The following is an extracted section of The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment by David Michael Levin, available as an E-book at The Philosopher's Gaze
"An Identity Transcending the Subject
Arguing in 1945, in his second major work, the
Phenomenology of Perception , against the philosophical program he calls "objectivism," Merleau-Ponty remarks that the "function" of such a program is "to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject [as self-contained and self-originating]" (PPE 320, PPF 370). Thus, he says, it is the peculiar mode of reflection that philosophers have adopted, or perhaps the way that philosophers have understood the process of reflection, which objectifies lived experience to this effect,
"whereas, when I perceive, I belong . . . to the world as a whole" (PPE 329, PPF 380).
Merleau-Ponty contends that what philosophers have termed "subject" and "object" are in reality
"two abstract 'moments' of a unique structure which is presence" (PPE 430, PPF 492). This accordingly assigns phenomenology its task: it must "rediscover," as "anterior" to the structure of subject and object, that "primordial layer" out of which that structure first emerged (PPE 219, PPF 254). This means that phenomenology must excavate hermeneutically "beneath the relation of the knowing subject to the known object" (CRO 98, CROF 3); that it "must return to the
cogito in search of a more fundamental
Logos than that of objective thought" (PPE 365, PPF 419); and that it must learn, for example, as he states in "Eye and Mind," how to enter into
"the immemorial depths of vision."[
7]
Correlatively, his fidelity to the phenomena compelled him to argue with equal force against the programs of idealism and intellectualism: "I am borne into personal existence," he asserts, "by a time which I do not constitute" (PPE 347, PPF 399). And, in a passage that carries singular significance when read in the light of the "tracework" that distinguishes the Levinasian conception of the phenomenological task,[
8] Merleau-Ponty observes:
"When I turn toward perception, I find at work in my organs of perception a thought older than myself, of which those organs are merely a trace." (PPE 351–52, PPF 404)
"My personal existence," he says, "
must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous "functions" which draw every particular focus into a general project." (PPE 254, PPF 294)
In other words, Merleau-Ponty brings to light, as prior to our personal, egological experience, an anonymous and prepersonal existence, an anonymous and prepersonal subject. This dynamic, temporal schema may also be thought in structural terms. Thus Merleau-Ponty will also speak of recovering a dimension "beneath" this experience, because he holds that, in the course of the ego-logical subject's formation, this prepersonal experience is not entirely destroyed, lost, or forgotten, but merely, as it were, deeply sublimated or suppressed: surpassed, but still preserved, and therefore, at least in principle, always to some extent potentially recoverable (PPE 347, PPF 399). The shocking significance of this recovery is, I think, made clear with great force when the philosopher tells us that,
"if I wanted to render the perceptual experience with more faithful precision, I ought to say that one perceives in me, not that I perceive" (PPE 215, PPF 249). In this formulation, we see Merleau-Ponty radically decentering, radically destabilizing the sovereign subject that has dominated the philosophical discourse of modernity.
Let us return, now, to the point that
"when I perceive, I belong . . . to the world as a whole." The recovery of our prepersonal existence is also, for Merleau-Ponty, the recovery of "a communication with the world more ancient that thought" (PPE 254, PPF 294). Thus he also wants to say that, "in so far as I have sensory functions, a visual, auditory and tactile field, I am already in communication with others" (PPE 353, PPF 406). This is a level of "communication" that he describes by reference to a corporeal intentionality that does not recognize the ego-logical boundaries constitutive of our "normal" experience:
"My body . . . discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Hence-forth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously. (PPE 354, PPF 406)
As we shall see, this is a description that anticipates by many years Merleau-Ponty's introduction, in his last manuscripts, of the metaphorical concepts of "intertwining" and "chiasm." In another formulation of the prepersonal communicativeness at work in this intentionality, Merleau-Ponty says:
"The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and the intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person's intention inhabited my body and mine his." (PPE 185, PPF 215. Also see PPE 320, PPF 370.)
This passage is significant, in part, because it introduces the concept of "reciprocity," again anticipating his last manuscripts. But it is also significant, of course, in that it intimates the existence of a certain moral disposition already orienting our bodily comportment—even if this moral "compass" is very rudimentary, preliminary, and pro-visional.
