Nature and Logos

nature
PHILOSOPHY
Hamrick / Van der Veken

nature and logos
This is the first book-length account of how Maurice Merleau-
and A Whiteheadian Key
logos
to Merleau-Pont y ’s
Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop
an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Fundamental Thought
Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last
ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty’s
unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the
first detailed treatment of certain works by F. W. J. Schelling in
the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence
William S. Hamrick
nature and logos

on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive
Jan Van der Veken
discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the Stoics’s notion of the
twofold logos—the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This
book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between
these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various
bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that haunted
philosophy and science since the seventeenth century.
William S. Hamrick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and has written and edited
several books, including (with coeditor Suzanne L. Cataldi) Merleau-
Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of
Thought, also published by SUNY Press. Jan Van der Veken
is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Catholic University of
Leuven and has written and edited several books, including (with
coeditor Patrick Burke) Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives.
S tat e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Y o r k P r e ss
w w w. s u n y p r e s s . e d u
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NATURE AND LOGOS
NATURE AND LOGOS
A Whiteheadian Key to
Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought
WILLIAM S. HAMRICK
JAN VAN DER VEKEN
State University of New York Press

Cover painting: Paul Cézanne, French, 1839–1906, The Bathers (Les Baigneuses),
1899/1904, Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 61.7 cm, Amy McCormick Memorial Collec-
tion, 1942.457, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Insti-
tute of Chicago. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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For information, contact

State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Meehan

Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamrick, William S.
Nature and logos : a Whiteheadian key to Merleau-Ponty's fundamental thought / William S.
Hamrick and Jan Van der Veken.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3617-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. 2. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861–1947.
3. Philosophy of nature. 4. Ontology. I. Veken, Jan van der. II. Title.
B2430.M3764H35 2011
194—dc22 2010032060
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Sandy, for her constant patience, encouragement, and love
—William S. Hamrick
and
for Professor Albert Dondeyne and Professor Alphonse

DeWaelhens, who introduced me to the fascinating world of
Merleau-Ponty
—Jan Van der Veken
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
—William Wordsworth, Lines,

Composed a Few miles Above Tintern Abbey,
On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.
July 13, 1798.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Chapter I: Nature as a Phenomenon 11
Chapter II: From Dualism to a Twofold Ontology 47
Chapter III: The Way of All Flesh 73
Chapter IV: Logos Endiathetos and Logos Proforikos 103
Chapter V: The Schellingian and Bergsonian Heritage 123
Chapter VI: Nature and Life 153
Chapter VII: Beyond the Limits of Phenomenology:

The Fate of the Subject 181
Chapter VIII: Com-prehending the Flesh 205
Conclusion 235
References 241
Index 253
vii
ABBREVIATIONS
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
AD Les Aventures de la dialectique. Translated into English as

Adventures of the Dialectic.
C Causeries 1948. Translated into English as Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, The World of Perception.
CAL “La Conscience et l’acquisition du langage.” Translated into
English as Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language.
E Éloge de la Philosophie. Translated into English as In Praise of
Philosophy.
HT Humanisme et terreur. Translated into English as Humanism and
Terror.
Hes Préface à A. Hesnard, L’œuvre et l’esprit de Freud et son
importance dans le monde moderne. Translated into English as
“Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s
L’œuvre de Freud.”
IP L’institution, la passivité, Notes de cours au Collège de France
(1954–1955).
N La Nature, Notes, Cours du Collège de France. Translated into
English as Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France.
NC Notes de cours, 1959–1961.
OE L’Œil et l’esprit. Translated into English as “Eye and Mind.”
PC I Parcours 1935–1951.
PC II Parcours deux, 1951–1961.
PhP Phénoménologie de la perception. Translated into English as
Phenomenology of Perception.
PM La Prose du monde. Translated into English as The Prose of the
World.
ix
x ABBREVIATIONS
PrP The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological

Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics.
Prim.Percp. “Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques.”
Translated into English in PrP as “The Primacy of Perception
and its Philosophical Consequences.”
RC Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960. Translated into
English as Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France,
1952–1960.
S Signes. Translated into English as Signs.
SC La Structure du comportement. Translated into English as The
Structure of Behavior.
SNS Sens et non-sens. Translated into English as Sense and Non-Sense.
TD Texts and Dialogues, Merleau-Ponty.
UAC L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson.
Translated into English as The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche,
Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul.
UI “Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Translated into English
in PrP as “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.”
VI Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail. Translated into
English as The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes.
ESA I Emmanuel de Saint Aubert,. Du lien des êtres aux éléments de
l’étre. Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951.
ESA II ———. Le scénario cartésien. Recherches sur la formation et la co-
hérence de l’intention philosophique de Merleau-Ponty.
ESA III ———. Vers une ontologie indirecte. Sources et enjeux critiques de
l’appel à l’ontologie chez Merleau-Ponty.
ESA IV ———, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, avec un texte inédit de
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature ou le monde du silence (pages
d’introduction).
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
AI Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1933].

CN The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1920.
ABBREVIATIONS xi
ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library,

1947.
FR The Function of Reason. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1958 [1929].
IS The Interpretation of Science. Ed. A. H. Johnson. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
MT Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1968 [1938].
PANW The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Ed. Paul A. Schillp.
New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951.
PNK An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919.
PR Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and
Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978 [1929].
RM Religion in the Making. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1927 [1926].
SMW Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967
[1925].
INTRODUCTION
What is it to perceive and to be perceived, to experience and to be expe-

