the opposition between language and silence is false,
that instead there is a language use that reaches into the underside of silence

293
294 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

that lines language. This new philosophical language “would be a language

of which he is not the organizer, words which he would not assemble, that
would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their mean-
ing.”1 This is the point at which Merleau-Ponty states this allusive language
that takes silence into account comes about through the power of metaphor,
“where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of
each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their
transfers and exchanges.”2 The metaphor, the poetic use of language, is the
bringing to expression of these lateral relations, which are resonances, nuances,
reverberations, felt significances, imaginal deepenings, and, above all, the way
differences that might not logically entail each other and may even be incom-
possible, nevertheless come together to form a depth of meaning while still
keeping the tension between them, which are the two poles metaphors keep
resounding within language.
Jessica Wiskus, commenting on this passage in Merleau-Ponty, says of
philosophy’s turn to this use of language: “There would need to be an opera-
tive language—a language capable of setting itself up within the gap between
sign and signification—a language that would turn back toward this non-
coincidence for the movement of its meaning. . . . This operative language, it
would seem, would be the language of poetry, the abode of metaphor. Poetry
and metaphoric language work precisely according to the principle of noncoin-
cidence; they aim at ‘making silence speak, at saying what is not-said, at explor-
ing language beyond its usual destination.”3 The poetic use of language within
philosophy would make it enter into the gaps between the well-used language
and the silent perceptual encounter with the world, as well as break into the
round of signifiers’ self-reference and enclosure,—tracing out the movements
running among all the beings of the nexus of sense of the flesh. It would take
language beyond itself without abandoning it. Merleau-Ponty concludes that
this new approach to language would leave us face-to-face with the prereflec-
tive silence of perception and give the life of things an opportunity to infuse
language with a life that was only nascent. This contrasts with the attitude
that language would distort or even destroy this silent source, which would be
the case if language and silence were really opposed instead of chiasmatically
related. Merleau-Ponty says there is a way of using language that goes beyond
“all its references” to “those behind it, which connect it to the mute things it
interpellates.” If the visible of perception has an invisible lining whose source
is ever renewed in the silent exchange of the gestures of the perceiver and the
world, then our expression in language must have a way to keep open the
access to this sense or the expressiveness of language would die. The way to
keep this access alive is through poetic language.
 A Poetics of Philosophy 295

Merleau-Ponty says the philosopher knows that language does not mask
Being, but must take the step to allow into language that which he or she
experiences as “bubbling up at the bottom of his [or her] mute experience.”
This kind of letting-be of the trajectory of the mute perceptual exchange with
the world toward language is to allow the poetic to become manifest, which
can occur only when a person relinquishes a certain posture of mastery over
language and thought. This poetic use of language that is a language “born
at this depth” and keeps its connection to its roots and foliage, Merleau-
Ponty says, “has no need to be translated into significations and thoughts, that
language-thing which counts as an arm, as action, as offense and as seduction
because it brings to the surface all the deep-rooted relations of the lived experi-
ence wherein it takes form, and which is the language of life but also that of
literature and of poetry—then this logos is an absolutely universal theme, it is
the theme of philosophy.”4 Our embodied movements toward the world are not
matters of reflection and will, but are the prereflective, responsive choreography
between the beckonings of the things within the field of relations in which
we are immersed through perception and our body’s enactment of the way
“the things have us” (“and that it is not we who have the things”),5 so that if
this poetic language “counts as an arm,” then it moves unselfconsciously and
expressively in response to the world’s beckoning to it. This is what Merleau-
Ponty means when he says, “That language has us and that it is not us who
have language.”6 Poetic language “offends” as it opposes the normal language
use, and “seduces” as it takes us into the spell of the world of silent gestural
exchange, and is an “action” because it transforms both the language user and
the world. That which is made manifest by this level of poetic expression of
language is “the theme of philosophy” since this is the way to express that
originary or primal contact with the perceptual world that founds ontology. If
philosophy would become this kind of operative language, which is the life “of
literature and of poetry,” then it would become a language “open to the things,
called forth by the voices of silence,” and continuing “an effort of articulation
which is the Being of every being.”7 It is only by opening itself to the poetic
use of language that philosophy can give rise to the indirect ontology of the
flesh and come to terms with the fate “that it is being that speaks within us
and not we who speak of being.”8 The setting forth of Being happens in the
opening to the depths of the world experienced in dialogue with the voices
of silence to which poetry gives expression.
The problem with arriving at this conclusion after following Merleau-
Ponty’s analyses of the primordial world of face-to-face contact in gesture,
silent voices, the transcendence of depth, the physiognomic imaginal, and
the poetic source of language’s expressiveness is that the shift to recognizing
296 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the centrality of this path would call for a startling change in the Western
philosophical tradition of its lexicon and methodology. To embrace the idea
that to let language be, to allow oneself to give up the control of the well-worn
assemblage of traditional concepts and terms in order to take up a relationship
toward the world more like the poet (or the painter) and to enter silence in
order to await metaphors arising from the interplay of “lateral relations,” and
giving evocative descriptions that speak to all the levels of a vertical understand-
ing of the world, would be a radical shift in philosophical practice. In other
words, there would be a move from what Merleau-Ponty called philosophies
that foreclose the openness of language resulting in a text that reads “as if it
spoke only of itself,”9 as he saw occurring in many philosophies, to instead
finding ways within philosophy to introduce a more poetic or literary use of
language in order to open a more originary encounter with the world. It is
ironic that one might go back to Merleau-Ponty’s beginnings as a philosopher
and find a passage in an unpublished text that he sent to Martial Gueroult
as part of his candidacy to the Collège de France, projecting his own path in
philosophy, that describes quite aptly this destination for philosophy. In this
text, he says, “Communication in literature is not the simple appeal on the
part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori of the mind;
rather, communication arouses these meanings in the mind through enticement
and a kind of oblique action. The writer’s thought does not control language
from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself,
inventing ways of expression, and diversifying itself according to its own mean-
ing.”10 He explains that only by this oblique reference in opposition to the
standard references of accepted terms does a reader get moved little by little
to another sense of the world. The way that the words arise spontaneously
from this more primary contact with the world is the way language opens to
the world by becoming self-generating and heading in a path that remains
unthought until then. Merleau-Ponty states, “Perhaps poetry is the only part
of literature where this autonomy is ostentatiously displayed.”11 He adds that
prose can only become strongly expressive by following this poetic manner in
reforming language and founding a new syntax. Merleau-Ponty goes so far as
to claim that any writer who can’t take some of these poetic risks is a writer
who has outlived his or her time as a writer.
Making poetic language central to philosophy would shift the traditional
philosophical emphasis on grasping the essential structures of the world through
concepts. Merleau-Ponty recognizes this outcome, and yet unabashedly calls
for an end of the use of language in philosophy to formulate laws supposedly
ruling what is. The new language of philosophy will no longer be “the search
for the essence.”12 He warns that this path is not a lapse into the equal and
opposite mistake of believing that the truth of philosophy lies in some speech-
 A Poetics of Philosophy 297

less union with the reality of the world. The philosopher must recognize that
“if Being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of Being.”13 The fact that the
invisible is not immediately accessible is the lining of the visible, and is allusive
marks its being. This means that our language use must utilize the recognition
that our relationship to being is founded on a primal perceptual contact that
has a trajectory toward expression since we have become it, but only by the
indirect return to a level where “there is overlapping or encroachment, so that
we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into things.”14 Like the
arm with which we gesture to someone, the trajectory toward expression of the
invisible lining of the visible has in some sense become part of our embody-
ing being; and, we must allow ourselves to become resonant with its depths,
rather than remain at the distance of the reflective use of concept language, in
order to bring it to expression. This means there is a constant moving further
into depths that are becoming, whereas in philosophy practiced by means of
“concepts,” we reiterate what we already know about things in a general way.
The need for philosophy to move outside of concepts is remarked by Mauro
Carbone in The Thinking of the Sensible as at the heart of the shift in Merleau-
Ponty’s idea of philosophy’s moving away from the tradition: “From the calling
into question of the frontal positioning of subject versus object, there can only
follow the calling into question of the grasping of the object by the subject.
The direct result is therefore the calling into question of the modern notion
of ‘concept,’ the Germanic root of which expresses precisely the intention of
grasping.”15 The concept grasps the things of the world, comes for them from
a distance and imposes its force on them to fix them within set borders, puts
them within a class of beings, and looks beyond their particular context. Instead
of allowing the continual encroachment of the flesh of beings upon each other
in transformative ways, there is the attempt to clarify by isolating the sense of
beings from one another.
The concept wrests its object into a formula of what is most general about
that being or happening, instead of bringing to awareness its lateral relationships,
the particular laceworks in which it is enmeshed or the ways that things are
interwoven not only with each other but also with perceivers within a particular
moment in a particular situation. Yet, as we have seen, it is the expression of
the physiognomies of beings—the expression of the way their interrelation with
other beings has a certain unfolding sense that can be augmented and deepened
by entering into the oneiric dimension of the world—that reveals an ongo-
ing originary sense. To articulate how the varied facets of a being that appear
emotionally, intuitively, imaginally, memorially, and so on within the thickness
of perception expresses the distinctive sense of beings—whether of Paris versus
New York, or of that friend versus this friend, or what is most compelling about
fighting for France against the Germans and protecting this farmer’s family—
298 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

and not what is most universal and rationally formulaic about them. It is these
nuances that deepen and enliven the sense of the beings of the world and their
lines of force that are to be traced out by a language that resonates to surfaces,
qualities, interrelations, and dynamic interplays of transformation. Poetic lan-
guage not only traces these lines of force, but also midwifes their coming into
greater being. The recognition that there is the invisible of the visible that gives
us “sensible ideas”—that is to say, insights apprehended within perception in the
imaginal, affective, memorial, intuitive, and other indeterminate but symboli-
cally pregnant and latent ways—has shifted Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy away
from the traditional central reliance on the concept.
In a working note of February 1960, Merleau-Ponty connects the idea
of the depth of the flesh with the surpassing of the philosophy of the concept.
He states that “every concept is at first a horizontalized generality, a generality
of style.”16 In the primal perceptual contact with the world, every being is a
nexus of interrelated senses, such that its deeper sense is a dimension, offering
another sort of generality than that of a concept. This is the perceptual source
of concepts, yet it gets lost in “high altitude” thought. The nexus of perceptual
qualities embodies a connectedness with a different logic, one that is infused
with the imaginal, affective and sensual senses of things. If we understand the
simplest perceptual given, such as the red of the dress, not as being an indi-
visible chunk of being, as Merleau-Ponty says in the passage in the “Chiasm”
chapter to which we have repeatedly alluded, but rather as a dimension of
overlapping senses that includes the robes of bishops, the clay terrains in Aix
or in Madagascar, the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917, the eternal femi-
nine, the garments of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like
hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées,
and so on, then the flesh gathers sense in a way that constellates the nuances
of varied ways of apprehension and retains the particularity within a context.
There is not necessarily a logical subsumption of these beings, but there is a
shared lived sense within a particular context. This leads Merleau-Ponty to say
right after this that “There is no longer the problem of the concept, generality,
the idea, when one has understood that the sensible is the invisible.”17 This
dimensionality is what the metaphor expresses. Poetic language enjambs the
varied senses of beings and thereby expresses their way of being intertwined
with each other in the perceptual apprehension of their sensible manifestation.
The concept bleaches away these “roots and foliage” of the way the beings of
the world are enmeshed in the “movements by vibration” of being co-emergent.
If philosophy would turn from its reliance on a parade of concepts arrayed in
a system to instead dare to write and speak in poetic language, it could open
itself to the depths of the sensible and the invisible of the visible.
 A Poetics of Philosophy 299

Even though Merleau-Ponty feared that philosophy could easily become

“the indefinite proliferation of writings,” degenerating into a perpetual con-
ceptual writing about other concepts in order to avoid returning to the things
themselves, as we discussed at the beginning of this work, he also felt “there is
a remedy . . . to proceed over and beyond by facing the things again.”18 This
is a “facing” that enters into the dimensionality of beings and uses language
from within this encounter, or as Merleau-Ponty says of this other path for
philosophy, it is “an operative language,” a “language that can be known only
from within, through its exercise” and that is how it becomes open to things
and called forth by the voices of silence.19 It is not using language as an attempt
to transcend the things to a higher ideality that would abstract some isolated
“property.” It is to use language to express that moment to which we have
pointed in the world of silence, where the gestured reversibility of the world
brings forth a lacework of sense where, for example, from “the side of ” the
sleet are expressed the many “voices” of the surround—whether of the sky’s
swirling color and threatening affective sense, or the wind’s persistent force
and movement against us, or the cold slipperiness of the earth as a deceptive
ground at that moment—as well as all the bodily bracings and efforts, feelings
of resistance, and so on, coming from our own “side” of the overall gestalt.
Poetry and the poetic use of language in literature move us from a sense ema-
nating from a central surveying vantage seemingly “outside” the world toward
a sense resulting from a returning to ourselves from a dispersion within the
world. In a later working note of November 1960, Merleau-Ponty articulates
how the reversibility of the chiasm changes the idea of expression and under-
standing within philosophy by explaining that “the idea of the chiasm, that
is, every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the
hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold
of.”20 There is what Merleau-Ponty calls a “pre-language” that is “inscribed”
in the world as its ability to speak silently, to gesture forth sense, and this
becomes “inscribed” within the perceiver as the “internal equivalent” of what is
perceived or as the “imaginary texture of the real.” This dynamic of perceptual
reversibility should give a redirection to philosophy:

Starting from there, elaborate an idea of philosophy: it cannot be

a total and active grasp, intellectual possession, since what there
is to be grasped is a dispossession—It is not above life, overhang-
ing. It is beneath. It is the simultaneous experience of the holding
and the held in all orders. What it says, its significations are not
absolutely invisible; it shows by words. Like all literature. It does
not install itself in the reverse of the visible: it is on both sides.21
300 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

Philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty conceived of it in this working note, in order

to articulate the flesh of the world, needs to use a language “like all litera-
ture.” This metaphoric language traces out the contours of the lacework of
the flesh—that is to say, the nexus of interrelations within the dimensional-
ity of beings we have described—and opens to the depth of the invisible of
the visible. This sort of language use is an active passivity and an opening to
the physiognomic imaginal to allow the voices of silence to find a way into
our writing to have their presence manifest. This would be a dispossession or
decentering from the anthropocentric vision of the philosophical and Western
cultural tradition that asserts that humans express our unique ability to grasp
the world in language as its source of meaning.
The language that achieves this change in our stance to see transcendence
as coming from within the world and its depths is the literary or poetic use
of language: “to rediscover man finally face-to-face with the world itself, to
rediscover the pre-intentional present—is to rediscover that vision of origins,
which sees itself within us, as poetry rediscovers what articulates itself within
us, unbeknownst to us.”22 This is the moment of the primal contact with the
world in perception that we find again as accessible in the poetic breaking open
of language to uncover its “other side,” or silent lining. For Merleau-Ponty, the
poetic moves “below” the positional intentionality of the reflective and concep-
tual use of language to a co-knowing and co-articulating with the world. As he
describes literary language in his summary of his course titled “The Problem
of Speech,” he says of the creative writer: “his task is to produce a system of
signs whose internal articulation reproduces the contours of experience; the
reliefs and sweeping lines of these contours in turn generate a syntax in depth,
a mode of composition and recital which breaks the mold of the world and
the everyday language and refashions it.”23 This particular capacity of language
in its poetic use to go beneath the usual forms of syntax, rhythm, texture, and
lines of movement is very close, says Merleau-Ponty, to the expressiveness found
in both music and painting and allows access to the latencies of perception to
allow them to continue to generate more sense. Insofar as we follow Merleau-
Ponty’s attempt to articulate an ontology of the flesh, only by turning to the
poetic can these latencies find expression. Certainly, philosophy cannot dispense
with concepts, yet neither can it fail to venture into the poetic use of language
if it hopes to further articulate Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology of the flesh.
Merleau-Ponty adds, “Thus literary speech expresses the world insofar as it has
been given to someone to live it and at the same time it absorbs the world.”24
The poetic literary language arises from a lived relationship to the world and
in returning to the silent dialogue with the world brings forth the world’s
gesturing of sense that is vital to an ontology of the flesh and to expressing
the invisible of the visible as the “other side” of the perceived.
 A Poetics of Philosophy 301

However, Merleau-Ponty did not only state theoretically the need for an
indirect ontology of flesh to avail itself of a central use of poetic language—it
was in fact a continuous writing practice of Merleau-Ponty. The presence of
the poetic on almost every page of Merleau-Ponty’s writing has not been fully
appreciated by many of his readers and commentators. As Jerry Gill says in
Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, “At the same time, and on the other hand, those
who are familiar with the interpretive literature dealing with Merleau-Ponty
may also be aware that no serious or extended treatment of the metaphorical
character of his mode of thought is available. Most interpreters have been con-
tent to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s message quite apart from his medium, as if his
philosophy stands on its own, entirely separate from the images he employed
in expressing it.”25 More than two decades have passed since Gill made that
statement, and it is still largely true that the poetic dimension of Merleau-
Ponty’s writing goes unappreciated and unexplored. One wonders if Gill is not
right in his explanation of why his metaphors are not seen as essential to the
ideas of his ontology, when Gill says of those who dismiss the poetic power of
Merleau-Ponty’s words: “Such an approach reveals a subtle but quite traditional
view that the role of the metaphorical mode is ‘decorative’ or ‘substitutional’—a
view that Merleau-Ponty clearly rejects, since it flatly contradicts his central
notion of the axial character of embodiment.” If one believes that poetic lan-
guage is merely decorative or merely a flourish that replaces a dull word with
a more exciting or colorful one, then it is not essential to an ontology of the
flesh. However, as Merleau-Ponty understands it, the poetic brings together
in co-presence the intertwining of beings of the world and their enjambment
in time and space as they arise in the primal contact of perception, breaking
open language in order to re-establish this contact. Gill expresses the way that
flesh and its philosophical expression poetically are inseparable: “Philosophy,
for Merleau-Ponty, seeks to ‘show rather than say’ the ‘hollows’ and ‘joints’
of Being. Metaphorical thought and speech are seen as indispensable to this
process because only in them can the necessary chiasm or reversal of meaning
be encountered.”26 The power of the metaphor is the logic of encroachment or
chiasm—that the two or the many are both incompossible and inseparable—as
is the notion of depth that opens onto the flesh of the world.
Merleau-Ponty might be the most poetically expressive philosopher of the
Western tradition. Nietzsche is the name that might first come to mind when
thinking of a philosopher who turns to the poetic to express philosophical
insight. Yet, despite the fact that Nietzsche often wrote in verses and aphoris-
tic fragments that resemble poetry in their apparent form as they appear to
the reader on the page, his use of metaphor, which is the craft and heart of
poetic writing, is often missing or heavy-handed.27 His occasional metaphors
are not as finely crafted as Merleau-Ponty’s subtle and complex metaphors and
302 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

images. His language is often allegorical, which relies more on an analogizing

relationship among or between its figures. Certainly, to claim as Merleau-
Ponty does in the epigraph to the previous section that the “justification of
poetry rehabilitates the whole of language” is a more radical claim than Hegel’s
claim that poetry is the highest art form and approximates the least distance
between art and the revelation of the Absolute Idea. For Hegel, the recourse
to poetry was still a concession to the lack of full development of the human
mind on its way to a greater realization. Merleau-Ponty’s profession of belief
in the power of poetry as metaphoric language is certainly a repudiation of a
long tradition that has dominated Western philosophy since Plato’s expulsion
of the poets from the polis in book ten of The Republic. Actually, it is more of
a “standing on its head” of Plato’s dire warning that poetry has the power to
corrupt thinking and language in the search for truth, since for Merleau-Ponty
poetry seems at the heart of expressing the truth of Being.
However, for Merleau-Ponty, this truth is not “discovered” as some preex-
isting form or state of affairs, but is a creative act. In a working note probably
written in June 1959, Merleau-Ponty says, “Philosophy, precisely as ‘Being
speaking within us,’ expression of the mute experience by itself, is creation.
A creation that is at the same time a reintegration of Being.”28 This, too, is a
theme in Merleau-Ponty’s work that has been developing since the Preface to
the Phenomenology of Perception, in which he stated, “The phenomenological
world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but
the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing
truth, but like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”29 If phenomenology
as Merleau-Ponty initially understood it, and then later as he developed the
ontology of the flesh, is to be the bringing forth of the expression of the
silent, primal encounter with the perceptual world, it is a dynamic dialogue,
and there is no “going back” to an origin, but only a bringing forth into
expression and ultimately into manifestation of what was inexhaustibly present,
but only latent in the initial encounter. This brings philosophy and the arts
together in a kindred process of ongoing expression. Like the artist, who lays
bare, as Richard Kearney phrases it, “the generating axis of its becoming,” or
as “the imaginative painter opens himself to the invisible dialectic of Being,”30
so the philosopher requires the poetic use of language to bring forth Being
in an ongoing effort.
This coming together of the expressiveness of art and philosophy is pre-
cisely what Merleau-Ponty describes in the continuation of this working note
of June 1959, written less than two years before his death: “This considerably
deepens Souriau’s views on philosophy as supreme art: for art and philosophy
together are precisely not arbitrary fabrications in the universe of the ‘spiri-
tual’ (of ‘culture’), but contact with Being precisely as creation. Being is what
 A Poetics of Philosophy 303

requires creation of us for us to experience it. Make an analysis of literature

in this sense: as inscription of Being.”31 The literary use of language is the
inscription of Being within the flesh of the world through its allusive expres-
sion of the nexus of interrelations that follow out the tracings of the world’s
“gestures” or “behaviors.” In order to make contact with Being and open our
experience to allow its expression to come forth, language must trace out the
latent, interconnected depth of the perceived in a way like the literary use of
language. If Merleau-Ponty had lived longer, as this note sketches and as do
several others, he intended to explore further the power of the metaphoric, the
poetic, the literary, as affording another sort of expression in language vital to
philosophy’s ongoing act of expression the world’s coming to sense. Philosophy,
for Merleau-Ponty, needs the disruptive, but revelatory, impact on culture as
attributed to the poet in a statement such as, “It is not surprising that this
unblinkered vision and unbiased action should throw words out of focus and
regroup them and the objects of the world.”32 If we are to avoid the endless
nightmare of continually using well-worn empirical language exclusively for
problem solving, philosophy will have to open postmodern culture to the indi-
rect voices of silence by throwing “out of focus” our self-enclosed view of the
world and ourselves in an increasingly poetic use of language. Merleau-Ponty
followed this trajectory in his own philosophical writing, as he moved toward
his unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, and his last published
essay, “Eye and Mind,” in order to “regroup” language and “the objects of
the world.” Both works are profoundly poetic in their twisting of customary
language into new shapes and images, and for the central use of metaphor. It
may behoove the philosopher to be able to use poetic language as the means
of expression of indirect ontology, or in other words, as Merleau-Ponty says,
to make contact with the poetic and literary life of language as access to the
“Being of every being.”
In his notes for his 1959–60 course at the Collège de France, “Husserl at
the Limits of Phenomenology,” Merleau-Ponty again is wondering how one can
have access and express “this prespeculative Being,” and admits that it might
seem to many that at this point philosophy would be reduced to silence or
would have to attempt to coincide with an ineffable source of meaning. How-
ever, Merleau-Ponty denies this is the plight of an ontology with this goal. He
writes, “There really would be indirect language. The one which would not
try to objectify the Gesagte [“the said”], but which gives it through gestures =
poetry—and we could generalize: history, life, Passions.”33 Poetry is not like the
language uses that objectify that which they speak about, but rather is open to
a gestural interchange with the world. It is the kind of language that would
be needed to reawaken history from being represented in historical writing as
an objectified series of “facts” placed on a linear timeline. Only the poetic use
304 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

of language breaks out of the “spectator model” that tries to present what is
spoken about without its inextricable entanglement with perceivers, and also
with the community of creatures who encounter these beings and the com-
munity of speakers. It is the dimension of linguistic experience that throws
its writers and readers outside of language to recapture the felt experience
of life and its passions expressed in the highlighted tonality of the rhythm,
melody, dissonances, sounds, and its other distinctive features. A use of poetic
language in the study of philosophies would transform it from being a dead-
ening recitation of thinkers’ ideas as a catalogue of facts to become a series
of authentic encounters. This explains Merleau-Ponty’s assertion in the same
series of notes: “History of ф [‘philosophy’] as ‘the poeticizing of the history
of ψ [‘philosophy’].”34 The phrase is Husserl’s from an appendix to The Crisis
of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, but expresses well that,
for Merleau-Ponty, the latent sense, or what he calls here “the unthought,” can
only become manifest through writing in a poetic language that opens speech
to the primordial level of contact. However, this does not mean that philosophy
can step aside and let poetry reveal the world in its place, as Merleau-Ponty
answers to the question he knows might be posed in reaction to the assertion
that the poetic gives access to history, life, passions and even Being: “But then ψ
[‘philosophy’] replaced by art, poetry, life? No, because they speak only silently.
ф [‘Philosophy’] as the thematization of this speaking silence.” Philosophy has
need of poetic language to open access to the Being of beings and to open up
the primal perceptual contact with the world, but it needs also to articulate
the sense of these encounters in the language of ideas.
Notice, however, how this emphasis on poetic language as revealing of
Being differs from the ongoing critique of the rational and logical that has
been prominent within Western culture as the critique offered by the Romantic
tradition. The Romantic stance gives priority to poetry’s revelatory power as
another sort of transcendence of the spirit surpassing the embodied and mate-
rial. Often in the Romantic tradition, this transcendence occurs through the
vehicle of the body or emotion, but it goes beyond them to a realm of the
absolute. This kind of romantic longing for release from the mundane envisions
the poetic use of language in a manner akin to the analysis first articulated by
Plato in “The Ion,” where he states “a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy,”
who is pulled out of normal consciousness to some higher, semi-divine level of
revelation. This idea of poetry as irrational grasp of the highest truths through
being inspired from beyond the normal horizon of existence—a Romantic
idea of transcendence—and of coincidence with an Other, whether of a spirit
behind nature or a holy of a divine plane has persisted since Plato’s vision.
Some may even take Heidegger’s idea of the poet in this fashion when he states
in “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry” that the poet is caught between men
 A Poetics of Philosophy 305

and the gods.35 By contrast, poetry’s power of revelation for Merleau-Ponty

results from allowing us to enter into the earthly things and beings around us
on this embodied plane.
Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the poetic points us toward another sense of
materiality as oneiric and “holding” onto sensual meaning for us to articulate
and does not see materiality as a snare that prevents transcendence and revela-
tion, as both the rationalist and the Romantic or irrationalist philosophies have.
Poetry is not at odds with ordered reflective language, but rather Merleau-Ponty
sees it as its basis. Poetic revelation occurs not in going beyond the senses,
embodiment, and the Earth, but rather happens by entering into the Earth and
its materiality through layered perception, or what Galen Johnson has aptly
called this moment in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, a “transdecendence.”36 The role
of hearkening to the world of silence within the sensual announcement of the
world’s gestures in perception through poetic language is part of recasting of
both transcendence and spirituality in the way that we quoted Johnson previ-
ously when he locates Merleau-Ponty’s sense of spirituality “in the faces, bodies,
and lives of those who are most vulnerable: children, the poor, the ragged, the
homeless, the sick—and also in landscapes, seascapes, mountains, valleys, and
canyons where there lives a sublime stillness and wonder.”37 Spirituality taken
in this way does not refer to another realm as a source or model for what is
excellent about this one. Instead, this sort of spiritual call centers on coming
to the aid of those valued fellow human beings, other creatures, and inanimate
beings of this earthly realm to achieve their greatest excellence, integrity, and
thriving in their interconnection and community. The poetic manifesting of
greater depths of sense from the latent depths of our encounter with the earthly
dimension of world, other humans, and other creatures is a revelatory power
that brings greater kinship among beings. The plight of the others that needs
our help and beckons to us as listed in this statement by Johnson, as well as
the things of the natural world that inspire wonder, beckon to us in a way
that draws us up short, but not to attend to some higher “spiritual being” as
Levinas asserts, but rather to open ourselves more fully to the layers of sense
embedded in the world that enfold themselves in our deeper sense of ourselves.
 Conclusion
Sense and Solidarity at the Depths of the World

