Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Conclusion: The Visible and the Invisible

Conclusion: The Visible and the Invisible This new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as expression are the point of insertion of speaking and thinking in the world of silence. —Merleau-Ponty1 With all our correct representations we would get nowhere . . . unless the unconcealment of beings had already . . . placed us in that cleared realm in which every being stands for us and from which it withdraws. —Martin Heidegger2 From the very outset, this book was designed and written to carefully lead the reader through central areas of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and to examine his views in relation to the work of contemporary thinkers and criticisms. We have seen, for example, the rationale and continuing need for a phenomenology of perceptual life, even in the age of the “cognitive revolution.” Phenomenology is a method for uncovering and studying the features of reality as it is lived; it is an indispensable order of discourse that cannot be exhausted or replaced by analytic explanations, no matter how powerful those may be. We have also seen Merleau-Ponty’s unprecedented, patient, and occasionally flawed labors to uncover the features of perceptual experience, living embodiment , and intersubjective relations with others. In Phenomenology of Perception , he refers to this triad as the “symbiotic” system “self-others-things”; in the final writings he simply calls it “the visible.” And in chapters 6 and 7, I have sought to articulate an elusive, yet central aspect of his philosophy: his account of thinking, language, and knowing (“the invisible”) as expressive processes that are rooted in our perceptual life and yet go beyond that life. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, our expressive cognitions are rooted in living experience, transformative of it, and yet not reducible to it. They are natural processes that “sublimate” and “signify” our incarnate life without covering it. They are transcending processes of ideality that are not transcendental. At this late stage in the book, I hope that all these ideas and arguments are reasonably clear and that the reader finds them as provocative and promising as I do for enriched life experiences and ongoing philosophical thought. However, in these final pages, there are two last promissory notes I must try to fulfill. To start work on the first of these, it may be remembered that I have claimed that Merleau-Ponty’s account of expressive cognition offers a 194 Conclusion revolutionary paradigm for understanding the life of the mind. A paradigm, I said, that gives us a powerful alternative to the ancient model of Plato’s “divided line.” I believe finding such an alternative would be a rather extraordinary thing, because Plato’s hierarchical, dualistic model of the visible and the intelligible has remained quietly determinative of most western philosophical theories of ideality and its relationship to the world. We recall Plato’s image from Republic:3 One striking thing about Plato’s model of “the visible and the invisible” is that it denigrates and deforms the processes of visibility. Casting perceptual life as constituted by “images” and “bare particulars” (never mind treating the body as a “prison of the soul”), Plato has to search beyond this “feast of illusions ” for truths that correspond to a transcendental reality, that correspond to transcendental being and not becoming. Of course this ontology, this ontotheology , is explicitly taken up by Descartes when he denigrates the senses and underwrites all of his knowledge by the “divine guarantee.” But Plato’s divided line is more subtly invested in Aristotle’s substance metaphysics. This is because Aristotle’s depiction of reality as a collection of objects and their properties , that is, substances and their predicates, subjects and objects, is the direct descendent of Plato’s image of the visible as “bare particularity.” To be sure, Aristotle seeks to correct Plato’s view by building generality into the collection of substances, but this doesn’t change the ontology: “correct” thought and language , “truth” itself, become defined in terms of the mimetic correspondence between ideal formations and discrete, real objects. The Age of Representation (and Reflection) is born. Yet over the course of this book I have attempted to demonstrate how derivative and abstract is this idea of “real objects.” It is an artifact of intellectually cutting into the tissue of visibility and dividing into separate parts what is The Visible and the Invisible 195 rather lived as interwoven, as an intertwining of difference. Indeed, far from a collection of discrete...