rienced? How can we best understand the relationship between us and
the world around us, between ourselves and other people? In Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s late thought—what he sometimes termed his “modern,”
but usually his “new ontology” (e.g., at RC 91/128 and VI 166/222)1—he
takes up these questions in terms of how Being must be given so that we
can experience it. How is nature to be understood so that human experience
is attuned to it and that we are inextricably tied to it?
Merleau-Ponty began to formulate his “new ontology” about 1956, and
it was during the 1956–57 year at the Collège de France that he offered
what would turn out to be the first of three courses on nature.2 These
courses, together with his other writings during the last five years of his
life (1956–1961), make plain that a new understanding of nature is indis-
pensable to an “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (S 166–167/210)
because what we are somehow emerges from nature (RC 64/94). On his view,
therefore, nature is neither an arbitrary access to ontology nor one among
equally important alternatives.
In developing this “new ontology,” the last “Working Note” for the
completion of what we now know as The Visible and the Invisible specifies
that Part I of the entire project would deal with “The visible,” and that the
latter text forms an unfinished beginning of it. Part II would treat the subject
of Nature, and Part III, unwritten, would deal with the Logos (VI 274/328).
So the relationship between eye and mind, or between Nature and Logos,
becomes the most prominent theme of his latest reflections. Merleau-Ponty
wrote Eye and Mind in the summer of 1960. In fact, it is an elaboration of
the basic insights that he developed in the third Nature course, “Nature
and Logos, The Human Body,” that he had just completed. The influence
of the latter on the former is considerable and explains references in the
1. Citations from Merleau-Ponty’s texts will reference the English and then the original pagina-
tion. The original texts will be provided for substantive quotations and for altered translations.
2. “Le Concept de Nature” (January–May 1957), “Le concept de Nature (suite). L’animalité,
le corps humain, passage à la culture” (January–May 1958), and “Nature et Logos: le corps
humain” (January–May 1960).
1
2 NATURE AND LOGOS
first few pages of Eye and Mind to embryology, biological gradients (measures
of the speed with which an organism or cell changes in its physiologi-
cal activity, metabolism, and growth), operational thinking, and cybernet-
ics. In this work, we wish to articulate how the aspects of Whitehead’s
process philosophy that Merleau-Ponty knew helped him to formulate his
“new” fundamental thought—that is, how he found Whitehead’s thought
to be consonant with his own philosophy. We also want to illustrate how
Merleau-Ponty, had he been able to extend his thinking about nature beyond
Eye and Mind, could have found even more assistance in Whitehead’s texts
that he had not yet read.
As we shall see, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “ontological rehabilitation”
requires a new method that will turn out to be a descriptive generalization
of the body as perceived and as experiencing subject. This general notion,
which he labels “flesh,” encompasses both experience and that which is
experienced. In Merleau-Ponty’s reappraisal of his own earlier thought,
questions about nature and how human experience—earlier termed “sub-
jectivity”—can be related to it require a broadening beyond the limits of
his earlier phenomenology. Interrogating the being of nature and ourselves
placed within it leads him to realize that we would not be here if nature
were not such as it is and if we were not in a way made out of “the same
stuff” (OE 163/19). Therefore, Merleau-Ponty seeks a common notion to
include the experient and that which is experienced, or the world.
Further, Merleau-Ponty is also clear that his “new ontology” requires
a double overcoming. What must first be overcome are those aspects of
his earlier phenomenology that make it still a philosophy of consciousness,
even though he already positions his early phenomenology as an alterna-
tive to Husserl’s view of transcendental subjectivity. It is not that he will
consider consciousness to be irrelevant or avoidable, but rather that it will
be reintegrated into a more inclusive whole.
The second necessary overcoming aims at displacing the
Galilean-Cartesian concept of nature that, as he stated in his first nature
course, “still overhangs contemporary ideas about Nature” (RC 67/97),
even though, as Merleau-Ponty himself pointed out, its presuppositions
had already been undercut by science itself. His earlier writings already seek
to provide a phenomenological rehabilitation of the sensible in counter-
poise to the Cartesian dualism. However, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty’s
last writings take the earlier phenomenological critique to be not radical
enough.
The Cartesian view is characterized, first, by what Alfred North
Whitehead criticized as “the bifurcation of nature” (CN 30) into “nature
apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness”
INTRODUCTION 3
(Ibid., 31). On this view, what passes into our eyes—light waves—is not
visible, and what is visible—colors and other “secondary” qualities—is not
there. Thus, we have “two systems of reality” (Ibid., 30), nature as scientific
object and nature as perceived, the one being “true and not perceived” and
the other “perceived and not true” (Wahl 2004, 121). This doctrine is “the
original sin of modern [seventeenth- and eighteenth-century] epistemology”
(Van der Veken 2000, 327), and Merleau-Ponty captures well the oddity
of this unsatisfactory bifurcation when he writes, “Nothing is more foreign
to perception . . . than the idea of a universe which would produce in us
representations which are distinct from it by means of a causal action” (SC
188/202–203).
The “bifurcation” took different forms throughout modern philosophy
and science. Some of the principal forms consist of things in themselves,
whether knowable (e.g., Galileo, Descartes) or unknowable (Kant) as against
things as they appear to us; bodies as against minds/souls (e.g., Descartes,
Malebranche, Kant); the realm of facts versus the realm of values (e.g.,
Galileo, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Kant, and Leibniz, who tried to
unite them); and the closely related distinction between the realms of effi-
cient and final causes (e.g., Galileo, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Kant,
and, again, Leibniz, who attempted to unify them).
This unbridgeable split between objects and what we perceive about
them was proposed first by Galileo. This remarkable individual, although not
himself a philosopher, had a tremendous influence on the whole of modern
thought. It was precisely the development, elaboration, and implications of
his view of nature and our place within it that ran from Descartes, passing
through Leibniz to Kant, Baron d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Laplace, and beyond,
and created a philosophical and scientific impact powerful enough to reach
even twentieth-century philosophy and science.
Despite evident differences in their concepts of nature, all these think-
ers agree on three fundamental, interlocking, and mistaken beliefs. The first
is that the externally real—matter, substance—is exclusively quantitative
and therefore known only through mathematics and its practical applica-
tions. The second belief, which flows from the first, consists of the forced
exile of all purposes and values, all “secondary” qualities, from nature.
The third belief—shared by many modern philosophers and scientists—is
that nature is an object standing over against us as subjects, or spectators.
Following Merleau-Ponty, we refer to this doctrine in all its forms as “the
ontology of the object” (TD 11/PC II: 298). This ontology of the object in
a way evacuates human beings from being active participants within nature
and reduces them to onlookers disconnected from it. For Descartes, Leibniz,
and Berkeley, the class of spectators includes God as well. In The Visible
4 NATURE AND LOGOS
and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty no longer refers to this absolute spectator