The totality grasped is not beyond space and time; it is perceived as the
enjambing of what crosses space and time.
—Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (154)

It might seem strange to conclude with a declaration that sense and solidarity
are found at the depths as summing up what has been explored in this book.
We began with looking at the faces of the beings of the world, including human
beings, and this might seem to be an investigation of what sense lies on the
surface of things as on our outer features, postures, and gestures. This “view
from the outside” might seem to be the opposite of seeking for the depths of
meaning. Yet, we have seen that for Merleau-Ponty, the faces that are expressed
by all sensible surfaces are the access or opening to the depths of the world as
a nexus of sense, if they are pursued in a sensitivity to the silent underside of
our encounter with the beings of the world. Each being has an expressiveness
that plays across its surface. Yet, this sensible encounter has a latent sense, its
lining or “other side” that takes us into the depths of the world. In the same
regard, it might seem strange to say that the solidarity among persons that is the
basis for ethical sense and action that has been explored in this book is found
in the depths, when its stress has been the encounter of the face-to-face that
yields a horizontal transcendence—in opposition to a transcendence of heights
or toward a realm beyond or above this realm in its perfection and purity of
Being. The solidarity explored here grows out of the perceptual presentation
of the face-to-face as a horizontal interrelation in the sense that it is based
on the contingent facts, histories, and events in the lives of others that they
bring to encounters. It is in being co-present with others in the textures and
contours of their existence as overlapping, yet different—as having the power

307
308 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

to pull people outside of previous boundaries and transform them—in a soli-

darity through which the ethical call of this sense of the face is experienced.
This notion opposes the call of the traditional sense of solidarity stemming
from a source in an infinite height that informs the realm below through the
reach of its vertical transcendence. The solidarity this book explored is found
among humans in generating compassion and ethical behavior that starts at
the sensible surface. Once again, however, these surfaces are an opening to
the depths of all that surrounds us, and in which we participate together. The
reason for this seeming misdirection of sense and solidarity follows directly
from Merleau-Ponty’s definition of depth that runs throughout his descriptions
of silence, the face, the face-to-face encounter, the physiognomic imagination,
the sensible idea, and poetic ontology.
Merleau-Ponty might well be called the “philosopher of depth,” as depth
is the key notion that allows his philosophy from the start to its end to be
able to radically reconfigure what we mean by embodiment and perception. It
also gives him a different logic from the philosophical tradition that preceded
him and makes plausible a philosophy of ambiguity that is better thought of
as a philosophy of the inexhaustibility of becoming. The logic of Merleau-Ponty’s
idea of depth could be called a logic of inclusive differences. There is no doubt
that Merleau-Ponty felt a kinship with the endeavors of Cézanne, because he
saw Cézanne’s painting as did Giacometti (as quoted by Merleau-Ponty): “I
believe Cézanne was seeking depth all his life.”1 In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-
Ponty also quotes Robert Delaunay’s statement, “Depth is the new inspiration”
as Merleau-Ponty is discussing the philosophical import of modern painting.2
Although we may tend to think of depth in terms of space, it is Merleau-Ponty’s
increasing emphasis on the depth of time that gives Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
its most radical edge in allowing us to see new relationships between time and
embodying being, perception, physiognomic sense, the imaginal, materiality,
and the way flesh moves us into another relationship with the natural world.
Furthermore, depth undoes this distinction between space and time as being
two differing dimensions, and renders them a space–time chiasm.
Throughout the Phenomenology of Perception the developing idea of depth
decenters the notion of the subject in its descriptions of perception—even
though, admittedly and regrettably, Merleau-Ponty is still saddled at this point
with the term, “subject.” In an unremitting fashion, an attention to depth runs
throughout Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre. Merleau-Ponty declares in “Eye and
Mind” that depth understood through perception in its deeper ontological
sense brings about a radical reconsideration of what we mean by depth: “Once
depth is understood in this way, we can no longer call it the third dimension.
In the first place, if it were a dimension, it would be the first one.”3 Then,
he continues that it is even more accurate to call depth the “reversibility of
 Conclusion 309

dimensions.”4 Both the published version of The Visible and Invisible, including
its working notes, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind,” incessantly
return to depth as key to the ontology he is articulating. The notion of depth
is Merleau-Ponty’s way of subverting the subjectivistic approach to human
being, the mentalistic approach to subjectivity qua consciousness, and many
of the dualistic, reifying conceptions of the philosophical tradition. It might
not be too much to claim that once Merleau-Ponty had formulated his notion
of depth as the going together of incompossibles in the “Space” chapter of the
Phenomenology of Perception, he had already staked out a path that would lead
him inevitably to the ontology of the “flesh of the world.”5
Merleau-Ponty first introduces his notion of depth in opposition to the
dismissal of depth’s ontological importance as assessed by the tradition: “Tradi-
tional ideas of perception are at one in denying that depth is visible.”6 Depth
has been regarded throughout the Western cultural history as the “third dimen-
sion,” as a derivative phenomenon resulting from the accidental location of the
subject, and not as part of the “real furniture” of existence. In other words, it is
not an “objective” feature of the world made of objects “in themselves.” In the
Phenomenology of Perception, in the midst of the “Space” chapter, Merleau-Ponty
describes depth as being placed outside the focus of traditional philosophy, but
at the heart of his analysis of perception: “more directly than other dimen-
sions of space, depth forces us to reject the preconceived notion of the world
and rediscover the primordial experience from which it springs.”7 If we don’t
return to that silent and prereflective encounter that we explored in the first
chapters of this book, where rational categories have not yet been imposed to
reconstruct the primary perceptual experience, then depth will not be found.
In this indissoluble link between perceiver and world, there is only access to
depth by undercutting the dualism of subject and object. Merleau-Ponty offers
as an example, looking at the sides of a road that seem to converge in the
distant view of them, even though we know reflectively they remain parallel.
The opposition to probing perceptual experience stems from reflection. In the
perceptual experience, it is the case is that the sides of the road are “parallel
in depth,” which means that the roads both appear parallel and converging in
the distance—both incompossible appearances together yield the experience of
depth.8 The physiognomy of depth is to appear both parallel and to converge—
yet as part of a figure where neither stands forth determinately, since it is their
interrelation, or more precisely, their enjambment, that is depth. Similarly, in
a Cézanne painting, Merleau-Ponty points out how the poplar in the distance,
if it were to be taken out of context and compared, would seem to be smaller
than the man in the foreground. However, in the context of the overall scene,
the tree is seen as retreating toward the horizon within a depth of appearing
as both simultaneous senses. The poplar as being in depth is both large and
310 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

small, and neither. More correctly, the poplar is outside these categories within
the oneiric character of perception. Depth is a key component of the oneiric
character of perception that we have explored.
The example first given in the Phenomenology of Perception with which
Merleau-Ponty lingers, and to which he returns in both the text of The Visible
and the Invisible and a working note more than a decade and a half later is the
vision of the cube.9 He describes how the sides of a cube are neither given to
a perceiver as six equal squares facing each other at six equal right angles, nor
as obliquely skewed parallelograms trailing off from the side directly facing the
perceiver. The determinate shapes of either of these two categorical representa-
tions of aspects of the cube fail to help describe the phenomenon of depth.
It is not a matter of switching back and forth between the two alternatives.
The perceiver would lose the phenomenon of depth. Instead what is the case
within perception is that both possibly distinct moments are “enjambed,” piled
into each other as one moment. They are distinctly registered in a unique
way, but only within the seemingly logically impossible “co-givenness” of a
single percept, which is not one or the other, but rather in this enjambment
is the manifestation of depth. Each conflicting aspect of the phenomenon if
taken in isolation and as determinate lacks the sense of the overall experience.
Depth can emerge only within the temporal unfolding of the sensed unity
within disunity or within the tension of what can’t go logically together. The
perceived sides of the cube aligned as encompassing, or the road retreating in
the distance, or the tree withdrawing into the horizon, give these phenom-
ena their distinctive “look” or physiognomy as manifestations of depth. The idea
of squares turned askew is an idea lifted from a representation of the cube’s
surface gained in abstraction from the whole and they do not enter into the
primordial perceptual encounter with the cube.
Depth is not a successive and rationally comparative synthesis as the
traditional notions conceive it, but rather is yet another aspect of the oneirism
of perception and of oneiric materiality where—as in a dream—sensual aspects
that seem to be incompossible exist within another order of primal contact
and have a felt meaning. As we discussed in Part I in introducing Merleau-
Ponty’s idea of depth, he sums up this transgressive idea in which space and
time are enfolding: “This being simultaneously present in experiences which
are nevertheless mutually exclusive.”10 Within the phenomenon of depth, the
sides of the road are neither convergent nor parallel, the poplar tree is neither
smaller nor towering over the man in the foreground, and the sides of the cube
are neither squares nor parallelograms. In each case, they are both at once as
having depth. Depth is this phenomenon of experiencing the going together
of what should otherwise be incompossible, such that nonconvergent lines
envelop convergent lines, or smaller and larger figures envelop each other, or
right angled squares envelop parallelograms.
 Conclusion 311

This enveloping, however, is not primarily spatial. It is spatial as being

even more primordially temporal. Even in the Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty, as we noted previously, explains how the “quasi-synthesis” of
the sides of the cube is elucidated only when we understand it as temporal. He
adds, “When I say that I see an object at a distance, I mean that I already hold
it, or that I still hold it, it is in the future or in the past as well as being in
space.”11 These differing possibly discrete and compossible appearances in space
come together in the phenomenon of depth, because of the coming together
within the present of time, or what Merleau-Ponty calls “this contraction into
one perceptual act of a whole possible process.” It rationally seems that within
temporal unfolding, things should be linear and successive as logically discrete
moments, yet instead they are “contracted” or “enjambed” (a term Merleau-
Ponty will use later, as in the epigraph to this chapter, for example) or are
“simultaneous.” He continues to state, “But co-existence, which in fact defines
space, is not alien to time, but it is the fact of two phenomena belonging
to the same temporal wave. As for the relationship of the perceived object to
my perception, it does not unite them in space and outside time: they are
contemporary.”12 The perception of depth is the perception of incompossible
things being at the same time, and thereby being together in a way that defies
rational categories, but is part of the oneiric makeup of the prereflective world.
Merleau-Ponty finishes this thought by stating, “The ‘order of co-existents’ is
inseparable from the ‘order of sequences,’ or rather time is not only conscious-
ness of a sequence. Perception provides me with a ‘field of presence.’ ”13 Time as
a sequence is simultaneously a co-existence of varied moments in one moment
that is accessible as a field of presence. This idea of time will become more
prominent and radically stated in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings.
This enjambment of varied moments with the present is not limited to
such simple percepts as a road trailing off into the distance or the sense of
the volume of a cube, but is equally true of all our more complex and mean-
ing laden perceptions. For example, on the last pages of Swann’s Way, our
narrator looks at the women passing him on the path of the Bois de Bologne,
but what he sees in the present is more than this group with whom he feels
little connection: “Could I even have made them understand the emotion
that I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot,
in an otterskin coat, with a woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like
partridge feathers, but enveloped in the artificial warmth of her own house,
which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed into
her bosom whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freezing
air . . . of living actually in the human atmosphere . . . beside the blazing
fire, in front of the silk-covered settee, the flowers that looked out through
the closed windows at the falling snow?”14 The narrator may be looking at
the people passing him, but he is also experiencing in the present all those
312 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

moments of meeting Madame Swann on the same path, as well as all those
other times when she wore flowers and the times she had those same flowers
delivered to her house, and also all those times he sat with her by the blazing
fire in her home, as well as those other moments when he looked out at the
snow from this place of comfort. All these moments are not explicitly recalled
through recollection, but as Proust calls them, they are “gusts” of time that
surround us.15 This place as it is manifest for the narrator is inseparable from
this enjambment of varied times.
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception inevitably led him to the recogni-
tion that depth is more about the temporal unfolding of the phenomena, than
about the position of beings in space. The idea of objectivity is tied to an idea
of time without depth in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. Once we have abandoned the
idea of an objective world, what we have really abandoned is the sense of an
atemporal world being the unexamined foundation of perception and ontol-
ogy. The Cartesian world of subjects and objects is possible only by taking
the world as existing in a time of “instants.” These “instants” are constructions
resulting from their abstraction from their being inseparably within the tem-
poral unfolding of the world. Within any such clips of abstracted time, the
boundaries—between subjects and objects, between persons, between humans
and animals, and others sorts of divisions that give rise to certainties that seem
clear and distinct—appear as if they are more plausible, since the blurring and
overlapping that happen within time in the dialogue between perceiver and
perceived cannot happen in an instant. This is a correlate of what we said
previously about Absolute Consciousness having no sense of depth or access
to the texture of reality as experienced by humans, since humans gain this
within the depth of time. So, too, Merleau-Ponty states the world itself would
evaporate if it were really to be given in this fashion: “if the thing and the
world could be defined once and for all, if the spatio-temporal horizons could
even theoretically, be made explicit and the world conceived from such a point
of view, then nothing would exist; I should hover above the world, so that
all times and places, far from being simultaneously real would become unreal,
because I should live in none of them and would be involved nowhere.”16 As
linear and discrete, temporal moments would exclude us from the experience
of the world. By contrast, since we are time—as Merleau-Ponty states—we are
enmeshed in an unfolding of enveloping being. The emergence of meaning
comes about through the interplay of varied times that are the expression of
the physiognomy of the world.
In articulating the notion of “the flesh” (la chair) in The Visible and the
Invisible, Merleau-Ponty articulates the “in-between” left out by traditional
philosophical dichotomies. As the intertwining of body and world, past and
present, logical and emotional, perceptual and imaginary, personal and imper-
 Conclusion 313

sonal, among many other interstices of sense, flesh is manifest as the depth of
experience. Flesh as this intertwining of aspects of what had been located within
the subject and within the world as incompossible means that flesh is itself
opened by depth, or as Merleau-Ponty says in a “working note” of November
1959: “It is hence because of depth that things have a flesh.”17 Furthermore,
in articulating the movement of perception as flesh, Merleau-Ponty says of
the body that “if the body is a thing among things, it is so in a deeper sense
than they: in the sense that, we said, it is of them, and this means it detaches
itself upon them, and accordingly, detaches itself from them.”18 This double
sense of interacting with things in a revelatory way happens since being of
the same stuff, there is the lateral relation of interactively working upon one
another between body and world. There is this double movement within the
act of perception: we are a visible being or a being that can be touched,
and are therefore among those things toward which the vector of contact
and exploration moves, and yet we are also the way that the visible and tac-
tile moves out from within itself toward the gap or dehiscence where things
become seen or touched. Encountering things is a material interaction, takes
place within the flesh—not in a reductive sense of materiality as being merely
inert matter in motion, but rather as the heft of the sensible being infused
with the sense of doubling back on itself. Since we are of the perceived and
yet are the site of perceiving, this doubling comprises what could be taken as
logically incompossible, since the terms can be taken to be mutually exclusive.
Yet, given Merleau-Ponty’s articulated sense of depth as key to the flesh, this
instead makes us a “thing among things” but “in a deeper sense,” as he puts
it, the site of world’s emergence from depth. The body as this double move-
ment within and without is called by Merleau-Ponty “two outlines,” “two
laps,” “two leaves” or “two layers.”19 This movement is both an interposing
and also an enveloping. Embodiment is the opening of depth as these two
opposing movements. Our sense of things as the way of apprehending them
within perception is an enveloping of what had been opposed by traditional
ways of conceiving perception: seeing and seen, touching and touched, distance
and nearness, active and passive, self and other, material and ideal, real and
imaginal, and empirical and poetic.
Depth, as the site of flesh, opens the world in a way the dominant West-
ern philosophical tradition had not conceived. Describing perception in light
of the flesh of the world, Merleau-Ponty says we encounter “beings of depth”
such that, “What we call visible is, we said, a quality pregnant with a texture,
the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle
borne by a wave of Being.”20 The visible’s physiognomies present perception
with qualities, but they are entered only through a sensual texture—that is
to say, only through the indirect and overlapping constellations of sense that
314 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

can be explored for their latent meaning through physiognomic imagination

and poetic language. This manifests the “other side” of these surfaces in their
depths. This sense can emerge only from within this massive folding back of
beings upon one another, as we have explored, like the field of beings within
the simple percept of the red of a dress. These perceptual qualities are borne
along “by a wave of Being,” because it is only within the gestural interplay of
the world and perceivers that the process of always further unfolding meaning
occurs. It is a depth that emerges from within the surfaces of things, since all
beings have physiognomies that open into layers and interconnections of the
world that deepen their sense. Surfaces are not barriers to be penetrated in
order to wrest their secret meaning from them, as was the paradigm of depth
for the tradition. In temporal terms, the face of things and the world, like the
people we encounter, betray singular expressions of a long history, which also
has folded back on itself in becoming enfolding within the beings perceived.
A glance at their surfaces opens a depth. As Edward Casey writes in The
World at a Glance,21 “On the other hand, surfaces make depths available to
the glance: they make these depths accessible by presenting them.”22 The very
way that depths of meaning show themselves is through their surface appear-
ance or by what we might call their physiognomy. Casey makes the point,
however, that this glance that opens the depths from the surface comes about
through a “side look,” through a general bodily taking in, or an indirection
at odds with the penetrating gaze of the Western philosophical tradition that
attempts to see the depths by moving right through the surface.23 Casey later
moves on from a more spatial emphasis to speak of how the glance takes in
the depth of temporality “folding back into itself.”24 We encounter within the
current face of a being deeper senses of past and future that shine through
the present face as a depth, as the invisible of the visible.25
The notion of the flesh of The Visible and the Invisible allows an artic-
ulation of an ongoing temporal dimension which is simultaneously present
and absent, successive and yet not, accessible and yet not, remembered by
embodiment’s gathering itself from the world and yet also unfolding equally
from the flesh of the world folding back within itself in a more global sense
of reversibility. In an echo of the earlier statement from the Phenomenology of
Perception, “We base our memory on the world’s vast Memory” (une immense
Mémoire du monde), the notion of the flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to describe
how the depths of the world as layered times move through the individual and
the personal sense of the past and become enfolded in the world’s vaster time.
For Merleau-Ponty, depth opens a co-knowing with the world. At moments
of insight, the past reawakens in an active passivity. The world as flesh enfolds
us, offers a depth of past that it has held for us in safeguarding it. Insofar,
as Merleau-Ponty attributes to Proust the most apt expression of these depth
 Conclusion 315

dimensions of time, it is not surprising to read of the narrator coming to

this sense of time in the last pages of In Search of Lost Time. Marcel realizes
that, as humans, we are given through our embodiment an opening onto the
depth of time that resounds back to the depth of our own history as well
as the larger human history, and even into the primal depths of history. He
resolves to express in his writing this vast sense that lies hidden within our
existence. His last words of the novel are that he wants “to describe men as
occupying so considerable a place, as compared with the restricted place which
is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure,
for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch distant epochs
through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to
range themselves—in Time.”26 In the depths of time, we touch the depths of
the world in which epochs endure and become what they might have been.
The planet has had a long unfolding in time and materiality. Its flesh
both holds time and exhales time within the layers of our becoming enlaced
with the world in “lateral relations.” Like other creatures emergent from the
surround, we find ourselves claimed and located within this depth of time,
partially through silence’s reach into this deeper time. In discussing in Part I
this depth of time in silence, we cited Merleau-Ponty’s working note explicating
this “wild” or “barbaric” time, which describes that the silent encounter with
any visible landscape is to see simultaneously many other times of the past that
are contained within it—“inside itself ”—while also being the present time of
the landscape. Merleau-Ponty stresses that this is not a synthesis of times, or
a gathering-up of successive times, but that these differing times are literally
simultaneous in the perceived landscape.27 The landscape has lodged within its
depths differing temporalities. The deep past can be within the present as one
perceives the landscape. This comment from the working notes seems to be reso-
nant with the thoughts offered near the end of the 1959–60 lectures, “Nature
and Logos: The Human Body,” in which Merleau-Ponty considers the sense of
time lodged within the natural world in terms of its differing levels and says
they both outstrip human beings and yet hold us. The differing speeds of time
in evolution and personal existence, or the pace of change genetically and in
the particular lives of creatures, are of differing orders that can’t be synthesized.
The properties of each time are not deducible from the other.28 Similarly, there
are geological shifts and transformations, which are on a differing temporal
order than that of these objects in daily life. These other temporalities are part
of the background of deeper time latent within perception.
Merleau-Ponty says that we need to think of “temporal spatial levels” that
are within time and space as its vertical dimensionality, but they cannot be
assimilated to each other. These times “complement” one another, but there is
no “simultaneous fixing on the micro and the macro,” which comprises another
316 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

