SOURCE: Hass, Lawrence. “Sense and Alterity: Rereading Merleau-Ponty's Reversibility Thesis.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley, pp. 91-105. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Hass argues that a thorough understanding of Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis is fundamental to grasping his overall theories of phenomenology.]

When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: [I find] a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. … [B]etween my body looked at and my body looking … there is overlapping or encroachment.

—Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

This passage from The Visible and the Invisible succinctly recapitulates Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Neither a subjectivism, which favors the constitutive function of some transcendental subject, nor an objectivism, which reduces reality to the categories of operationally “discovered” being-in-itself, Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis expresses reality as a reciprocal envelopment between seer and seen, touching and being touched, which defies analysis through disjunctive categories, and yet provides the very ground for them. This reversibility of “flesh,” this interfolding of my corporeality in the flesh of things, is, Merleau-Ponty says, “an ultimate notion”¹—one that frees us from the subject-object, monism-dualism bifurcations that permeate the history of Western ontology. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis—which is best grasped as an Ur-thesis, as a showing of the fundamental interweaving that “theses” tear asunder—is one of the most powerful and provocative elements of his thought.

And yet in recent years the reversibility thesis has become the focus of considerable critique—specifically, that it is not able to account for the phenomena of intersubjectivity and alterity.² A first worry is that the reversibility thesis is fundamentally obscure. Indeed, what sense can we make out of Merleau-Ponty's suggestions that non-sentient things “look at me”?³ A second concern is that the reversibility thesis begs the question as a response to the philosophical problem of other minds: Doesn't, in fact, appealing to reversibility presuppose the very thing of which we need an account? And thirdly, it is charged that talk of “reversibility” and “reciprocity” eliminates difference between oneself and others—that it “reduces the other to the same.”⁴ I will argue in this [essay] that these criticisms are unjust—that they depend upon a distinctly ungenerous reading of Merleau-Ponty's late work. More specifically, I believe that they fail to recognize the extent to which the reversibility thesis can and should be grasped through Merleau-Ponty's account of sensibility in Phenomenology of Perception.⁵ I will argue that when we do justice to that account, and read the reversibility thesis through it, the above criticisms can be seen to dissolve.

GESTALT SENSIBILITY IN PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOR

Toward the end of undermining empiricist and intellectualist theories of perception, Merleau-Ponty opens Part One of Phenomenology of Perception with the following expression of the perceptual gestalt:

[A] “figure” on a “background” [e.g., a colored patch on white paper] contains … much more than the [sense-]qualities presented at a given time. It has an “outline,” which does not “belong” to the background and which “stands out” from it; … the background on the other hand having no bounds, being of indefinite colouring and “running on” under the figure. The different parts of the whole … possess, then, besides a colour and qualities, a particular significance [sens].

(1962, 13; 1945, 20)

For Merleau-Ponty (following the core insight of gestalt psychology) perception, as we live it, always and irreducibly has an internally related figure-background structure: to perceive a thing just is to select it out of and against a background (or field) from which it is distinct. If so, then—Merleau-Ponty argues—all empiricist and intellectualist accounts of complex perception as the cognitive compilation of discrete sensations, sense-data, or qualia are unsound, since the identification of discrete “sensations” can only be achieved against a background irreducible to them.⁶ In sum, complex perception—understood in terms of the figure-background structure—is not built up like “a house out of bricks” as modern philosophy and classical psychology has it;⁷ rather, living perception provides the ontological basis (and hence disconfirmation) of all such accounts.⁸

But for Merleau-Ponty the perceptual gestalt is more than a figure against a background; it also involves the oblique meaning, or “sens,” that “transfuses” them.⁹ Consider again the colored patch on white: One doesn't see the background “running on” behind the figure; rather one has the sense that it does—a sense that, as it were, radiates from or inhabits the difference or gap between the patch and the paper. This is why Merleau-Ponty refers to this nascent, latent meaning as both “behind” the figure and “independent of the background.”¹⁰ Neither positively given nor transcendentally signified,¹¹ perceptual meaning for Merleau-Ponty is not “significance” (as Colin Smith's translation repeatedly has it), but sens—an irreducible, yet oblique sense that impregnates the gestalt:

The sensible configuration of an object … is not grasped in some inexpressible coincidence, it “is understood” through a sort of act of appropriation. … Once the prejudice of sensation has been banned, a face, a signature, a form of behaviour cease to be mere “visual data” whose psychological meaning is to be sought in our inner experience, [and instead become] whole[s] charged with immanent meaning.

