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

Anders Skou Jrgensen, stud.mag. Frit Emne B Vejl.
: Joel Krueger
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Anders Skou Jrgensen, stud.mag. Frit Emne B Vejl.: Joel Krueger
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Contents pages
Introduction 3
1) Let's talk about meaning: what we do, when we do ontology 4-10
2) So, what goes on in the perceptual field? Flesh, world and divergence 10-11
2.1) La chair as mediation: uncovering the style of being 11-16
2.2) A short digression: what about illusions? 16-17
2.3) More on mediation what is la chair and what does it do? 17-18
2.4) But isnt flesh alive?
The difference between la chair du mondeand la chair du corps 18-20
Conclusion 20-21

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Towards an ontology of the flesh
- The notions of la chair and cart in the late philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to present an interpretation and explication of two key notions in the late
philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, namely the notions of flesh, la chair, and divergence, cart. Given
that these notions are to be understood as ontological notions, the paper also aims to do a
presentation of what ontology means in the context of Merleau-Pontyian philosophy.
What I intend to do in this paper is thus twofold: my primary aim is to articulate an
interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart within what I will propose to be a Merleau-
Pontyian ontological framework. This will be done through close reading of the last chapter of Le
visible et linvisible (VI). Secondarily, the aim of this paper is to explain how Merleau-Ponty
conceives of philosophical ontology as an expressive act. This will be pursued by arguing from
Merleau-Pontys own conception of language that the telos of the phenomenological, ontological
descriptive account is to express certain ways phenomena present themselves within a life-world.
The telos of this paper then is both to present an original interpretation of the last chapter of Le
visible et linvisible and to explain how the concept of ontology is to be understood when reading
Merleau-Ponty.
The structure of this paper is as follows: first of all, 1) I will seek to explain what
Merleau-Pontyian philosophical ontology is all about, in a general sense, in the context of his
philosophy of language. This chapter will take up slightly less than half of the papers length.
Second of all, I will 2) seek to explain what the present ontological project that is the last chapter of
Le visible et linvisible specifically involves through a close reading of the text. This chapter takes
up the majority of the paper and is divided into the subsections 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. At the end of
the paper I will present my conclusion.