background coming together of incompossiblities that is a part of the depth

of the larger world. There are juxtapositions of “temporal spatial levels” that
pervade living beings in this natural world: “The living being, reduction of
fluctuation, sum of instabilities. It is the structure of the spatiotemporal field
since the organism has an external circuit, integration of a spatial divergence
and of a temporal interval.”29 As living beings, for Merleau-Ponty, we are within
this space–time field that is one of instabilities and differences that are bridged
with the outcome of sense and vitality, as well our eventual cessation. There is
in one’s breath the first gasp of creatures up from the water into air—a gasp
repeated by each human, not only at birth but in some sense with each intake
of the world’s atmosphere. We creatures have running through us and beneath
our own time differing times on other levels of who we are that reverberate
within our perceptions of the world, often unnoticed. As Merleau-Ponty states,
“we cannot understand the human organism without its external circuit, its
planetarization.”30 For Merleau-Ponty, there is an ongoing depth to our percep-
tion that emerges from the time and sense of the entire planet. It is not “in”
the psyche, but in the latent depths of encountering the mountain, or the path
of the sun across the sky, or the rhythms of tides that gesture temporal senses
of the world that can surface from the depths of time like strange creatures
from the sea, but are always felt on the fringes of life in the world.31
This theme is worthy of a much longer exploration, but at the conclu-
sion of this book, it suffices as a sketch of how expansive is Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of the depth of perception. To understand depth in this way can allow
us to see the import of the topics we have explored. The silent interchange
with the world as continually gesturing to us, although a communication that
happens in the sensual contact of primordial perception, can carry us to a
depth of sense that is enveloping on a vast scale. This realization allows us to
see “horizontal transcendence” or transdescendence, to use Galen Johnson’s term,
in a way that adds to the import of the alterity of depth discussed within this
book. When we are carried beyond ourselves into the depths of the world in
perception, there are aspects of the background sense of what we perceive that
recede deep into the past. At the end of Part I we spoke of silence’s power to
return us to a hush of time that is vertical and is always still at the first day.
These senses of time convey that each event that occurs is inseparable from a
background of history that includes not only the entire expanse of our cultural
history and the history of mankind itself, but also the history of the planet
in its transformations. We discussed Merleau-Ponty’s remark at the end of
“Eye and Mind” that the whole of human history is in some sense stationary
because it is co-present in all endeavors we undertake; and yet, any institution
surrounding a cultural endeavor, like the practice of painting, has not only a
co-present background that goes back to the first cave painting, but simultane-
 Conclusion 317

ously goes to the furthest reach of the future of that endeavor to incorporate
all these events in its thickness of being. As Merleau-Ponty says in a working
note of April 1960, speaking of Proust’s articulation of an “architectonic past,”
there is a past of “a mythical time, to the time before time, to the prior life.”32
Edward Casey has developed this sense of time further toward the end of his
book Spirit and Soul, where he states, “But beyond the personal and collective
past is a past which is expansive rather than contractive. Such a past is a time-
less time, inchoate and antedating history or personal experience . . . in that
time, a time before measurable, Chronic time. Such a time never was actual
and hence it is not remembered as actual. That means it is not remembered at
all in the usual sense.”33 Casey goes on to say that this deep time is a mythic
past that can be brought forth only prepersonally or non-egologically. He also
says the dominant mode of recollecting this deep past is a type of imagining.
In terms of the phenomena we have described, it is part of the physiognomic
imagining that brings forth the invisible of the visible perception. The deepest
past is the latent depth of perception.
The depth of time that is the underside of the simplest perception, usually
kept in the background, is also, however, a particular kind of depth of connec-
tion or depth of interrelation. Relations take time to form and to strengthen.
Relations also require the meshing of rhythms, synchronizing, interplay, and
establishing “dialogue.” These and other aspects unfold in time. Merleau-Ponty’s
analysis of space, the habit body, and interpersonal relations requires a depth
of time to develop, as can be made more apparent in concrete examples. The
spatiality of embodiment demonstrates that one is always embedded in a locale,
yet to live in one town for many decades, for example, deepens or thickens
one’s being interwoven in the texture of that town and its life, such that it
becomes difficult to leave it and feel “as if one is oneself.” For another example,
Merleau-Ponty shows how tools like one’s car are incorporated into the back-
ground sense of one’s own body in the body schema, but to wear glasses for
one’s entire life will tighten and strengthen their place in one’s body schema, so
that one feels like a vital part of one’s body is missing without them. Finally,
even though we are all talked into our sense of self and inextricably entwined
with others, to have a spouse or friend for decades, for example, makes the
other become almost a part of myself without whom I am lost. So, if in the
background of the silent interrelation with the world is the anonymous body’s
long kinship with it, then the depth of sense interwoven with the world’s his-
tory is even stronger.
This leads Merleau-Ponty to claim that “I am present to my present, to
all the preceding past and to a future”—not absolutely—but nevertheless in
“a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants” that encompasses a long
history.34 Dealing with the vast trajectories within the textures and events of
318 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

the natural world forms a continual dialogue from birth and even before it.
We take up an anonymous history of perceiving from within the natural world
that goes back to the beginning of human’s history. This can give rise to a felt
solidarity with the natural world and the life of the planet that is latent in
the depths of perception. Our chiasmatic relationship with the natural world
has its own voices of silence that speak of this never extinguished ancient
sense of belonging and interrelating: “the Earth as Ur-Arche brings to light
the carnal Urhistorie.”35 The Earth as our interlocutor continually whispers
to us in our perceptions of a much more ancient and encompassing bond.
Given our exploration in the third part of this book about the power of poetic
language to break open our usual linguistic relations with that about which
we speak in order to open us to the depth of the silent primordial encounter
with things, the sense of this solidarity can be expressed and heightened by a
poetic expression of our situatedness in the natural world. This certainly gives
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh and his consideration of physiognomic
imagination and poetry, a particular relevance for any attempt to facilitate a
greater sense of connection between populations and the natural world, given
the increasingly pervasive global state of alienation from the natural world.36
Yet, it is in the face-to-face with the other person or persons that this
temporal depth may have particular relevance to the argument we have pursued
about the ramifications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh for founding
an ethics of solidarity. We have seen that instead of the face-to-face bringing
us up short to encounter the infinite transcendence of the Other and uniting
with this higher plane of obligation and sacrifice, Merleau-Ponty’s thought leads
us to see in the face-to-face encounter, the power of achieving a felt solidarity
with others that encompasses the particularity of their situatedness in both its
overlap and differences with our own contingent history by opening a depth
of perceivable and felt sense. This means that instead of acting on behalf of
general principles instantiated by the concrete other or others we face, we are
instead prereflectively drawn into standing within his or her—or their—world
and its threats and fragilities. We come to understand him or her—or them—
by being directly touched in our own embodied, affective sensitivity, yet remain
at the distance of our own separately contingent situation. However, these last
thoughts about the vast temporal reach of depth add another dimension to
the ethical call of the alterity of depth, as we have called it, in opposition to
the alterity of infinite height—realizing how very deep and expansive is this
shared history and connectedness within the flesh.
When at the end of his 1946 presentation to the Société française de
philosophie about the central theses of his work, which we have previously
discussed, Merleau-Ponty states his distrust for an ethics of the ideal, since
“history is other people, it is the interrelationships we establish with them,
 Conclusion 319

outside of which the realm of the ideal appears as alibi” and often “principles
are mystifications.”37 The depth of perception as taking us into contact with
this nexus of relationships does have an ethical weight, Merleau-Ponty claims,
even though nothing guarantees that morality will emerge. Yet, Merleau-Ponty
declares, this primordial level of perception is the only response to ethical
skepticism and pessimism.38 We cited previously Merleau-Ponty’s dismissal in
this discussion of grounding ethics of another “side of things” in an infinite
realm, but it is vital to note that Merleau-Ponty insists that the primacy of
perception leads to a perception of the world and of the persons that we love
that makes impossible a certain doubt and spite against the ethical treatment
of others. This aspect of primacy of perception, I believe, is the depth of
primordial perception.
Merleau-Ponty states that the search for an absolute beyond the plane
of experience, of embodied existence, is doomed to failure, but that trans-
formed in another direction, it a realizable quest—that is to say, if we look
for the equivalent of an absolute within experience. He states, “Just as I grasp
time through my present and by being present, I perceive others through my
individual life, in the tension of an experience which transcends itself.”39 This
is a pregnant thought that Merleau-Ponty will develop throughout the rest of
his life, but this perspective leads continually to the increasing realization that
through the present moment, I can enter a depth of time of immense expanse
and an interplay of times that takes me beyond my individuality to find myself
enmeshed with the myriad destinies of humanity, other creatures, and the beings
of the Earth. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expressed the realization well in Pilote
de guerre that one can feel empty and hollow pursuing ethical action for the
sake of an abstraction called “humanity,” unless it is based on a more immedi-
ate felt connection with humanity through its concrete presence in one’s life.
We tend to think of these contacts in personal and currently limited terms,
yet if we realize that in the background of perception, on the level of both the
anonymous perceiver and the history of one’s life and cultural heritage, there
are myriad concrete, contingent contacts and enmeshments, the scope of that
specific perceptual thickness of interrelations with others is quite massive. If
there is a depth of perception that encompasses the nexus of relations that are
the lining of each percept, then to be immersed in the myriad acts of human-
ity of friendship, kindness, love, beauty, discovery, creativity, and so on, that
have spanned the long history of human beings on this planet in uncountable
instances of community, gives us another sense of humanity as inexhaustible and
of an unfathomable depth. On a felt immediate level, this can add propulsion
toward our embrace of others and the need to give and sacrifice for their sake.
Yet, as Merleau-Ponty stated, this ethical calling to action is not guar-
anteed and requires an ongoing practice to cultivate. For others may well
320 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

employ their perceiving, imagining, and feeling as embodied beings to immerse

themselves into a depth of the entanglement of human atrocities and acts of
meanness or hate that are also the background sense of the world. That simple
percept of the red of a dress, from the Chiasm chapter we have discussed,
might also play off the sight of the blood of one’s dead relatives killed by
terrorists, or the red flames of one’s small village being burnt down govern-
ment forces, or the red of mouth of a baby screaming in hunger and illness
while not aided after a typhoon, or the red of the raw skin of a horse who
has been overworked and abused by its owner, and so forth. By focusing on
this “other side” of our primordial perceptual contact with the world, persons
can fuel projects of violation and evil. It may also be that the worlds in which
their contingent lot has left them to dwell may be worlds full of these sorts
of angering or fear-inducing underlying senses in the background depths of
perception. This does not annihilate the possibility that one can still find within
the face-to-face contingent depths of perceiving the other and their world an
overlap with one’s own world and its depth that can inspire felt solidarity and
sacrifice, but it becomes more challenging. The varied possibilities within the
depth of perceptual sense mean that the ethics of solidarity is no more a given
practice that is the following of just, rationally reflective universal principles
and their proper application, which also require cultivation and choice. Indeed,
in a world of violation, the relationship of present and past may easily become
fractured in ways, as described by Patricia Locke, who says, “Affective time
presents itself as continuous, but not as a smooth sequence for the one who
is caught up in grief. There is a felt suspension of the present, a folding of
parallel pasts into the present in ways that do not fit, a discontinuity of selves
who are also grieved along with the one lost.”40 For someone growing up in a
devastated world of violation, ongoing grieving may in some sense take them
out of time and its depth, keeping them contacting repeatedly those explosively
emergent violating events and losses, and the entanglements that motivate
people to close off from others, or make them want to fight back in pain.
Merleau-Ponty recognized the fragility of sense and solidarity of the pri-
macy of perception. The sense of the world at its depths, even though accessible
in the primal contact of surfaces that lead perceivers further into meaning, may
fail to be reached by a culture, for example, obsessed with “problem solving,”
by those alienated from their bodies’ sensitivity, and by those so violated that
it is too painful to be open to the originary dimension of the world and its
depths. Yet, it is also true that for Merleau-Ponty to be human is to have the
depths of perception that birth a renewal of enriching sense and solidarity pos-
sibly accessible at any moment by seizing our concrete situation. The empirical
language use that Merleau-Ponty saw as becoming ubiquitous and distancing
humanity from this resource intrinsic to flesh can be broken open by the
 Conclusion 321

poetic use of language that picks up the threads of silence that Merleau-Ponty
saw running throughout the entirety of language. In his unpublished notes for
the essay, “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty thinks of the work of the one who
uses creative expression, whether painter or writer, to find a way to open up
the interconnectedness among persons within a shared world and writes, “the
true point of view: not the universal view, nor the omnipotent view . . . but
the view of the Ineinander.”41 The poetic use of language breaks open the way
that the empirical use of language screens us from the depth of what is spo-
ken about, and in regard to others, allows us to meet them in an overlapping
ground in which we can enter their world. The truest perspective is not from
some outside of the perceptual world, but by entering more deeply within its
enmeshment. Yet, poetry opens a common ground while maintaining differ-
ence, since poetic language also calls attention to its operation as breaking with
normal reference, intention and location. In being aware of its operation, we
experience both joining more openly in that primal contact with each other,
but also realize we stand together in a space of expression that is outside the
normal realm of events. Despite the attitude of postmodern cultural common
sense that views poetry as an impotent or decorative use of language, it is an
irreplaceable resource through the use of allusive language to enter the depths
of the flesh toward a more open community with others. An interesting con-
tradiction to this postmodern marginalization of the poetic use of language is
the fact that often when communities find themselves at momentous instants
in which a deeper expression and forging of community is vital—such as at
a memorial service for one who has died, or to commemorate a communal
milestone, or at the ceremony joining two persons in a commitment of love—
there is a turn to poetry as the one way to express what transcends everyday
sense and gather a communal feeling in order to fathom together and express
the deeply significant sense of that moment.
The power to bring perceivers from surface to depth, to bring forth the
invisible of the visible, is also very much the conjoint working of what we
have explored in this book by the name, “the physiognomic imagination.” If
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy leads us to a felt calling toward sacrificing for the
sake of the welfare of the other beings of the natural world, as well as toward
our fellow humans on the grounds of an interconnection with others in their
contingent histories and situations, which gives explicitly articulated ethics its
efficacy, then physiognomic imagination is necessary for a truly ethical life.
Richard Kearney, after reminding his readers that given Merleau-Ponty’s ontol-
ogy of the flesh, “the invisible essence of any object can never be exhausted in a
single perspectival perception, its totality can be anticipated only by means of a
proleptic imagining,” draws the conclusion that we enter into society with others
only through the exploration of an imagination that draws out the depths of a
322 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

“symbolic system.” In other words, within the ontology of the flesh, the depth
of the interconnections with others as—for example, Proust has demonstrated
for Merleau-Ponty—can only fully emerge within these symbolic matrices of
invisible but sensible ideas. Kearney states that this means that “society itself is,
in a fundamental sense, an incarnation of human imagining.”42 For Merleau-
Ponty, he believes, the deeper crisscrossing of our human destinies is perceived
in the latent depths that only imagining can further express and manifest.
Kearney’s philosophical conclusion at the end of his study of the Conti-
nental philosophical tradition’s contribution to understanding imagining is that
“[m]orality could not work effectively without imagination’s ability to narrate
particular stories which exemplify an otherwise abstract rule.”43 Like Merleau-
Ponty, Kearney feels that the moral imperative to help others is not truly
apprehended by rational or abstract means, but rather by feeling the import
of the moral law in regard to the concrete situations of others and so “making
the law answerable to particular persons and circumstances the exemplary role
of imagination refuses the option of some absolute vantage point, instead it
privileges the capacity to identify.” This ability to identify with the other by
inhabiting their situation and share in feeling its contours and textures comes
about through the practice of the physiognomic imagination—exploring the
depths of perceiving the other’s situation in sensitive and creative ways. Kearney
is insistent that this requires a regular practice of imagination, as otherwise
ethical principles become hollow: “Without this imaginative ability to invoke
exemplary figures and narratives, to put oneself in others’ shoes, to identify
oneself with their actions, thoughts, or feelings, it is difficult to see how moral
sentiment or reason could operate at all.”44 Kearney presents these thoughts
as his conclusions about the power and importance of this level of imagining,
but I think it also represents well where the thought of Merleau-Ponty leaves
his readers. For Merleau-Ponty, the “other side of things” that he criticized
for being posited as a transcendent and separate realm by traditional religions
and metaphysics, instead must line the experience of this fleshly realm we
inhabit. This other side of this world is opened by the power of imagining to
enter its depths.
Furthermore, for Merleau-Ponty, entering the depths of the flesh yields
both the necessary ethical separation from others that removes them from our
ego-centered projects, but also weds them to our destiny in a way that despite
difference, we are called to a mutuality of care. In a working note of November
1, 1959, Merleau-Ponty is considering the nature of the chiasm among people.
He says that the cleavage among people is not that of subjects and objects, and
even though in a cursory look at how we appear to each other, it might seem
as if the other is inaccessibly lost in “states of consciousness,” or as if the other
“seems to remain in his own ‘dream,’ ” yet the chiasmatic relationship among
 Conclusion 323

us “is also what makes us belong to the same world—a world which is not
projective but forms its unity across incompossiblities such as that of my world
and the world of the other. . . .”45 In other words, the way we come to stand
with others and to stand within the others’ worlds is across incompossiblities,
through depth—a depth that will never collapse the distance between differing
situations, but allows us to become united with others through our separate
places. This is the work of bringing forth the latencies of perception through
physiognomic imagination, so that we might feel along with others how it is
to face the adversities that befall others. Then, we can face together the ethical
action required to aid others in working on their situation, or as Merleau-Ponty
says of the ramification of the chiasm between persons: “Chiasm, instead of
the For the Other: that means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but
a co-functioning. We function as one unique body.”46 If we are to truly work
with others on their behalf, it happens most truly as embodying beings, who
can feel together the many strands of sense that make up the depth of what
they have committed to face as the right action, and through the world at that
moment, we have become one unique body, whether in the searing moment
of fire above Arras or in the peace felt while gliding through turbulent skies
above the Andes, as Saint Exupéry expressed so aptly in his novels. We are one
unique body not as transcending the face of the other as being called above this
world, but as the flesh looking into the faces of the others and feeling united
in a sparking forth of care despite differences. This is a moment of passion,
not an obligation abstractly registered, but most accurately compassion—a
passion with others, as compassion literally means, for our shared cause felt
in the depths of our bodies.
Yet, we can end this meditation only by returning to where it began:
with the voices of silence of the world that gesture to us today as they always
have and never cease to offer us the ongoing moment when sense first comes
into being. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty concludes his discussion of the
power of expression of the artist by stating that he or she touches and is also
touched by the light that shines on the face of the visible, yet simultaneously
reaches into the depths of a profound latency in perception to render forth
the invisible. He says the painter’s accomplishment is to touch these “two
extremities.” In being open to this exchange with the world, what happened
was: “In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire
and engulfed his body.”47 This fire is the spark of sense that the world freely
offers in its never-ending gesturing to us, its speaking in the voices of silence.
Merleau-Ponty’s work warns us to listen to this silence in a way that seems
ever more distant from this age of stimulus bombardment.
Merleau-Ponty asks us to bring philosophy to non-philosophy and inter-
rogation—that is to say, to find in other concrete inquiries into the contingent
324 Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

facts of the world the physiognomies that offer new sense, new fire, to the
older path of philosophy, and to remain in the uncertainty of entertaining
mysteries, instead pursuing continual problem solving. Despite the cultural
ethos of progress, which has carried over from the Enlightenment to the frenetic
postmodern imperative of continual innovation, Merleau-Ponty reminds us to
listen to the stirrings of “the first day,” because each of us has the possibility
always of creating new sense for ourselves and others. At the end of his sum-
mary of his course, “Limits of Phenomenology,” he says our “implantation” in
our “terrestrial roots” has at its depth a history beyond history “which binds all
existing or possible societies insofar as they inhabit the same ‘earthly’ space, in
the broadest sense, and finally it contains a philosophy of the world as Offenheit
der Umwelt.”48 For Merleau-Ponty, as embodying beings, we are enmeshed in
an accessible common rootedness in the depth of our planet’s long history
of sense and its continual rebirth at each instant, such that there is a voice,
which comes from everything to which we are related in our surroundings—a
power to gesture that shows us a face with which we are able to express new
meaning and purpose together.
 Notes

In the following notes the page reference to the English translation of French texts will
be given first, followed by the page reference to the French edition.

Preface
1. There are several notable exceptions to this, several of whom will be dis-
cussed in the sections of this book centering on ethics: Kym Maclaren, who agrees
that embodied ethics of Merleau-Ponty’s sort takes a new approach to ethics than
traditional ethics, in “Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Ethics: Rethinking Traditional Eth-
ics,” Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, ed. Christine Daigle (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2006); M. C. Dillon, who asserts that an ethics of Merleau-Ponty
would center on pathos or compassion, in The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of
Particularity, ed. Lawrence Hass (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Richard Kear-
ney, who doesn’t solely give credit to Merleau-Ponty, but does see his contribution,
and meanwhile Kearney articulates in his last chapter an ethics of felt community with
others on a prereflective level most like the ideas of this work, in Poetics of Imagining:
Modern to Post-modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); David Michael
Kleinberg-Levin, who finds in Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on silence an attunement
to the moral call of the natural world, but turns to Levinas to supplement it with a
more specifically moral summons, in Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility
in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2008); and, the volume of various essays by many thinkers, Interrogating Ethics:
Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. James Hatley, Janice McLane and Christian
Diehm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), especially the essay by Bernard
Waldenfels, “Responsivity in the Body: Traces of the Other in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory
of Body and Flesh,” 91–106, where Waldenfels attempts to show that both the overlap
and difference within the relations with others in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh
turns us toward the other, but with a sense of their otherness or uniqueness in a way
that functions like Levinas’ more radical sense of the Other; and, Helen Fielding,
“Body Measures: Phenomenological Considerations of Corporeal Ethics,” Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy, 1998, vol. 23, no. 5: 533–45, where Fielding demonstrates
that thinking of the body in technical terms rather than as the lived body skews ethics.

325
326 Notes to Preface

2. This aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is aptly expressed by Gary Brent

Madison: “In thus holding to a ready—does so because it makes of the subject and
object in the objective world where there is consequently no one who perceives. . . . But
for Merleau-Ponty, before things can be the pure objects of which science speaks, they
are dimensions of my existence in that they address me in a natural and immediately
meaningful language. . . . The subject who perceives and is immediately in contact
with a world of perceptual meanings is a pre-subject. . . .”; Gary Brent Madison, The
Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981).
3. See Glen Mazis, “Matter. Dream, and the Murmurs among Things,” in Dif-
ference, Materiality, Painting, ed. Veronique Foti (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1996), 72–90; Galen Johnson, Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking about Merleau-
Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 35.
4. Although this will be briefly explored later in this work, an exploration of
how in other cultures, especially Native American this is articulated, see Paula Gunn
Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), as well as in Glen Mazis, Earth-
bodies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 184–90, where the Native
American ideas are connected to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception as oneiric.
5. From the unpublished notes for The Visible and Invisible, using the page
and ordering system of the Merleau-Ponty archives at the Biobliothêque Nationale, VOL
VII, Le visible et l’invisible, MF 9849, p. 127.
6. As Gail Weiss states of Merleau-Ponty’s work: “Although he was formally
trained as a philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, who occupied the chair of child psychol-
ogy at the Sorbonne at the time of his death in 1961, would himself be considered
an interdisciplinary scholar by contemporary standards. Neurophysiology, gestalt and
developmental psychology, political theory, literary and aesthetic theory, anthropology,
and linguistics were familiar terrains that he actively drew upon in developing his
phenomenological descriptions of perception, language, political life, art, literature and
history, all of which elaborated, in excitingly original and different ways, the primacy of
the lived body in our everyday experience.” Gail Weiss, Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary
Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 1.
7. IVLS 52–53, LIVS 66.
8. PP x. PPF 5.
9. PP xiii, PPF viii.
10. PP xv, PPF x.
11. Jerry H. Gill states the importance of metaphor to Merleau-Ponty’s work in
this way: “The primacy of metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is nowhere more
forcefully and obviously demonstrated than in the simple but highly significant fact
that he himself found it both impossible and unhelpful to carry out his own work
apart from an exceedingly rich display of metaphoric images. Indeed, it is possible
to argue that no other philosopher in the history of the Western tradition has relied
so heavily upon the metaphoric mode as a means of developing and expressing his
thought. It is safe to say that there is scarcely a page of Merleau-Ponty’s works that is
not replete with figurative images.” (Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor [Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991]: 129–30).
12. EM 182, OE 70.
 Notes to Part I, Section I 327

13. The title of Malraux’s 1951 novel Les Voix du Silence.

14. EM 188. OE 86.
15. PrPhl, 65, EPh 76.
16. Ibid.

Introduction
1. A statement about many of these cultural concerns was expressed by Mer-
leau-Ponty in his 1951 Geneva lecture that was later published in Signs, entitled “Man
and Adversity.” (ILVS 43).
2. EM 159, OS 9.
3. One can’t help thinking here of Heidegger’s similar concerns in the human-
ity’s abandonment of meditative thinking in a consuming reliance on “calculative think-
ing” that is concerned solely with problem solving by recombining the well-worn
concepts of the culture. See the “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking.
4. EM 160, OS 12.
5. Ibid.
6. Plato’s image of the cave still threatens us, but perhaps in new forms.

Part I, Section I
1. Part I of this book will enter into the world of silence as a realm of creative
expression and opening to the world. Certainly, there are many silences that have a
malignancy and are imposed on victims of force and oppression. There is a reduction to
silence from a fuller expression or, to quote Bernard Dauenhauer, whose phenomenol-
ogy of “pregnant silences” we will be referring to in this chapter, “there are silences of
poverty and absence as well as pregnant silence.” Bernard Dauenhauer, “On Silence,”
Research in Phenomenology 3, no. 1 (1973), 22.
2. PP 456, PPF 520. In Donald Landes’s newer translation, he renders the
passage: “Your son is caught in the fire, you will save him. . . . If there is an obstacle,
you would give your shoulder to knock it down. You live in your act itself. Your act
is you. . . . You give yourself in exchange. . . . Your true significance becomes daz-
zlingly evident. It is your duty, your hatred, your love, your loyalty, your inventive-
ness. . . . Man is but a knot of relations, relations alone matter to man.” (Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012).
3. I must give credit and thanks to Richard Kearney for posing this question
to me at the 37th annual Merleau-Ponty Circle Association meeting on September
20–22, 2012, at Fordham University, New York. After I presented a portion of this
chapter on silence, Dr. Kearney asked me whether I had pondered the deeper tie that
must run between the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Saint-Exupéry. He set me off on
a wonderful journey of carefully reading all the novels of Saint-Exupéry and thinking
about the issues that resulted in this chapter.
4. Ibid.
328 Notes to Part I, Section II

5. PP xv, PPF x.
6. Ibid.
7. VI 4, VIF 18.
8. Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010), 99.
9. IP 128, IPF 171.
10. Ibid.
11. VI 138, VIF 182.
12. Ibid.
13. VI 139, VIF 183.
14. VI 145–46, VIF 190.
15. Dauenhauer, Silence, 21.
16. Ibid.
17. Dauenhauer, Silence, 22.