(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 57; 1945, 70)

While this quote makes clear Merleau-Ponty's view that the sens of a gestalt is not some fundamentally “inner” or “private” event, he more fully demonstrates elsewhere that the gestalt as a whole or in its “parts”—figure, sens, background—defy propositional analysis, i.e., cannot be coherently maintained as the occurrence or product of cognitive judgments.¹² For Merleau-Ponty then, perceptual experience—far from being “a veil of representations”—is better grasped as the ongoing configuration of the world by a living body that underlies and informs propositional thought. But as a configuring of the world by my body, as the corporeal selecting of perceptual figures out amidst a field, it is impregnated with a latent sensibility—a sense of what gets hidden both from and by my perspective. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

[P]erception is just that act which creates at a stroke, along with the cluster of data, the meaning which unites them—indeed which not only discovers the meaning which they have, but moreover sees to it that they have a meaning.

(1962, 36; 1945, 46)

And since the sens of a gestalt is one that emerges because of my corporeal immersion in a world of things, it also serves as an oblique guide for my orientations, for other perspectives I might take up. It is the double aspect of this “primary” meaning—as both sense (of what's hidden) and guide (to other possible perspectives) that the French word sens retains. Hence, with this rich and multiple sens at the heart of it, the perceptual gestalt is not best understood as the “figure-ground structure,” but rather as a meaning-laden complex beyond the form-content distinction altogether.

While much could be said about the importance of the perceptual gestalt so understood, e.g., how it frees theory of meaning from the bifurcated cognitivist categories of philosophical modernism and transcendental phenomenology, what we must see is that it leads Merleau-Ponty to a philosophically rich understanding of behavior. Indeed, far from being the sum result of prior and discrete excitations, behavior for Merleau-Ponty is more richly and most basically understood as a complex relation between local “figuration” against global “background,” shot through with sensibility:

If I stand out in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but these are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to speak from the pressure they exert on the table. If I stand holding my pipe in my closed hand, the position of my hand is not determined discursively by the angle which it makes with my forearm, and my forearm with my upper arm, and my upper arm with my trunk, and my trunk with the ground. I know [sais] indubitably where my pipe is, and thereby I know where my hand and my body are, as primitive man in the desert is always able to take his bearings immediately without having to cast his mind back, and add up the distances covered and deviations made since setting off.

(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 100; 1945, 116-117)

A first thing to seen in this quote is its evocation of even the simplest behavior as an internally related figure-ground. Indeed, when I lean on the desk, my hands bear the weight of my body and become the culmination, the “figure” of it—with my back, my shoulders, the muscles in my arms rippling into place. But I could only locally project my hands on the desk against my body's global configuration, and so that “background” both conditions and is conditioned by the former. This is why Merleau-Ponty says that the behaving body is a projective being: its most basic function is to project out of and against itself toward things, to perpetually resolve itself into figure-ground structure, to be itself a perspective toward the world at the same time it conditions perspective through its perceptual figurations.¹³

And just as the perceptual figure-ground is infused with prepropositional meaning—the sens of hidden perspectives and possibilities—Merleau-Ponty's “corporeal schema” is a precise analogue to it. Neither presently given nor fully absent, neither propositional in character nor the product of judgment, this “corporeal schema” is best grasped as a kinesthetic sense of my body that is held out in my behavioral gestalt—lodging as it were in the difference between my local projection and global orientation. Indeed, for me to reach out and grip the table—a local action both conditioning of and conditioned by the whole of my body—means that my arms, shoulders, legs have also assumed some relatively determinate position. Tracing this sens is how I “know” the position of my hand and body when focused on my pipe, why “my whole posture can be read … in the pressure [my hands] exert on the table,” why I can rub a sore muscle in my back without having to either look to find it or judge that it hurts. As an oblique prepropositional sense of my body that is no more or less basic than the behaviorial figure-ground that occasions it, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is precisely the corporeal schema that undermines the reductive machinations of physicalism: “For its part the organism presents physico-chemical analysis not with the practical difficulties of a complex object, but with the theoretical difficulties of a meaningful being.”¹⁴

In this section we have briefly seen Merleau-Ponty's account of latent, oblique sensibility in living perception and behavior. What we must now do—on our way to the reversibility thesis—is see the fundamental importance of this account to Merleau-Ponty's work on alterity and intersubjectivity. It is to these arguments that we now turn.