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1) Let's talk about meaning: what we do, when we do ontology
To be able to present my interpretation of the key notions of la chair and cart as proper ontological
notions, that is, as notions pertaining to the meaning of being, it seems necessary first to explain in
broad terms how Merleau-Ponty conceives of ontology understood as a subgenre of philosophy. In
other words, how the study of the meaning of being that is philosophical ontology, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is both properly practiced and understood. This means, to phrase it in slightly more
mundane terms, to explicate not only what we talk about when we talk about being, but also specify
exactly what we do when we talk about being. I will explore these questions in the following.
A possible entry into the concept of philosophy (that is, ontology) present in VI is
found in the working notes to VI. In a short, enigmatic sentence, Merleau-Ponty describes his
practice as indirect ontology: 'On ne peut pas faire de l'ontologie directe. Ma mthode "indirecte"
(l'tre dans les tants) est seule conforme l'tre - "[l'ontologie] ngative" comme "thologie
ngative".' (VI, 231) It is not possible, he states, to do direct ontology - instead, one has to practice
ontology akin to what the theologian practices, when he practices negative theology (roughly the
idea that one cannot describe the positive qualities of God, as this would reduce God to the being of
our wordly concepts). What can he mean by this? To understand this, it is necessary to present a
short sketch of Merleau-Ponty's conception of language, as language is necessarily the medium (or,
if you will, the flesh) of philosophical thought.
In very broad terms, Merleau-Ponty holds what a commentator calls an "embodied"
conception of language. (Ihde, 62) Accordingly to hold such a position within the philosophy of
language means that, 'Language [...] is not something had by a subject, it is the subject in action.
Speech in the broad sense is the performance of thought' (ibid., 69). In other words, meaning or
thought is always already "embodied", understood as bound up in the materiality of linguistic
expression, while linguistic expression is not reducible to the uttering of words in a natural
language, but is to be understood broadly as the mode of acting by the subject as far is this action is
meaningful. As another commentator points out, expression is here to be understood in a broad
sense, including also bodily expression, and even the expressive content of things (Waldenfels,
92). There is no such thing as meaning in itself apart from language (i.e., there are no intelligible
platonic ideal substantial entities), while language cannot be reduced to spoken or written language;
language is a much broader phenomenon concerned with bodies engaged in certain practices that
express meaning, i.e. make signs. (Ihde, 70)
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Now, when we understand something as meaningful, we are actually engaged in the
practice of linguistic expression in this sense. And when we stumble upon a conceptual
understanding of the thing in question, we are thus engaged in the practice of expression in this
sense as well. In other words, understanding is not a only a matter of passive reception of
perceptual content, but of active conception of properties through language; as Dastur puts it, the
boundary between perception and language fades in the act of understanding: perception is a
kind of articulation [...] To perceive is always to sketch a figure against the background of the
world, to organize an area of the visible [...] This is why we can speak about perception in the same
way as we do about a language. (Dastur, 28-29) The essential nature of the thing in question, its
meaning, is the compound of our perceptual access and our expressive practices. The title of the
work, le visible et l'invisible is precisely the distinction between perception and its meaning: 'Mais il
y a tout de mme cette diffrence entre la perception et le langage que je vois les choses perues et
qu'au contraire les significations sont invisibles.' (VI, 263) and one of the main aims of the work is
to describe how the visible and the invisible are intertwined in being.
The embodied conception of language has important consequences for the ontological
practice: when we do ontology, we always do it as a) an example of the more general phenomenon
of linguistic expression, b) from the point of view of the embodied subject. But ontology is,
following Heidegger, of course much more than a subgenre of philosophy our pre-theoretical
understanding of the world, our way of being, is ontological, and philosophical ontology is a way of
interacting with this understanding, an understanding that is fundamentally an act of expression as
Garth Gillian specifies, philosophy (for Merleau-Ponty) takes its intelligibility from the act of
expression in rapport with the perceptual birth of meaning. [...] And philosophys hold upon truth is
within the act of expression (Gillian, 14-15), while Henri Maldiney points out that,
Philosophy exists in its speech, and philosophy exists from speech. The speech of a
philosopher is one specific manifestation of the ambiguous sense of the logos. []
The logos of the world is not the logos of anyone [personne] and the philosophical
logos is not an interpretation of the world by me nor by man. Instead, it is a revelation
of Being in man (Maldiney, 73)
Philosophical ontology understood as a practice of "expressing meaning", as it were, is bound up in
our concrete engagement with being through language, a pre-theoretical expression of the meaning
of being, the deeper sense of ontology - hence, there is no reality to be described apart from the one
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given to us through perceptual existence, while perceptual existence is always a matter of being-in-
language, as far as this existence is ontological in a working note, Merleau-Ponty goes as far as
describing language as the home of (invisible, i.e. meaningful) Being: Ltre dont le langage est
la maison ne se peut fixer, regarder, il nest que de loin. (VI, 263).
Now, what Merleau-Ponty effectively is going to deny given this position is that there
exists any such thing as a describable pre-linguistic field of perception available to the perceiver
(since everything described become ontologized), keeping in mind that language in this sense is
not to be understood as any given language (English, Greek etc.), nor as a compound of words,
grammatical structures and so on., but instead as the way in which meaning comes to be through
expressive acts performed by the human subject. This position entails that everything that is
available in the perceptual field is always already implicitly enveloped in language, in the specific
sense that language is used here, hence embedded within a pre-given structure of meaning (what we
might call "world"). A child that has not yet learned to speak can obviously still perceive, a point
we as philosophers have to take seriously, Quun enfant peroive avant de penser, quil commence
par mettre ses rves dans les choses, ses penses dans les autres [], ces faits de gense ne peuvent
tre simplement ignors par la philosophie (VI, 27), but the world in which the speechless child
finds itself perceiving is still the world understood, thus the world of meaningful expression: Le
enfant comprend bien au-del de ce quil sait dire, rpond bien au-del de ce quil saurait dfinir
(VI, 29). One might say that the child learns to see the world in the same way and correlative to the
way that she learns to speak her first language, because everything the child understands and every
signifying gesture that the child makes in response to this is already bound up in the language of the
world. Without going into too much detail, Merleau-Ponty here employs a distinction between
objectified language, in the sense we come to know it through the scientific study of language,
linguistics, and operative language (langage oprant), the language that flows with life, through
which we express being in our everyday existence, la langue par celui qui vit en elle, lenroulement
en lui du visible et du vcu sur le langage, du langage et le vcu
1
(VI, 165-166) the language we
breathe, if you will. Before the child comes to know language as a given structure of expression, she
expresses herself through signifying gestures that is, lives in operative language.
One could name this the life-world (to use a Husserlian term) theory of perception
indeed, Merleau-Ponty himself calls his project une philosophie de Lebenswelt (VI, 222).