as “God,” but as a “Kosmotheoros.”3
It was in the process of criticizing this pervasive view of nature
in modern thought, and overcoming the bifurcations that still haunted
philosophy and science, that Merleau-Ponty found helpful support in the
philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The texts that he read in prepar-
ing for his first course on nature are The Concept of Nature, Science and the
Modern World, and Nature and Life, published in English and then in French
before being reprinted as Part III of Modes of Thought. Merleau-Ponty also
knew Jean Wahl’s Vers le concret, the long middle chapter of which deals
with Whitehead. Merleau-Ponty found in Whitehead’s writings very simi-
lar reasons for rejecting the Galilean-Cartesian view of nature, although
Whitehead did so in a much more systematic fashion. These similarities
account for the fact that, although Merleau-Ponty knew little about the
technicalities of Whitehead’s later process metaphysics,4 he felt some con-
sonance with Whiteheadian themes such as “brute facts,” “the passage of
nature,” the rejection of “vacuous actuality,” and the “fallacy of simple loca-
tion.”5 Merleau-Ponty’s creation of the all-encompassing notion of the flesh
is an instance of what Whitehead would call descriptive generalization. In
addition, Merleau-Ponty found in those texts a comparable view of nature
as process (passage), activity, passivity, and auto-productivity.
In what follows, we will attempt to point out how Merleau-Ponty’s
earlier phenomenology already contains a critique of nature in modern phi-
losophy, and how he elaborates this insight in his “new ontology” of flesh. In
turn, we will also examine the limitations of that ontology, and show how
Whitehead’s philosophy constitutes a more adequate response. Whitehead
3. Kosmotheoros is the name of a late work on cosmology by Huygens (1629–1695) and pub-
lished posthumously (N 181, n. 4 [editor]; note not reproduced in the English translation). In
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly would have spoken of “God” or “the
Absolute,” and in his lectures on “Institution,” the Kosmotheoros is defined as “un observateur
absolu” (IP 120). See also VI 227/280. Yet, in general, the change toward the religiously neutral
term kosmotheoros allows for a greater openness in the late works for the ultimate question of
rationality. In this regard, see Jan Van der Veken (1989, 202–209).
4. Vers le concret does discuss Whitehead’s major exposition of his process metaphysics, Process
and Reality and, indeed, demonstrates an astonishingly accurate grasp of it for the time. (Process
and Reality appeared in 1929, and Wahl’s text in 1932.) However, there is no evidence that
Merleau-Ponty employed, let alone understood, its technical vocabulary. Also, as Franck Robert
states, “In the unpublished course notes [from the Collège de France], Merleau-Ponty specifies
that Whitehead’s ideas are ‘developed freely’ [“développées librement”], not in the terms of a
positive and objective reading” (2008, 363, n.2). However, this is an easy admission because
it is also a fair description of how Merleau-Ponty dealt with most of his sources.
5. The extent of Merleau-Ponty’s reading and appreciation for what he found in Whitehead’s
texts did not become clear until the 1995 publication of recently discovered student notes (La
Nature) from his three nature courses. That book contains a thirteen-page essay titled “L’Idée
de Nature chez Whitehead.”
INTRODUCTION 5
was not a phenomenologist manqué, nor Merleau-Ponty a speculative meta-

physician malgré lui. Rather, what we want to show is that Whitehead’s
more developed conceptuality can expand Merleau-Ponty’s emerging ontol-
ogy, which his tragically premature death prevented him from developing.
Both thinkers argued against the representation of nature in modern phi-
losophy, and their search converged in the direction of a convincing alterna-
tive. In the pursuit of this objective, what Merleau-Ponty learned from the
Whiteheadian texts that he read, and what he learned from other authors
that he studied when preparing his lectures on nature, helped him to begin
to formulate his final ontology. The Whiteheadian texts with which he
was not familiar could have been of further help to make his own position
more precise and adequate. Both thinkers, however, offer us an ontology
in which, as John Compton says nicely, “nature is through and through
fluid, active, generative, expressive, inter-weaving and inter-corporeal and,
indeed, inter-sensory.”6
Besides providing at least an outline of what we take to be a philo-
sophically adequate ontology of nature, there are four other philosophical
issues at stake. First, it is an instance of the ancient task of “saving the
appearances” through a defense of one single reality overcoming all forms of
dualism. Or, to phrase it differently, rejecting the bifurcation of nature unites
reality and appearance. Second, avoiding this bifurcation furthers the tradi-
tional aim of philosophy “to understand how things in the broadest sense of
the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars
1963, 1). These two reasons taken together express the Whiteheadian philo-
sophical requirements of empirical adequacy and logical coherence.
These reasons are, of course, as old as Western philosophy itself. By
contrast, the third and fourth reasons stem from practical concerns. The
third reason is that the doctrine of the bifurcation of nature is not a dead
historical artifact. The notion that nature is essentially quantitative survives
not only in physics, but also in contemporary self-understanding at large.
Further, the idea that nature is a spiritually empty set of causal relations
persists today, not only in pure science, but also in its biotechnological appli-
cations—even though pure and applied sciences no longer subscribe to the
mechanistic causality of modern thought. Also, the belief that nature is an
object standing over against us as disengaged subjects, or spectators, survives
today not only among many philosophers, but also with non-philosophers
successfully conditioned by the sedimentation of “common sense” derivative
from Cartesianism. How else can we explain why it took so long to develop
6. Personal correspondence, 13 October 2007. Also worth noting is his statement, “Our expe-
rience of engagement with nature is at once an experience of nature as for human life and
of human life as firmly in nature. We are a constant and reciprocal interdependence with the
natural world.” “Toward a Phenomenological Philosophy of Nature” (2002, 201).
6 NATURE AND LOGOS
an ecological consciousness, to bring people to an awareness that they are