Part I, Section II
1. VI 125, VIF 166.
2. Ibid. “Le langage est une puissance d’erreur, puisqu’il coupe le tissu continu qui
nous joint vitalement aux choses et au passé, et s’installe entre lui et nous comme un écran.”
3. EM 160, OE 12.
4. In the intervening decades since Merleau-Ponty made this statement, varied
postmodern analyses have offered a description of that “screen” as being furthered
by cultural forces of power and repression of populations with dire effects on the
planet, too. Of the myriad examples that could be offered, Derrida’s analysis of the
power of the word “animal” to screen off our experience of the myriad of kinds of
beings grouped under this abstract name that serves as a way to dislocate us from our
experience of them as groups of varied sorts suffering in varied ways from our war
against so many of them: “I think that Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanist
indifference, to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a
sacrificial war as old as Genesis.” Derrida adds soon after: “One could say, first, that
in the end such a bellicose hatred in the name of human rights, far from rescuing
man from the animality that he claims to rise above, confirms the waging of a kind
of species war and confirms that the man of practical reason remains bestial in his
defensive and repressive aggressivity, in his exploiting the animal to death. One could
also say, second, that bad will, even a perverse malice, inhabits and animates so-called
good moral will” (Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 101).
5. PP xx, PPF xvi.
6. PP xxi, PPF xvi.
7. VI 4, VIF 18.
8. VI 6, VIF 21.
9. VI 6–7, VIF Ibid.
10. VI 8, VIF 23.
 Notes to Part I, Section III 329

11. Ibid.
12. This is Mauro Carbone’s point of departure at the beginning of The Think-
ing of the Sensible in distinguishing Merleau-Ponty’s transformation of philosophy by
doing away with reliance on the “concept” that we will discuss in Part III, Section V.
13. Galen Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-
Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 230–31.
14. This is a telling point made by Bryan Smyth in contrasting Merleau-Ponty’s
sense of wonder with that of Aristotle and other philosophers—namely, that for Mer-
leau-Ponty the wonder is unending because it reveals existence itself as mysterious in a
way that cannot be dispelled, only entered into. Bryan Smyth, Merleau-Ponty’s Existential
Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), xi.
15. Dauenhauer repeatedly points out that “deep silence” does not just happen,
but rather is a “positive phenomenon” that requires an intention, that is to say, an
openness toward silence. That is why Dauenhauer refers to this phenomenon as “doing
silence” (Dauenhauer, Silence, 26).
16. VI 8, VIF 23.
17. VI 4, VIF 18.
18. Ibid.
19. Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 3. Hass continues: “Again, it is this representational view that Merleau-
Ponty’s philosophy of expressive cognition will show is mistaken.”
20. VI 125, VIF 166.
21. Ibid.
22. Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, 199.
23. In the “working notes” published with the (unfinished) Visible and the Invis-
ible, which follow after the body of the text; hereafter referred to as “working notes.”
These will be distinguished from those unpublished notes of Merleau-Ponty that have
been collected and annotated in the publications of Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, which
will be referenced according to the volume in which they are contained. Finally, the
unpublished notes that the author studied and selected in the archives at the National
Library in Paris will be noted according to their location in the archives.
24. VI 179, VIF 233.
25. Ibid.
26. VI 176, VIF 230.
27. VI 178, VIF 232.
28. VI 176–77, VIF 230.
29. VI 180, VIF 234.
30. VI 181, VIF 235.
31. Ibid.

Part I, Section III

1. VI 179, VIF 232–33.
2. Ibid., VIF 233.
330 Notes to Part I, Section IV

3. VI 177–78, VIF 231.

4. PP 127, PPF 147–48.
5. VI 171, VIF 224.
6. Ibid.
7. Joseph Margolis agrees that what the later Merleau-Ponty mistook in the
idea of the tacit cogito was not the world of silence—which Merleau-Ponty continued
to explore throughout his work—but rather “he failed to account for the fact that the
‘tacit cogito’ is itself linguistically constituted.” In other words, the sense of self-presence
is only consolidated through language and reflection. In the realm of silence, there
is not this presence of self to self. See Joseph Margolis, “Philosophical Extravagance
in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” in Écart and Différance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
on Seeing and Writing, ed. Martin Dillon (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1997), 127.
8. VI 171, VIF 224.
9. PPF 462.
10. PP 403, PPF 461.
11. These course notes have been published by Emmanuelle de Saint Aubert in
Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collège de France, Notes, 1953
(Geneva: Mêtis Press, 2011).
12. Ibid., 106.
13. PPF 461.
14. Ibid.
15. PP 403, PPF 461.

Part I, Section IV
1. VI 146, VIF 191–92.
2. Bernard Waldenfels expresses this thought in the following passage about
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology: “In his later work he anchors the body in a process of self-
doubling. As both seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, touching and being
touched, the body is no longer the corps propre (the body proper) but now conceived
as chair (flesh). The noncoincidence within coincidence ascribed to the state of the
body. . . . The self-relation, typical of our body, turns into a self-withdrawal, and
this leads us to an ‘irremediable absence’ (VI 165/125), including ‘absence from the
self ’ (VI 303/247).” The fission of the self into the world in this “doubling” leads it
to have to return to itself from the world. Bernard Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the
Body,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. James Hatley,
Janice McLane, and Chris Diehm (Pittsburgh. PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006).
3. SNS 17, SNSF 22.
4. Ibid.
5. “Merleau-Ponty argues that the modern painter includes his vision within
the painting and fundamentally contravenes the requirements of an outside vision.
Representation for be for him both an artful construction over, and destruction of, the
living elements he is already in connection with through the flesh: space, color, texture,
 Notes to Part I, Section IV 331

movement, depth.” Michael Gendre, “Philosophy and the Question of Non-Philosophy

in Merleau-Ponty’s Notes de cours 1959–1961,” Chiasm International, vol. 3 (2001), 57.
6. Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 313.
7. As we shall see toward the end of this work, it is also the interplay of
myriad other times.
8. VI 201, VIF 254.
9. Dauenhauer, Silence, 26.
10. Ibid., 27. Dauenhauer goes on in this passage to say that becoming open
to silence is not only to “do silence” but to take responsibility for allowing the other
to be encountered.
11. Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature and Music after Mer-
leau-Ponty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10.
12. Wiskus, Rhythm, 41.
13. EM 184, OE 77.
14. Ibid.
15. EM 185, OE 79.
16. CD 13, CDF 18.
17. Ibid.
18. PP 284, PPF 329.
19. Ibid.
20. PP 285, PPF 329–30.
21. PP 284–85, PPF 329.
22. Ibid.
23. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word sens in French captures perfectly this ambi-
guity, since it signifies not only meaning or sense, but also direction.
24. Wiskus points out that the kind of temporal depth inscribed by music
through, for example, two reiterations of a melody, open a depth such as described by
Merleau-Ponty, but also inaugurate a movement of sense such that as Merleau-Ponty
says in his course notes that “movement and meaning” [are] indissociable.” Wiskus,
Rhythm, 41.
25. VI 132, VIF 174–75.
26. Ibid., VIF 175.
27. IP 160, IPF 212.
28. IP 165, IPF 217.
29. PP403, PPF 461.
30. PP 281, PPF 325.
31. Ibid.
32. FNP 53, FNPF 68.
33. Shigeru Watanabe of Tokyo University had trained pigeons to be able to
identify and discriminate between Picasso’s and Monet’s paintings. Perhaps even more
startling was the fact that “when shown new paintings they had never seen before,
the pigeons were able to classify them as impressionist or abstract.” This is cited and
discussed in George Page, Inside the Animal Mind (New York: Random House, 1999),
77–78.
34. PP 404, PPF 462.
332 Notes to Part I, Section V

35. This is not to say that a glance cannot encompass a wide and deep field,
embodying a significant kind of apprehension, as articulated by Edward S. Casey, who
draws on Merleau-Ponty’s work, as well as that of others. Edward S. Casey, The World
at a Glance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 93. I sought to develop
Casey’s idea of the power of the glance to take in much of the world by combining his
analyses with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the depth of the flesh in “Touring as Authenti-
cally Embodying Place and Glancing a New World,” The Journal of Environment, Space,
and Place 1 (June 2009): 169–88.
36. David Levin pursues this question of how we can learn to hear the silence
within language as articulated by Merleau-Ponty, since for Levin it is essential to
ongoing creativity and also to hearkening to an ecological call of the myriad natural
beings who silently beckon to us. Levin states, “A retrieval, then, of the creativity of
the inaugural moment . . . would require an openness, in our listening, to whatever
might claim us, coming from the limitless dimensions of silence. A return to silence in
this sense will always open our experience to ever-new possibilities of meaning.” David
Levin, Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and
Levinas’s Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 101.

Part I, Section V
1. PP 404, PPF 462.
2. Dorothea Olkowski, “Expression and Inscription,” Écart and Différance, ed.
by Martin Dillon (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 52.
3. PP 68, PPF 82.
4. Bachelard is explaining in this passage how the poet listens to the trees of
the night and so comes to “unite the outside cosmos with the inside cosmos.” Gaston
Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 188–89. We will examine
parallels between the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard in terms of an “oneiric
materiality” in Part III, and also explore how this foreshadows of the sense of the
reversibility of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s later works.
5. Ibid.
6. PP 187, PPF 218.
7. PPF 462.
8. Ibid.
9. PP 404, PPF 462.
10. As signaled by Merleau-Ponty by putting “acquired” in quotation marks.
11. Voegelin, Listening, 99.
12. Even though Merleau-Ponty will in his late writings dispute the idea of
the tacit cogito, since it implies having self-presence when there is not in this silent
encounter, his description in the Phenomenology of Perception already has aspects that
undermine that idea. The kind of presence of the tacit cogito he describes is a “pure
feeling of the self ” that is “merely a comprehensive and inarticulate grasp upon the
world.” This is not the self-presence of self-consciousness, nor does it indicate a self-
subsistent presence.
 Notes to Part I, Section VI 333

13. PP 404, PPF 463.

14. EM 163–64, OE 21.
15. Voegelin, Listening, 92.
16. It is necessary to remind the reader that even though this is the primary
source of meaning, it is only inchoate and needs to come to language, as Merleau-Ponty
states next: “Though it is true that all particular knowledge is founded on this primary
view, it is also true that the latter waits to be won back, fixed and made explicit by
perceptual exploration and speech” (PP 404). The world of silence makes itself felt
in its “behavior” or gestures—evoking that vitality which fuels the endless task of
perceiving the world, ourselves, and each other—but awaits expression in language to
become meaningful in a more established sense. This need for language to bring forth
what was inchoate in the first moment of perception will become a pregnant field for
Merleau-Ponty to explore in seeking new ways that language and philosophy can speak
beyond traditional language use. We will see that literary and poetic uses of language
are more open to the lines of force and the sense in the movement and gesture of the
silent world than reflective categorization.

Part I, Section VI
1. From an unpublished note, 1958: “Qu’est-ce que exactement que le je silen-
cieux? L’être parle en nous et percoit en nous—le je perceptive (le je de retention primaire)
comme écart—comme on, anonyme, première du sens—sens de figure-et-fond—schema
corporel d’espace et de temps.” MF 9852, vol. 8, Livre en Projet, 1958–60, Notes de
Travail, 168.
2. I realize there are those who also read Merleau-Ponty’s text more in this
fashion, too, such as one finds in Leonard Lawlor’s understanding of the role of silence
in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Lawlor’s sees silence in Merleau-Ponty as synonymous with
“non-sense” or “absence” of sense or meaning. Lawlor states, “Merleau-Ponty himself
defines this silence as negativity or lack.” Leonard Lawlor, Thinking through French
Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),
33. Certainly, there is some aspect of this sense of absence in Merleau-Ponty’s idea of
silence, as we discussed in the relationship of Merleau-Ponty’s sense of silence to literal
silence or lack of sound and word, but I do not think it exhausts what is most vital
and original in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of silence.
3. Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2001), 4.
4. MacKendrick, 4–5.
5. VI 68, VIF 96–97.
6. IP 39, IPF 76.
7. VI 270, VIF 324.
8. Glen A. Mazis, Earthbodies (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2008), 7–12.
9. An analogy might be drawn to the logic of modern biology. It had once been
thought that cells were entities that comprised our bodily tissues. Yet cells are seen to
334 Notes to Part I, Section VII

be no more than interplays of other structures—whether mitochondria or ribosomes

or lysosomes—that work across difference, just as are bodies communities of difference,
including millions of bacteria that make them function as they do, or tissues, or lower
level structures, where, for example, the messages of sense that travel along nerve axons
depend on the opposition of ions whose interplaying differences of positive or negative
charge create the moving potentials that comprise the messages relayed. Throughout
the modern sciences, in realizing the complexity of phenomena, binary logic has been
replaced by more complex logics, and phenomenology as practiced in the painstaking
way of Merleau-Ponty also employs this more inclusive logic.
10. PP 264, PPF 306.
11. PP 265, PPF 306.
12. IVLS 46, VIVSF 58.
13. VI 264–55, VIF 318.
14. Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2009), 129.
15. VI 179, VIF 233.
16. Emmanuel de Saint Aubert makes the point that Merleau-Ponty’s embodied
perspective rules out a philosophy of “purity.” The encroachment of beings leads to
an “impurity” or ambiguity of sense that is opposed by philosophies of consciousness:
“L’empiétement, l’intrusion ou l’enjambement sont loi de l’action humanine parce que
nous sommes incarnés; à l’inverse, la pureté est le Noli me tangere qui ferait l’impératif
secret des philosophies de la conscience, l’illusion de l’innocence incorruptible de leur
for intérieur.” Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Du liens des êtres aux elements de l’être (Paris:
J. Vrin, 2004), 43–44.
17. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 256.
18. VI 4, VIF 18.
19. VI 126, VIF 167.

Part I, Section VII

1. VI 179, VIF 233.
2. Johnson, Retrieval, 207.
3. Ibid.
4. Saint Aubert, Du liens des êtres, 19.
5. Merleau-Ponty says: “It is indeed a language of this sort that Bergson himself
required for the philosopher” (VI 125, VIF 167).
6. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans.
Mabelle L. Andison (Minneola, NY: Dover, 2007), 35. To quote this example of how
Bergson feels about this issue more fully, it reads: “Therein lies the initial vice of philo-
sophical systems. They think they are telling us something about the absolute by giving
it a name. But once again the word can have little definite meaning when it designates
a thing; it loses that meaning when you apply it to all things. . . . But the more you
increase the extension of the term, the more you diminish comprehension of it.”
7. Bergson, Creative Mind, 29.
 Notes to Part I, Section VIII 335

8. VI 125, VIF 167.

9. VI 149, VIF 195.
10. From the unpublished writings, Cours de jeudi, La problem de la parole,
Collège de France, 1953–54 (MF 9586, vol. 12), p. 122.
11. ILVS 41–42, LIVSF 52.
12. ILVS 75, LIVSF 84.
13. Ibid.
14. David Ferris makes a similar point: “The operation of language described
in these sentences necessitates (il nous \ faut) a self-inflicted muteness as the condi-
tion of its understanding. Only by reducing language to this muteness can language’s
ability to escape from us be countered. . . . Because of this escape there will always
be a silence that language can never give voice to but without which it could never
speak.” “Chiasmatic Differences,” in Écart and Différance, ed. Martin Dillon (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 37–38.
15. VI 236, VIF 289.

Part I, Section VIII

1. From unpublished notes for the course, “The Problem of Speech”: “Les
choses appelerent l’art (la peinture, la language) en tant qu’elles sont deja en situation
allusive, laterale.” Cours de jeudi, La problem de la parole, Collège de France, 1953–54
(MF 9586, vol. 7), 106.
2. IP 124, IPF 167.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press,
1956), 417.
4. VI 147–48, VIF 194.
5. VI 147, 194.
6. TL 14, RCF 25.
7. VI 155, VIF 203.
8. As de Saint Aubert expresses the same point: “Mais l’homme ne peut per-
cevoir et se percevoir qu’en tant qu’il est percu—il connaît et se connaît au contact
de ce qui le reconnaît. Cette perception par co-perception attaint sa plenitude dans le
rapport avec l’autrui: l’être humain éprouve son existence dans l’expérience de son corps
sous la vision et le toucher d’autre. Mais, elle s’étend aussi à toute chose, qui s’animé
à son tour, lui renvoie son regard and son toucher jusqu’à sembler le percevoir.” Saint
Aubert, Du liens des êtres aux elements de l’être, 239. English translation: “However,
man can’t perceive or perceive himself without being perceived. The perception by
co-perception achieves its plenitude in linkage with the other: human being experi-
ences its existence within the vision and touch of the other. However, it extends to all
things, who are animated in their turn, returning its look and touch up to the point
of seeming to perceive it.”
9. Nancy, Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York, Fordham University
Press, 2007), 22.
10. Ibid., 21.
336 Notes to Part I, Section IX

11. VI 155, VIF 203.

12. Louise Westling explores at length how Merleau-Ponty’s ideas dovetail with
those of several natural and ecological sciences to articulate how the human being’s
encounter with the silence of the world’s gestures is part of the larger animal pursuit
of bringing to voice the meaning inherent in the natural world; or as she puts it,
“language is the human voicing of immanent meanings in the world” that draws “on
man-animality intertwining, on the yearning for articulation of every being, and on the
profound synergies that link living creatures together on this planet.” Louise Westling,
The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014), 124.
13. VIF 155, VIF 203–204.
14. David Kleinberg-Levin draws the same conclusion from looking at Merleau-
Ponty’s idea of the silence that undergirds language: “And I can hear within my voice,
the voices of nature—its animals, its birds, its creaking, sighing and whispering trees,
its raging waters descending the mountains, howling winds, thundering clouds.” David
Kleinberg-Levin, Before the Voice of Reason (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2009), 16.
15. VI 155, VIF 203.

Part I, Section IX
1. PRI 153.
2. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume One: The Poems, ed.
by Richard J. Finneran, (New York: Scribner, 1997), 24.
3. CD 18–19, CDF 24.
4. PP 330–31, PPF 381–82.
5. VI 137–38, VIF 181.
6. Johnson, Retrieval, 230.
7. PP 242, PPF 280
8. ILVS 68. LIVS 85.
9. Ibid., 70.
10. EM 190, OE 92–93.
11. This quality of incompleteness or open-endedness in moving among many,
but finding no closure, can be seen as another aspect of a sense of silence: “The para-
digm of painting—or of art in general—is of silence. . . . The term silence indicates
here that the expression will never be complete, will never attain its fullness in the final
pronouncement. This silence of the expression, this basic incompleteness of an expres-
sion, is manifested in the iconicity of the image. The icon is the moving image that
can never be pinned down and is never complete.” Jenny Slatman, “Phenomenology of
the Icon,” Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition,
ed. Bernard Flynn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 213.
12. VI 267, VIF 321.
13. Ibid.
 Notes to Part II, Section I 337

14. Voegelin, Listening, 135.

15. VI 267, VIF 321.

Part II, Section I

1. David Morris, “Faces and the Invisible of the Visible: Toward an Animal
Ontology,” PhaenEx: Journal of Phenomenological and Existential Theory and Culture,
vol. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007), no. 2, 124–69.
2. Morris, “Faces,” 133, 140.
3. A good example of this is from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, where the
face of a house, nestled in the countryside, that formerly might have had a welcoming
expression of a place to rest, now in wartime has the ominous expression of a possible
place where the enemy is surveying the countryside.
4. PP 25, PPF 33.
5. PP 23–24, PPF 32.
6. PP 23, Ibid.
7. PP 52, PPF 64.
8. PP 57, PPF 69.
9. Ibid.
10. WP 69, WP 33.
11. PP 18, PPF 26.
12. PP 19, PPF 27.
13. PP 58, PPF 70–71.
14. PP 11, PPF 18.
15. PP 214, PPF 248.
16. IP 124, IPF 167.
17. PP 23, PPF 32.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid. (my emphasis).
20. The “mental blindness” that Merleau-Ponty finds in objective thought might
well be called an inability to recognize the face or physiognomic being of people, events,
creatures and objects. In other words, in a non-clinical sense, Western philosophy and
culture may suffer from a generalized prosopagnosia.
21. PP 30, PPF 38.
22. Ibid.
23. IP 8–9, IPF 38.
24. PP 132, PPF 154.
25. “We commit what the psychologists call ‘the experience error,’ which means
that we know to be in things themselves, we immediately take to be in our con-
sciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived
things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end up by
understanding neither.” “We commit what the psychologists call ‘the experience error,’
which means that we know to be in things themselves, we immediately take to be in
338 Notes to Part II, Section II

our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since
perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end
up by understanding neither” (PP 5).
26. PP 130, PPF 151–52.
27. Ibid.
28. For example, Schneider fails in potential sexual situations to fathom whether
a woman’s expressions are seductive or if they betray an interest in him or display
excitement, since he cannot experience that “the visible body is subtended by a sche-
ma . . . outlined a sexual physiognomy.” (PP 156, PPF 182).
29. PP 157, PPF 183.
30. Ibid.
31. PP 322, PPF 372.
32. PP 132–33, PPF 154.

Part II, Section II

1. PP 297, PPF 343–44.
2. PP 132, PPF 154.
3. PP 132, PPF 154 (my emphasis).
4. Ibid.
5. PP 132–33, PPF 154.
6. PP 133, PPF 155.
7. BH 101.
8. BH 102.
9. CR 116–117.
10. CR 117.
11. PP 209, PPF 242–43.
12. PP 320, PPF 370.
13. See the chapter on human witnessing as the closest dimension to a human
“essence” that there is. Glen Mazis, Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries
(Albany State University of New York, 2008).
14. IP 165, IPF 217.
15. Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 278.
16. Ibid., 279.
17. Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: An Introduction to a Phenomenology
of Perception. Trans. Paul Milan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 136.
18. Ibid.
19. Johnson, Retrieval, 159.
20. Ibid., 152.
21. Ibid., 157.
22. As Johnson states, it is “an account of aesthetic desire that is not a lack or
a need, a cooler and more positive notion of desire that begins elsewhere than from
negation or possession, and one with a more nuanced account of our relations with
the world and others.” Ibid., 147.
 Notes to Part II, Section III 339

23. TL 129, RCF 178.

24. TL 128, RCF 177.
25. Saint Aubert, Du liens des êtres, 276.
26. Ibid.
27. Saint Aubert, Du liens des êtres, 22.
28. PP 281, PPF 325
29. PP 146, PPF 170.
30. N 218, NF 281.
31. VI 138, VIF 182.
32. VI 135, VIF 178.
33. VI 144, VIF 189.
34. Martin Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), 170.
35. “But this is also an opening of my body to other bodies: just as I touch my
hand touching, I perceive others as perceiving” (N 218).
36. Ibid.
37. N 278, NF 345.

Part II, Section III

1. Cited from Faulkner by Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenom-
enological Ontology. Trans by Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)
405–406.
2. M. C. Dillon, The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity, ed.
Lawrence Hass (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 192.
3. Ibid.
4. Kym Maclaren, “Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Ethics,” Existential Thinkers and
Ethics, ed. Christine Daigle (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2006), 149.
5. Ibid., 150.
6. Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 254.
7. See Earthbodies, 7–12.
8. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 107.
9. Ibid., 106.
10. Ibid., 107.
11. Maclaren,” Embodied Ethics,” 154.
12. Edward Casey uses Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of embodied perception
to show how the glance enters into the depths of the other person’s world, rather than
the “gaze” that has been prioritized by traditional philosophy, as well as by Levinas
according to Casey. He asserts: “The stare—a species of the gaze—reduces the other to
a perceptual particular with no powers of self-transformation. It embodies the spirit of
gravity, which delimits, pins down, and finally bogs down. It fixes on the other just as
he or she is. The glance that acknowledges affirms the other as other, a matter of being
(that is, being a singular member of humanity) and becoming: it alleviates the other’s
340 Notes to Part II, Section IV

self-presentation like a grace note, allowing this other to realize a self-othering that is
curtailed under the regime of the gaze. Supporting the being and the becoming of the
person rather than contributing to his or her static perception, the glance shows itself
to be indispensable in the interaction with others that constitutes the very medium
of the ethical realm.” Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 354.13. Hugh Silverman, “Tracing Responsibility: Levinas
between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy,
vol. 17, no. 1, 91.
14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 191.
15. Ibid., 187–88.
16. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis, (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 91.
17. Thomas Busch, “Ethics and Ontology: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty,” Man
and World, vol. 25, 196–97.
18. Levinas, Otherwise, 35. Also cited by Busch, “Ethics,” 197.
19. Levinas, Totality, 190.
20. Levinas, Otherwise, 88.
21. Ibid., 89.