GESTALT SENSIBILITY AND ALTERITY

Recall what we have seen so far: Beyond my propositional concepts and judgments I occasion perceptual gestalten. And the “I” in question here is a behavioral gestalt, a being-in-the-world that projects out of and in virtue of itself. A first thing to be stressed is what could only be alluded to above—namely, that for Merleau-Ponty specific perceptual figurations and behavioral projects are themselves internally related, two mutually conditioning modalities of one system: wherever perception occurs so too does behavior.¹⁵ It follows from this, and our earlier discussion of the sens peculiar to each, that my perceptual-behavioral life is shot through with multiple meanings—a sense not only of my corporeality and its position, but also of other possible perspectives I might effect. We see then that alterity in one sense is already there in the simplest perception: as an oblique sens of other possible comportments it is at the heart of every figure-ground, lodging as it were in the “ontological difference” between the terms of gestalt.

But consider what happens when a behaving body arrives on the scene:

No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living body in [the] process of acting than the objects surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of significance: they are no longer simply what I myself could make of them, they are what this other pattern of behaviour is about to make of them. … Already the other body has ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and become [sic] the theatre of a certain process of elaboration, and as it were, a certain “view” of the world.

(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 353; 1945, 406)

Just when “I”—my projective behavior—was having the oblique sense of other possible perspectives on a thing, along comes a body that also projects toward it. That possible perspective that was merely an ambiguous sense for me has now been taken up by a behaving being, a projective gestalt. And it is here—in my perceptual figuring of this behavior—that I sense (sens) this “entity” as another perspectivally perceiving being, a being with a sense (sens) of its own corporeality. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

I experience my own body as the power of adopting certain forms of behaviour … now, it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world.

(1962, 353-54; 1945, 406)

And also:

[E]ach one of us [is] pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body [; this] baroque world is not a concession of mind to nature; for although meaning [sens] is everywhere figurative, it is meaning which is at issue everywhere.¹⁶

For Merleau-Ponty then, one doesn't judge by analogy, or apodicticly know the other qua other; rather, behavior before, toward, or with me is infused with a sense (sens) of alterity—seeing behavior prepropositionally means to my perceiving, behaving body that here is another, similar in kind.

A first thing to be seen about this account of intersubjectivity is that it doesn't beg the question to “the problem of other minds.” After all, it might be charged that one already needs to know the other as such in order to grasp this movement before me as behavior. But we can clear Merleau-Ponty on this score if we recall his view of behavior as a projective gestalt: my reaching out for a pen is only achieved against a specific orientation of the rest of my body—an orientation that both conditions and is conditioned by the local project. Indeed, to move or remove one part of the living body just is to occasion movement or change in the rest. And this means that we do in fact perceive behavior as behavior—since rocks, machines, and fields of wheat do not have parts that interrelate in this highly specific way.¹⁷ In sum, behavior as an internally-related, sense-manifesting “system” is not only something that I prepropositionally live, it is also something I can perceptually figure and in doing so sense that this is another perceiving being, another corporeal schema.

Understanding Merleau-Ponty's account of intersubjectivity in terms of this sensibility is both clarifying and powerful. For one thing, it helps us, with significant precision, correct the shortcomings of certain phrasings that appear occasionally in Merleau-Ponty, but more frequently in secondary literature. For example, it is simply too loose to say that on this account “one perceives the other”; rather one perceives behavior that, against the double background of the world and my corporeality, bears the sens of other perceiving being. This is not, I insist, a merely technical distinction: not only does Merleau-Ponty himself insist time and again on the fundamental role of perceiving behavior as such in our intersubjective experience,¹⁸ but—as we just saw—without the perception of behavior as a specific and fundamental kind of phenomenon in our experiential field, the whole account is threatened by circularity.¹⁹