1
Le vcu is Merleau-Pontys concept of lived experience, i.e. conscious, meaningful life.
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According to Don Ihde, Merleau-Ponty would indeed hold that this is case: 'We have been led
astray by those who have spoken of a "prelinguistic" state insofar as we have been led to believe
that this state is equivalent to a state prior to meaning.' (Ihde, 71, my emphasis) The point can be
put like this: given that the subject is always already in-the-world, the world being understood as
the complex of relations between meaningful entities present to the subject, whatever the subject
utters about whatever goes on in the perceptual field is pertaining to this world understood as
meaningful. However, given that meaning is always meaning-as-language, the world is always
already a world of language, and whatever is perceived therefore always already perceived through
(operative) language as well: la structure de [] monde muet est telle que toutes le possibilities du
langage y sont dj donnes. (VI, 200) While this might have led us to a constructivist account of
the sort that we can only see what is already named, the point is rather one of potentiality and
latency: the perceivable is always nameable, i.e. understandable but not necessarily named
already, hence only implicitly meaningful:
Cependant il y a le monde du silence, le monde peru, du moins, est un ordre o il y a
des significations non langagires; oui, des significations non langagires, mais elles
ne sont pas pour positives. (VI, 223)
What Merleau-Ponty states here, by saying that there is such a thing as non-positive (i.e.
indeterminate), non-language significations, is that what goes on in the perceptual field is as much
as inherently implicitly meaningful, but that we need positive significations of the operative
language (expressions of meaning) to awaken the implicit to become explicit. There is altogether
no sharp ontological separation between perceived being and its realization as explicitly meaningful
in language one might say that the difference between realized meaning and potential meaning
in this sense is a difference of degree, not of kind. Meaning is already there to be "seen" in the
things of the world, because the condition of them being noticeable at all as precisely something in
the world is their already being enveloped in language. Meaning is a latent property of the
perceptual field, because perception of something as such is always perception of something as
being in the world. However, one must remember that for something to be nameable it does not
entail that everything about this something can be named at once. In other words, there is always
the possibility of there being more meaning to a thing than can be captured in rigid definitions:
'There is no final, no complete expression. [...] The existentiality of language is such that the field
of implicit silence is always broader than the focus of explicit speech.' (Ihde, 72)
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Now, if we grant that the perception of something is always a perception of something
as being in the world, i.e. as meaningful and thus linguistically embedded, then we must ask how
we ought to understand the implicitness of meaning in the perceptual field i.e., what is there,
when we just perceive instead of perceiving something? If ontology is the practice of articulating
meaning always somehow present in the perceptual field, what does it mean for this meaning to be
un-articulated? Merleau-Ponty proposes the rather vague term of "silence" for this yet unarticulated
meaning: 'Silence, in Merleau-Ponty's use, is the field of pregnant, latent expressiveness always
already present to the living subject. Pregnant silence is always and wholly present; man lives
within the world of implicitly meaningful silence.' (ibid., 73) Silence is in this way understood as
the field of possible speech about the world, the availability of meaning before meaning actually
occurs, the dimension of the perceptual field out of which articulated expression emerges. However,
given that this field of silence is understood as a condition of possibility of articulated expression,
naming and so on, it is necessary that it remains itself a necessarily obscure but inherent part of the
field of perception, because as soon as anything is designated as something in the field of
perception, that is, given a specificity, a meaning etc., it has emerged from silence and is then not
silent anymore. Silence in this sense is thus a negative term, in the sense that one might speak about
negative theology - we cannot name it, understood as describing its positive properties, but we can
designate it negatively. The field of silence from which meaning emerges is then a field of the
inherently unnamable, although it is nothing but what is implicitly namable.
Now, all complexity aside, the point is actually deceptively simple: one can only
describe just what one understands about something, while this something has to be meaningful to
be understandable; and it is impossible for this meaning to present itself except through the medium
of language, that is, linguistic expression, while linguistic expression is only available to people
understood as living, breathing, feeling and thinking bodies. When one describes something, then
one describes something that is in some sense describable, hence implicitly meaningful. This does
not entail that everything describable is already fully described - only that it is within the reach of
description, that is, of language. This does entail though that whatever is describable is somehow
already recognized as being in some sense understandable, hence named - in other words, to dis-
cover something entails not only the dis-coverability of the something, the aforementioned silence,
but that there is something about the something which is already designated, named etc.. We never
discover anything from scratch, so to speak, but always from within a pre-given structure of
meaning, i.e. from within the world. Or to recall and modify Nagel's famous notion, there is no
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view from nowhere, while somewhere is always understood as being within the confines of
language.
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So, what do we talk about when we talk about being, and what exactly is it we do
when we do this? To put it short, we express or make available the meaning of being, understood as
the process of articulating whatever is designated in the perceptual field from within the complex
structure of pre-given implicit and explicit linguistic meaning, i.e. world.
Why then, can we not do direct ontology? Since being is always already expressed
somehow as being in the world, the nature of being in itself (that is, extra-wordly being) always
escapes any sort of designation. Being in itself cannot be any-thing, because anything
understandable is always something within a world, the world which of course itself is. Being can
then not be named, it is in this sense no-thing, but we can still talk about the certain ways it seems
to behave within the scope of the world as it comes to view as particular beings, relations and so on.
To equate being with nothingness is wrong, but since everything has being, and being isnt itself
anything, no-thingness is an integral dimension of being as it presents itself as a commentator puts
it, this negative dimension does not have anything to do with positive nothingness, [..] This
negativity, [...] lies within Being and, ultimately is not different from its very presence. (Barbaras,
81) To do (philosophical) ontology is then not simply to describe being as it is, as being itself is not
available, but to enquire into the way being seems to behave, interrogating as it were what goes on
in the perceptual field with the purpose of giving an always tentative account of the nature of being
itself as it presents itself to the embodied subject. An account, that is fundamentally an expression
of meaning, not a passive reception and pinning down of properties.

