Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

5. Later Developments: Écart, Reversibility, and the Flesh of the World

5 Later Developments: Écart, Reversibility, and the Flesh of the World Here is the common tissue of which we are made. The wild Being. And the perception of this perception . . . is the inventory of this originating departure. —Merleau-Ponty1 1. Merleau-Ponty’s Transition In the previous chapters I have sought to elucidate the central elements of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. We have seen the rationale for carrying out a phenomenology of perception. We have seen Merleau-Ponty’s virtue of sensibility : the enhanced living and awareness that come from recognizing living perception as a synergistic opening onto the world. We have seen the fundamental place of living embodiment in his account of the self, as well as his important contributions toward understanding our elemental relationships with others. In sum, we have followed Merleau-Ponty’s own plan in Phenomenology of Perception and have seen “the system ‘self-others-things’ as it comes into being ” (PP 57). There are, of course, many other aspects to Merleau-Ponty’s early ontology of living experience: for example, his treatments of time, lived space, and freedom. His work on these subjects is original and important, but not, I think, utterly essential for a primary purpose of this book: that is, uncovering his account of expressive cognition. What is essential to that end are the rather dramatic emendations Merleau-Ponty made to his ontology in his final writings. Indeed, in several of his working notes from the late 1950s, MerleauPonty writes of the need to “take up again, deepen, and rectify” his first two books.2 This need, he says, is a result of having still retained vestiges of “the philosophy of consciousness” in the early work which keeps him from bringing his ontology to satisfactory explication. While I believe it is an error to take his comments as anything like a rejection of Phenomenology of Perception, there is no question that in the late 1950s, what turned out to be the final years of his life, Merleau-Ponty was inspired to a new way of thinking in which his philosophy is transformed in a remarkable way.3 With the recent publication of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature from 1956 Later Developments 125 to 1960, we can now discern that his research for them was an important source of this inspiration. Coinciding with the final years of these lectures, MerleauPonty composed a number of texts that manifest this transformation, in particular : “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (1958), The Visible and the Invisible (1959–1961), the “Introduction” to Signs (1960), and “Eye and Mind” (1960). In all this, as a kind of set, we see Merleau-Ponty working to “deepen and rectify ” his ontology and to more fully integrate it with his account of expressive thinking and language. Nonetheless, many aspects of these late texts are consonant with his earlier works. For example, the late writings are also infused with a commitment to reveal living perceptual experience, embodied subjectivity , and our reciprocal relations with other selves. They too continue his practice of critically engaging a number of traditional ontologies that obscure our inherence in the world. However, Merleau-Ponty adds several new elements to the mix. Importantly, he develops some new master concepts for his ontology: “écart,” “reversibility,” and “the flesh.” Further, he more fully works to articulate the complex relation of perceptual experience (“the Visible”) to thought and ideality (“the Invisible”). And he now refers to his philosophical method as “interrogation,” a method that is performed with a new voluptuous language, a new expressivity. In my conclusion to the book, after elaborating Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression, I will be able to say much more about his subtle, but decisive shift in method from phenomenology to expression . However, in this chapter my task is to elucidate his late, breakthrough concepts of écart, reversibility, and the flesh of the world. I will argue that, despite certain difficulties, these concepts remain quite compelling and productive for our contemporary attempts to understand and express our synergistic relationships with the transcendent world and with others. 2. Écart and Reversibility Of all the late writings, Merleau-Ponty most fully develops and deploys his new ontological concepts in The Visible and the Invisible. My plan in the following sections is to work most closely with this text and draw on the other late writings as necessary. I should mention that this plan is not without difficulties, for what is published as The Visible and the Invisible is only...