not disconnected from their environment?
The awareness that a new worldview is in the making also exists
among some scientists. Tim Eastman, a plasma physicist, refers to Ervin
Lazlo as a case in point:
Quantum field theory shows the world as a plenum of events at

multiple scales, now extended in networks of relationships to cosmic
scales—a “process universe.” . . . All things are constituted ulti-
mately by networks of relationships, from microscopic to macroscopic
and cosmic scale. Research in nonlinear dynamics and ecology
also demonstrates the emergence of new structures and entities in
multiply-interconnected systems. (Lazlo 2006)7
Merleau-Ponty adds in the 1957 course on “The Concept of Nature”

that the influence of the Cartesian view persists despite the fact that
twentieth-century physicists working with relativity and quantum theories
witnessed very non-Cartesian developments and “the possibility of another
ontology” (RC 69/99).8 Two years later, he expands on this theme as follows:
But today, when the very rigor of its description forces it [physics]
to recognize as ultimate physical beings and full right relations
between the observer and the observed, such determinations that
only have meaning for a certain situation of the observer, it is the
ontology of the kosmotheoros [contemplator of the world] and its
correlate, the Great Object, which take on the shape of prescientific
prejudice. (VI 15/32)9
7. Tim Eastman, “Our Cosmos, from Substance to Process,” to be published in the World
Futures Journal special issue “Process Philosophy and the Sciences,” ed. Franz Riffert and Tim
Eastman. The cited reference, included in Eastman’s text, is to Ervin Lazlo, Science and the
Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions Press, 2006).
8. In The Visible and the Invisible, the author states that physicists such as Eddington show the
untenability of the ontology of the object, but they think falsely that this has no bearing on
psychology. They still describe the world in terms of a Cartesian separation of primary and
secondary qualities, as if their work “ceased to be valid at the frontier of our body and did not
call for a revision of our psycho-physiology” (25/45).
9. See also N 103/141. At several places in his texts, Merleau-Ponty identifies Laplace as a
thinker who subscribes to the view of scientist as kosmotheoros. See, for example, N 135/181.
In Causeries 1948, Merleau-Ponty makes an analogy between the way that modern art replaces
classical perspective and the manner in which relativity theory has replaced the standard view
of modern philosophy (C 39/19) that space is a “milieu of simultaneous things” dominated
by “an absolute observer . . . without a point of view, without a body, without a spatial situ-
ation—in sum a pure intelligence” (Ibid., 41/21–22).
INTRODUCTION 7
The fourth reason for undertaking this project is quite different. It con-
sists of the negative practical consequences of a cleavage between nature and
values. There are many illustrations of this unhealthy division. At one level
we lose a deep philosophical justification for ecology at a time at which recent
accelerations in climate change, coupled with the reckless consumption of
natural resources,10 have shown us how crucial a principled ecology really is.
Intercorporeal relations form a crucial part of our linkage with nature
and provide a foundation for a broader than anthropocentric ethic. When
people become desensitized to these relationships, the bodily basis for com-
munity is fractured. This cleft between nature and values, in which the basis
for affectivity has been badly damaged, is more and more apparent today in
the abuse and exploitation of both humans and other animals in a plethora
of depressing phenomena.
In order to accomplish these objectives, this essay is divided as follows.
Chapter I recounts Merleau-Ponty’s early view of nature as phenomenon—
that is, as a correlate of perceptual consciousness. It summarizes his descrip-
tions of the lived body’s perception and behavior in both normal and certain
pathological cases, as well as the origin of meaning, in order to contrast his
views of the body and its interactions with nature with those of several mod-
ern philosophers. Chief among these is Descartes, Merleau-Ponty’s constant
sparring partner. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s
criticisms of a latter-day Cartesian, his estranged friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.
The second chapter explains why and how Merleau-Ponty thought it
necessary to transcend his earlier phenomenology of nature with his “new
ontology” and how the principal Whiteheadian concepts with which he
felt some consonance can be a help in doing so. The chapter then devel-
ops and articulates the main themes of the “new ontology” by showing how
Merleau-Ponty sought to replace dualisms with a twofold ontology. This in turn
leads to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, which is the subject of Chapter III.
In developing his “new ontology,” Merleau-Ponty holds that the most
difficult aspect of the chiasmatic reversibility of flesh to understand is “the
bond between the flesh and the idea” (VI 149/195) or between Nature and
Logos. The intelligibility of nature is not imposed on it from the outside.
Rather, meaning is in-[the]visible as its hidden latency and lining. This
notion is the ontological radicalization of his earlier phenomenological
descriptions of perception as a “nascent logos”: “Here again, we grasp . . . a
logos before language, which will perhaps help us to better understand the
expressed logos” (PC II: 29).11 In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty approaches
10. For a rapid summary of the most depressing details of both reckless consumption and
extinction of species, see Edward O. Wilson (2003).
11. “Ici encore, nous saisissons . . . un logos avant le langage, qui nous aidera peut-être à mieux
comprendre le logos proféré.”
8 NATURE AND LOGOS
the relation of ideality and flesh in terms of the Stoics’ notions of a logos endi-
athetos and logos proforikos. The meaning and significance of these notions,
referred to in The Visible and the Invisible, the author’s retrospective sum-
maries of his courses on nature, and in the Nature lectures themselves, have
been latent in the literature until now. So we devote considerable attention
to them in Chapter IV.
Merleau-Ponty’s critical analysis of modern philosophical accounts of
nature and our relationship with it were not cut out of a whole cloth. He
was influenced not only by the Whiteheadian concept of nature, but also by
the work of two other thinkers who reacted negatively to modern rational-
istic philosophy—F. W. J. Schelling and Henri Bergson. It is their heritage
that forms the subject of Chapter V; the examination of Bergson’s views of
life in nature continues in Chapter VI as the context for Merleau-Ponty’s
own reflections on life, animality, and the relationship of mind and nature.
Chapter VII begins by articulating a recent, prominent challenge by
Renaud Barbaras to the tenability of Merleau-Ponty’s “new ontology.” It
indicates how Merleau-Ponty could have responded to these criticisms, and
it then uses Whitehead’s process philosophy to show how it can provide
additional support for Merleau-Ponty’s likely response. That in turn serves as
the point of departure for a demonstration of how Whitehead’s philosophy
can furnish Merleau-Ponty’s last ontology with a firm metaphysical founda-
tion. It is here that we explain how Merleau-Ponty could not only benefit
from the few Whiteheadian texts that he knew, but also could have profited
even more from the texts with which he was unfamiliar. This task requires
the remainder of Chapter VII as well as the final chapter.
In seeking to clarify the intertwining of Merleau-Ponty’s “new ontol-
ogy” and Whitehead’s process philosophy, we are mindful of the fact that
we are writing for two separate audiences that usually do not communicate
with each other, and for which we hope this work will serve as at least a
partial encounter. In process philosophy conferences, it is normal to hear
that Whitehead is the most ecologically sensitive and supportive twenti-
eth-century philosopher, without any mention or perhaps even knowledge
of the work of Merleau-Ponty. Likewise, in meetings dedicated to the latter’s
thought, the same thing is routinely said about him by those who know little
of Whitehead’s philosophy. In this book, we show how these two masterful
thinkers can be conjoined in a novel and enriching unity—what Whitehead
calls, and Merleau-Ponty after him, a “concrescence,” a growing together.
Also, because we are writing for both audiences, who are accustomed to
reading only one of these two thinkers, we have occasionally provided the
required background explanations.
These necessary explanations can easily suggest that this work is simply
a comparison of Merleau-Ponty’s and Whitehead’s conceptions of nature and
INTRODUCTION 9
a demonstration of their consonance. However, our aim is to transcend the