2) So, what goes on in the perceptual field? Flesh, world and divergence
Starting from the point of view of the embodied subject, Merleau-Ponty wants to give an account of
what goes on in the perceptual field, because, naturally, this is where being presents itself to us. The
purpose is to do ontology, still, and since being is never present except through perceptual

2
One has to be weary of making too strong claims about our being captured in this sense within the confines of our
world one might object, since discoverability entails world that entails language, can animals not discover
anything?. One might reply, though, that the claim that understanding implies world implies language doesnt
necessarily prevent animals from experiencing one just has to posit that the worlds of animals are language worlds
as well (i.e. structures of signification).
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existence, Merleau-Ponty wants to give an account of the nature of being as mediated through
perceptual existence. However, what is imperative is to remember that the one who is to do
ontology of course herself is what she is describing and asking for, i.e., the nature of being, is
always also the nature of herself as a being. In a way reminiscent of Spinozistic philosophy, being is
then interrogating itself about itself. Obviously though, from the point of view of the subject, there
seems to be a difference between the being of the subject and the being of whatever is present to the
subject giving an account of being then involves both giving an account of what binds the
embodied subject to the beings of the world (i.e. in virtue of what they are part of the same), and
giving an account of how this binding also seemingly involves a separation between the beings of
the world and the subject. Merleau-Ponty wants to describe the first as the function of la chair,
flesh, the second as cart, divergence or separation. In the following Ill seek to describe the way in
which these notions are fleshed out, if you will, in VI. On a short note, since the aim is to do an
original interpretation of these notions, I have focused as much as possible on a close reading of the
text and not on commentary of scholars, as was indeed not the case in the first half of this paper.

2.1) La chair as mediation: uncovering the style of being
Since we already established that any sort of ontological practice, i.e. expressing the meaning of
being, must be done starting from what shows itself in the perceptual field, the task becomes first of
all to pay attention to whatever there might be there to be noticed. Merleau-Ponty starts from these
two components of the ontological practice, observation and expression, what he calls the seeing
and the speaking:
Voir, parler, mme penser [] sont des experiences de ce genre, la fois irrcusables
et nigmatiques. Elles ont un nom dans toutes les langues, mais qui dans toutes aussi
porte des significations en touffe, des buissons de sens propres et de sens figures, de
sorte que ce nest pas un de ces noms, come ceux de la science, qui font la lumire, en
attribuant ce qui est nomm une signification circonscrite, mais plutt lindice
rpt, le rappel insistant, dun mystre aussi familier quinexpliqu, dune lumire
qui, clairant le reste, demeure son origine dans lobscurit. (VI, 170)
Seeing and speaking (and thinking understood as a mode of speech) are interesting words due to the
fact that every language seems to have them, however, they are not very clear in relation to what
exactly it is they designate. We all know what it means to see and to speak, but what exactly the
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meaning of speaking and seeing is, ontologically speaking, is somewhat ill-defined we get the
reference but are not very clear on the meaning. Merleau-Ponty suggests that we start our
phenomenological enquiry into the meaning of being by enquiring into whatever these ill-defined
words may be said to express phenomenologically. In a way reminiscent of the Heideggerian mode
of enquiry, where one starts with the necessarily pre-ontological understanding of being all-present
in everyday life and then explicates whatever proper ontological understanding may be deduced
from phenomena constitutive of this everyday life, Merleau-Ponty starts with these words (seeing,
speaking) that we all know and use and then seeks to contribute to them a proper ontological
dimension in other words, he starts with the world we know and then seeks to re-discover, as it
were, the meaning of being implicit in it:
3
notre construction [] fait retrouver ce monde du
silence. [] Il tait l prcisment comme Lebenswelt non-thmatis. (VI, 222) Since I have
already presented my view on the notion of speech in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, I will
concentrate my presentation on the notion of seeing.
Starting with seeing, what seems to be the case first of all is that seeing is the way in
which what is visible presents itself to us. Thus, we start our enquiry into the nature of seeing by
enquiring into the nature of visibility:
Le visible autour de nous semble reposer en lui-mme. Cest comme si notre vision se
formait en son coeur, ou comme sil y avait de lui nous une accointance aussi troite
que celle de la mer et de la plage. (VI, 171)
The visible seems to rest in itself, but our vision does not seem completely disconnected from it it
is, as he states, as if our vision formed itself in the heart of the visible. Our seeing and what is
seen is not distinguished in a way comparative to the distinction between subject and object; one
notices that the image Merleau-Ponty applies metaphorically to the distinction does not place the
subjective and the objective components in separate ontological realms: the closeness is like the one
between the ocean and the strand, both materially manifest, not the like the separation between the
immaterial and the material of the classical ontological distinction between subject and object.
Although he does not posit vision and the visible in two separate ontological realms,
Merleau-Ponty does assert that some form of ontological distinction is to be upheld or else the
idea of vision and thus its correlating phenomenon would lose its meaning: il nest pas possible