Part II, Section IV

1. Levinas, Totality, 191.
2. Ibid., 193.
3. Ibid., 196.
4. Levinas, Otherwise, 94.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Brian Schroeder, Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence (Routledge:
New York, 1996), p. 122.
8. Ibid.
9. Levinas, Totality, 197.
10. Schroeder, Altared, 120.
11. Ibid., 200.
12. Ibid., 200–201.
13. Ibid., 202.
14. Levinas, Otherwise, 94.
15. Kleinberg-Levin, Before the Voice, 178.
16. Schroeder, Altared, 120.
17. N 137.
18. Levinas, Otherwise, 94.
19. Levinas, Totality, 203.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
 Notes to Part II, Section V 341

22. Ibid., 205.

23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 207–208.
25. Levinas, Otherwise, 166.
26. Ibid., 131.
27. S 17.
28. Levinas, Otherwise, 166.
29. S 18.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. Ibid.
32. EM 188, OE 87.
33. Levinas, Otherwise, 88.
34. Ibid., 89.
35. Ibid., 82.
36. Ibid., 83.
37. Ibid., 93.
38. Ibid.
39. VI 12. VIF 28–29.
40. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and the Human Emotions (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1957), 24–27.
41. Levinas, Otherwise, 166.
42. Kleinberg-Levin, Before, 195.
43. S 16, SF 24.
44. Ibid., SF 23.
45. “The things are the prolongations of my body and my body is the prolonga-
tion of the world.” VI 255. VIF 308.
46. VIF 26.
47. VI 10, VIF 26.
48. VI 11, VIF 27.
49. Ibid.
50. VI 81, VIF 113.
51. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body,” Interrogating Ethics:
Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. by James Hatley, Janice McLane and Chris-
tian Diehm (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne, 2006), 102.
52. VI 269, VIF 322.
53. VI 263. VIF 317.

Part II, Section V

1. PP 456. PPF 520.
2. ILVS 76, LIVS 95.
3. Ibid., 77, LIVS 96–97.
4. A notable exception to this is the work of Bryan Smyth who examines this
question in his essay, “Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenom-
342 Notes to Part II, Section V

enology,” Continental Philosophy Review (2010), vol. 43, 167–91, and in his book,
Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014). His very different interpretation of the meaning of this passage
and whether it fits with Merleau-Ponty’s perspective and why this is the case will be
discussed shortly. Already, however, it must be noted that Smyth reads these passages as
direct statements that show the character’s sense of the world as well as Saint-Exupéry’s,
and not as the indirect and symbolic communication of a novel.
5. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras. Trans by Lewis Galantiére (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1986), 105–7.
6. FA 105.
7. Ibid., 105–106.
8. Ibid., 106.
9. Ibid., 120.
10. Ibid., 118.
11. Ibid., 116.
12. Ibid., 117.
13. Ibid., 119.
14. Ibid., 118.
15. Ibid., 18.
16. Ibid., 121.
17. Ibid., 127.
18. Ibid., 125.
19. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight. Trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932), 71.
20. Ibid.
21. Saint-Exupéry, Flight to, 120.
22. Bryan Smyth, Merleau-Ponty’s Existential, 141.
23. Ibid., 149.
24. “And without question, Merleau-Ponty meant to imply that what was true
of Saint-Exupéry’s flight in 1940 also applied to his final flight in 1944. Incarnating
pure human productivity and eschewing all circumstantial compromise, Saint-Exupéry
melded with the world, thereby achieving the organically complete agentive integrity
characteristic of absolute knowledge . . . it does not achieve absolute knowing in any
communicable sense, but rather presents for us the phenomenon of absolute knowing,
as it were, that betokens the uncognizable outer limit of cognition.” (Merleau-Ponty’s
Existential, 116).
25. “Concerning the lines from Pilote de guerre that are cited at the end of Phe-
nomenology of Perception, then, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty had no truck with their
actual textual content. Strictly speaking, in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s work, these
lines are non-sense, and they do not properly say anything. But Merleau-Ponty did
want them to do something. That is, he wanted the apogogic invocation of the disin-
carnate ‘noeud de relations’ as intended by Saint Exupéry. . . .” (“Heroism and History,
148).
26. “As a mythic expression of human universality, the notion of the contem-
porary hero can thus be seen as a militant incarnational reinterpretation of “Man” as
 Notes to Part II, Section VI 343

understood and promoted by others (including Saint Exupéry) as a transcendent ideal,

for the sake of which, in their view, heroic deeds are sacrificially enacted. The differ-
ence is crucial. That Merleau-Ponty’s hero is “man” means that the existence of the
individual in question is de-particularized in such a way as to embody this universality
subjectively.” (Merleau-Ponty’s Existential, 141).
27. “Merleau-Ponty’s construal of absolute knowledge as a possible “way of liv-
ing” is his crucial (albeit mythic) gambit. For it supports his postulates of latent human
universality and purposiveness. . . . It amounts to the decision to see heroism as an
extra-historical manifestation of human productivity, and to make this the background
of historical perception, against which vital communication can become at once the
means and end of historical agency.” (“Heroism and History,” 186). The full scope
of Smyth’s arguments in both his essay, “Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s
Existential Phenomenology” and his book, Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology
and the Realization of Philosophy, would take me outside the topics of this book, since
it focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy and his relations to other political
theorists, so I commend the interested reader to those texts.
28. RLL 206 (my translation).
29. MN 28, MNF 36.
30. Ibid.
31. RLL 81 (my translation).
32. MH 185, SF 224.
33. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Responsivity,” 100.
34. VI 12, VIF 29. I refer the reader to my earlier book on Merleau-Ponty whose
theme is that Merleau-Ponty details how we primarily understand the world in embod-
ied affect: Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
35. PP 285, PPF 330.
36. Ibid., 246.
37. These ideas are developed at length in my Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile
Ontology.
38. PP 285, PPF 330.
39. Ibid., 284, F 329.
40. Ibid., 321, F371.

Part II, Section VI

1. From the unpublished notes to The Visible and the Invisible: “L’examen du
quelque chose, de mon rapport silencieux et glissant avec lui, ne peut être entrepris sans
examen des rapports chose-monde . . . et monde-être.” Vol. VII Le visible et l’invisible
MF 9849, p. 139.
2. Levinas, Totality, 212.
3. Another way to think of this conflict of ethical approaches between Levinas
and Merleau-Ponty is to think of Carol Gilligan’s critique of the ethics of “justice” in
her work, In a Different Voice. There she demonstrates how an ethics of “justice” and
its attributes of law, distance, and integrity versus an ethics of “care” that puts the
344 Notes to Part II, Section VI

priority on interrelation, emotional overlap, and long term shared praxis can be seen
to follow from the male psychological developmental patterns in a patriarchal culture
and be part of the defenses that safeguard its construction of masculine self. Gilligan
shows how this has made traditional ethics one-sided and in some sense destructive.
4. Levinas, Totality, 214.
5. S 15, SF 21–22.
6. Ibid., SF 22.
7. Ibid., 17, SF 24.
8. VI 137, VIF 181.
9. Ibid., 48, VIF 73.
10. Ibid., 49, VIF 74.
11. Ibid., 115, VIF 155.
12. “. . . the flesh is the originary unity of the own and the non-own, that is,
a consciousness, which sustains itself only by transgressing its limits, by opening itself
to another.” (Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 30).
13. Rachel McCann, “A Sensuous Ethics of Difference,” Hypatia, vol. 26, no.
3 (Summer, 2011), 497.
14. Ibid., 149.
15. VI 80, VIF 112.
16. Waldenfels, “Responsivity,” 102.
17. Levinas, Totality, 214.
18. Ibid., 39.
19. Busch, “Ethics,” 199.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 115, VIF 154.
22. Ibid.
23. This example refers to the “Min al Bahar” (Arabic for “from the sea”) that
was arranged by Israeli women from 2006–2012 to bring Arab children for a day
to the sea and play with Jewish children (Franziska Kabelitz, Common Ground News
Service, www.commongroundnews.org).
24. Jonathan Bennet, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Vice and Virtue
in Everyday Life, ed. by Sommers and Sommers (New York: Wadsworth, 2013), p. 23.
25. Phillip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper, 1994).
26. FA 142.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 147.
29. Ibid., 148.
30. Ibid., 151.
31. N 271, NF 339.
32. This human-animal interrelatedness is what Donna Haraway has been articu-
lating for decades and this phenomenon is what she calls “companion species.” All
her work is relevant here, but I think the most concise statement of these relations
is The Companion Species Manifesto (Paradigm Press, 2003). There are many other
works that could be mentioned in this regard that amplify Merleau-Ponty’s sense of
interanimality, including David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage,
 Notes to Part II, Section VI 345

1997) and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2011), Louise
Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2013), Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of
Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2009), as well as my own Earthbodies and Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring
Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
33. N 276, NF 346.
34. Derrida’s wonderful reading of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The Snake” is one
of the places where Merleau-Ponty and Derrida meet in their suggesting a reorienta-
tion of the hierarchy putting animals below humans and suggest instead a kinship. See
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign. Trans by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 238–49.
35. Ibid., 334–45.
36. I have explored how Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh parallels in many
ways the Buddhist idea of “emptiness” and how both lead to an ethics of compassion
that has many similarities in the essay, “Flesh of the World Is Emptiness and Empti-
ness is the Flesh of the World, and Their Ethical Implications,” in Merleau-Ponty and
Buddhism, ed. by Jin Y. Park & Gereon Kopf, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
September. 2009), pp. 183–208.
37. Morris, “Faces,” 132.
38. These examples are all from the chapter, “The Moral Sense,” (later revised to
“Evolutionary Ethics” in the second edition) in Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals
(Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007). For other examples, see Marc Bekoff and
Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Life of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009). See also Donald Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
39. Of course, Kant suggests that although there is no direct ethical obligation
toward animals, there is an indirect ethical obligation in that cruelty toward animals
might correlate with cruelty toward other humans, which is to be ethically avoided. This
point of view, however, remains thoroughly human-centered, and as Derrida asserts,
“it is a matter of putting the animal outside the ethical circuit.” (Derrida, The Animal,
106). He says the thinkers such as Descartes and Kant who define soul as reason are
such that “Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanist indifference, to the Judeo-
Christian-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war as old as
Genesis” (101). For a further discussion of this issue, see my essays, “Human Ethics as
Violence towards Animals: The Demonized Wolf,” Spaziofilosofico, vol. 3, pp. 291–304,
and “Animals, before Me, with Whom I Live, by Whom I Am Addressed: Writing
after Derrida,” in Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen D.
Moore, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 17–35.
40. There are also burgeoning examples of interspecies acts of hospitality among
various animals.
41. The topic of what animals apprehend, experience, and share is too large
to take up fully here. It will be the main theme of The Animal I Have Always Been,
which is forthcoming. The topic is also explored partially in my works, Earthbodies
and Humans, Animals, Machines.
346 Notes to Part II, Section VII

42. Aldo Leopold, The Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 239.
43. Ibid., 261.
44. CD 16, DCF 21.
45. VI 40, VIF 63.
46. Ibid., 41, VIF 64.

Part II, Section VII

1. PRI 25–26.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Ibid.
4. This particular aspect of how in carrying forth our endeavors, the adversities
which seem to block these endeavors instead provide us with new avenues of creativity
through spontaneously emerging oblique avenues to proceed is taken up in depth in
Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Man and Adversity,” based on his 1951 Geneva lecture. Signs,
224–246, 284–308F.
5. IP 78, IPF 125.
6. Ibid.
7. PRI 26.
8. Contrast this with David Kleinberg-Levin’s gloss on Levinas’s perspective:
“The moral law remains imperative, commanding respect and obedience, precisely
because its hold on us comes from another temporality.” Kleinberg-Levin, Voice, 235.
9. PRI, 27.
10. Johnson, Retrieval, 101.
11. IVLS 71, LIVS 88.
12. Johnson, Retrieval, 68.
13. PRI 27.
14. ILVS 71, LIVS 88.
15. VI 274. VIF 328.
16. Johnson, Retrieval, 134.
17. Edward S. Casey, “The Ethics of the Face to Face Encounter: Schroeder,
Levinas, and the Glance,” The Pluralist, vol. 1, no. 1, 81.
18. Schroeder, Altared Ground, 97.
19. VI 263, VIF 317.
20. Brian Schroeder, “There’s More than Meets the Eye: A Glance at Casey and
Levinas,” The Pluralist, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2006), 100.
21. Ibid., 101. Obviously, this is not a hearing or a saying of any mundane
type, since it is “before” speech or perception. I refer the reader to the insightful and
detailed description of how one might under this “Saying” in David Kleinberg-Levin’s
last chapters of Before the Voice of Reason.
22. VI 264, VIF 318.
23. “Chiasm, instead of the For the Other,” VI 215, VIF 268.
24. VIF 26.
25. VI 10, VIF 26.
 Notes to Part II, Section VII 347

26. Ibid., 11.

27. Casey, “The Ethics of the Face,” 76.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. Ibid., 80.
30. Ibid., 76.
31. Ibid.
32. Kleinberg-Levin, Before the Voice, 237.
33. Susan Bredlau makes the opposite point also: that for an ethical relationship
to occur, the other person or persons must remain a certain distance in the depths of
the world to allow one the lived space in which to be not intruded upon or violated:
“This depth is the difference between a world that is intrusive and a world that is
respectful, a depth where the near and the far are conceived, not in feet and inches, but
in terms of violation and honor.” Susan Bredlau, “A Respectful World: Merleau-Ponty
and the Experience of Depth,” Human Studies, vol. 33 (2010), 411–23.
34. VI 8, VIF 23.
35. Ibid.
36. A word that will surprise some with its resonances with Levinas, yet it occurs
without a reference to subjection to an Infinite.
37. VI 11, VIF 27.
38. VI 80. VIF 112.
39. Barbaras, Being of, 30.
40. VI 143, VIF 188.
41. VI 138, VIF 182.
42. Ibid.
43. VI 82, VIF 114.
44. VI 221, VIF 274.
45. Ibid., 83.
46. McCann, “Sensuous Ethics,” 500.
47. Helen Fielding, “Multiple Moving Perceptions of the Real: Arendt, Merleau-
Ponty, and Truitt,” Hypatia, vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer, 2011), 520.
48. Ibid., 532.
49. Bettina Bergo, “The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substi-
tution,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 16, no. 1, March 2011,
24–25.
50. Fielding, “Multiple,” 520.
51. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan holds a similar view of Merleau-Ponty’s sense of
alterity and its ethical implications: “It is, then, precisely this irreducible alterity, the
experience of the singular, embodied subject facing the prohibited experience of the
other, which underwrites the ethical commitment. What renders us “wholly impli-
cated,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it (VI 72–73), is the uniqueness and unrepeatability of
our context, our bodily being in time and space, which becomes an ethical imperative
more powerful than any formal categorical and abstract law. It is this embodiment,
which both isolates and connects the subject and the other, which ensures their mutual
decentering and mutual responsibility to and for each other. It is, in other words, this
universal singularity, which turns our solitude into a commonality.”(399) (Daphna
348 Notes to Part III, Section I

Erdinast-Vulcan, “That Which ‘Has No Name in Philosophy:’ ” Merleau-Ponty and

the Language of Literature,” Human Studies (2007) vol. 30, 395–409.

Part III, Section I

1. It is striking that in the last projects of Merleau-Ponty, the imaginal took
a central position in what he wanted to articulate and in how he saw his work pro-
gressing. The opening pages of The Visible and the Invisible claim that this unfinished
work must abandon the old ideas of things as brute, material existents, as in-itself,
and cease thinking of knowing being a matter or representing the world, but instead
find an ontology that does more justice to our experience of the world: “We have to
reformulate the skeptical arguments outside of every ontological preconception and
reformulate them precisely so as to know what world being, thing-being, imaginary–
being, and conscious being are” (VI 6–7, VIF 21). It is not surprising that Merleau-
Ponty considers it imperative that the ontological sense of the world and things must
be reformulated, but equally vital and prominent to those tasks is an ontology of
“imaginary-being.” However, this does follow from Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the
role of the imaginal in terms of the ontology of the flesh he seeks, as he states in the
working note from November 1960 that is the epigraph to this section: “Incompre-
hensible in a philosophy that adds the imaginary to the real,” and is followed by the
further declaration: “understand the imaginary through the imaginary sphere of the
body—and hence not as nihilation that counts as observation but as the true Stiftung
of Being” (VI 262, VIF 316).
2. Of course, for Merleau-Ponty, there are no sensations in the sense of under-
lying discrete inputs, as empiricism construes the basis of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s
first page of the Phenomenology of Perception declares the idea of a sensation is such
“that nothing could be more confused” and then continues in the next paragraph:
“pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated ‘impact,’ instantaneous,
an atom of feeling. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this
notion corresponds to nothing in our experience . . .” (PP 3, PPF 9).
3. Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1976), 15.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. Ibid., 14–19.
6. James Morley, “The Texture of the Real: Merleau-Ponty on Imagination and
Psychopathology,” in Imagination and Its Pathologies, ed. by James Phillips and James
Morley (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003), 93.
7. Annabelle. Dufourcq, “Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire,”
Phaenomenologica 204, 187 [my translation].“La notion d’imaginaire est d’emblée enva-
hissante dans la première philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, mais elle n’est pas thématisée: dans
la Phénoménologie de la perception. Merleau-Ponty emploie abondamment les termes du
registre lexical de l’imaginaire non pour défi nir ce type spécial de représentations et de
comportements que l’on appelle couramment l’imaginaire, mais pour décrire la perception,
le corps propre et le Lebenswelt.”
 Notes to Part III, Section I 349

8. Ibid., “La Phénoménologie de la perception ne circonscrit pas un domaine spécifi

quement imaginaire ni un concept de l’imaginaire.”
9. PRI 40.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 41.
12. PP x, PPF v.
13. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1998) 66.
14. James B. Steeves, Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Imagination
(Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 75.
15. Not in Kant’s sense of the free play of the imagination, which as Coleridge
recognized is akin to the deeper sense of the imaginary, as taking what is perceived
and bringing out its non-discursive grasp on the world in a “conceptless concept.”
16. Samuel Coleridge, Biographia, Literaria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 294.
17. PP 323, PPF 374.
18. As Merleau-Ponty will explore later in his 1954–1955 lecture course, “Insti-
tution and Passivity,” in regard to Proust’s narrator.
19. PP 324. PPF 374.
20. Ibid., 339.
21. PP 35, PPF 44. I want to thank James Steeves for pointing out this remark
in parenthesis that I had not noticed.
22. As Steeves points out, there are also reference to the “free variation” of
imagination in a mode of a deliberate exploration of varying possibilities to arrive at
invariant structures like the use of imagination in the phenomenological reduction.
23. Steeves, Imagining Bodies, 77.
24. Ibid., 78.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. PP 343, PPF 395.
27. Ibid.
28. FA 112.
29. PP 288–289, PPF 334.
30. Casey, Imagining, 34.
31. Ibid., 35–37.
32. Ibid., 55.
33. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), 4.
34. Nancy, The Ground, 22.
35. Ibid., 2.
36. PP 57, PPF 69.
37. Nancy, The Ground, 10.
38. Ibid., 9.
39. PP 53, PPF 65.
40. Nancy, Ground of, 11.
41. Ibid., 6.
350 Notes to Part III, Section I

42. Ibid., 7.
43. Ibid., 13.
44. PP 323, PPF 373.
45. PP 333, PPF 384.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 319, PPF 368.
48. Morley, “The Texture,” 93.
49. Ibid., 97.
50. Nancy, Ground of, 21.
51. Ibid.
52. “The unity of the object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent
order which is about to spring upon us as a reply to questions merely latent in the
landscape. It solves a problem set only in terms of a vague feeling of uneasiness” (PP
17, PPF 25). The foreshadowing Merleau-Ponty mentions is at least partly the prere-
flective imaginal possibilities latent in the percept.
53. PP 135, PPF 157.
54. “The description of movement as a change in location or variation of relations
between a ‘mobile’ and its coordinates is a retrospective schema, an ulterior formulation
of our bodily experience of movement. Once motion is cut off from its perceptual
origins, it defies representations and is self-destructive, as has often been shown since
Zeno. But to give an intelligible account of motion it is enough to go back . . . to
the internal experience of motion, in other words, to our own movement. We have
to understand how the immediate unity of our gesture is able to spread itself over
external experiences and introduce into them the possibility of transition which from
the standpoint of objective thought is unreal “(TL 5, RCF 13).
55. PP, 144, PPF 168–69.
56. Ibid., 146, PPF 171–72.
57. Ibid., 147, PPF 172.
58. Ibid., 146, PPF 171.
59. For Renaud Barbaras, the motor meaning Merleau-Ponty has uncovered
in the Phenomenology of Perception is the founding of the distance and unity of what
much later Merleau-Ponty will see as the intertwining of the visible and the invisible.
See Renaud Barbaras, “Motricité et phenomenalité chez le dernier Merleau-Ponty,”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: La Nature ou le monde du silence, ed. Emmanuel de Saint
Aubert (Paris: Heremann Editeurs, 2008), 203. Barbaras concludes at the end of his
essay, “It is indeed motricity the founds the unity in difference of the visible and the
invisible, a unity that alone permits the articulation of the speaking of perception and
seems to be, in doing this, the key to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology” (215) [my translation].
60. PP 210, PPF 243–44.
61. Ibid., 211, PPF 244.
62. Color is one very straightforward and simple example of the kind of solicita-
tion and embrace involved in perceiving anything. This matrix of varied senses evoked
by each object’s qualities or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, the dimensionality of possible
experiences set up by a percept are what Merleau-Ponty calls its “motor physiognomy.”
They are felt meanings, ways our embodying being has of joining up with the encoun-
 Notes to Part III, Section II 351

tered field of sense, and they are not reducible to determinate physicalistic properties
and are “not in the physicist’s world” (PP 210, PPF 243). For Merleau-Ponty, the
process or response to the face of things is not causal, but rather is how perception
enters into communion as he puts it in on the next page: “the sensible not only has
not only a motor and vital significance, but is nothing other than a certain way of
being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, seized and acted upon
by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a
form of communion” (PP 212, PPF 246). We could see this as the properties not of
the physicist world because they are imaginal and they render us intimate with the
presence of a being.
63. PP145, PPF 170.
64. Ibid., 145–46, PPF 170.
65. Ibid., 284, PPF 328.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 285, PPF 329.
68. Ibid., 289, PPF 334.
69. Edward S. Casey, Spirit and Soul: Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Dallas:
Spring Publications, 1991), 71. We will pursue the parallel with Bachelard’s ideas about
imagining later in this part of the book.