merely comparative approach by fleshing out at least the initial stages of
an ontology of nature, to which Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead provide a
fertile and productive access.
A note on sources is also required here. The appearance of four
remarkable volumes by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert: Du lien des êtres aux
éléments de l’être, Le scénario cartésien, Vers une ontologie indirecte, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty—published in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008, respectively—
have been tremendous resources for scholars because of Mme Suzanne
Merleau-Ponty’s permission for the author to access not only all of her
husband’s unpublished manuscripts, but also his personal library. Therefore,
de Saint Aubert’s texts provide a wealth of indispensable information not
used in earlier studies. This trove of inédits is so valuable and will be so often
referred to that the four volumes have been included in the “Abbreviations”
page after Merleau-Ponty’s own texts.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Professors André
Cloots, Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; and to
Jocelyn Dunphy-Blomfield, Monash University, for their considerable help
with this book. This work is much stronger because of their significant
insights and criticisms.
Leuven
April 2010
I
NATURE AS A PHENOMENON
Nature appears in Merleau-Ponty’s early texts more as a context for a phe-

nomenology of embodied existence than as a topic of interest in its own
right.1 Since the philosopher became intensely interested in nature only
from 1955 or 1956 on, one might think that an exploration of the earlier
phenomenology of perception and behavior constitutes a digression from the
later “new” ontology. Yet there are at least two reasons why this is not so.
First, although Merleau-Ponty deploys his phenomenology as a critical
response to previous philosophies, principally Cartesianism and its progeny,
it also serves as a groundwork for the “new” ontology to come. The latter
preserves the early work because, as noted in the Introduction, although
Merleau-Ponty significantly changes his conception of method for doing phi-
losophy, he does not repudiate his earlier descriptive results. Merleau-Ponty’s
late work “remains passionately phenomenological” in some sense because it
thinks “as closely as possible to phenomenality in order to better inhabit it”
(Janicaud 1991, 15). However, the later writings will advance a new way to
think phenomenality and, as we shall see, drive the earlier phenomenology
beyond its limits.
Furthermore, the expression, “new” ontology, shows that Merleau-Ponty
does not regard his later texts as replacing phenomenology with an ontol-
ogy. Since he already considered his early work to be an ontology, the later
writings consist of what he took to be a more adequate ontology. In the
early works, nature appears as a phenomenon, a correlate of consciousness,
1. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons . . . which guarantees for my experiences
a given, not a willed unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life.
Its counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory func-
tions” (PhP 330/381). “Le monde naturel est l’horizon de tous les horizons . . . qui garantit
à mes expériences une unité donnée et non voulue par dessous toutes les ruptures de ma
vie personnelle et historique, et dont le corrélatif est en moi l’existence donnée, générale et
prépersonnelle de mes fonctions sensorielles.”
11
12 NATURE AND LOGOS
albeit a body-consciousness that he distinguished from a Cartesian cogito

or a Kantian and Husserlian transcendental subjectivity. In The Structure
of Behavior, nature is the complex of “indifferent” things, and the structure
of behavior disengages the body from that complex and reinserts the body
“as a totality to be understood in the perception of the spectator” (PC
II, 17). In Phenomenology of Perception, perceptual consciousness is situated
within nature rather than outside it, but in both works nature appears as a
correlate of a body consciousness. By contrast, in the later writings, nature
is no longer only what one can “show,” or “let appear” as phenomenon
inasmuch as the visible is always doubled by an invisible that on principle
cannot itself appear.2
Second, the earlier phenomenology provides necessary concrete
details for the otherwise largely empty notions in the late texts, chiefly
The Visible and the Invisible. As Rudolf Bernet rightly points out, revisit-
ing the earlier texts prevents the central notions of The Visible and the
Invisible from languishing as puzzles and remaining void of “phenomenologi-
cal content” (1993, 55). One cannot go directly to the flesh for ontological
understanding any more than, as Husserl never tired of stating, one can
go directly to an essence. Therefore, in the current work we will approach
Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of nature as he himself did—through his ear-
lier phenomenology.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE
In these earlier writings, Merleau-Ponty portrays nature from the perspective