3
This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty is straight forward Heideggerian, but I follow the authors cited in this chapter,
Dastur, Maldiney etc. in seeing close affinities between the two philosophers.
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que nous nous fondions en lui [le visible], ni quil pass en nous, car alors la vision svanouirait au
moment de se faire, par disparation ou du voyant ou du visible.(ibid.) It isnt possible that vision
merges completely with the visible, because the visible in that case would cease to be visible as
such, since visibility implies vision. The seeing and the seen seem to be co-originary in this sense
while it is not possible that vision and the visible are posited in distinct ontological realms, it is not
possible either that they remain completely indistinct. They are (albeit, distinct) parts of the same
fabric.
Initially, the point Merleau-Ponty is making is more radical than it might at first seem:
the world as it were cannot consist of brute things with properties and the relations between them
on one side and then a seer whose mind grasps these properties and relations on the other
(dualism), nor can seeing be just one of many relations between brute things (monism): Ce quil y
a donc, ce ne sont pas des choses identiques elles-mmes qui, par aprs, soffriraient au voyant, et
ce nest pas un voyant, vide dabord, qui, par aprs, souvrirait elles (VI, 171). What seems to be
the case phenomenologically speaking is a midway between these two. But to understand the
midway, we must understand its components, i.e. the visible and the vision. What is it we see? In
the case of a certain color, we not only see the specific singular instance of the color in question (the
quale) but always see the color as a certain particular instance of all the different variants and
instances of this color the bundle of singular instances, as it were, of this specific color: La
couleur est dailleurs variante dans une autre dimension de variation, celle de ses rapports avec
lentourage: ce rouge nest ce quil est quen se reliant de sa place dautres rouges autour de lui,
[] (VI, 172) This means that when we see a particular instance of (Merleau-Pontys own
example) the color red, we see it within the horizon of all instances of redness that is, different
sorts of red garments, flags, blood, and so on. The red of the surface then has a certain sort of
thickness of signification to it the red itself makes its appearance as being just the red of a
surface, while resonating with the numerous of other instances of red apparent in the cultural fabric
of our world: precisely as quelque chose qui vient toucher doucement et fait rsonner distance
diverses regions du monde color ou visible. (VI, 173) The blueness of this particular coffee cup
on my desk holds in itself, through my vision, a phenomenal interconnectedness with the blue of the
sky, the blue of the ocean and so on, both in virtue of simply being blue and the differentiation in
the phenomenal field of possible blues. (ibid.)
An important point here is that there is no essential blue at work, no blue as such: the
different singular instances of blue together form a field of interconnected blues that, if one occurs,
14

resonates with the others. The question is now, if there is no essential blueness that binds the
blues together, in virtue of what are these singulars interconnected? Since the singular blue is
always a blue of the world, and the blue is always a way a certain surface comes to view, and the
surface is (at least phenomenologically) the surface of a body (even if the body is ethereal), these
blues must be connected through the way in which these bodies come to give (as in Husserlian
Gegebenheit) themselves: Entre les couleurs et les visibles prtendus, on retrouverait le tissue qui
les double, les soutient, les nourrit, et qui, lui, nest chose, mais possibilit, latence et chair des
chose.(VI, 173) The tissue, the fabric that binds singulars together as something or other (blues,
trees, foxes etc.) is not a thing itself, nothing that is definable as a particular set of properties, but is
rather a potentiality, a latency, and a flesh of the singulars in question. The being (and thus, the
meaning of the being) of blue is thus the particular framework that is in itself invisible, as it is no-
thing, but is the way in which the thing appears, i.e. if you will, using Merleau-Pontyian
vocabulary, the certain style of the thing: Le sens est invisible, mais linvisible nest pas le
contradictoire du visible: le visible a lui-mme une membrure dinvisible, et lin-visible est la
contrepartie secrete du visible. (VI, 265) The meaning of whatever appears is the secret
counterpart of the appearance, the framework that both structures the singular appearance and
binds the singular appearance to other appearances that share this particular style. In this way, what
is invisible is actually part of the visible, since the visible singular gives itself as meaningful one
cannot see the meaning itself, but if whatever is visible is meaningful, one has access to the
meaning that in this way comes to view.
4
The visible and the invisible are intertwined in
appearance, while the way anything appears is in its own flesh. Why flesh? At this moment of the
analysis, Merleau-Ponty wants primarily to stress the bodily being of the thing in question, as he
thinks about seeing as a way of grasping the being of whatever is there in this way it is a sort of
palpation with vision. (VI, 171) The same way we feel a surface and recognize whatever is there to
be felt, we let our vision examine the appearance of whatever is there as a being to be recognized in
space.

