Embodied Consciousness and the Poetic Sense of the World

It will always be the task of perception
to know perception.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology of Perception

Man must become the hero of his world.

Wallace Stevens
"Montrachet-le-Jardin"

"We must," writes Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, "recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon" (6). With this declaration, he begins his attempt to overcome a philosophical habit of opposing self and world, of perpetuating dualisms in which the ultimate foundation of "truth" invariably resides in whichever term of the duality a given thinker deems more fundamental than the other. Behind this restless foundationalism is a particular desire that sets it in play—the desire for an initial set of principles which, however few and narrow in scope, can at the very least be taken as certain. To this desire for certainty Merleau-Ponty will oppose the fact of ambiguity, since "ambiguity is of the essence of human existence," ¹ since "existence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its fundamental structure" (169). This structure is that of consciousness itself, or more precisely, that of embodied consciousness, since for Merleau-Ponty consciousness, in its original, pre-reflective capacity, "is being-toward-the-thing through the intermediary of the body" (138-39). And while this somatic intentionality depends on a certain "transcendence" (169), without which consciousness would never find itself within a given situation, we must resist the temptation to conceive of this transcendence as in any way "transcendent"—i.e., as an elevation of the subject to a vantage point above, beyond, or prior to the relation between body and world, or as the "transcendental" activity of a cogito that founds this relation and to which embodiment appears as an afterthought or, worse still, an impediment. What embodiment calls for is an understanding of the subject not as constitutive of, but as constituted along with experience—a move of particular importance not only in aesthetics (in its broadest sense), but also in cognitive science, as attested to by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, who cite Merleau-Ponty's work as the starting point for what has come to be "the tangible demonstration within cognitive science that the self or cognizing subject is fundamentally fragmented, divided, or nonunified" (Embodied Mind, xvii). ² By shifting the point of inquiry from the self-identity of the cogito to a subject that is "fragmented" and "nonunified," these authors are able to conceptualize, with the aid of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, a consciousness whose cohesion is immediately "divided," immediately doubled within the synaesthetic nexus of the body: "For Merleau-Ponty, as for us, embodiment has this double sense: it encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms" (ibid., xvi). It is by virtue of this double sense that ambiguity becomes "the essence of human existence."

The question then arises: By what method does one disclose the truth of ambiguity? When the aim is not to minimize or dispel but rather to hold forth and positively investigate the ambiguous, is not every method (since its task, qua method, is to elucidate, clarify, account for and explain) inevitably destined to conceal in its very act of disclosure that which it hopes to disclose, so that in order to remain faithful to its topic, the analysis of ambiguity is forced to remain ambiguous and hence ineffectual, allowing us to proceed no further than the assertion that ambiguity is, in fact, "essential"?

Since for Merleau-Ponty meaning and ambiguity are interwoven "in the silence of primary consciousness" (xv), it is toward this silence that the analysis of ambiguity must lead in order both to accomplish and to articulate its task. Access to this silent realm is gained through "radical reflection," a method whose aim "consists, paradoxically enough, in recovering the unreflective experience of the world" (241). Paradoxically enough. For how is one to account for this silence without converting it into...