In other intriguing passages of note, Merleau-Ponty elaborates what we might call the "emotional essence" of this prepersonal dimension of communication, bringing to the fore, with particular attention to vision and touch, the intertwining of the different senses and their respective fields, and arguing that, in consequence, we can touch things from which we are distant with the tactile sensibility of our eyes and therefore that, correspondingly, we can be touched, affected, by what we behold from a certain distance (PPE 223, 229; PPF 258, 265. Also see VIE 134, VIF 177). Even in these descriptions, as we can see, the concept of "reversibility," which assumes much greater importance in his last writings, is clearly prefigured.
I
I
the perception of other people and the intersubjective world are problematical only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible all around him. He has no awareness of himself or of others as private subjectivities. (PPE 355, PPF 407)
In "The Child's Relations with Others," a text drawn from material discussed in 1960 in a series of courses he gave at the Collège de France, and in other texts he wrote during the last decade of his life, Merleau-Ponty elaborated this thought, showing its confirmation by empirical research into the psychology of child development. Although his principal concern seems to have been the phenomenological refutation of the presuppositions behind the argument for solipsism, the experiences to which he calls our attention and the vocabulary he uses to articulate them incontrovertibly imply that what is ultimately at stake is moral experience, and therefore that this argument against solipsism constitutes a phenomenology of moral experience, tracing its origin and development in the life of the child. It is greatly to be lamented, I think, that the scholars continuing his work have not given sufficient recognition to the significance of Merleau-Ponty's work for a phenomenology of moral experience.
In "The Concept of Nature" lecture course he gave at the Collége de France, Merleau-Ponty pointed to "an ideal community of embodied subjects, of intercorporeality."[9] But he left this intriguing thought quite undeveloped. "The Child's Relations with Others," however, begins to flesh out this extremely bold thought, pointing, for example, to the unmistakable evidence for a certain "pre-communication" and "postural impregnation" taking place between the infant and others (CRO 119, CROF 33). "I live," he says, "in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine" (CRO 146, CROF 69). This, he thinks, argues for the view that such experience constitutes an "initial sympathy," and consequently even a certain "initial community" (CRO 118–20, CROF 31–34). Thus, in "The Child's Relations with Others," the anonymous, prepersonal dimension of experi-
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ence excavated many years earlier in the Phenomenology of Perception is finally rendered in terms that explicitly bring out its significance for moral life and moral vision. Even here, however, he leaves the significance of this evidence for a phenomenology of moral experience surprisingly undeveloped. Of particular importance for our concerns is the fact that he does not explore the implications of this material for a radical critique of the egoism and individualism that prevail in modern culture and for the articulation, in the evocative language of his phenomenology, of a different moral vision, a different vision of morality.
The task which the resumption of this project would seem to suggest—or which certainly, in any case, one might profitably undertake—calls for reflecting on the transformative potential inherent in the phenomenological recovery (Merleau-Ponty's crucial words are "récupération" and "reprise") of this marvelous experience of prepersonal intercorporeality in the early life of the infant. What if the adult, instead of maintaining a gaze the character of which is solely determined by an ego-logical subjectivity—and consequently by an objectifying, instrumental rationality and a correspondingly ego-centered ethics—should undertake to ground the character of his or her gaze, his or her moral vision of the world, in the bodily felt sense that would emerge from the effort to recover something of the infant's experience, long suppressed, split off, forgotten, of intercorporeality, an ontologically significant prepersonal interconnectedness among all beings? What if the adult, instead of perpetuating a vision, a way of looking and seeing that has been complicitous for too long in an ontology and politics of violence, were to attempt to make contact with this prepersonal intercorporeality, with what, in "The Intertwining—The Chiasm" (VIE 137, VIF 181), Merleau-Ponty will call a "universal flesh," so that the character of the gaze would be normatively determined, would be more radically attuned, by the openness to alterity constitutive of the perceptual field as a whole? If the gaze that predominates in our time is a gaze that reflects the fragmentations, the diremptions, the reifications distinctive of modernity, is it not possible that a gaze in deeply felt contact with the affective-conative wholeness and openness of this field could emerge from this experience with a tact and intactness that would significantly alter its character? It would be a question of a vision, a way of looking and seeing, that is wholehearted, fully embodied, whole—not borne of the metaphysical dualisms that ushered in the age of modernity, most especially, those forms of splitting that set up irreconcilable oppositions between reason and feeling, mind and body, reason and imagination, meaningful thought and thoughtless perception, reality and appearance, ego and other.