4
While Adina Bozga certainly has a point when she says that singularity is not the first and foremost concern of the
ontological framework of VI, I find it difficult to understand how she can state that Merleau-Pontys phenomenology
cannot be considered as a description of the singular (Bozga, 260). It seems clear enough, given my analysis, that the
virtue of which a singular blue color can be blue at all is due to its inhabiting a particular space within the network of
singulars sharing the same style, but that it doesnt owe its blueness to an essential blueness rather, essential
blueness owes its essentiality to the field of singulars that together make up this particular style of being.
15

Now, further concerning the subjective part of the equation, the seer who sees:
Merleau-Ponty believes that we need to take the assertion that the way or style in which a being
comes to view is in its flesh seriously in a non-metaphoric sense: on va constater que ceci nest pas
analogie ou comparaison vague, et doit tre pris letter. (VI, 173) The assertion must be taken
literally, [le] regard, disions-nous, envelope, palpe, pouse les choses visible.(ibid.). What does
this assertion tell us about the one who sees? Well, first of all, if it is the case that the look is more
than analogous with palpation, the key might be to examine what goes on in palpation: Nous
trouverions peut-tre la rponse dans la palpation tactile o linterrogeant et linterrog sont plus
proches (ibid.). There is a closeness in the phenomenon of tactile experience between one who
touches and the thing touched my experience of, for instance, touching the bark of a tree, feeling
its roughness. After all, being close is a spatial expression. How can it be that I can feel the
textural surface of the tree? Ceci ne peut arriver que si, en mme temps que sentie du dedans, ma
main est aussi accessible du dehors, tangible elle-mme; It seems necessary that my hand, to be
able to touch anything, must itself be touchable from the outside, while it feels from the inside.
It is, he says, a matter of the hand incorporating itself into the universe it explores. (VI, 174) The
world that it opens is in essence the world of the hand itself, in the sense that this hand of mine is,
with its capability of touching, a fully integrated part of the reality of the world at hand. Although
this intimacy seems natural enough to assert in the realm of touching/touched, of tangibility, it does
seem somewhat less intuitive to assert that it is, in the same way, a necessary condition for vision to
be visible. This is exactly the claim Merleau-Ponty is making though, cette dlimitation des sens
est grossire. [] Il faut habituer penser que tout visible est taill dans le tangible, tout tre tacite
promis en quelque manire la visibilit (VI, 174-175) What is visible is cut out in the tangible,
while whatever is tangible is promised to visibility this means that the visible presents itself in
the same world as that of tactile perception and vice versa. There is thus a flesh of the visible as
well as the tangible chair here means style (singular) or way (general) of being manifest as doubly
seeable and touchable. Yet there is a distinction present using the metaphor of the map, Merleau-
Ponty states that,
Il y a relvement double et crois du visible dans le tangible et du tangible dans le
visible, les deux cartes sont completes, et pourtant elles ne se confondent pas. Les
deux parties sont parties totales et pourtant ne sont pas superposables. (VI, 175)
While the two maps in some way represent the same world, they are distinct maps in terms of
content. In terms of meaning, using the metaphor of language, the meaning of a touch and the
16

meaning of a look might be co-referential (that, is, adhering to the same reference) but they are
distinct ways of referring. They disclose being, yes, but the manners by which they disclose are
different. Although this is the case, the properties common to experience through vision and tactile
experience are clear enough to Merleau-Ponty: vision is a palpation, the world disclosed is the same
world, and because this is the case, the same closeness that is the condition of possibility of tactile
experience is a condition of possibility of visual experience: the touching hand is dependent on
being manifest in the tactile world, hence touchable, while the vision depends on the seer being
manifest in the visible world. (ibid.)

2.2) A short digression: what about illusions?
What seems to be the case then is a certain reversibility between the one who sees and whatever is
seen if he sees he can be seen, if he touches he can be touched, at least in principle. One might
now conjure up certain objections to this argument, given that this is actually what Merleau-Ponty
believes. One concerns the reversibility between seeing and seen, taking up the idea of the invisible
man, who experiences the world just as anyone else would, but is not visible. This objection is
easily refuted though due to the fact that the claim is about being visible in principle and not de
facto one might throw paint on the invisible man, as he is still manifest as a body with a surface,
thus making him visible. Another concerns the reversibility between visual and tactile experience,
taking up the idea of visual illusions that are seeable but not touchable. Merleau-Ponty does have a
response to a problem such as this, claiming that the principle of reversibility holds even when telle
vision particulire se rvle illusoire, car je reste sr alors quen regardant mieux jaurais eu la
vision vraie et quen tout cas, celle-l ou une autre, il y en a une. (VI, 190) This is actually two
responses in one: the first one claims that, due to the fact that I am able to discover the illusionary
nature of the illusion, there must be a true vision that is, once I discover the illusion (a
hologram, for instance) to be untouchable, I have incorporated this into my vision of it. I am not
able to continue my seeing it as a touchable being, once I have discovered its ethereal nature thus
I have in some way actually touched the untouchable, meaning I have discovered the non-tactility of
its tactile dimension. The second response claims that I cannot understand what it means to be
illusory unless I have a presupposed faith in what I see is actually the case, or else the distinction
between illusion and non-illusion would have no meaning being-illusion thus depends on true
vision as a condition of possibility. To put it slightly differently, illusion qua illusion only makes
17

sense as exception to the rule of right perception, which seems to be a matter of the seeable being
touchable and vice versa.