Understanding Merleau-Ponty's account of intersubjectivity through the phenomenon of sense (sens) also reveals the error of referring to “prepersonal” intersubjectivity as anonymous. For while it is true on Merleau-Ponty's view that I am already bound up with others in a way prior to and informing of my propositional concepts (of self and others), it is an intervolvement that is shot through with different senses—the sens of my corporeal schema, the sens of other perspectival openings onto the world relative to my position. As Merleau-Ponty decisively puts it:

I perceive the other as a piece of behaviour, for example, I perceive the grief or the anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or his hands, without recourse to any “inner” experience of suffering or anger. … But then, the behaviour of another, and even his words, are not that other. The grief and the anger of another have never quite the same [sens] for him as they have for me. For him these situations are lived through, for me they are displayed.²⁰

Merleau-Ponty argues here that one's prepropositional relations with others are, far from an experience of “anonymity” or nondistinction, shot through with an irreducible and inassimilable distance, a gap between my lived sense of self and the emergent sense of other. Insisted on time and again by Merleau-Ponty (certain passages notwithstanding), this irreducible difference between self and others not only coheres with the latest psychogenetic observations, but also grounds and explains the relative stability of the self-other conceptual pair across cultural, historical, and linguistic domains.²¹

Another strength of grasping intersubjectivity through the phenomenon of sense (sens) is that it fully squares with our everyday notion that we can be mistaken about whether or not some real or imagined entity actually is an other. Indeed, since my experience of the other qua other is as a sens that impregnates some comportment (against the double background of the world and my corporeality), it follows that the other is not “given,” “present,” nor “signified,” but rather irreducibly “traced” or meant before me, and thus “read” as it were by my living body. And this means that my fundamental experience of alterity is less an apodictic intuition than a corporeal interpretation, and so a priori open to misreading.

Having said that however is not to reopen the door of Cartesian narcissism—leaving one to wonder whether there are any other existing egos—for as Merleau-Ponty explicitly argues, formulating that thesis already presupposes the living sens of others:

[M]y experience must in some way present me with other people, since otherwise I should have no occasion to speak of solitude, and could not begin to pronounce other people inaccessible. … I can evolve a solipsist philosophy but, in doing so, I assume the existence of a community of men endowed with speech, and I address myself to it.

(1962, 359; 1945, 412-13)

The upshot here is that while it is possible for me to prepropositionally “misread” some specific X before me as an instance of behavior, doubt about whether there are any such “things” does not legitimately follow, since framing that thought, and even the possibility of “misreading” could only occur against the background of intersubjective experience. Indeed, it is never a matter of me, ex nihilo and prepropositionally, facing the spectacle of the world trying to figure out which if anything is An Other (a Sartrean image my presentation has possibly perpetuated); rather, I quite literally “find myself” amidst and against a family or community of specific others who inform my behavioral projects and perceptual figurations. In short, for Merleau-Ponty the sense-manifesting gestalt of alterity is as ontologically fundamental as its perceptual and behavioral analogues—as mutually conditioning of them as they are of it.

There are other things about Merleau-Ponty's account of the fundamental role of sense (sens) in intersubjective phenomena that might be developed by way of support. For example, how consistent it is with our experience of animals, and how it powerfully coheres with Merleau-Ponty's arguments that language plays “a crucial role” in living intersubjectivity. But perhaps the best measure of its force is that attending to it can undo those recent criticisms of the reversibility thesis. In order to make those arguments, we must first see that the phenomenon of gestalt sensibility informs Merleau-Ponty's late thought on reversibility. These two projects are the concern of the final section.

GESTALT SENSIBILITY AND REVERSIBILITY

There is no one place in any of Merleau-Ponty's late writings where he explicitly states that reversibility is to be understood through the phenomenon of gestalt sensibility. And yet I will argue here that Merleau-Ponty's reflections on reversibility reveal this specific connection, that is, that the terms of gestalt inform those reflections in a most important way.

To begin this case, let's consider a quote from the late essay, “The Philosopher and His Shadow”:

There are certainly more things in the world and in us than what is perceptible in the narrow sense of the term. … Sensible being is not only things but also everything sketched out there, even virtually, everything which leaves its trace there, everything which figures there, even as a divergence and a certain absence. … This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior.