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In "Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty gives voice to a vision in touch with its sense of the dimensionality of the visual field:
We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come into contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once. (EM 187)
Merleau-Ponty's "Working Notes," written during the last years of his life and published posthumously in The Visible and the Invisible , elaborate the radical significance of this dimensionality, bringing the question of vision back to my experience of the other person:
There is . . . no problem of the alter ego , because it is not I who sees, not he who sees; because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to flesh, of being here and now and of radiating everywhere and forever. (VIE 142, VIF 187–88)
This passage merits special attention, because the reference to an "anonymous visibility" resumes the phenomenological vocabulary of the much earlier work, the Phenomenology of Perception , while the reference to the "flesh," in which our vision is rooted, carries this work forward, formulating a more explicit, more audacious challenge to the subject-object structure within which the metaphysics of the modern age has persisted in thinking our moral relations with others—and indeed with everything in our world.
The boldness of some of the texts published posthumously in The Visible and The Invisible is really quite breathtaking. And yet, it is a boldness that continues the earlier work, excavating and recovering a deeper dimension of our experience with vision, rather than introducing a break in his project. In the reference, for example, to "a visibility older than my operations or my acts" (VIE 123, VIF 165), one may clearly hear echoes of passages in the Phenomenology of Perception . But in the later texts, our embodiment is figured in radically new terms, for he wanted, instead, to articulate a dimension that metaphysical discourse cannot possibly comprehend and appropriate. Thus, in The Visible and the Invisible , he brings to light a dimension not only (temporally) "prior to" and (structurally) "beneath" the personal or ego-logical structuring of experience, but even (temporally) "prior to" and (structurally) "beneath" the "initial sympathy" and "initial community" of the prepersonal. This deeper dimension he calls "flesh," drawing on mythopoetic language from the ancient beginning of philosophical thought: it is in terms of flesh, he says, that we must think
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"the formative medium of the object and the subject" (VIE 147, VIF 193). This way of thinking shows us that:
my body is made of the same flesh as the world . . . and moreover, . . . this flesh of my body is shared by the world. (VIE 248, VIF 302)
But, he warns,
we must not think the flesh starting from substances, from [the metaphysical splitting that opposes] body and spirit . . . but as an element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being. (VIE 147, VIF 193)
"The flesh," he says,
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 a general thing . . . . The flesh is in this sense an "element of being." (VIE 139, VIF 183–84)
Thus, "my body sees only because it is a part of the visible in which it opens forth" (VIE 153–54, VIF 201). And being a "part," being "of" the visible, "of" its partage , and sharing in its fate—this means that "he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it" (VIE 134, VIF 177–78). In one stroke, this phenomenology succeeds in canceling the complicity of the philosopher's conception of vision in forms of domination and violence.
The figure of the flesh also enables Merleau-Ponty to introduce two other terms of decisive importance: "chiasm" and "intertwining." In his words, "by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world" (VIE 160, VIF 212). And "things pass into us as well as we into things" (VIE 123, VIF 165). We need to recover, we need to see,
the intertwining of my life with the lives of others, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my perceptual field with that of others. (VIE 49, VIF 74)
We need to recover this experience for our way of looking and seeing. We need to understand that,
in reality, there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities. There are . . . two opennesses, two stages where something will take place. (VIE 263, VIF 317)
And we need this understanding to serve as the "grounding" of our vision.
For Merleau-Ponty, the intertwinings, the chiasmic dynamics of the flesh, suggest that a certain reversibility takes place in the perceptual field:
The chiasm, reversibility, is the idea that every perception is doubled with a counter-perception . . . one no longer knows who speaks and who listens. (VIE 264–65, VIF 318)
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Nor, for that matter, who is the looking subject and who is the object seen.