Part III, Section II

1. PP 284, PPF 328.
2. PP 285, PPF 330.
3. PP 56–57, PPF 69.
4. PP 285, PPF 330.
5. PP 290, PPF 335. “In order to realize what is the meaning of mythical or
schizophrenic space, we have no means other than that of resuscitating in ourselves, in
our present perception, the relationship of the subject and his world which analytical
reflection does away with. We must recognize as anterior to ‘sense-giving acts’ (Bedeu-
tungsgebende) of theoretical and positing thought ‘expressive experiences’ (Ausdruckerleb-
nisse)” (P 291). The mythic and even the schizophrenic sense of the world is a layer of
each person’s enmeshment with the silent and physiognomic exchange with the world
before explicit meaning is born that we can potentially resuscitate in expression, except
that the reflective and analytical stance of our culture mitigates against this retrieval.
6. Ibid., PPF 336.
7. Ibid.
8. PP 287, PPF 332.
9. PP 291, PPF 337.
10. PP 287, PPF 332.
11. Yet, Merleau-Ponty says this proximity can be rediscovered philosophically.
We will explore this possibility later in the chapter.
12. “A schizophrenic feels that a brush placed near the window is coming nearer
and nearer to him and entering his head, and yet he never ceases to be aware that the
352 Notes to Part III, Section II

brush is over there. If he looks toward the window, he still perceives it. The brush, as
an identifiable term in an explicit perception, is not in the patient’s head as a material
mass. But the patient’s head is for him not that object which everyone can see, and
which he himself sees in a mirror: it is the listening and observing post which he feels
at the top of his body, that power of joining up with all objects through sight and
hearing. In the same way the brush which presents itself to the senses is merely an
envelope or a phantom. The true brush, the stiff, prickly entity which is incarnated in
these appearances, is concentrated in the gaze. It has moved from the window, leav-
ing there only its lifeless shell. No appeal to explicit perception can arouse the patient
from this dream, since he has no quarrel with explicit perception, and holds only that
proves nothing against what he experiences” (PP 290–291, PPF 336).
13. PP 294, PPF 340.
14. PP 292, PPF 338.
15. “Primitive man lives his myths against a sufficiently articulate perceptual
background for the activities of daily life, fishing, hunting, and dealings with civilized
people, to be possible. The myth itself, however diffuse, has an identifiable significance
for primitive man, simply because it does form a world, that is, a whole in which each
elements has meaningful relations with the rest.” (Ibid.).
16. PP 293, PPF 339.
17. WP, 51, C 19.
18. WP 60, C26.
19. Sartre’s last section in Being and Nothingness within “Doing and Having” that
he calls an “existential psychoanalysis in interesting in this regard, for here is a place
that rather than dwelling on the imaginal as unreal and non-being, Sartre is describing
how there are imaginal or symbolic depths to what we perceive, given our particular
situation and choice of a “project to be.”
20. WP 63, C 29.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 65, C 30.
23. Section V.
24. WP 70, C 33–34.
25. Ibid., 74, C 39.
26. Ibid., 76, C 40.
27. Ibid., 93, C 53.
28. Ibid., 96, C 56.
29. Ibid., 98–99, C 58.
30. Ibid., 99, C 59.
31. Ibid., 99–100, C 59.
32. Ibid., 100–101, C 61.
33. SNS, 57, SNSF 74.
34. In Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology, I provide an exhaustive analy-
sis of how emotion as a moving out in to the world and sensitively registering how
it stands with our relationship to all parts of the word is an inseparable dimension of
 Notes to Part III, Section II 353

all perception according to Merleau-Ponty’s analyses. There is no need to repeat these

descriptions here, but rather I refer the reader to that book. It is a parallel description
to how the imaginal is also inseparable from perception.
35. SNS 52–53, SNSF 67.
36. Ibid., 58, SNSF 73–74.
37. Ibid., 57, SNSF 73.
38. Ibid., 58, SNSF 73.
39. Ibid., 57, SNSF 73.
40. WP 83–84, C 45–46.
41. CPP 176, PPEF 225.
42. Ibid., 177, PPEF 225.
43. Ibid., 178, PPEF 227.
44. Ibid., 180–81, PPEF 229.
45. Actually, interestingly enough, it has not been noticed by commentators
that in the last few pages of Sartre’s The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, Sartre himself
proposes another idea of the emotions as apprehending the world in a unique way.
See my essay, “A New Approach to Sartre’s Theory of Emotions: Towards a Phenom-
enology of Emotions,” Philosophy Today, vol. xxvii, 3 (1983), pp. 183–200. One of
the few other readers who also notes this difference in the last pages of the book is
Merleau-Ponty, who says, “In the course of his study Sartre revises his conceptions”
(CPP 181, PPEF 230). He notes that in the last part of the book, a new mythic and
oneiric order of the imaginal emerges.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 182, PPEF 230.
48. Ibid., PPEF 231.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 448–449, PPEF 557.
51. Ibid., 449, PPEF 557.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 454, PPEF 564.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 454–55, PPEF 564.
56. Dufourq, Ontologie de l’imaginaire, 291 (my translation). “Le réel, le monde,
les autres et la source inépuisable du sens sont toujours « présents » jusque dans
l’imaginaire qui semble pourtant s’éloigner tout particulièrement d’eux.”
57. PP 331, PPF 382.
58. This lining of the imaginal is also a key to a temporal depth that Merleau-
Ponty is discussing in this passage and to which we will return in the last sections of
this book.
59. CPP 455, PPEF 564.
60. Ibid.
61. Dufourcq, Ontologie de l’imaginaire, 275 (my translation).
62. CPP 456, PPEF 566.
354 Notes to Part III, Section III

63. “There is already a kind of presence of the other in me” (Ibid., 456).
64. “Mental images push the real into the background and allow us to engage
in fanciful ways of relating to objects and emotions.” Steeves, Imagining Bodies, 88.
65. Ibid.
66. The latter case is usually at a psychic distance that Sartre rightly identifies
as an attempt to possess these qualities through the possession of the other.
67. FA 151.

Part III, Section III

1. IP 5–6, IPF 34.
2. Ibid., 7, IPF 36.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 13, IPF 44.
5. Ibid., 25, IPF 60.
6. Dufourcq, Ontologie de l’imaginaire, 377 (my translation). “La théorie mer-
leau-pontyenne de l’institution permet d’échapper à cette dérive: que tout soit image
signifie fondamentalement que tout est symbole, sens voilé non suffisant mais appelant
à être davantage révélé. Certes, l’on ne peut chercher ce sens que dans de nouvelles
images, mais, d’une part, chaque nouvelle image doit être saisie comme approfondisse-
ment des précédentes, c’est la quête initiée par une image que je poursuis dans les autres.”
7. IP 13, IPF 45.
8. Ibid.
9. Dufourcq, Ontologie de l’imaginaire, 337 (my translation).
10. IP 78, IPF 125.
11. IP 119, IPF 160.
12. IP 121, IPF 163.
13. IP 133, IPF 179.
14. IP 147, IPF 194.
15. Ibid.
16. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 124.
17. Ibid.
18. IP 147–48, IPF 195–96.
19. IP 152, IPF 201.
20. Ibid.
21. IP 130, IPF 175.
22. IP 157, IPF 208.
23. James B. Steeves, “The Virtual Body: Merleau-Ponty’s Early Philosophy of
Imagination,” Philosophy Today, vol. 44 (Winter 2001), #4, pp. 377.
24. “The imagination is a central theme in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. It is
by means of the imagination that we are able to free ourselves from ordinary experi-
ence and explore a world of possibility. The artist creates new structures and symbols
that allow the audience to see reality in a new way. Likewise the phenomenal body
develops habits of motility and perception into new structures that endow our world
 Notes to Part III, Section III 355

with a dimension of possibility. From the most mundane experience to most sub-
lime aesthetic creation, the body is at work in transforming ordinary experience into
a world of human freedom and personal expression” (Steeves, “The Virtual Body,
370).
25. WP 65, 30–31.
26. For a more detailed exploration of this connection, see especially in Emman-
uel de Saint Aubert, the section on the influence of the surrealism of André Breton
(pp. 225–233), and the following section on the influence of Paul Claudel in the idea
of “co-knowing” (“co-naissance”), which in French has the sense of both knowing and
“co-birthing.” See also (pp. 234–55). Du lien des êtres aux elements de l’être: Merleau-
Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951 (Paris; Vrin, 2006).
27. WP 61–65, C 27–30.
28. James Steeves makes the insightful point that implied in Merleau-Ponty’s
description of perception is the necessary exploration of the imaginal lining of each
percept (which he calls its virtual aspect) is also a continual references to possible bodily
movements to other vantages: “The virtuality of perception also resembles the virtual-
ity of the body, because the virtual qualities implied by the quality in the foreground
are also modes of virtual embodiment. To grasp the entire structure of the perceptual
object, the perceiver must engage with the virtual modes of embodiment implied (378)
by each quality of the perceptual background” (Steeves, “The Virtual Body,” 377–78).
29. IP 165, IPF 217.
30. Ibid.
31. Both in this lecture and in the later essay, “Eye and Mind.”
32. Ibid.
33. Steeves, “The Virtual Body,” 377.
34. IP 195, IPF 254–55.
35. “Just as, for Merleau-Ponty, Proust’s musical idea discloses the membrane
between the ideal and the sensible” (Wiskus, Rhythm of Thought, 96).
36. Ibid.
37. VI 247, VIF 300.
38. Johnson, Retrieval, 163.
39. VI 149, VIF 195.
40. Ibid., VIF 195–96.
41. Wiskus, Rhythm of Thought, 94.
42. Ibid., 93.
43. VI 151, VIF 199.
44. Ibid., 149, VIF 196.
45. Ibid., 150, VIF 197.
46. Ibid.
47. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Inte-
riority, trans Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 2011),
19. Bachelard also comments on Sartre’s discussion of this image in Situations 1, but
is at odds with Sartre’s idea of imagination as “invention” versus exploring the depths
of what is given by the world in perception. See the next section for a full discussion.
48. Ibid.
356 Notes to Part III, Section III

49. Rajiv Kaushik, Art and Institution: Aesthetics in the Late Works of Merleau-
Ponty (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 107–108.
50. VI 243, VIF 296.
51. VI 267, VIF 321.
52. Ibid. Also: “the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, and bound
synthetically to . . . other moments of time and past, but has them really behind itself
in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side ‘in’ time.”
53. Ibid., 243.
54. Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief
(New York: Modern Library, 2003) 193.
55. In Patricia Locke’s essay, “Among the Hawthorns: Marcel Proust and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty,” she makes the point that the openness to natural forms and their
depths leads the narrator to an openness to the depth of art and the imaginal: “This
motif, one among many references to flora, shows the young narrator’s sensitivity to
beauty. His vague appreciation of the natural world develops into sensitivity for art
as a locus of truth. Merleau-Ponty argues, ‘Perception as an encounter with natural
things’ is ‘as the archetype of the originating encounter, imitated and renewed in the
encounter with the past, the imaginary, the idea’ (VI 158).” Locke points out the
encounter with the hawthorns is the beginning of a long journey for the narrator that
“is a necessary prerequisite for time regained, reformed with the incorporation of the
imaginary and of memory.” Patricia Locke, “Among the Hawthorns,” ed. by Gail Weiss,
Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2008), 99.
56. In the 1957–58 lecture course, “The Concept of Nature,” in the section,
“Animality: The Study of Animal Behavior,” in discussing the oneiric relation between
the animal and world (a topic we will discuss later), Merleau-Ponty gives several descrip-
tion of what is meant by the oneiric or what gives dreams their distinctive texture. He
says, the world when it appears not as part of goal orientation, but “as a theme that
haunt consciousness” then it is like the nature of the dream where “the orientation
of the oneiric consciousness toward certain poles that are never seen for themselves,
but which are, however directly the cause of all the elements of the dream.” He con-
tinues a few pages later that this oneiric sense is such that the object is wanted and
not wanted simultaneously, because it is “a tension that wants to find relief without
knowing why, it does no aim so much at the real as at the irreal.” The poles of the
dream as invisibles of the visible that are indeterminate and toward which one moves
without knowing exactly how or why. This movement is “oriented towards the image
or the typical.” It is the qualities themselves that become what haunts us and grabs us
in the oneiric (N 179, 193).
57. IP 210, IPF 271.
58. Proust, Swann’s Way, 188.
59. Ibid., 190.
60. Ibid., 188.
61. VI 152–53, VIF 200.
62. Proust, Swann’s Way, 189.
63. Ibid.
 Notes to Part III, Section IV 357

64. Emmanuel Alloa, “The Theater of the Virtual: Staging Potentialities with
Merleau-Ponty,” in Encounters between Performance and Philosophy, eds. Alice Lagaay
& Laura Cull, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210.
65. Ibid.

Part III, Section IV

1. de Saint Aubert, “Du liens des êtres,” 259, quotation is from BBN DESC
[120] (15). The quotation in French reads: “Toute ontologie est un type d’imagination,
toute imagination est une ontologie. Il y a une imagination qui n’est nullement néantisation
(position d’un irréal comme irréal)—qui est cristalisation de l’être.”
2. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 123.
3. PP 60, PPF 74.
4. Ibid., 61, PPF 74.
5. Ibid.
6. that is a “birthing” through each other as both are transformed.
7. HLP 6.
8. PP 387, PPF 443.
9. PP 144, PPF 168.
10. VI 271, VIF 325.
11. VI 178, VIF 232.
12. VI 225, VIF 279.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 226.
15. EM 177, OE 57.
16. Indeed, in the 1947 essay, “The Metaphysical in Man,” Merleau-Ponty had
written, “There can be no rivalry between scientific knowledge and the metaphysi-
cal knowing which continually confronts the former with its task. A science without
philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without
methodical exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths,
which is to say, errors” (SNS 97, SNSF 119).
17. EM 162, OE 16.
18. EM 167, OE 31.
19. EM 163, OE 19.
20. BNF Vol. VII Le visible et l’invisible MF 9849, 127. “Implication reciproque
de la chose dans mon corps et de mon corps dans la chose: montrer que tout cela
revient à reconnaître la chair.”
21. Ibid.
22. EM 164, OE 23.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 165, OE 24.
25. Ibid., 163, OE 19.
26. Ibid., 163, OE 21.
27. Ibid., 188, OE.
358 Notes to Part III, Section IV

28. Ibid., 164, OE 22.

29. “The painter’s vision is a continued birth” (Ibid., 168, OE).
30. Ibid., 169, OE 35.
31. “. . . all the objects of his quest . . . are not seen by everyone” (EM 166,
OE 29).
32. EM 172, OE 43.
33. EM 178, OE 59.
34. EM 174, OE 48.
35. EM 175, OE 52.
36. PP 393, PPF 450.
37. EM 167, OE 31.
38. Ibid.
39. EM 168, OE 32.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 181, OE 69.
42. Ibid., 180, OE 65.
43. Ibid., 184, OE 77.
44. Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 236.
45. PP 389, PPF 446.
46. de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 236, 240.
47. It is interesting that in a later unpublished note that is labeled as an idea
for courses, Merleau-Ponty writes “Husserl’s intersubjectivity means we are “co-born”
(“co-nè”).” pp. 118–19, BNF Volume VI “Projets de Livres, 1958–1960” MF 9587.
48. Paul Claudel, Poetic Art. Trans. Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1948), 29.
49. “That which things have in common is movement. Wherever there is variety
in existence there is movement. . . . All things know each other, by being either adjoin-
ing or complementary. Each movement, when reaching its end, results in the creation
of equilibrium or form. . . . Vibration is movement, prisoner of form.” (Ibid., 39).
50. “Nothing is complete in itself; all is drawn from within itself, from the
outside by the vacuum, delineated by its absent form, as each trait is determined by
the others” (Ibid., 47).
51. “Consequently, two common states of matter, depending on its establishing
or maintaining the equilibrium; efference and vibration. The first, according to the
point of view, corresponds quite well to the words standing in our mind for conception
and imagination. . . . Vibration is movement held in check by form. The vibration is
expressed, according to environment, in a certain order, which is upset by any outside
contact or shock: this is first stage of sensibility.” (Ibid., 49–50).
52. Ibid., 61.
53. de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 241.
54. EM 182, OE 71.
55. EM 186, OE 81.
56. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 125.
57. Ibid., 187.
58. Proust, Swann’s Way, 555.
 Notes to Part III, Section V 359

59. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 123.

60. VI 262, VIF 316.
61. Saint Aubert, “Du liens des êtres,” 259, quotation is from BBN DESC [120]
(15). The quotation in French reads: “Toute ontologie est un type d’imagination, toute
imagination est une ontologie. Il y a une imagination qui n’est nullement néantisation
(position d’un irréal comme irréal)—qui est cristalisation de l’être.”
62. Ibid.

Part III, Section V

1. VI 245, VIF 298.
2. Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 255.
3. CPP 420, PPEF 521.
4. Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 258.
5. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter.
Trans. Edith Farrell, (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 1.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 2.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, trans by Daniel Russell (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971), 20.
10. “This state of indistinction from others, this mutual impingement of the
other and myself at the heart of the situation in which we are confused, this pres-
ence of the same subject in several roles—all are met with again in adult life” (PRI
153–54), and “The state of union with another, the dispossession of me by the other,
are this not suppressed by the child’s arrival at the age of three years. They remain in
other zones of adult life. . . . Transitivism, which has been surpassed in the realm of
immediate daily life, is never surpassed in the realm of feeling” (PRI 155).
11. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 9.
12. Ibid.
13. Lecture Three, WP 59–66, C 25–31. The analyses of honey, lemon, water
and the rock garden are strikingly parallel to the kind of analyses that run throughout
Bachelard’s texts, and so acknowledged by Merleau-Ponty.
14. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 14.
15. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement.
Trans. Edith and Frederick Farrell (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 2002), 7.
16. L’eau et rêves (Paris: José Corti, 1989), 30.
17. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 20.
18. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 3.
19. Ibid., 10–12.
20. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 16.
21. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 5. He calls following the normal path of reverie,
“a downhill path” at odds with doing phenomenology.
22. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 6.
360 Notes to Part III, Section V

23. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 7.

24. Ibid., 28.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 29.
27. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 103.
28. Ibid., 121.
29. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 28.
30. Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 5.
31. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 31.
32. Ibid., 193. “Water also has indirect voices. Nature resounds with ontologi-
cal echoes.”
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Merleau-Ponty’s account of reversibility stresses that it takes time to accom-
plish, like the gradual “blurring” of the touching-touched between ones hands. See
my extended discussion in “Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time: The
Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Reversibility,” in Merleau-Ponty,
Hermeneutics and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch & Shaun Gallagher (Albany, SUNY
Press, 1992), 52–68.
35. CD 17, DCF 22–23.
36. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 31.
37. WP 65. C 30.
38. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 5.
39. Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres, 267.
40. This phrase is the title of a chapter in Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace of
1957, which Saint Aubert believes caught Merleau-Ponty’s attention (Ibid.).
41. Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 7.
42. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 11.
43. Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 8–9, 20–22.
44. AD 7.
45. Saint Aubert cites four unpublished notes that demonstrate Merleau-Ponty’s
being struck with Bachelard’s sense of the elements during this time period: 1) “Bach-
elard Fire-Water-Air-Earth” (Notes sur la vie, B.N., vol. XVII [144] 1958 or 1959), 2)
“The ‘elements’ (Bachelard) = milieu of Being, engulfing” (Être et Monde, B.N. vol.
VI., 199, 1959, 3)”There are other things hidden in all things, there is an imagina-
tions of elements, there is an oneiric perception, Bachelard” (Notes de travail, B.N.
vol. VIII., 239, inédites, probably December 1959, 4) “Elements in the sense of Bach-
elard . . . this idea of ‘elements,’—not only the elements of Nature, but the elements
of our life” (Notes de travail, B.N. vol. VIII., 239, inédites, Notes de travail, B.N. vol.
VIII., 301, inédites, December 1959) (my translation of the notes).
46. VI 139, VIF 184.
47. VI 267, VIF 320.
48. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 193.
49. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 174.
50. Ibid., 111.
51. Ibid.
 Notes to Part III, Section VI 361

52. For a discussion of “fragile ontology, see pages 317–328 of my Emotion and
Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
53. EM 164, OE 23.
54. For a discussion for the nature and importance of nuance, see pages 206–17
in Emotion and Embodiment.
55. VI 40, VIF 63.
56. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 120.
57. Ibid., 174–75.
58. PP 212, PPF 246.
59. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 166.
60. ILVS 52, LIVS 66.
61. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 166.
62. Ibid., 200. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty states, “Quality, light, color,
depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our
body and our body welcomes them. Things have an internal equivalent in me.” (EM
164, OE 22).
63. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969), p. xviii.
64. Ibid., xxiv.
65. Ibid., xii.
66. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 166.
67. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 214.
68. Ibid., 215
69. Ibid., 167.
70. PP 23, PPF 32.
71. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 16.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 217.
74. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 12.

Part III, Section VI

1. EM 180, OE 86.
2. Wiskus, Rhythm of Thought, 7.
3. TL 15.
4. Another way to express the problem of how the primordial contact of per-
ception can be best expressed through language is to consider the way that everyday
language use (le langage parlé) relies upon circulating the already realized products of
reflection. Jessica Wiskus points out how Merleau-Ponty describes how “. . . reflection
is incapable of opening upon the world at the level of brute perception.” Reflection
takes the initial primordial perceptual contact with the world and construes the experi-
ence according to categorical thought and then attributing these properties to it, as we
discussed in describing the “experience error”: “It constructs a sustained sense of the
thing by retroactively identifying the reflection with the initial perception.” If everyday
362 Notes to Part III, Section VI

language is a product of this reflective process, it sacrifices its openness to our primordial
experience (Rhythm of Thought, 5). Wiskus then points to this passage in The Visible and
the Invisible: “But it is just as sure that the relation between a thought and its object,
between the cogito and the cogitatum, contains neither the whole nor even the essential
of our commerce with the world and we have to situate that relation back within a
more muted relationship with the world, within a initiation into the world upon which
it rests and which is already accomplished when the reflective return intervenes. Wed
will miss that relationship—which we shall here call the openness upon the world
(ouverture au monde)—the moment the reflective effort tries to capture it, and we will
be then be able to catch sight of the reasons that prevent it from succeeding, and of
the way through which we would reach it” (VI 35–36, VIF 57).
5. PW 10, PWF 17 (my translation). The first half was written in 1951.
6. As Martin Dillon points out this distinction parallels Saussure’s distinction
between “langue” (the established language and “parole” (“speaking”) and perhaps even
more so between Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic, everyday
speech: “Heidegger is no doubt correct in contending that the discourse in which most
of us spend our time is idle chatter (Gerede): and there is little doubt as well that
Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between originating or creative expression and institutional-
ized language owes much (or more) to Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and
inauthentic speech as it does to Saussure’s distinction between la parole and la langue,”
(Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 190).
7. PW 11, PMF 18.
8. Ibid., 12, PMF 19.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. IP 10–11, IPF 40–41.
11. Ibid., 11, IPF 41.
12. IVLS 43, LIVS 54.
13. See Wiskus for a discussion of Mallarmé’s passage that Merleau-Ponty is citing
(The Rhythm of Thought, 7–9). The key point is that the sense to be brought forth is
like the quality which arises from the flowers of the bouquet, which is latent and not
a graspable property. Here, it is the quality is “mellowness,” and not the love hidden
within the bouquet that Merleau-Ponty discusses in the Phenomenology in regard to the
flowers given by Félix de Vandenesse to Madame de Morsauf in Balzac’s The Human
Comedy (PP 321, PPF 371). The point is similar.
14. ILVS 43, LIVS 56.
15. ILVS 44, SF 56.
16. ILVS 79, LIVS 99.
17. Ibid., 78.
18. VI 126, VIF 168.
19. ILVS 42, LIVS 53.
20. RLL, 128 (“Le poète est comparable à l’homme quand il a créé langage”).
21. RLL 213 (“La vérité est poésie mias parce que la poésie est vérité”).
22. Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani-
ties Press, 1991), 127.
23. ILVS 44, LIVS 56.
24. ILVS 51, LIVS 64.
 Notes to Part III, Section VI 363

25. VI 185, VIF 239.

26. Ibid.
27. IVLS 52, LIVS 65.
28. ILVS 43, LIVS 54.
29. WP 100, C 59.
30. Martin Harrison, an accomplished poet as well as philosopher, felt that
Merleau-Ponty had captured the sense that through poetry, language becomes a mobile
being that inhabits from all points and expresses that multiplicity. He stressed how
poetry expresses the gaps and blurs: “When we try to more full and coherent account
of sensory experience, including hearing, touch, fragrance, movement, and so on, it
becomes clear we must add in the memories of our perceptions, as well as the gaps
and blurs in them.” Martin Harrison, “Face to Face: Poetry and Place,” Cultural Studies
Review; Mar 2006; vol. 12, no. 1, 88.
31. ILVS 46, LIVS 58.
32. Ibid., 45, LIVS 56.
33. Proust, Swann’s Way, 115.
34. Ibid., 130.
35. CD 11, DCF 16.
36. ILVS 76, LIVS 95.
37. Ibid.
38. Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 187.
39. Locke, “Among the Hawthorns,” 105.
40. See my essay, “Touch and Vision: Rethinking with Merleau-Ponty Sartre on
the Caress.” Philosophy Today, vol. xxiii, 4 (1979), 142–53. There I quote Merleau-
Ponty’s icon of reversibility, hands touching, and interpret: “ ‘my hand which is felt
from within, is itself also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand,
for example, if it takes its place among the things that it touches, and is in a sense
one of them, opens up finally a tangible being of which it is a part. Through this
crisscrossing within it, of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorpo-
rate themselves into the universe they interrogate . . . and finally a veritable touching
of the touch . . . descends into things, such that touch is formed in the midst of the
world’ (VI 133–34, VIF 176). In touch the distinction between touching subject and
touched object blurs. Rather than a confrontation and an appropriation, there is a
permeability of boundaries, and an opening up of interpenetration, of communion.
This is the distinguishing possibility of touch, and like all possibilities can be achieved
to a greater or lesser degree, and is never realized in an absolute sense, which would
be a permanent, perfect reciprocity” (148).
41. PP 187, PPF 218.
42. RLL 94.
43. Wiskus, 9–10.
44. Proust, Swann’s Way, 116.
45. Harrison, “Face to Face, Poetry and Place,” 87. Wiskus also says, “Thus space,
too, can be rhythmical, and Mallarmé’s extension of space as silence holds particular
significance for Merleau-Ponty . . . and stands as an entire field to which the poet
turns his or her work” (Wiskus, Rhythm of Thought, 11).
46. PP 23–24, PPF 31–32.
364 Notes to Part III, Section VI