of the lived body—also called “the phenomenal body,” “the body proper”
(le corps propre), “my own body,” and “incarnate cogito”—and its correla-
tive life world. These topics, as well as his conception of phenomenology,
have been the subjects of multiple lengthy commentaries, including our
own, over at least the last forty years, and Lawrence Hass’s fine new study
(2008) is only the latest addition. Therefore, it is not necessary or even
desirable to resurvey the same ground in fine detail. Rather, our interest lies
only in its major outcroppings that are most important for understanding
Merleau-Ponty’s early view of nature.3
To begin with, the lived body is immersed in the world with oth-
ers, and exists in perceptual-behavioral circuits with things. To express this
2. Merleau-Ponty insisted on this difference. As he told one of us (Van der Veken), the invis-
ible is not like the hidden back side of a chest that could be seen if the back were exposed.
It is also important to keep in mind that, as Janicaud notes, Merleau-Ponty defends, “ ‘not an
absolute invisible . . . but the invisible of this world’ ” (1991, 22, citing VI 151/198).
3. For much more about the treatment of nature in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology
of Perception, see Toadvine (2009), Chapters 1 and 2, respectively.
NATURE AS A PHENOMENON 13
fundamental, inextricable involvement, Bernet states that Merleau-Ponty’s

sense of the phenomenological reduction consists of a “reduction to natural
life” in place of a “reduction of natural life” (1993, 57). This is true, but
only if we bear in mind that there are also certain senses of nature that
Merleau-Ponty rejects. One of these, discussed by Bernet himself, is nature
considered as scientific objects in the sense of wholes of isolable parts exist-
ing in external relations with each other—partes extra partes. Another is the
conception of nature as an immutable substratum to which cultural mean-
ings get added. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no fixed and abiding layer of
human nature to which culture gets added. Everything about us is equally
“fabricated” and “natural,”4 rooted in “simple biological being,” but also what
eludes “the simplicity of animal life” (PhP 189/221).5
For example, at times our existence is dominated by biological norms,
as when our desire for self-preservation holds sway. At other times, however,
those norms can be displaced by a “personal choice” (Ibid., 78/93) that
places our continued existence in jeopardy, such as risking our lives to save
others in danger of being killed. Because there are “many ways” for a body
and consciousness to exist (Ibid., 124/144), the body supports “an indefi-
nite number of symbolic systems” that surpass the meanings of “ ‘natural’
gestures,” but which also atrophy if not continually funded by our bodily
involvement with other people and with things around us (RC 9/18).
Because there is no immutably natural substratum of our existence,
Merleau-Ponty will later criticize Marx in a way to which we shall return
with Sartre. He will argue that Marx’s theory of history is grounded on a
view of unexplained and “perhaps mythical” Nature6 that is supposed to be
self-contained, “pure object, being in itself,” but which is never present in
our experience because the latter always “shapes and transforms it” (RC
64/93).7 Therefore, this pure Nature in itself is “everywhere and nowhere,
like an obsessive fear” (Ibid).
In his early phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s positive characteriza-
tion of Nature begins with this unity of the physical and the spiritual, the
4. Cf. VI 253–54/306–307, and for additional discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of clas-