(Signs 1964, 171-72; Signes 1960, 216-17)

One thing evident here is an explicit and much discussed element in Merleau-Ponty's late writings: namely, the phenomenon of “a certain absence,” of “divergence,” of what is elsewhere called écart, as an irreducible “separation” or “openness” that makes possible the positivity of things.²² Setting aside Merleau-Ponty's use of this “separation-openness” in The Visible and the Invisible to undermine a host of Western ontologies, what's crucial for our purposes is that it was already explicated in his earliest writings on gestalt. For, as Merleau-Ponty insists in Phenomenology of Perception, it is only in virtue of such a “difference” or “depth” that a figure can be selected against its background:

The [figure-background] structure, or the perspective, is no obstacle to me when I want to see the object: for just as it is the means whereby objects are distinguished from each other, it is also the means whereby they are disclosed. To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other.

(1962, 68; 1945, 82)

Moreover, just as we have seen Merleau-Ponty's early position that a figure-background configuration is “impregnated” with sense (sens) in virtue of that “difference”—a sense of what is hidden, of other possible perspectives and comportments—so too does the quote from “The Philosopher and His Shadow” convey the oblique meaning in the “hollows” of sensibility and behavior. Others are not given to me, Merleau-Ponty insists in that quote, not positively present, but rather “sketched” before me, trailing behind this body like a “wake.” Indeed, neither wholly present nor wholly absent this “trace” of the other “as a divergence,” this “certain absence” precisely echoes the living sense (sens) of the other that lodges between my corporeality and this bit of behavior before me, in the irreducible difference between us. Nor is this connection between écart and the sens of a gestalt unique to this passage; Merleau-Ponty evokes it time and again throughout the late writings and with utter explicitness in a number of working notes. Consider, for one example, the following note from May 1959:

It is in better understanding perception (and hence imperception)—i.e.: understand perception as differentiation. … Understand that the “to be conscious” = to have a figure on a ground … the figure-ground distinction introduces a third term between the “subject” and the object.” It is that separation (écart) first of all that is the perceptual meaning [le sens perceptif].

(1968, 197; Le visible, 250)

So what we have discovered through this textual work is that écart and perceptual sens are inextricably linked in Merleau-Ponty's late thought. And this means that Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis is fundamentally informed by the phenomenon of gestalt sensibility. Why is that? Because Merleau-Ponty explicitly holds that écart lodges at the heart of reversibility:

[W]e spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence. … [M]y flesh and that of the world therefore involve clear zones, clearings, about which pivot their opaque zones …

(1968, 147-48; Le visible, 194)

Écart, then, for Merleau-Ponty is the “open pivot,” the “hinge” around which reversibility swings. But it is, we have just seen, a sense-laden pivot.²³ And this means that the “folding back,” the “coiling over,” the reversibility of the seen upon the seer, the touched upon the touching is, in a phrase, a phenomenon of sens: to see means for me—obliquely and prepropositionally—I can be seen; to touch my left hand with my right means (as a possible comportment) I can touch my right with my left, and we understand why Merleau-Ponty often refers to the inverse movement as virtual.²⁴ In sum, reversibility fundamentally involves the phenomenon of sensibility—a living sens of being visible and touchable that emerges through some perceptual or behavioral “figuration.”

It is here, with this recognition of sense (sens) at the heart of reversibility, that the recent objections to the reversibility thesis can be seen as flawed. First of all, we can see that Merleau-Ponty is not being fundamentally obscure when he endorses Klee's comments that the trees of a forest seem to see him, or when he speaks of “feel[ing] looked at by the things.”²⁵ For we now understand that this “feeling of” or “seeming to” be seen is the sens of one's own visibility—the sense of alterity, of other perspectives on the world and on me—which inhabits and informs my every sight. And in no way does this make the “folding back,” the “being seen,” the sens of alterity epiphenomenal or derivative. For just as the perceptual, behavioral, and intersubjective gestalten “hang together” at the ground, so too does seeing and sensing; they are two mutually informing leaves of the same book. This is precisely why Merleau-Ponty insists in The Visible and the Invisible on calling this lived interfolding of sight and sens “the Sensible”—drawing on the word's multiple implications. Given the main argument of this chapter, much more might well be developed about this “Sensibility,” this chiasmic flesh, this paradoxical “generality … innate to myself”—for instance, how it promises a compelling, nontranscendental solution to “the problem of universals.” Nonetheless, we have seen what we need to for our immediate purpose. Namely, that grasping gestalt sensibility in the movement of reversibility dissolves the criticism that Merleau-Ponty's late writings forward some obscure and implausible anthropomorphism about inanimate things.