47. PW 63, PMF 89.

48. Ibid., 63–64, PMF 89.
49. EM 164–65, OE 24.
50. ILVS 78, LIVS 97.
51. PW 64, PMF 90.
52. Ibid., PMF 90–91.
53. Ibid., 76–77, PMF 108.
54. Ibid., 109, PMF 155.
55. Ibid.
56. TL 25, RCF 40.
57. IP 156, IPF 206.
58. In an article in Le Monde in October, 2014, Emmanuel Alloa cites refer-
ences by both Simone de Beauvoir in her diary and in a letter of Elisabeth Lacoin
that they have read their friend’s—Merleau-Ponty’s—pseudonymous novel (Nord: Récit
de l’artique [Paris: Grasset, 1928]). The supposed author was named Jacques Heller.
Alloa gives several reasons why the subject matter, locales, and subject matter might
point to Merleau-Ponty’s authorship, but also reports that Merleau-Ponty never admit-
ted this, nor did his daughter, nor were there any indications of it found among
his papers. Alloa makes the argument, however, that keeping this secret would be
plausible, since Merleau-Ponty made several statements expressing his opinion that
it was not possible to be both a literary writer and a philosopher. Yet, as will dis-
cuss at the end of this chapter, Merleau-Ponty is one of the most literary or poetic
philosophers ever to write in the Western philosophical tradition. Did he keep his
literary talent reserved for his increasingly poetic writing in philosophy? (Alloa, Le
Monde, 10/23/2014, also available at https://www.academia. edu/9041201/Un_roman_
de_jeunesse_de_Merleau-Ponty_Nord_r%C3%A9cit_de_lArctique_1928).
59. In a passage we already cited.
60. VI 125, VIF 167.
61. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and
Feeling,” Critical Inquiry, 1978.
62. Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 197.
63. Ibid.
64. IP 135, IPF 180–81.
65. VI 263, VIF 317.
66. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, 144.
67. Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 194.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 195.
70. Saint Aubert, Vers une ontologie indirecte, 59. [“Ainsi, dansle monde de la
chair, les metaphors sont moins metaphors que ‘transsubstantiation’ . . .].
71. “It follows from this that in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, poetry, as the work of
metaphor has an ontological meaning comparable to that of painting; it leads back to
the originary experience in opposition to the objective cutting up of the world issuing
from instituted language. The poetic work tries to attain within language, that which
 Notes to Part III, Section VI 365

exceeds and precedes its objectifying power and tries to grasp its point of insertion
into the silent universe” (Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 196).
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Yet, to really fathom how this world of silence speaks and how poetry by
gesturing toward it and using cadence, rhythms, rhyme, assonance, dissonance, and so
on allows us “to enter into things,” we need to remember the earlier point we visited
in the first section about physiognomies that there is a “movement by vibration,” and a
movement among the devices of the creative use of language which is a kind of virtual
gesture. One may take gesture as a pointing toward a silent meaning in the qualities of
things, but there is also within perception another link to be made between movement
itself and meaning or sense. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty had already elaborated
upon another kind of meaning that he called “motor meaning” as a “gearing into” the
demands of the situation. Yet, we also saw how Merleau-Ponty broadens the sense of
the meaningfulness inherent in gesture to consider movement as we perceive it within
the world, such as in his example of the falling of sleet. Yet, what Merleau-Ponty is
claiming is not that the inanimate world has something analogous to the intention of
humans who express themselves in gestures, but rather that movement itself has to be
understood in another way than the tradition’s reductive concept of movement: “The
possibility: the expression of movement which is not an imitation or a reproduction,
for example, in immobile art (painting): there is given to the eyes a trace, a text to
read, and taken in by my exploratory motor-being, which it wishes to say: move-
ment . . . to root a perceptual thinking in the mobile subject. Representative thought
is later built upon this as a higher order, but to understand that underlying this; there
is the perception of movement because there is between myself (my body, my field)
and the spectacle an expressive link (MSME 125). The movements of animate beings
are easily read for their sense—the rush, the vehemence, the hesitation, the fear of
certain ways of moving the body—but we just as often we read inanimate beings, like
the tide is violent or gentle, the breeze is caressing and sweet, the softly falling snow
is gentle and calm or the howling wind is vicious. The traditional ethnocentric view
says we are the makers of all meaning—human consciousness is the sole source—and
in saying things of this sort we are projecting our own experience onto these beings.
Yet, it is just as plausible that we understand ourselves by taking in the sense that the
world expresses. Even more plausible is that there is a circulation of sense between per-
ceiver and perceived where both are expressive. Merleau-Ponty’s description of perceived
movement oppose this tradition: “Movement and sense are inseparable, synonymous;
not only does a certain meaning retain a certain tempo. Change of meaning happens
with the change of the cadence of movement, accelerating or slowing down” (MSME
116). Movement is inseparable from meaning and its varieties in tempo or cadence
change its meaning—an inexorable but slow movement of something with a certain
conveyed sense will alter with a burst of speed. So, Merleau-Ponty gives the examples
that if we were to accelerate the tempo of the movements of plants they would seem to
be more like animals (MSME 116). In the world of silence that the poet and literary
writer brings to language in order to “remake his language with this language” (PW
366 Notes to Part III, Section VII

110, PMF 155), the movement within the context has a sense to be expressed. Unlike
the taking of objects out of context and the way they show themselves in particular
circumstance in everyday or scientific discourse, Merleau-Ponty says that “In the poem,
as in the perceived object, form cannot be separated from content; what is being pre-
sented cannot be separated from the way in which it presents itself to the gaze” (WP
101, C 60). A willow tree blowing gently in the breeze, swaying gracefully, conveys a
sense that is not merely an object to be classified scientifically as the bearer of a set
of objective characteristics and may inspire us to relax and let ourselves go more eas-
ily with the trajectory of events blowing on us, and this differs in its expressed sense
from a willow tree being thrashed violently in the midst of a fierce storm, which will
convey an entirely different sense.

Part III, Section VII

1. VI 125, VIF 167.
2. Ibid.
3. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 7.
4. VI 126, VIF 168.
5. VI 194, VIF 247.
6. Ibid.
7. VI 126–27, VIF 168.
8. VI 194, VIF 247.
9. VI 126, VIF 167.
10. PRI 8.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. VI 121–22, VIF 162.
13. VI 122, VIF 162.
14. VI 123, VIF 162.
15. Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), p. xvii.
16. VI 237, VIF 290.
17. Ibid.
18. VI 239, VIF 293.
19. Ibid., 126–27, VIF 168.
20. VI 266, VIF 319.
21. Ibid.
22. VI 208, VIF 261.
23. TL 25, RCF 40.
24. Ibid.
25. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, 152.
26. Ibid., 153.
27. By “heavy handed” metaphors, I mean metaphors that do not bring together
startling enmeshments between beings that would break open the everyday categories
used to apprehend the things of the world, nor are the aspects of beings that are
 Notes to Conclusion 367

brought together by the metaphors subtle and hidden. The language is not that far
from everyday usage. Not all versified language is truly poetic or metaphoric.
28. VI 197, VIF250.
29. PP xx, PPF xv.
30. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 125.
31. VI 197, VIF 251.
32. PW 64, PMF 90.
33. HLP 49.
34. HLP 15
35. Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Elucidations of
Holderlin’s Poetry (Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 2000), 63.
36. Galen Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-
Ponty’s Aesthetics, p. 131
37. Ibid., 134.

Conclusion
1. EM 179, OE 64.
2. Ibid.
3. EM 180, OE 65.
4. Ibid.
5. As we discussed in Part I—PP PP 264, PPF 306.
6. PP 254, PPF 294.
7. PP 256, PPF 296.
8. PP 261, PPF 301–302.
9. VI 140, 202, VIF 184, 255.
10. PP 264, PPF 306.
11. PP 265, PPF 306.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Proust, Swann’s Way, 604.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. PP 332, PPF 382–83.
17. VI 219, VIF 271.
18. Ibid., 137, VIF 181.
19. Ibid., 136–37, VIF 180–81.
20. Ibid., 136 (my emphasis), VIF 180.
21. A book that adds further descriptions of how the surface opens to depth by
exploring Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception by focusing on the distinctive power
of the glance.
22. Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance, 48.
23. This also accords with more of the “tactile look” or “caressing regard” that
I contrast with the gaze in “Touch and Vision: Rethinking with Merleau-Ponty Sartre
on the Caress,” Philosophy Today, vol. xxiii, 4 (1979), pp. 312–318.”
368 Notes to Conclusion

24. Casey, World at a Glance, 281.

25. In a working note of April 1960, Merleau-Ponty, explains further this notion
of the verticality of savage time and also offers on the several explanations in the
working notes why he must reject Husserl’s notion of time and time consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty states that “the past that adheres to the present and not the conscious-
ness of the past that adheres to the consciousness of the present: the ‘vertical’ past
contains in itself the exigency to have been perceived, far from the consciousness of
having perceived bearing that of the past” (VI 244). It is not a matter of conscious-
ness of the past being connected to the consciousness of the present, but rather even
though we are not conscious of the past, such the narrator of In Search of Lost Time
having no prior awareness of the whole world of Combray, the past is there in the
depths of time, as simultaneous but hidden, or can become simultaneously present
through a sudden interconnection with the present, so, for example, when the narra-
tor who walks in the Bois de Bologne of many years later, he has more of the sense of
walking through the Bois de Bologne of an earlier period. Merleau-Ponty in the same
passage says of Husserl’s time analysis: “The whole Husserlian analysis is blocked by
the framework of acts which it imposes upon it the philosophy of consciousness. It is
necessary to take up again and develop the fungierende or latent intentionality which
is the intentionality within being” (VI 244). For Merleau-Ponty, with his notion of
the flesh, humans do not direct a consciousness toward objects and the world and
constitute them, but rather on a deeper prereflective level of dialogue with the world
senses emerge which are from the world as much as from us, which emerge in a pro-
cess of perception and manifestation that is passive-active. The ontology of that flesh
means that we co-know and co-imagine and co-remember with the world of which
we are part. The depth of time is a dimension from which we and the world emerge
as interlocutors of the voices of silence. Rather than Husserl’s timeline with its past
and future sinking away at an incremental rate, Merleau-Ponty ends this passage by
saying we are within “the spatializing-temporalizing vortex” (VI 244). A vortex does
not have a definitive progression in one direction, but in its swirling there is a dynamic
equilibrium of a multiplicity of forces. Another way to represent the difference with
Husserl’s analysis of time is the contrast Merleau-Ponty makes with Husserl’s diagrams
of time when he says that even though Husserl “complicated” the traditional time line
of a series of “nows” with pretensions and retentions, still “the representation of the
phenomenon of flow is faulty” as being too straightforward (VI 195). Rather, says
Merleau-Ponty, the present and time must be seen as “an encompassing,” that is to say
as an indeterminate depth of more fluid boundaries, gaps, fissures, levels, overflows,
encroachments, with surprising emergences and transformations that is all the while
an ongoing birthing of sense.
26. Marcel Proust, Time Regained [vol. VI., In Search of Lost Time]. Trans by
Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartine (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 531–32.
27. VI, 267, VIF 320–21.
28. N, 263, NF 331.
29. Ibid.
30. N 265, NF 333.
 Notes to Conclusion 369