sical natural law theories, see Hamrick 1987, 187ff.
5. Cf. PhP 160/186: “[B]iological existence gears into human existence and is never indifferent
to its distinctive rhythm” (PhP 160/186). “[L]’existence biologique est embrayée sur l’existence
humaine et n’est jamais indifférente à son rythme propre.”
6. From the 1957 course on “The Concept of Nature” onward, Merleau-Ponty usually, but
not always, capitalizes “Nature.” It is there that he discusses Schelling for the first time,
which is perhaps related to this stylistic change. We will follow that practice when referring
to Merleau-Ponty.
7. The view that experience “shapes and transforms” our view of Nature is decidedly untrue
in the famous episode in Sartre’s La Nausée when M. Roquentin encounters the dark, gnarled
tree root, of which more below. It is more nearly he that is shaped and transformed than the
tree root.
14 NATURE AND LOGOS
body and its cultural milieu, and develops with increasing specificity and
sophistication to symbolic systems. At the first and most basic level, Nature
presents itself to us as pre-predicative, anonymous, pre-personal bodily life
out of which personal life develops by means of a “recovery [reprise]” (PhP
254/293). This pre-personal life is characterized by the “on,” i.e., “one per-
ceives” rather than a cogito that intervenes with personal acts. It is a “silent”
or “tacit cogito” (PhP 402/461), “another subject beneath me” that takes up
a preexisting world and that designates my place in it. This “tacit cogito” is
described as a “captive and natural spirit,” as opposed to “the momentary
body” that is deployed in making “personal choices” (PhP 254/294).
For Merleau-Ponty, human existence consists of a continual inter-
change of the pre-personal and the personal (PhP 84/99), the natural aspects
of the lived body, of material things, other people, and the world around
us, and the body’s spiritual dimensions. However, the pre-personal and the
personal are not joined together externally, an in-itself and a for-itself, as
separable “parts.” Rather, they interpenetrate, so to say: personal life finds its
anchorage in Nature because the pre-personal body is already animated by
life. The “physiological” and the “psychic” “gear into each other” (s’engrènent
les uns sur les autres) (Ibid., 77/91) because they are never separated to begin
with.8 Moreover, just as the existential structure of Dasein for Heidegger
consists of being-in-the-world-with-others, so also, for Merleau-Ponty, the
lived body, other people, material things, and the world around us all form
a unitary system. Thus, Merleau-Ponty writes, there is an “ontological world
and body9 which we find at the core of the subject” (Ibid., 408/467).
In its continual oscillation with the personal, the pre-personal life of
the body manifests itself most directly and primarily in perception, behav-
ior, and expression. To describe this pre-personal life, Merleau-Ponty relies
heavily on the experiential and experimental results of Gestalt psychologists.
Indeed, in his 1946 address to the Société française de Philosophie in which he
defended the principal theses of Phenomenology of Perception, his explanation
of “perception as an original modality of consciousness” begins immediately
by referring to “the unprejudiced study of perception by [Gestalt]psycholo-
gists” (Prim.Percp. 12/103).
It has proven convenient for some philosophers during and after
Merleau-Ponty’s lifetime to indict his work as “merely psychology”—a charge
8. The early texts, mainly Phenomenology of Perception, employ a number of dyadic descriptions
of this unity, which shift in meaning from one set of terms to another. As Hass compendiously
lists them, they are “(1) the habit body and the personal body, (2) the impersonal and the
personal, (3) the biological and the individual, (4) the sedimented and the spontaneous, [and]
(5) the organic and the existential” (2008, 87).
9. The English translation conceals the fact that “ontological” modifies both “world” and
“body”: “Le monde et le corps ontologiques. . . .”
that has been leveled more than once against phenomenology itself. In the
1946 address, he showed that he was aware of this criticism (Ibid., 13/404)
and subsequent discussion indicated that he was correct to anticipate the
objection. As we shall see, his struggle to demonstrate the ontological import
of phenomenology formed one of his main reasons for developing a “new”
ontology.
Merleau-Ponty takes both Gestalt psychology and phenomenology to
have significant ontological import, although the Gestaltists themselves, he
believed, did not grasp how their research results undermined their causal
account of perception.10 Their traditionally mechanistic account of percep-
tion construed it to be the passive effect of prior and separable stimuli,
whereas their research results revealed perception to be an active process of
spontaneously organizing or structuring a given perceptual field. Perception
is, thus, neither passive nor separate and distinct from the stimuli that
purportedly determine it. Instead, in the way that perception selectively
arranges and organizes stimuli according to certain bodily norms, to achieve
equilibrium with its environment, perception helps constitute the stimuli as
such. Therefore, objective properties and subjective intentions are not just
intermixed, but in fact create a new type of unity.
This new type of unity comes about because, as opposed to supposedly
atomistic sensations of pure color, sound, and the like—which are actually
the objects of a very artificially framed consciousness, usually in laboratory
situations11—the simplest perceptual datum forms part of a perceptual field
as a focal point against a background context, and is already “laden with a
meaning”(PhP 4/10). A perceptual field opens itself to us and we to it. We
inhabit this field not as spectators, but as active participants, and it is this
participation that explains the fact that body and world are to be found “at
the core of the subject.”
This participatory structuring of a perceptual field is evident in the
description of a Gestalt structure. Negatively, Merleau-Ponty defines it as a
whole that is irreducible to the sum of its “parts” (VI 204/258). The structure
is neither a thing, a collection of things, nor opposed to them. Positively,
a Gestalt is a whole in which each part is internally related to each other
part. The whole is present in each part, the whole is more than the sum of
10. This was the first of many instances that Merleau-Ponty advanced this critique of science.
Also, as we shall see, he understands the full ontological value of the Gestalt to be disclosed
only in his “new” ontology in which he bluntly states, there is “no other meaning than carnal,
figure and ground” (VI 265/319).
11. Cf. Heidegger’s observation that “[w]hat we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of
sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north
wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling. It requires a very artificial and complicated
frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’ ” (1962, 207).
16 NATURE AND LOGOS
its parts, and a change in one part does not leave the others undisturbed.
Hence, each part is interdependent rather than independent.
Exactly how such experiences are “laden with meaning” depends on
how values of space and motion and rest are distributed according to the
focal point and background of the phenomenon. To consider only spatial
values, there is the way that a change of the spatial significance of some
part(s) within the whole changes its (their) experiential identity as, for
example, in Edgar Rubin’s famous illustration of the “face or vases” (see, for
instance, Gurwitsch 1964, 118–19), or in the equally familiar “duck/rabbit”
example that Ludwig Wittgenstein discusses in The Philosophical Investigations
(1968, 194). Such examples illustrate the first entry into Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of the celebrated theme of ambiguity—that “what we live
or think always has several meanings” (PhP 269/197). Here, as with bodi-
ly phenomena discussed below, the chief significance of ambiguity is to
stress the active structuring of a perceptual field as opposed to determinis-
tic causal accounts of perception and behavior. Ambiguity also permeates
Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of social phenomena, as discussed in detail
elsewhere (e.g., Hamrick 1989).
For the same reason, such phenomena also contradict the ontology
of the object. They demonstrate that what is given in perception is not
something purely objective to a spectator-like subject, but rather comes
into being in the way that the lived body participates in the fact that and
how it is given.
This is certainly the case with the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion
(PhP 6/12) in which, when angled lines are attached to horizontal lines of
equal length, the two horizontal lines appear unequal. What is particularly
interesting about this example is that not only does the phenomenon not
correspond to the stimulus, but also one can know theoretically that the
two horizontal lines are parallel before, during, and after the addition of the
auxiliary lines and yet the illusion appears anyway. For Merleau-Ponty, this
is no mere psychological curiosity, but rather something with ontological
weight. Therefore, he will argue against placing the Gestalt in the frame-
work of consciousness and cognition (VI 205–206/258–59). Each “part” has
a functional significance within the whole that is, in turn, “considered as
the equilibrated and balanced coexistence of its functional parts in their
thoroughgoing interdependence” (Gurwitsch 1964, 149).
The selective structuring of a perceptual field is also temporal. A mel-
ody, for instance, does not equal the sum of its notes because each note has
only a functional significance within the whole, and Merleau-Ponty points
out that this fact explains why the melody survives transpositions to a dif-
ferent key. Conversely, one change merely in the relationships between the
notes will suffice to decisively change the melody (SNS 49/87). Similarly,
in films the perception of any given shot is contextualized by what precedes