2.3) More on mediation what is la chair and what does it do?
I have presented la chair as the way in which a particular singular thing is manifest as a doubly
visible and tangible entity. Merleau-Ponty now asserts that, due to the fact that everything, seer and
seen, as far as its being a thing concerned, is mediated in its being through this flesh, there is a
certain constitutive separation, a thickness of flesh, between the seer and what is seen:
Cest que lpaisseur de chair entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa
visibilit elle comme de sa corporit lui; ce nest pas un obstacle entre lui et elle,
cest leur moyen de communication. (VI, 176, my emphasis)
The separation between seer and seen that is this thickness of flesh between them is thus actually
the means of communication between them in other words, phrased yet again in the language of
transcendental philosophy, flesh is here a condition of possibility of interaction between things. And
this makes sense, because if both things were not manifest as separate entities, albeit of the same
fundamental nature, in the same world, how would they be able to act upon each other? It is only
because I as a seer am not merging with the thing upon interaction, that I can grasp it with my hands
and explore it with my look. What we are actually touching upon here is the notion of cart
rendered as divergence, separation, etc. in English, but a single term in the original French. cart is,
in its most general sense, a mode of being of the flesh as manifest: it is the constitutive separation of
the unity of manifest being into the singulars of the world. Drawing upon the notion of lpaisseur,
thickness, just explored, I, as an example, need to be both of the same tangible world and
manifestly distinct within it to be able to touch at all. When my touch has both certain inner
qualities (my consciousness of it) and outer qualities to it (the physical interaction taking place), this
is due to the fact that I know myself to not be whatever I touch, but to be of the same world, still.
What is going on is then a diffrence sans contradiction, [un] cart du dedans du dehors. (VI, 177)
I am not, in virtue of my being a sensible pour soi, a contradiction of what is there to be seen and
thus not me: being-not-me is not a contradiction of being-me. I am diverging from whatever is not
me, within the same world, through the same flesh, just enough to know our differences. cart, is
present at all levels of being manifest in flesh: the separation between my inner world and my outer,
physical body is a matter of divergence as well la chair is here not a conceptual unity of what
18

cannot be unified, the traditional metaphysical concepts of spiritual and physical, but instead the
notion of corporeal manifestation of and thus separation within the original unity of the body, of the
inner life and the outer world:
La chair nest pas matire, nest pas esprit, nest pas substance. [...] La chair est ce
sens un lment de ltre. Non pas fait ou somme de faits, et pourtant adhrente au
lieu et au maintenant. (VI, 181-182)
La chair is thus in time as far as it is now and in space as far as it is here being the mode of
manifestation of things. It is because of this peculiar nature of being a general thing that Merleau-
Ponty draws upon the concept of element (in the sense that fire, water, earth and air used to be
employed as the constitutive components of being). He utilizes this notion to put emphasis on the
fact that la chair cannot be reduced to this individual, singular flesh of a given particular, but must
be understood as a way of being that binds beings together in constitutive separation (that is, cart).
The way in which this element presents itself in the context of human beings
specifically is then as the double-sidedness of the body. Even though Merleau-Ponty goes on to
deny the adequacy of the metaphor, I find it helpful to phrase it in the way that the body is a being
of two leaves (of a page), notre corps es un tre deux feuillets, dun ct chose parmi les choses
et, par ailleurs, celui qui les voit et les touche (VI, 178), one of which is being of objective reality,
a thing among things, and another which is being of subjective reality, the inner life that feels what
it touches. One gets a feeling that there is a completely natural, even necessary separation between
these sides of the body, as there is between the front and the back of a piece of paper, without there
being two parts or components of the being in question.

2.4) But isnt flesh alive? The difference between la chair du mondeand la chair du corps
Why call it flesh and not matter? Flesh seems to imply that there is something live at work, some
sort of sentience, but considering the Merleau-Pontyian flesh of the stone I grab and throw into the
flesh of the ocean, it is clearly not the case that flesh is to be understood as being first and foremost
something alive with feeling. Merleau-Ponty stresses that it is not a matter of anthropomorphizing
being, nous nentendons pas faire de lanthropologie, dcrire un monde recouvert de toutes nos
projections (VI, 177), but instead a matter of pointing out that the way in which we, as sentient
beings, are as beings of two leaves, is nothing but an exemplary version of the way beings as such
are as being itself behaves within the world as flesh:
19