For all that lived alterity, the “general” sense of other perspectives on the things and on me that resonates in every perceptual figure-ground, it is imperative to recall Merleau-Ponty's view that it achieves particular content when I perceptually figure some behavior. And that is because this comportment toward me, or the things in my field, or with me in some shared project, means something in a quite specific way: namely, that this human or animal entity also perceives, also has a sens of its corporeality, and hence is another more or less similar to me. And this allows us to see why talk of “reversibility” and “reciprocity” doesn't beg the question about “knowing other minds.” Since, as we saw earlier, Merleau-Ponty's view is that others are prepropositionally meant or sensed in their behavior as such, and since reversibility is a phenomenon of sense, it turns out that, far from being circular, Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis offers a powerful account of living intersubjectivity—a solution to the “problem of other minds.”

Finally, and perhaps most pressing, this reading of reversibility through the phenomenon of sens also obviates the charge that Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis “reduces the other to the same.” For, as we have seen, it is precisely the difference, the écart, the irreducible “separation” between us that “traces” the sens of reversibility. Indeed, far from “destroying the radical alterity of the other,”²⁶ the reversibility thesis—understood as a phenomenon of sens—insists upon it: the other qua other, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is never apodicticly “given,” never “comprehended” against some horizon, never assimilable by me; for all our intercorporeality, for all our flesh-to-flesh intervolvement, there is irreducible “separation” between us—an “absence” that obliquely bears your “trace.”²⁷ And so while elaborating and adjudicating the full range of Levinas's critique of Merleau-Ponty is beyond the limits of this chapter, we have seen that one strand of it is deeply questionable. Indeed, when Levinas charges that Merleau-Ponty's thought of reversibility “reduces the other to the same,” or is an epistemological positivism,²⁸ he not only fails to do justice to the radical, differential account of sens that is essential to it, but he also fails to acknowledge the debt his own writings on “the trace of the other” bear it.²⁹

But perhaps in the end it will be suggested that my reading of the reversibility thesis through the terms of gestalt sensibility mires Merleau-Ponty's late and soaring writings in early, superceeded concepts. However, I would like to suggest by way of conclusion that this criticism forgets that Merleau-Ponty never ceased “thinking” the gestalt and its oblique meaning; it is thematized in all his writings, insistently in the late working notes, tied to écart and flesh. And this means that while M. C. Dillon and others are right that certain themes in Merleau-Ponty's early work are best understood in terms of the late,³⁰ the converse is also true in a profound way. Indeed, if the central claim of my chapter here is forceful—namely, that reversibility is most clearly and unproblematically grasped as a phenomenon of sens—then we see the severe limits of favoring the “late” writings over “early” ones. For just as self and others are two interwoven, yet fundamentally differentiated modalities of one “system,” so too, it would seem, are they.

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 140; Le Visible et l'invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). For all substantive quotations I will cite the page(s) from both the English and the French editions (respectively).

2. Galen Johnson makes a fine case that “alterity” is preferable to “intersubjectivity” given the latter term's relation to philosophically modern concerns about “knowing other minds.” “Alterity,” he suggests following Levinas, keeps the focus on ontological relations with others and differences. Nonetheless, I think it is important, for reasons that will emerge, to have a term that characterizes the specific kind of alterity relation we have with behaving beings (humans and animals), and “intersubjectivity,” despite its baggage, seems best. For Johnson's argument and an excellent survey of some of the issues that this paper will speak to see his “Introduction” to Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. xvii-xxxiv.

3. See, for instance, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167. Also see The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139.

4. This criticism is most famously made by Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), Section 1. Also see “Two Texts on Merleau-Ponty,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, pp. 55-66. This criticism is developed in a somewhat different way by Claude Lefort in “Flesh and Otherness,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, pp. 3-13.

5. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962); Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). For all substantive quotations I will cite the page(s) from both the English and the French editions (respectively).