31. See my essay, “Each Embodied Step is the Walk of Natural History,” Poli-
grafi: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, pp. 141–67, Winter 2011 Issue
[on “Natural History”].
32. VI 243, VIF 296.
33. Edward S. Casey, Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology (Dallas:
Spring Publications, 1991), 268.
34. PP 331, PPF 381.
35. VI 259, VIF 312.
36. In this regard, please see my essay addressed to Arnie Naess, founder of
deep ecology. In his essay to which I was responding, Naess expressed frustration in
his attempts to take his deep ecological students to beautiful natural settings, such as
his cabin atop a mountain, when they failed to pause and feel any connection with
what was surrounding them. In my experience—in addition to the theoretical insights
expressed in this book—taking students to natural settings and then having them sit
silently for a time and then having them write a poem about what they are perceiving
allows them to perceive deeply and connect to the natural world in a way they would
not be able to accomplish otherwise. See the essay, “Deep Ecology, The Reversibility
of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word,” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1,
no. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 46–61.
37. PRI 25–26.
38. Ibid., 26.
39. Ibid., 27.
40. Patricia Locke, “Intermittences: Merleau-Ponty and Proust on Time and
Grief,” Critical Studies, 2010, Volume 32, 151.
41. BN Vol. V, “l’Oeil et l’esprit” MF 9586 p. 153 (11) [“le vrai point de vue:
ni vue universal—la à l’omnipotance . . . : (mais) vue de l’Ineinander”].
42. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 135–36.
43. Ibid., 230.
44. Ibid.
45. VI 215, VIF 268.
46. Ibid.
47. EM 188, OE 86.
48. TL 122–23.
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 Index
Abgrund, 17
Abram, David, 48
activity/passivity, 38, 47–48, 217–18,
220–21, 225, 252, 260
affective sense, xii, xiii, xvi–ii, 11, 30,
57, 60, 91, 93, 96, 101–2, 105, 112,
116–18, 123, 128, 137–40, 150,
187, 191–92, 197–99, 226–27, 256,
282–83, 298–99, 318, 320; mood,
23, 37–38, 63
Allen, Paula Gunn, 48, 326 (ftn 4)
Alloa, Emmanuel, 234–35, 357 (ftn 64),
364 (ftn 58), 371
alterity, absolute (of height), perceptual
(of depth), 157–71
ambiguity, need to embrace it, 32–33,
75, 100, 103, 182, 189, 201–2,
208–9, 308, 334 (ftn 16)
animality, 33, 48, 75–76, 328 (ftn 4),
331 (ftn 3); chiasmatic relationship
with [interanimality], 151–55, 195,
312; and esthesiological desire,
92–97; oneiric perception, 203–4;
physiognomy of, 104
Aristotle, 14, 18, 67, 101–3, 137, 329
(ftn 14)
artist, xv, xxi, 26–31, 35, 39–40, 64,
67–70, 75, 84, 114, 161, 184, 191,
203, 224, 238–52, 258, 260, 266,
268, 271, 280, 283–84, 291, 302,
323, 354 (ftn 24)
Augustine, 43
377
awakening to the world 4, 14, 114, 132–
33, 149–50, 260; and poetry, 278
Bachelard, Gaston, xiv, 224, 251, 332
(ftn 4), 351 (ftn 69), 355, (ftn 57),
359 (ftn 5, 9, 11, 13–22), 360 (ftn
28–32, 36, 38, 41–43, 45, 48–49),
361 (ftn 56, 59, 61, 63, 66–67, 71,
74), 371; ante-predicative, 36–37;
dialectic of inside and outside,
264–65; dynamism of image, 264;
element, 262–63; formal imagination,
257; hiddenness of imaginal, 229,
257; importance of literary, 254;
material imagination, 194, 203,
241, 255–70; oneiric temperament,
pancalism (reversibility), 260–62;
opposed to Sartrean imaginal, 253,
255; physiognomy, 257; penumbral
(gentle/dispersed) ontology, 265–69;
poetic reverie, 249, 260, 268, 272;
relation of imaginal and perceptual,
255–59; reverberation, 267–68;
transcendence of image, 264–65;
warning of “geometricized” world,
269
Balzac, Honoré de, 68, 139–40, 362
(ftn 13)
barbaric principle, 71, 230–31, 315
Bataille, George, 43
Beauvoir, Simone de, 364 (ftn 58),
Blood of Others, 144
378 Index
Barbaras, Renaud, 26, 90–91, 167,
280, 288–92, 331 (ftn 6), 338 (ftn
15–18), 339 (ftn 6), 344 (ftn 12),
347 (ftn 39), 350 (ftn 30), 363 (ftn
38), 364 (ftn 62, 67), 365 (ftn 71),
371
Bennett, Jonathan, “The Conscience of
Huckleberry Finn,” 148–49
Binswanger, Ludwig, 30
Bekoff, Marc, 345 (ftn 48), 371
Becoming, xiii, xvi, xxii, 14, 51–54, 57,
59, 69–70, 82, 92, 100, 110, 145,
152, 217, 246, 252, 264, 277, 291,
297, 302, 308, 315, 325 (ftn 1), 339
(ftn 12), 340 (ftn 13), 372
Beethoven, Ludwig, Ninth Symphony, 28
Berg, J. H. van den, 268
Bergo, Bettina, 171, 349 (ftn 49)
biosphere (as mentioned by Merleau-
Ponty), 152–53
body schema, 95, 190–91, 198, 317
Braque, Georges, 204
Bredlau, Susan, 347 (ftn 33), 371
Breton, André, 224, 256, 355 (ftn 355)
Buchanan, Brett, 371
Busch, Thomas, 106, 146, 340 (ftn 17,
18), 344 (ftn 23–26)
Buthos [the abyss], 51
Carbone, Mauro, 297, 329 (ftn 12),
366 (ftn 15), 372
Casey, Edward S., glance in face-to-
face, xiii, 163–66, 176, 184–86, 188,
194–95, 206, 243, 314, 317, 332 (ftn
35), 339 (ftn 12), 340 (ftn 13), 346
(ftn 17, 20), 347 (ftn 27), 348 (ftn
3), 349 (ftn 30), 351 (ftn 69), 367
(ftn 22), 368 (ftn 24), 369 (ftn 33),
372, 374
categorical subsumption, xiii, 3, 14, 23,
32, 52, 82–83, 90, 100, 136, 178,
224, 238, 268, 271, 278–79, 291,
310, 347 (ftn 51), 361 (ftn 4), 367
(ftn 27); mixed in painting, 245, 248
Cézanne, Paul, xxv, 11, 27, 29, 33, 38,
68–69, 71, 75, 85, 155, 161, 202,
245–48, 251, 262, 280, 284, 291;
depth, 308–9; motif, 25–26
chiasm, xiii, 30, 45–47, 54, 59–63, 69,
94, 109–10, 201–2, 237, 260, 263,
298–301, 308, 318; of inner and
outer, 243–47, 264; logic of, 103;
of metaphor, 288–94; of perception
and dream, 221–22, 260; of sensible
and ideal, 226–35, 256, 284–87; of
silence and speech, 26, 46, 64; of
time, xiv, 59, 72, 230; with animals,
151; with other humans, 115, 123,
143, 164, 320–33
childhood experience, 67–68, 89,
199–201, 203, 207–9, 232, 255–57,
344 (ftn 23), 359 (ftn 10); open
imagination of, 257–58; recognition
of colors, 80
circulus vitiosus deus, 51
Claudel, Paul, 51, 203, 224, 250–52,
251, 255, 262, 355, 358, 372
co-knowing [co-naissance], 250–51,
269, 300, 314, 355 (ftn 26), 368
(ftn 25)
Coleridge, Samuel, 372; fancy, 179–81,
349 (ftn 15–16)
compassion, 83, 100–2, 112, 137,
148–49, 152, 162, 308, 323, 345 (ftn
36)
compression of sense in myth, 199–201
concepts as limiting, xii, xvii–xix,
14–15, 23, 53, 111, 114, 177,
187–89, 208, 239, 246, 266, 269,
272, 278, 281–82, 296–300, 309,
327 (ftn 3), 329 (ftn 12)
constitution, 21
contingency, xi, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 16,
20, 44, 102–5, 113–16, 118, 131,
136–39, 143–46, 152, 157–59, 167,
263, 267, 307, 318–21, 323–24
co-perceiving, 64, 151
co-perception, 95, 121, 345 (ftn 8)
 Index
co-speaking, 48, 64
culture, as encompassing, xi, xiv, xviii,
1–3, 8–10, 15, 23, 47–48, 53, 55 61,
63, 69, 77, 83, 103, 142, 147–49,
151, 155 169, 197–99, 209–12, 232–
34, 275, 337 (ftn 20); as entwined
with natural, 10, 68, 203
Daigle, Christine, 325 (ftn 1), 339 (ftn
4), 373
Dauenhauer, Bernard, 11, 27–28, 327
(ftn 1), 328 (ftn 15–17), 329 (ftn
15), 331 (ftn 9–10), 339 (ftn 8), 340
(ftn 13), 345 (ftn 34, 39)
denial of supersensible, 68, 91, 113,
133, 160–62, 168
depth as the first dimension, xvi, 249–50
Derrida, Jacques, 104, 151, 328 (ftn 4),
330 (ftn 7), 372, 373, 374
Descartres, Rénee, xiv, xvii, 9, 18, 20,
28, 29, 83, 166, 191, 237, 245–47,
254, 284, 312, 328 (ftn 4), 345 (ftn
39)
desire reconfigured, 29, 39, 45, 85–97,
161, 187–89, 221, 261–64, 338 (ftn
22)
dialogue of perceiving-perceiver, x–xi,
3–4, 11, 20, 23, 31, 40–41, 75, 83,
87–89, 121, 181, 191, 194, 224,
236–39, 241–42, 244–48, 271,
275, 283, 300, 302, 312, 318, 368
(ftn 25); with affective, 138; with
imaginal, 261–62, 265, 272; with
movement/gesture, 190–91, 193
Diehm, Chris, 325 (ftn 1), 330 (ftn 2),
341 (ftn 51), 375
difference, ix, xi, xvi, 45, 60, 76, 104,
107, 115, 118, 130–31, 134, 142–46,
157–71, 188, 234, 261–62, 265, 268,
274, 288–89, 294, 308, 316–18,
322–25, 333 (ftn 9), 344 (ftn 13),
350 (ftn 59), 372, 374
differentiation, 21, 33–34, 45, 60, 221,
223, 228, 268
379
Dillon, Martin, xxiii–iv, 94, 100–1, 325
(ftn 1), 330 (ftn 7), 332 (ftn 2), 335
(ftn 14), 339 (ftn 34, 2), 362 (ftn 6),
372, 373, 374
dimensionality, 152, 263–64, 290,
298–300, 315, 350 (ftn 62)
dislocation (cultural) xv, 3, 13, 41,
82–83, 166, 214, 269, 328 (ftn 4);
towards infinite in Levinas, 107, 110,
113, 116
Dufourcq, Annabelle, 177, 210, 213,
219–20, 348 (ftn 7), 353 (ftn 61),
354 (ftn 6, 9), 372
écart in relation to others, 110, 115,
144; in relation with world, 27, 47,
61–62, 109–10, 123, 330 (ftn 7),
333 (ftn 11), 372, 373
embodying being explained, 10–11
embrace with landscape, 26, 86, 91–92,
134, 182, 231–32, 249
empiricism, 76–78, 80, 176, 259,
268–69, 283, 348 (ftn 2)
emotional sense as vital to ethics,
138–40, 148–49, 343 (ftn 3)
encroachment, 47, 143, 164, 263, 269,
290–91, 297, 301, 334 (ftn 16), 368
(ftn 25)
endless nightmare of culture, vii, xv, 1,
41, 63, 270, 292, 303
erotic, 91–92
esthesiological flesh, 92, 95–96
eternality, 44, 63, 71, 218, 230
ethics, absolutes, 111–14, 119–20, 171,
318–25; and animals, 104, 150–53,
345 (ftn 9); anthropocentricism, 151;
biotic community, 154; contingency
of, 157–58; of flesh, ix–xi, 125–40,
143, 146, 147–48, 169–71, 320,
325 (ftn 11); hierarchy, 154–55, 343
(ftn 3); positive versus negative, 102;
prereflective, 99, 137–38; and silence,
xvii, 8, 332 (ftn 36); versus tradition,
96, 100–3
380
evanescence, 35–41, 146, 266
event-matrices, 218–20, 231
expansion of the sense of the world,
xxii, 11, 14, 20, 137–38, 189,
224–25, 252, 264, 317–19
experience error, 82, 259, 337 (ftn 25),
361 (ftn 4)
expression of the world, xvii, 23, 37–38,
96, 198, 276–79
faces of the world, 75–84; of animals,
104, 152–53; beckoning of, 69, 75,
78–81, 85–89, 94, 104, 181, 190,
193, 223, 232, 237–39, 247–48, 261;
expression of, 75, 78–79, 83, 96,
163–65, 205; “look of,” 79, 163, 225,
239, 262
face-to-face encounter between or among
persons, xi, 78–79, 83, 93, 99–101,
105, 130, 141, 141–56, 159–71,
307–8, 318–20
fascination, 247
felt solidarity, the ethics of, xi–xv, xviii,
102–3, 123, 125–40, 156, 162, 166,
318, 320; and interrogation, with the
planet, 153–54, 318
Ferris, David, 335 (ftn 14), 372
Fielding, Helen, xxiv, 170–71, 325 (ftn
1), 347 (ftn 47–48, 50), 372
film, 33, 83, 195, 204–6
fire (deflagration), xxi, 40, 121, 142,
244–45, 271–73, 323
first time (as if ), 55, 128, 243, 248, 284
fissures, 57, 62, 71, 72, 145, 171, 221,
228, 264–65, 368 (ftn 25)
flesh as matrix of sense, xiii, xiv, 10–11,
17, 25–27, 75–76, 90–91, 93, 96,
151–52, 190, 230, 239, 290
Flynn, Bernard, 336 (ftn 11), 374
fragility, xi, 2, 13, 107, 114, 156, 165,
318, 320; of solidarity, 144–46,
ontology, 266
Freud, Sigmund, 67–68, 90–91
Gasquet, Joachim, 26, 204, 291
Index
gestalt, xviii, 30, 32, 36, 62, 84, 92–93,
183–84, 191, 223, 238, 259, 299,
326 (ftn 6)
gesturing of the world, xvii, 26, 30, 34,
44, 48, 52, 76, 82, 97, 113, 136,
189, 192, 237, 241–42, 247–48, 262,
265, 269, 271, 276, 288, 291, 300,
316, 323, 365 (ftn 74)
Gendre, Michael, 330–31 (ftn 5)
Giacometti, Alberto, 243, 308
Gill, Jerry H., 276, 289, 301, 326
(ftn 11), 364 (ftn 66), 366 (ftn 25),
372
Gilligan, Carol, 344 (ftn 3), 372
Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 17–18,
191, 219
global locality, xv, 249
Griffin, Donald, 346 (ftn 38), 372
Goldstein, Kurt, 191
Haraway, Donna, 344 (ftn 32), 373
Hass, Lawrence, 15, 325 (ftn 1), 329
(ftn 19, 22), 339 (ftn 2)
Hatley, James, 325 (ftn 1), 330 (ftn 2),
341 (ftn 51), 375
Hallie, Philip, Lest Innocent Blood Be
Shed, 149, 344 (ftn 25), 373
hallucinations, 176, 182–83, 188,
193–94, 197, 200–2
Heidegger, Martin, 304–5, 327 (ftn 3),
345 (ftn 32), 362(ftn 6), 367 (ftn
35), 371, 372
historicity, xiv–xv, 30, 80, 102, 107,
112–14, 116, 129, 147, 149, 152,
158–59, 218–19, 240; wild history,
221
horizon, xiv, xxii, 31, 37, 39, 64, 68,
80–81, 106, 114, 144, 148, 158,
182, 193, 201, 208, 211, 212, 214,
219–20, 233, 264, 277, 279, 304–5,
309–10, 312
Hyppolite, Jean, 177–78
Husserl, Edmund, xvii, xxi–ii, xxvi, 17,
20, 49, 85, 263–64, 293, 303–4, 358
(ftn 47), 368 (ftn 25)
 Index
image, 40, 94, 183–84, 250, 260, 262,
279, 287, 289, 294, 326 (ftn 11),
336 (ftn 11), 349 (ftn 33), 354 (ftn
2, 6), 355 (ftn 47), 356 (ftn 56),
371, 374; as animation 60, 204, 260,
267–68; contrasted with Sartre, 180,
207–10, 214–15; as force, 205–6,
219–22; as key to philosophy, xxi,
53–57, 60, 146, 268, 301–3; as
monstrative, 185–89; relation to
invisible, 242–43, 260–61; tradition
as enfeebled perceptions, 206–7
Imagination (imaginal), as ontology,
237–54; depth of, 192, 204,
254, 269, 271–74, 313–14, 321;
entanglement of real and imaginal,
208–9; entering world of another,
308, 322–23; in cultural roles, 209–
14; in theater, 210–13, 234–35, 357,
371, two modes, 180–89, 213–14,
256–57; versus Sartre, 178–82, 184,
187, 207–10, 212–15, 221–23, 252,
255, 265; within phil. Tradition,
175–77, 226, 267
incompossibles, together, xvi, 29, 46,
164, 171, 242, 275, 288, 290, 309
indirect ontology, x–xi, xiii–iv, xvii–viii,
15–16, 45, 51–53, 77, 116, 162,
217, 235, 241, 255–56, 265–67, 272,
280, 288, 295, 300–1, 303
individualism, ix, 2, 116, 120, 129–30,
143, 150, 256
Ineinander, 242, 321, 369 (ftn 41); with
animals, 17, 96, 151
inexhaustibility, xi, 13, 27, 48–49, 70,
82, 90, 107, 122, 144–15, 156, 159,
167–68, 171, 181, 182, 188, 211,
239, 319
infinity, 110, 114, 218; as objectified
versus open, 17
instant, the, 26, 40, 59–61, 63, 68–69,
70, 103, 166, 214, 217–18, 230,
312, 318, 324, 348 (ftn 2)
institution (Stiftung), 32, 81, 218–20, 291,
316–17, 354 (ftn 6); books as, 273–75
381
interanimality, 11, 17, 18, 33–34,
75–76, 92–96, 104, 151–55, 195,
203, 328 (ftn 4), 333 (ftn 33), 336
(ftn 12, 16), 337 (ftn 1), 338 (ftn
13), 339 (ftn 8), 344 (ftn 32), 345
(ftn 34, 38–41), 356 (ftn 56), 365
(ftn 74), 371, 372, 373, 374, 375
intersubjectivity, xvii, xix, 38, 63,
101–2, 105, 114, 141–51, 155–56,
158, 159–71, 307–8, 318–23, 358
(ftn 47)
intertwining, 11, 16, 38, 43, 49, 52, 53,
56, 90, 92, 94–95, 117, 123, 128,
136–37, 143–44, 149–51, 162–63,
167, 170, 213, 218–20, 227, 230,
241–43, 294, 301, 312–13, 326 (ftn
6), 336 (ftn 12), 350 (ftn 59), 356
(ftn 55), 373
intrinsic value, 104, 107, 110, 113,
150, 155; as earthly, indeterminate,
103, 118, 130–31, 161–62; redefined,
161–62
interdisciplinary, xix, 326 (ftn 6), 356
(ftn 55), 369 (ftn 61), 373
inter-world [entremonde], 115, 143, 167
invisible of the visible, xiii, xiv, 54, 113,
223, 225–30, 238, 242, 245–46,
249–50, 252, 254, 255, 260–62,
267, 275, 294, 297–300, 302, 314,
317, 321–23, 350 (ftn 59), 356 (ftn
56)
Johnson, Galen, xxiv, 15, 52, 69, 89,
91–92, 161–62, 226–27, 305, 316,
326 (ftn 3), 329 (ftn 13), 334 (ftn
2), 336 (ftn 6), 338 (ftn 19–22), 346
(ftn 10, 12, 16), 355 (ftn 38), 367
(ftn 36), 373
Kearney, Richard, xxiv, 180, 221,
237–38, 252–53, 261, 302, 321–22,
325 (ftn 1), 327 (ftn 3), 349 (ftn
13), 354 (ftn 16), 357 (ftn 2), 358
(ftn 56), 359 (ftn 59), 360 (ftn 27),
367 (ftn 30), 369 (ftn 42), 373
382
kinesthesia, 20, 198, 240
Kabelitz, Franziska, 344 (ftn 23)
Kaushik, Rajiv, xxiv, 229–30, 356 (ftn
49), 373
Klee, Paul, xxi, 29, 75, 161, 244–45,
248
Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, 112,
120, 166, 325 (ftn 1), 336 (ftn 14),
340 (ftn 15), 341 (ftn 42), 346 (ftn
8, 21), 347 (ftn 32), 373x
Koffka, Kurt, 80
Kowalski, Gary, 345 (ftn 38), 373
Landes, Donald, 327 (ftn 2)
language, allusive expression of, 52–57,
59–60, 65, 278, 287, 294, 297,
303, 321, 336 (ftn 1); as a being,
274, 280; creative, 13–18, 273–92;
deformation, 273–74; empirical,
274–75, 278–79, 281, 284, 303,
320–21; listlessness of, 55, 82; new
meaning birthed in, 250, 260, 267,
272–74, 279–80, 288–89; possible
violence of, 13–16; as power for error,
293, 13–18; in self-enclosure, 15,
53, 278–79; spoken (parlé) versus
speaking (parlant), 272–73, 361 (ftn
4); structuralist analysis of, 53
Lascaux caves, 242
latency of sense, vix, 27, 44, 53, 93,
127, 145, 193, 203, 211, 213,
218–20, 224, 226–27, 229, 240, 243,
247–54, 255, 261, 266, 229, 268,
271, 276, 282–83, 288, 291, 298,
302–5, 304, 307, 313–18, 322, 350
(ftn 52), 362 (ftn 13), 368 (ftn 25)
lateral relations, 17–18, 53, 141–56,
287, 294–97, 313, 315
Lawlor, Leonard, xxiv, xxvi, 333 (ftn 2),
371, 373
Lawrence, D. H., 345 (ftn 34)
Leopold, Aldo, 154–55, 346 (ftn
42–43), 373
Levinas, Emmanuel, viii, xi, 76, 133,
137, 162–63, 325, 332 (ftn 36),
Index
339 (ftn 12–30, 340 (ftn 14–21,
1–21), 341 (ftn 22–31, 33–38, 41),
344 (ftn 4, 17) 346 (ftn 17–18,
20–21), 347 (ftn 27–31, 36, 49)
371–74; comment on Signs and lateral
universality, 146–47; combining
ethical approach with Merleau-Ponty,
148–55; difference with Merleau-
Ponty on face, 11, 99–108, 141–42,
162–64, 168–69; difference with
Merleau-Ponty on alterity, 109–23,
165–66, 305; substitution versus
kinship, 148–55
libidinal attraction, 90–97; versus Eros
as overcoming lack, 91
light, xxi, 22, 132, 266, 361 (ftn 62); of
the image, 185–87; and the imaginal,
217, 227, 231, 246, 249
Locke, Patricia, xxiv, 281, 320, 356 (ftn
55), 363 (ftn 39), 369 (ftn 40)
logic of inclusive ambiguity (differences),
45, 103, 308
logos endiathetos, 17, 39
logos prophorikos, 17
love, 7–8, 22, 28, 44, 45, 54, 68, 79,
96, 100, 113, 116, 118, 126, 129–34,
138–40, 147, 150, 154, 160, 180,
186, 193, 205, 209, 212–15, 219,
220, 225–29, 234, 249, 319, 321,
327 (ftn 2), 326 (ftn 13)
MacKendrick, Carmen, 43–44, 333 (ftn
3, 4), 373
Maclaren, Kym, xxiv, 101, 104, 325 (ftn
1), 340 (ftn 2, 11), 373
Madison, Gary Brent, 326 (ftn 2)
Mahler, Gustav, 27–28
Malraux, André, xxi, 327 (ftn 13)
Marcel, Gabriel, 87–88
Margolis, Joseph, 330 (ftn 7), 373
Matisse, Henri, 29, 33
Mazis, Glen, 326 (ftn 3, 4), 333 (ftn
8), 338 (ftn 13), 373–74
McCann, Rachel, xxiv, 143–44, 169,
344 (ftn 13), 347 (ftn 46), 374
 Index
McLane, Janice, 325 (ftn 1), 330 (ftn
2), 341 (ftn 51), 375
memory, xiii, xiv–xv, xviii, xxii, 70, 107,
117, 152, 198, 225–26, 314, 356 (ftn
55)
metaphor, and chiasm, 288–94;
Merleau-Ponty’s use of, 289–305
Michaux, Henri, 269
Monet, Claude, 332 (ftn 33)
Morley, James, 374
Morris, David, xxiv, 75–76, 152–53,
163, 337 (ftn 1, 2), 345 (ftn 37)
motor meaning (intentionality), xvii–
xviii, 21–22, 89–90, 190–92, 198,
207, 239, 350–51 (ftn 59, 62), 365
(ftn 74)
movement by vibration, 28–31, 249–51,
280, 365 (ftn 74)
music, 27–28, 33, 122, 185, 190,
192–93, 204, 226–28, 281, 282, 286,
300, 331 (ftn 11, 24), 355 (ftn 35),
375
myth, 138, 193–94, 197–203, 205,
208–10, 213, 220–21, 223, 226, 227,
230–31, 240, 317, 342–43 (ftn 26),
351 (ftn 50), 352 (ftn 15), 353 (ftn
45)
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 64, 184–89, 199, 206,
243, 335 (ftn 9, 10), 349–50 (ftn,
33–35, 37–38, 40–43, 50–51)
negative philosophy as non-foundational,
52
negativist thought, 44
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51, 161, 301
not-one-not-two logic, 47, 62
Olkowski, Dorothea, xxiv, 36, 332 (ftn
2), 374
oneiric materiality, xiv, 217, 241, 246,
249–51, 310
oneiric dimension of perception, 152,
197, 201, 203–4, 208–10, 212, 221,
224–25, 231–35, 237, 240, 245–47,
248–49, 254, 260, 263–64, 267, 280,
383
286–87, 297, 305, 309–11, 326 (ftn
4), 332 (ftn 4), 353 (ftn 45), 356
(ftn 56), 360 (ftn 45)
ongoing genesis of sense, xii, 54–55,
71, 82, 245, 248, 250, 271, 275–76,
279, 355 (ftn 26), 357 (ftn 6), 368
(ftn 25)
Page, George, 331 (ftn 33)
Park, Jin Y., 346 (ftn 36)
Pascal, Blaise, 160
past, immemorial, 107, 220
perception, and ontology, as coition
[accouplement] (coupling), 85–86,
89–90, 91–92, 94–95, 125,
dislocation, xv, 3, 13, 41, 62–63,
113, 116, 241, 269, 328 (ftn 13);
as field, xvi, 21, 26, 30–31, 36,
68–69, 82, 94, 102, 139, 159, 169,
178–79, 191, 277, 295, 311, 314,
316, 332 (ftn 35), 350–51 (ftn 62),
365 (ftn 74); implications of primacy
of, 137–38, 160, 176, 177–78, 319,
320; interpersonal (of others), xv, 3,
79, 81, 83, 89, 109–24, 146–47,
151, 162–70, 212, 221–22; latent
depths of, pleasure of, 88–90, 93,
95; opacity of, 90, 158, 167–68;
primordial contact of, 14–15, 53, 64,
135–36, 288, 361 (ftn 4); proximity
of, 121–22, 167, 183, 201, 249;
thickness of, 30, 40, 56, 137–38,
146, 164, 174, 186, 217, 220, 247,
249, 297–98, 319; as vibration of the
world, 90, 224; Visibility, 69; woven
with imaginal, 175–254
perceptual faith, 15, 79, 86, 91, 93,
168, 171, 177, 181, 187–89, 211–12,
220
perceptual qualities, 23–24, 84, 89, 104,
188–89, 199, 202–3, 214, 223–25,
229, 246, 298, 314, 365 (ftn 74)
phenomenal field, 35–36
phenomenology, xvii–xviii, 14–15, 49,
85–86, 106, 113–14, 134, 177–78,
384 Index
phenomenology (continued)
182–83, 191–92, 258–59, 260,
263–64, 268, 302–3, 327 (ftn 1),
333–34 (ftn 9), 359 (ftn 21)
philosophical tradition, xiii, xvii–xviii,
10, 18, 23, 43, 52–53, 75–76, 105,
267, 295–96, 308–9, 313–14, 364
(ftn 58)
physiognomic logic, 75–76
physiognomic perception, xii, 81,
87–88, 96, 105, 177, 190–91, 198,
239–40, 251
physiognomic sense, 75–84, 168, 198,
308
phronesis, 100–2
Picasso, Pablo, 33, 331 (ftn 33)
Plato, xiii–xiv, xi, 18, 52, 56–57, 91–92,
151, 159, 166, 168, 176, 302, 304,
327 (ftn 6)
poetic language, as vital to ontology,
276–300
poetry, xiv, xix, xxi, xxii, 135, 193, 197,
204–5, 254, 259, 271–91, 293–305,
318, 321, 363 (ftn 20, 45), 364 (ftn
71), 365 (ftn 74), 367, (ftn 35), 372
postmodern self-enclosure, xi, 2–4,
8–10, 12, 15, 47, 77, 83, 99, 303,
321, 324, 328 (ftn 4)
Ponge, Frances, 56, 75, 203, 224
pre-human perceived, 10
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time,
44–45, 54–55, 72, 75, 217, 225–35,
247, 252, 279–80, 284, 312, 314,
317, 322, 349 (ftn 18), 355 (ftn 35),
356 (ftn 55, 58–60, 62–63), 358
(ftn 58), 363 (ftn 33, 44), 367 (ftn
14–15), 368 (ftn 26), 369 (ftn 40),
374
problem of self and other [traditional],
122–23, 162, 168–69
rays of the world, 93, 264
reading, 136, 273–74, 279–84
reflection as violence, 14, 16–17
representational thinking (overcome),
14–15, 21–22, 77, 94, 191, 194–95,
199, 222, 272, 310, 330 (ftn 5), 351
(ftn 54), 368 (ftn 25)
resonance, 64, 96, 211, 243, 294; and
Bachelard, 267–68
reversibility, xi, 11, 26, 46–47, 59–61,
64–65, 67, 72, 94, 104–6, 132, 145,
148–49, 152, 155, 163, 184–85, 221,
223, 238–39, 241–42, 248, 252, 253,
261–63, 277, 281, 283–85, 288–89,
299, 308–9, 314, 332 (ftn 4), 360
(ftn 34), 363 (ftn 40), 369 (ftn 36),
373
rhythms as articulated by artists and
creative language, 38, 231–32 243,
245, 247, 274, 279, 280–82, 285–86,
287, 316, 365 (ftn 74)
rituals, 209–10
Romanticism, 47–48, 176, 304–5;
Sorrows of Young Werther, 47–48
Saint Aubert, Emmanuel de, xxiv, xxvi,
52–53, 93, 254, 255–56, 263, 291,
329 (ftn 23), 330 (ftn 11–12), 334
(ftn 16, 4), 335 (ftn 8), 339 (ftn
25–27), 350 (ftn 59), 355 (ftn 26),
357 (ftn 1), 358 (ftn 44, 46, 53),
359 (ftn 61–62, 2, 4), 360 (ftn
39–40, 45), 364 (ftn 70), 371, 374
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, Pilotte de
guere (Flight from Arras), xii, xxiv,
7–8, 125–40, 149–51, 154, 155, 223,
319, 327 (ftn 30, 341–42 (ftn 4, 5),
342 (ftn 19–21, 24, 25)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xii, 60–61, 100, 109,
115, 115, 119, 168, 203, 256, 337
(ftn 31), 339 (ftn 1), 341 (ftn 40),
352 (ftn 19), 353 (ftn 45), 354 (ftn
66), 355 (ftn 47), 363 (ftn 40), 367
(ftn 23), 373, 374; on desire, 91;
dualism of, 61, 222, 237, 253, 255,
271; on emotion, 207–8; on love,
212; theories of imagination opposed
 Index
by Merleau-Ponty, 178–82, 184, 187,
207–10, 212–15, 221–23, 252, 255,
265
Schneider, 83, 86–87, 189–90, 338 (ftn
28)
Schroeder, Brian, 111–12, 163–64, 340
(ftn 7, 8, 10–13, 16), 346 (ftn 17,
18, 20, 21), 372, 375
science, dismissing lived dimension,
40, 77, 190; dismissing imaginal,
xiv, 240–41, 259, 269, 326 (ftn
2); linked by Merleau-Ponty with
imaginal and art, 238, 240–41; linked
to phenomenology, 18, 228, 358 (ftn
16); new reductionism of, 3, 15
schizophrenia, persons with, 184,
199–200, 352 (ftn 5, 12)
sedimentation [Fundierung], xxi, 20, 82,
255–56
sensible ideas, 217, 225–33, 235, 237,
246–47, 298, 308, 322
sensory versus sensual, 259
Sigé [mythic figure of silence], 51–52
silence, 19–42, 67–74; anchoring roots
of, 43–50; “deep silence,” 329 (ftn
15); hearkening to, 7–12, 47–48, 52,
64–65, 247–48, 262, 268, 285, 293–
94, 305, 332 (ftn 15); postmodern
intolerance of, 8–10, 47; relationship
with literal silence, 20, 27–28, 37,
44–48, 271, 333 (ftn 2)
Silverman, Hugh, 105, 374, 339–40
(ftn 13)
Simon, Claude, 75
singing the world, xxi, 37–38, 281–
22
Slatman, Jenny, 374, 336 (ftn 11)
Smyth, Bryan, 134–35, 162, 329 (ftn
14), 342 (ftn 4), 343 (ftn 22–27)
social and cultural construction of
meaning, xvii, xix, 1, 3–4, 10, 23,
47–48, 58, 77, 102–3, 128, 138,
139, 147–49, 159, 166, 176, 192,
193, 197, 210, 214, 219, 222, 228,
385
234, 238, 259, 265, 278, 300, 312,
316, 321, 324, 327 (ftn 1), 328, (ftn
4), 343 (ftn 3)
Socrates, 1
Société francaise de philosophie, 113, 157,
177, 318
space, affective/imaginal/memorial sense
of, xii, 29–30, 138–40, 193–94,
200–1, 206, 283; Cartesian, xvi, 29,
202, 245, 284; of dream, 29–30;
enjambed, 69, 143, 301, 307,
310–11, 315; field of space/time, xiv–
xv, xviii, 43, 46, 242, 290, 308, 312,
324, 334 (ftn 1); hodological, 186,
190, 192, 275; intermundane, 123,
162–63; lived, 20, 26, 60, 79–80, 82,
93, 147, 283, 347 (ftn 33); mythical,
197–99, 202; of others (in-between),
164, 170, 274–76, 280, 285–86; of
painting, 28–29, 244–46, 249, 251,
330 (ftn 5); pre-given, 197–200,
249–50; taximetric, 162–63; as vast
context, xvii, 239, 242, 292, 315–16,
324
Stendahl, 127, 273, 280
Steeves, James, 180–82, 223, 225, 349
(ftn 14, 21–23), 354 (ftn 64, 23–24),
355 (ftn 28, 33), 375
style, 23, 32–34, 35, 77, 79, 84, 96,
118, 121–22, 164, 169, 189, 205,
231, 262, 263–65, 268, 283, 285,
287, 298
surrealism, 224, 256, 355 (ftn 26)
symbolic, 53, 55, 127–28, 187–88, 190,
194, 197, 203, 206, 210, 219–24,
254, 298, 321–22, 342 (ftn 40), 352
(ftn 19), 354 (ftn 24); in animals, 96;
instances of, 29, 51, 139, 232
syncretism, 67, 183
tacit cogito, impossibility of, 20–21, 330
(ftn 7), 332 (ftn 12); and world of
silence, 35, 330 (ftn 7)
taximetry, 95
386
technology, “operational/problem-
solving” thinking, ix, 1, 3, 240–41
time, chiasmatic (“savage”), xiv–xv, 63,
115, 230–31, 242, 245–46, 249–50,
290, 308, 311–12, 315–16, 331 (ftn
7), 356 (ftn 52); depth of, 26, 44,
63, 107, 160, 220, 245–46, 275,
308, 312, 314–15, 317–20; enfolding
as unfolding, 59–60, 69–70, 72, 310,
314; enjambment of, 46, 69, 107,
143, 301, 307, 311–12; “ever new”
of (originary), 55, 71, 231, 247,
285; “first day” of, 68–72, 248; of
institution, 81, 217–20, 237; linear,
61, 303, 312; mythical, 230–31, 316;
non-linear, 46, 71–72; of reversibility,
61–63, 262, 360 (ftn 34), 374; single
wave of, 68–72, 107
Toadvine, Ted, xxiv, 47, 334 (ftn 14),
371, 375
touching-touched, 60–62, 94–95, 145,
313, 330 (ftn 2), 339 (ftn 35), 360
(ftn 34), 363 (ftn 40)
transcendence, 3, 160, 264, 277; beyond
the world, 10, 44, 106–7, 109, 117,
119, 155, 162, 304, 307–8; into
the depths of the world, xi, xxi, 88,
91–92, 113, 117, 152, 155, 157,
160–62, 164, 289, 300, 305, 307,
316, 318
transdecendence, 305, 316
truth, xviii–xix, xxii, 2, 4, 18, 56, 65,
117–18, 135, 159–60, 170, 176, 221,
228, 241, 277, 282–83, 290–91,
296–97, 302, 356 (ftn 55), 357 (ftn
16); poetry as, 204, 226–28, 288–89
Ulysses, 27
Index
Valéry, Paul, 63–64, 142, 229–30, 241,
248, 276, 282
Van Gogh, Vincent, 33, 247
verticality, of sense, 63–65, 96, 105,
107, 113, 117, 198, 239, 296, of
time, 67, 69–72, 315–16, 368 (ftn
25); of traditional transcendence, 147,
149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 162–63,
308
Voegelin, Salomé, 9, 39, 40, 71–72, 332
(ftn 11), 333 (ftn 15), 337 (ftn 14), 375
voices of silence, xxi, 10, 77, 96, 126,
368 (ftn 25)
Waldenfels, Bernard, 122, 138, 145, 325
(ftn 1), 330 (ftn 2), 341 (ftn 51),
343 (ftn 33), 344 (ftn 16), 375
Wantanabe, Shigeru, 331 (ftn 33)
Weiss, Gail, xxiv, 326 (ftn 6), 356 (ftn
55), 373
Westling, Louise, 336 (ftn 12), 344–45
(ftn 32), 375
wild Being [l’Être sauvage], 17
wild mind [l’esprit sauvage], 63
wild time, 71, 315, 368 (ftn 25)
Wiskus, Jessica, xxiv, 28, 33, 227, 271,
282, 294, 331 (ftn 11–12, 24), 355
(ftn 35, 41–42), 361 (ftn 2, 4), 362
(ftn 13), 363 (ftn 43, 45), 366 (ftn
3), 375
Wonder, 4, 14–15, 22, 23, 27, 133,
162, 240–41, 305, 329 (ftn 14)
world’s gesture, 22–23, 37, 72, 281, 285
Yeats, W. B., “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree,” 68, 336 (ftn 2), 375
Zeno, 350 (ftn 54)