But Merleau-Ponty further claims, repeating a point he made in "Eye and Mind" (EM 166), that this reversibility means that the flesh involves a certain process of "mirroring" (VIE 255, VIF 309) and that, in consequence, "the seer is caught up in what he sees, [so that] it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism in all vision" (VIE 139, VIF 183). Elaborating the meaning of this claim, Merleau-Ponty continues, arguing that,
for the same reason, the vision he exercises he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally my passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as others see it, the contour of the body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (VIE 139, VIF 183)
In other words, as I have argued elsewhere at greater length than I shall be able to argue here, this is a "mirroring" which actually, in effect, double-crosses the reflective "narcissism" that Merleau-Ponty discerns.[10] This is not the narcissism of Descartes, Freud or Lacan: not at all the self-absorption or self-aggrandizement of a monadic ego, but rather the beginning, in fact, of a deconstruction of ego-logical subjectivity. For while it is true that the others whom I see reflect my bodily presence back to me through their eyes, so that, when I look at them, I am able to see myself, this passage of reflection through the gaze of others also obliges me to see myself in dispossession, in a condition of decenteredness: I recognize myself as another for an other, and I am obliged to acknowledge that there are other perspectives. In the eyes of others, I behold the truth that I belong to the "universal flesh" of the visible and the invisible. Looking into the eyes of others, I may see myself; but what I should see is that I am exposed, vulnerable, held in their beholding. Thus I am exposed to the possibility of being touched and moved by what I see reflected in or through their gaze. The reflective mirroring between myself and the other thus sets in motion a certain reversibility of our positions. As I have argued elsewhere, this reversibility in the structuring of the visual field radically subverts the narcissism of vision and its obedience to a logic of identity. Moreover, it constitutes an experience of the utmost importance for the formation of one's sense of justice: it is a preliminary experience, an intimation, of the responsibility commanded by justice; it is already an experience of the meaning of justice.[11]
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Although Merleau-Ponty sees reversibility and reciprocity in the intertwinings and reflections set in motion between my gaze and yours, and sees, when reflecting on the significance of research into the "psychology" of the child, what he terms an "initial sympathy" and an "initial community," his unfortunate willingness to continue describing the mirroring and reversibility of chiasmic vision as a "narcissism" suggests that he still could not clearly see in the exchange of gazes that he discusses in The Visible and the Invisible the most radical subversion of narcissism and its logic of identity; nor does he seem to see any moral predisposition, any rudimentary or preliminary orientation toward the Good, toward Justice. And yet, he says that
we will have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. (VIE 152, VIF 199)
What I want, therefore, to argue is that we need to think of this "ideality" as the "inscription" of a certain moral predisposition or orientation. I want to say that the prepersonal experience with vision constitutes the hint of a promise: the promise, namely, of a potential the development of which is possible. Not teleologically predetermined, not in the least assured, but always just possible—depending, in the case of children, on favorable social conditions, and in the case of adults, on their willingness to restore a felt connection between their vision and their prepersonal experience.
Returning to the Phenomenology of Perception , we find that Merleau-Ponty was already insisting there that
our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. . . . We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification. . . . The social is already there when we come to know or judge it. . . . Prior to the process of becoming aware, the social exists obscurely and as a summons [sourdement et comme sollicitation ]. (PPE 362, PPF 415–16)
This may be reassuring. But the argument sketched all too briefly in this chapter can easily be misunderstood. I certainly do not want to suggest that adults should undergo a regression to identity-confusion, regression to a mode of experiencing prior to the formation of ego-logical subjectivity, but rather that there is a need for vision to reestablish contact with chiasmic experience, with the intertwining of gazes, with the "universal flesh" out of which it emerged, so that an historically new form of subjectivity and a
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different way of looking and seeing, neither that of the prepersonal nor that of the egoic, might—perhaps—come into being.[12]
What we need, here, is a narrative giving phenomenological articulation to a certain developmental process in regard to our capacity for vision. In The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty implied such a narrative, maintaining that
the stages passed through are not simply passed; they have called for or required the present stages. . . . The past stages continue therefore to be in the present stages—which also means that they are retroactively modified by them. (VIE 90, VIF 123)
We might begin the elaboration of this narrative by taking Merleau-Ponty's work to suggest a developmental schema showing, from a temporal and dynamic point of view, three phases or moments and, from a structural point of view, three dimensions or strata. [1] In the first phase, a phase we would identify with early childhood, there is a passive, anonymous, prepersonal experience with vision, an experience prior to thematic consciousness, prior to volition, and belonging to a time prior to the conventional, ego-logically constructed order of time, exposing the identity of the one who sees to the radical alterity of the chiasm, the intertwining and its reversibilities. Thus we might say that, in this phase, vision enacts the immediate responsiveness, or the immediately responsive responsibility, of a proto-moral self. [2] Stéphane Mallarmé once wrote these marvelous words, useful in introducing the second phase: "L'enfant abdique son extase. . . . "[13] In the second phase, a phase largely determined by the processes and conditions of socialization to which the child happens to be exposed, the experience of the first phase is aufgehoben , repressed and surpassed, but also to some extent still preserved, becoming a "tracework" dimension that continues to function "beneath" the formation of the egological subject. Here vision belongs to—and serves—the self-centered ego-subject of a bourgeois modernity whose way of looking and seeing is predominantly motivated by self-preservation and self-interest. Here, vision, detached from its experience of a chiasmic alterity, reflects and manifests the familiar forms of conventional ego-logical morality. [3] Whereas the first phase is a vision whose proto-moral disposition is the gift of nature and the second phase is the destiny of a vision that has been socially constructed, the third phase, manifesting the vision of a truly moral self, is entirely contingent on the moral motivation of the subject. In other words, the possibility for this phase to come about is entirely dependent on a certain "practice of the self": the willingness of the ego-logical subject to work
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on itself and undertake a process of radical self-deconstruction, whereby it would return to make contact with and retrieve (if only in the form of a certain tracework) the prepersonal experience of chiasmic vision that was suppressed, alienated, and forgotten in the course of a necessary and inevitable socialization.