Nous voulons dire [...] que ltre charnel, comme tre des profondeurs, plusiurs
feuillets ou plusieurs faces [...] est un prototype de ltre, dont notre corps [...] est
une variante trs remarquable, mais dont le paradoxe constitutif est dj dans tout
visible (ibid.)
We are but a remarkable variant of the double-sidedness of being as flesh everything visible
pertains to the structure of cart due to its manifestation in the flesh. The point is not that everything
out there feels in the same way that we do, but that our feeling things is but an interesting
manifestation of the depths and layers of being present in every visible of the world. The stone on
the beach does indeed not feel anything, but it does have a reality and a thickness (literally, the
inside of the stone, as it were) that we cannot see or feel from anywhere else but the surface of the
stone. The point is thus not to say that the flesh of the human live subject is the original,
primordial flesh from which everything else is constructed, but that the flesh of the human live
subject is constructed through the general structure of the flesh of the world, the general way of
manifestation of being. This is also the reason why we can understand the things themselves at all
we are made of the same stuff of the world and thus always already find ourselves in an intimate
relation with it: Le corps nous unit directement aux choses par sa propre ontogense, en soudant
lune lautre les deux bauches dont il est fait. (ibid.)
Now, a peculiar thing about la chair du corps is its reversibility: whatever it touches
touches it (I feel both the texture of the surface and the surface on me), and it can even touch itself
and touch itself touching. If my hand touches my body, I, as my body, am both touching and
touched. One would now think that if we shared flesh with the flesh of the world, cart or not, there
ought to be a like reversibility when I touch something that is not me why is it that I can feel both
sides of myself touching, but not feel both sides of my touching the other? Merleau-Ponty remarks
that it is a mistake to think my body touching another body of the world analogously with my hand
touching my body la chair is clearly not to be thought of as a great pulsing beast that our bodies
are the limbs and organs of. (VI, 185) But if this is not the case, what then? It is something akin to
the metaphor of the maps used earlier, when two bodies (live or dead) interact: Leurs paysages
senchevtrent (ibid.), their landscapes are entangled, but they are never entirely the same
landscape, the landscapes do not merge. What this means in terms of reversibility is that this
relation is asymmetrical: the relation between the sentient body and the world is a relation where I
as sentient body can feel myself touching while touching the surface, but only feel the surface of the
flesh of the other (be it a stone, a tree or the flesh of a live organism). However, the asymmetrical
20

reversibility present at the level of conscious interaction with objects is already present, to some
degree, at the level of the body touching itself: Il est temps de souligner quil sagit dune
rversibilit toujours imminente et jamais realis en fait. (VI, 191, my emphasis) The point is not
that I cannot reverse the touch (my touched hand can still assume the rank of touching), but that the
touched and the touching cannot coincide in one single experience: Ma main gauche est toujours
sur le point de toucher ma main droite en train de toucher les choses, mais je ne parviens jamais la
concidence; elle sclipse au moment de se produire (VI, 191) This is a very subtle point that
requires the reader to do his own phenomenological experiments, but it is rather crucial to the
argument here. Merleau-Ponty seems to make the argument that, since the asymmetrical relation of
reversibility is already present at the level of the body conscious of itself, the difference between
this reversibility and the reversibility between one flesh and another is a difference of degree, not of
kind. Drawing upon my interpretation of the notion of cart earlier, one might say that the this
asymmetrical reversibility is actually a necessary condition of my experience of the other as exactly
other if there were complete reversibility, I would never be able to tell the difference between my
hand and anothers, nor where my body ends and the carpet upon which my feet are planted begins.

Conclusion
To sum everything up, this paper had two distinct aims: it wanted to present an original
interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart as ontological notions in the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty, and it wanted to clarify how the notion of ontology is to be understood in the
context of Merleau-Pontyian philosophy. So, what has been said in this course of this paper? It has
been argued that ontology in this context is fundamentally expression of the meaning of being, and
that philosophical ontology is but a variant of our more general language expressions, while
language as such is a much more general phenomenon than that of utilizing a natural language,
namely, the phenomenon of living bodies expressing themselves in the most general sense. In this
discussion of language, it was concluded that all meaningful perception is (life-)wordly perception,
and that wordly perception is essentially perception within the confines of language in the broad
sense just mentioned.
In the second half of the paper the aim was to present mentioned original
interpretation of the notions of la chair and cart in le visible et linvisible. The text of Merleau-
Ponty is dense and difficult, but through a close reading of the original text, one discovers that la
21

chair is the way any being comes to present itself as bodily manifest, its style, and that the sentient
body is but a remarkable variant of a the fundamental double-sidedness of the flesh, that is
present at all levels of being. This double-sidedness is an cart, a constitutive divergence or
separation that is a mode of flesh, i.e. a mode of being in so far as being presents itself as manifest
in the world. Therefore the difference between seeing and touching is less than their similarities,
while the difference between the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world is not a difference in
terms of kind, but a difference in terms of said divergence within the flesh as such.

Works cited
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Le visible et linvisible. ditions Galimard, 1964 .
Bozga, Adina: The exasperating gift of singularity; Zeta Books, Bucharest, 2009
Gillian, Garth: In the folds of the flesh: philosophy and language. In: The Horizons of the Flesh. Ed:
Gillian, Garth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973
Ihde, Don: Singing the world: language and perception. In: The Horizons of the Flesh. Ed: Gillian,
Garth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973
Dastur, Francoise: World, Flesh, Vision: In: Chiasms Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed:
Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000
Maldiney, Henri: Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty: In: Chiasms Merleau-
Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000
Barbaras, Renaud: Perception and movement: the end of the metaphysical approach. In: Chiasms
Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh. Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000
Waldenfels, Bernhard: The paradox of expression. In: Chiasms Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh.
Ed: Evans, Fred; Lawlor, Leonard. SUNY press, Albany, 2000

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