Abstract
It is well known that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960–1961. More precisely, through a self-criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness – which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome – to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the “element” of Being, and on Being itself as “true negative,” or as “Being of deflection” and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this term inherited from Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considered Being no longer as a determined Being – namely, as the essence of what is – but rather as an irradiation of interior or exterior horizons from which subjects and objects arise as “rays of the world.” This comprehensive movement manifests a clear rejection of substantial dualism for the benefit of “brute Being” or “wild Being” monism.
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Notes
- 1.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), English translation: Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962).
- 2.
See PhP., p. 160–161/137–139: “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’” (with footnote reference to Husserl); and “Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body”. See on these issues the deep analysis of J. Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 165–169, English translation: On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 146–150.
- 3.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), English translation: The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
- 4.
See B. Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, II: The Florentine Painters (London: Puntam’s Sons, 1896; second edition, revised, 1902), p. 40–41. See also Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms in Eye and Mind and in the Cours du Collège de France.
- 5.
E. Husserl, Ideen II (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), § 37, English translation: Ideas, II (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), § 37, p. 155.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
P. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990) p. 375, English translation: Oneself as Another (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 324.
- 8.
F. Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, in Chair et langage. Essais sur Merleau-Ponty (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2001), English translation: “World, Flesh, Vision”, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) p. 41. F. Dastur adds: “there is not only a ‘vague comparison’ between seeing and touching, but also a literal, essential identity between flesh and visibility: the look ‘envelopes, palpates, espouses the visible things.’”
- 9.
J. Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy , op. cit., p. 239/211.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 242/214.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 139/121.
- 12.
See, on the same issue, the criticism towards the American aesthetician Bernard Berenson in OE: “when, apropos of Italian painting, the young Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he could hardly have been more mistaken; painting evokes nothing, least of all the tactile. [...] It gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible” [M. Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard 1964), p. 27, English translation: Eye and Mind, in G. Johnson (editor), “The Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics Reader” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p.127)].
- 13.
See M. Richir, « Le sensible dans le rêve », in R. Barbaras (editor), Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: P.U.F., « Épiméthée », 1998) p. 239–254. See also the analysis of P. Leconte in his work Proximité. Lectures du phénomène éthique (Argenteuil: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2011), p. 84–90.
- 14.
M. Richir, « Le sensible dans le rêve », op. cit., p. 244. [our translation].
- 15.
P. Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the human Body (New York: International Universities Press, 1935).
- 16.
As Lefort points out in a note to the Visible and the Invisible working notes, “Ester, as a French translation of Wesen , is a term borrowed from Gilbert Kahn. Cf. M. Heidegger, Introduction à la métaphysique, French translation (Paris: P.U.F., 1958), p. 239 (Glossary of German terms)” (VI, p. 256 / 203). [T.N.]
- 17.
G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), English translation: Confronting images (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 142–143; See also ibid., p. 143: “In this optic, we are using the visual and not the invisible as the element of this constraint of negativity within which images are caught, catch us.”
- 18.
Here Merleau-Ponty quotes R. Delaunay. In a note he refers to Du cubisme à l’art abstrait (Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957) p. 110 and 115. For the Apollinaire texts, we shall refer, in the same work, to p. 144–166. Apropos of the main Delaunay thesis on the “simultanéité” and the “métier simultané,” see mostly p. 106–115.
- 19.
A. Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz, 1893), English translation: The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (New York: Stechert, 1907); A. Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste [1897–1898] (Graz: Böhlau, 1966), English translation: Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (New York: Zone, 2004); W. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (Munich: Piper, 1908), English translation: Abstraction and Empathy (London: Routledge, 1953); B. Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, op. cit.
- 20.
R. Delaunay, op. cit., p. 109; to be put in relation with M. Merleau-Ponty, OE, p. 64–71/140–142.
Bibliography
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Rodrigo, P. (2020). Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought. In: Lau, KY., Nenon, T. (eds) Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 109. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_13
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