To the extent that the subject retrieves something of the infant's first phase experience with vision, the "initial sympathy" normally constitutive of that phase could be taken up and developed, becoming a freely embraced, reflectively affirmed sympathy, while the first-phase participation of the infant's vision in the "syncretic sociability" of an "initial community" could become the adult citizen's participation in a deliberative community of principled sociability built on a true reciprocity of gazes—gazes which look with respect at one another and would be capable of reversing their point of view to identify it with that of the other. I want to speak, here, not of empathy, Einfühlung , but of sympathy, because the former is a concept that would inevitably inscribe the experience in question within the very metaphysics of subjectivity out of which Merleau-Ponty is trying to break. The prefix suggests the wrong picture: that of a solitary subject which must overcome its inwardness, its self-enclosure, to project and transfer its feelings into an other who is no less closed off from corporeal intersubjectivity.—And perhaps we should also say that the prefix suggests a picture which is an all-too-accurate reflection and representation of the alienated world modernity has produced, but which we must unequivocally oppose in order to flesh out the possibility of a vision constitutive of a radically different moral and political order.
The recuperation of this vision, were it to be undertaken, would be the realization of a response-ability that has always already claimed us as beings gifted with the capacity to see, but which, without this difficult work of retrieval in consciousness and freedom, would not be confirmed as the identity-shattering ground of our visionary existence. According to this schema, vision is a capacity stretched between the "always already" and the "not yet." For the "moral self" is a never-ending, never-completed, ongoing project of exposure to the other, a difficult and, for some, a frightening process of self-deconstruction in responsiveness to the other. But perhaps we can find some measure of comfort after all in the thought that the moral vision which we have not yet realized has by a gift of nature always already been granted us as a possible destiny.
The hope which this argument represents, a hope the adumbrations of which Merleau-Ponty's work traces and to which he gives expression in the second of the quotations at the beginning of this chapter, but which
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he never spelled out, is that the tracework recovery of this chiasmic experience—the restoration of felt contact with its intertwining of subjectivities—could alter the moral character of the predominant gaze.
In "The War Has Taken Place," written at the close of the Second World War, Merleau-Ponty reflected on anti-Semitism as a way of looking and seeing:
An anti-Semite could not stand to see Jews tortured if he really saw them, if he perceived that suffering and agony in an individual life—but this is just the point: he does not see Jews suffering; he is blinded by the myth of the Jew. He tortures and murders the Jew through these concrete beings; he struggles with dream figures, and his blows strike living faces. Anti-Semitic passion is not triggered by, nor does it aim at, concrete individuals.[14]
Perhaps. But does this reflection avoid confronting the question of radical evil? In any case, I believe that a looking and seeing in felt contact with what we might call, after Levinas, the asymmetry and heteronomy of its chiasmic dimension could not only, if it were engaged as a social practice, elevate the moral condition, the moral sense and sensibility of the human world; it could also, as some of the passages quoted earlier suggest, profoundly alter our relationship to nature, encouraging the development of a deeper sense of responsibility for the earth and the life it sustains—for its rivers and lakes, its forests, its animals.[15] If responsibility extends as far as our ability to be responsive, the emergence of a chiasmic vision would perhaps see with more feeling the injustices of our world and be moved by the very sight of so many threats to the inconceivable beauty of its life. Perhaps.
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Vision is . . . that gift of nature which Spirit [l'Esprit ] was called upon to make use of beyond all hope, to which it was to give a fundamentally new meaning, yet which was needed, not only to be incarnate, but in order to be at all.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (p. 127)
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6— Outside the Subject: Merleau-Ponty's Chiasmic Vision
. . . . .
The Philosopher's Gaze
NOTE: Since it takes me more time than I have available to reinstate roman type where computer word processing subsumes everything into italics, link to the original text at the link rather than reading my attempted c&p. And for a more comprehensive understanding of MP's philosophy, read the other two sections of the book devoted to MP, linked in sequence in the T of C at the left of the page.