6. “But if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sense, one may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free … to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 4; 1945, 9-10).

7. Phenomenology, p. 21.

8. To see these arguments in greater detail, see M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), Part One. Also see my “The Antinomy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty and Causal Representation Theory,” in Man and World, Vol. 24 (1991), pp. 13-25.

9. Phenomenology, p. 14.

10. Phenomenology, pp. 14, 35.

11. This last insight—that gestalt sensibility for Merleau-Ponty is not some transcendental signified—is absolutely imperative. Most importantly, it shows that Levinas's argument that Heidegger equates Being as horizon with meaning—rearticulated by Derrida in at least one text as a vestige of Heidegger's commitment to the “metaphysics of presence”—simply does not hold against Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, we have just seen Merleau-Ponty's explicit view that the meaning is not equivalent to the background (or horizon), but happens or lodges in the irreducible difference between the figure and background—“traced” there in the difference that is no concept or thing. Setting aside the question of the force of this criticism to any of Heidegger's work after 1930, that it has no bearing on Merleau-Ponty's account of meaning has significant implications. First, it suggests a fundamental poverty in Levinas's treatment of Merleau-Ponty. But also, and relative to this, it obscures certain profound affinities between Merleau-Ponty's thought and the writings of both Levinas and Derrida. For Levinas's criticism of Merleau-Ponty's alleged account of meaning see “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 75-107. For Derrida's specific argument against Heidegger, see Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 18-26.

12. For Merleau-Ponty's arguments see, in particular, Phenomenology, chapter 3, and “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), pp. 48-59. Also see Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

13. See, in particular, Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fischer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983), Part II.

14. Phenomenology, p. 56; 1945, p. 69.

15. “[I]f my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in pursuit of its aims. … [O]ne's own body is the third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure, and every figure stands out against the double horizon of external and bodily space” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 101; 1945, 117).

16. “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 181; “Le Philosophe et son ombre,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 228. For all substantive quotations I will cite the page(s) from both the English and the French editions (respectively).

17. This is not for Merleau-Ponty to claim that we cannot be mistaken about whether or not this particular movement before me is behavior; as will be shown below, misreadings are possible on his account—a feature that I take as a great strength of it.

18. See, for some examples, Phenomenology, pp. 57-58 and pp. 352-54, “The Film and the New Psychology,” pp. 52-53, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” p. 172, and The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 82-83.

19. There is a certain resonance here between Merleau-Ponty's position and Wittgenstein's claims in Philosophical Investigations that perceiving behavior is enough for us to “know” other minds. But the connection is merely superficial: not only is Wittgenstein's understanding of behavior repeatedly cast in terms of the internal-external bifurcation—a picture of consciousness that Merleau-Ponty explicitly criticizes—but also Wittgenstein has no recognition of the prepropositional sense (sens) that is so crucial to Merleau-Ponty's account. I believe it is precisely the failure to see this perceptual sensibility and the role it plays in intersubjective life that makes Wittgenstein's insistence that “we just see the other” so unsatisfying.

20. Phenomenology, p. 356; 1945, p. 409, emphasis added. This is another passage—a particularly crucial one—in which Colin Smith's translation of sens as “significance” distorts the character and subtlety of Merleau-Ponty's view.

21. On these matters see Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Drawing on recent findings in psychogenetic development, Stern concludes: “Infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other differentiation. There is no confusion between self and other in the beginning or at any time during infancy” (10, emphasis added).

22. Also see “Eye and Mind,” pp. 180-85, for an important discussion of this phenomenon as “depth.”

23. “[I]t would be naive to seek solidity in a heaven of ideas or in a ground of meaning—[meaning] is neither above nor beneath the appearances, but at their joints; it is the tie that secretly connects an experience with its variants” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 116).

24. See, for instance, “An Unpublished Text,” in The Primacy of Perception, pp. 6-7. Also see “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” pp. 171-72.

25. See “Eye and Mind,” p. 167, and The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139.

26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 35-36.

27. Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” p. 172.

28. For this last suggestion see Levinas's “Two Texts on Merleau-Ponty,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, pp. 57-58.

29. See, for example, Levinas's “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, Section 9, “The Trace.”

30. For Dillon's forceful arguments in this regard see Merleau-Ponty's Ontology.