Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh

CHAPTER 1: World, Flesh, Vision

CHAPTER 1 World, Flesh, Vision FRANÇOISE DASTUR One cannot deny that the philosophical problem that oriented MerleauPonty ’s entire approach is, in a sense, the “classical” problem of the relations of the soul and the body. Merleau-Ponty did not encounter this, however, as a “regional” problem, to which he would have devoted the full force of his reflection; rather, he encountered this problem because one of the most general philosophical problems guided his investigations from the start: the relation of consciousness to the world. Already in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty set himself the task of finding an intermediate position between intellectualism and empiricism, that is, between an insular subject and a pure nature. The world and consciousness, the outside and the inside, are not distinct beings that the full force of philosophical thought must contrive to reunite; rather, they are interdependent, and it is precisely this interdependence that becomes legible in the phenomenon of incarnation. If the “frontal” opposition of consciousness and the world is renounced, then what has to be clarified first is the body, that is, what the philosophical tradition has always left unthought. Several times, Merleau-Ponty defines the Western way of thinking as “surveying thought,” which, as such, can only produce a “naive ontology” (VI 240/187), because, wresting the object from the flesh from which it is born (VI 302/248), turns it into the Great Object. It becomes that Sublimated Being whose subjective correlate is, then, nothing other than the Kosmotheoros, that look that comes from nowhere and that consequently presents itself as a look dominating and embracing everything. Where does the look come from? How does the for-itself arise? What is subjectivity? These are the questions to which Merleau-Ponty always returns, even though he was led to recognize that the consciousness-object distinction can no longer be considered a valid starting point (VI 253/200). Because the question of the subject cannot be set aside so easily (cf. VI 244/190–91 and 247/193–94), Merleau-Ponty tirelessly interrogates Husserl’s texts and particularly those texts where the intentionality of consciousness can no longer simply be 23 24 FRANÇOISE DASTUR understood as “activity.” In a certain way, Husserl is the first Western thinker who undertook to dismiss the ideal of the Kosmotheoros by stressing the engagement of consciousness in the world—this is the case, even if, in the end, he does it in order to restore this ideal at the transcendental level through the “project to gain intellectual possession of the world,” which is what constitution always is (S 227/180). Reading The Visible and the Invisible carefully, one notices that the philosophical adversary, the representative of a philosophy of the subject for Merleau-Ponty, is Sartre and his massive opposition of the for-itself and the in-itself, and not Husserl, whose last writings more and more take account of the unconstitutable. It is Sartre, and not Husserl, who identifies subjectivity and activity, and already in Sense and Non-Sense Merleau-Ponty notes that what he expected from the author of Being and Nothingness was a theory of passivity (SNS 133/77). It is again Sartre who, considering the model of the in-itself (VI 269/216), determines the for-itself according to the same “sacrificial” structure that is already found in Hegelian absolute subjectivity (VI 127/93). Certainly there is no passage to absolute subjectivity in Being and Nothingness, and the for-itself’s passion remains futile.1 But, precisely because Being slips away, “the For-Itself is charged with the task of making it” (VI 269/216). The “activism” of consciousness cannot be pushed any farther. On the contrary, the “later” Husserl— the Husserl that Merleau-Ponty had read and contemplated since his visit to Louvain in 1939, the Husserl of Ideas II, the Crisis, and the unpublished manuscripts, who placed himself “at the limits of phenomenology” (RC 159/ 181)—is also the one who gave a greater and greater role to intentionality without acts, to fungierende Intentionalität, which in an anonymous and hidden manner “produces the natural and prepredicative unity of the world and of our life” (PP xiii/xviii). THE WORLD AND REFLECTION As can be ascertained by consulting the detailed chronicle that Karl Schuhmann prepared of Husserl’s manuscripts,2 or by reading Gerd Brand’s book which synthesizes part of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts,3 the problem of the world is...