it, and this sequence of shots generates a new whole that does not add up
to the mere sum of its individual shots (Ibid., 54/97).
The organization of a perceptual field likewise characterizes behavior,
for different situational responses occur to the same bodily excitation. We
react to stimuli holistically, and in different situations they will assume
different meanings for the bodily organism. The reflex is not the product
of preexisting stimuli because there is a reversibility between the two such
that the reflex “turns back upon” the stimuli and gives them a meaning that
derives from the entire situation (PhP 79/94). Therefore, subjective inten-
tions and objective properties are thoroughly mixed up with each other and
comprise “a new whole” (SC 13/11).
For Merleau-Ponty, this “mixed-upness” implies that perception and
behavior are intelligible sense-giving activities that evidence a pre-reflective
motor intentionality anterior to the intervention of conscious acts or reflec-
tive constitutions of meaning. It is usual to point out that intentionality, as
Husserl conceives it, means that consciousness is always of something, but it
is not as common to add that intentionality is much more than that. Motor
intentionality for Merleau-Ponty is not just one feature of experience among
others, but also their common pivot. It is the axial theme of Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy of incarnation because it is through our motor intentionality
that, as opposed to the objective body, the lived body, also called “the
knowing body” (PhP 390 n. 1/357, n.4), becomes a system of powers for
exploring and making sense of its world. It becomes an “I can” in addition
to an “I think,” a view that persists in Merleau-Ponty’s later works as well
(OE 163/21). This “I can” or “I am able to,” which Merleau-Ponty borrows
from Husserl’s unpublished papers (PhP 137/160)—possibly the manuscripts
that became Ideas II (see §60, 277)—is the means by which perception can
become “a nascent logos” (“un logos à l’état naissant”) (Prim. Percp. 25/133).
In the birth of this logos, consciousness and mobility are so intimately
intertwined that either can be said to be the cause of the other (RC 8/17),
though they are simply two “halves” of the same whole. Conscious awareness
and movement measured in objective space amount only to two abstract
aspects of one existence (Ibid.). Or, as Merleau-Ponty expresses it later in
“The Philosopher and His Shadow,” motor intentionality “ties together the
stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing, and the two series to
each other” (Ibid., 167/211).
Further, the motor intentionality through which we possess many holds
on the world provides in the same movement both the unity of the senses
and the more inclusive unity of bodily processes and systems. In our inten-
tional directedness toward the world, the senses achieve a “never-finished
integration into one knowing organism” (PhP 233/270). The senses have
18 NATURE AND LOGOS
a synergy in virtue of which they interpenetrate in corporeal synesthesias,

and Merleau-Ponty interprets the unity of the body according to the same
model. Like the senses, bodily processes and systems also have a Gestalt
unity because in their functioning they are not a collection of independent
parts, but overlapping parts of a whole existing in internal rather than
external relations with each other.
In addition, spatial unity becomes visible “only in the interplay of the
sensory realms” (PhP 222/257). That is, the unity of things that beckon to
our intersensorial explorations comes about in the same movement as does
the unity of the body in its intentional explorations. Motor intentionality
does not produce the unity of things, nor does the unity of the thing bring
into being the correlative unity of a body consciousness. Rather, it is the
relationship that is primary, and the unity of the body consciousness and
the thing are dual and inextricably linked aspects of it.12 We will return to
this relational primacy with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s debt to Paul Claudel.
Given the centrality of motor intentionality for understanding how
we form part of a unitary system of bodies, material things, and the world
around us, it follows that the lived body cannot be simply an object amidst
other objects. It is both empirical object and inhabited by a subject. It is
“our general medium for having a world” (PhP 146/171), a theme that The
Visible and the Invisible reprises with its claim that all notions of objects
presume our “perceptual life” as their necessary correlate, a life that brings
about “the primary openness to the world” (37/60).
The early writings express in several ways the non-objectivity of the
lived body, as opposed to the objectified body studied in the sciences. There
is, for example, the argument from permanent presence. My body, unlike all
other entities, cannot be arrayed before me because it is always on the mar-
gins of my perceptual field. In this way, it is always “with me” (PhP 90/106).13
Second, bodily motility entails that the body’s spatial existence differs in
principle from that of a purely material thing. The latter can be described as
“in” (dans) space (and time) in a contained-container relationship, but the
lived body ex-ists, stands forth dynamically in its various projects. Rather
than being “in” space and time, the body “inhabits” them (PhP 139/162; cf.
UI 5/403). Instead of being “in the world” in the first sense, it is “au monde,”
something like “at the world,” the meaning of which is caught in English
12. Hass nicely states that, for Merleau-Ponty, perception consists of “a ‘synergy’ between my
living, embodied self and the transcendent, natural world. It is the site where other embodied
selves emerge, where our perspectives meld, cross, or intertwine (2008, 24–25).”
13. Whitehead also views the body in this way, expressed in identical language (and even
in italics), when he states that “the ‘withness’ of the body is an ever-present, though elusive,
element in our perceptions” (PR 312).
expressions such as being “on the town,” “on top of the world,” and the like.
Hence, to characterize this lived contact with the world, Merleau-Ponty’s
early works typically use “spatiality” and “temporality” for the lived body
and “space” and “time” for the objects of scientific measurement.14
Third, our bodies present themselves to us as a non-objective “cor-
poreal or postural schema” (UI 5/403).15 This schema orients us spatially
because in the “practical system” (Ibid., 102/119) of perceiver and perceived,
our bodies consist of the “zero point of orientation,” as Ideas II terms it
(1989, 61; cited at N 75/108) or, as the Cartesian Meditations states, “my
animate organism . . . is inseparable from the absolute Here” (1960, 123).
As such, it gives meaning to words such as “on” and “under,” “near” and
“far,” “up” and “down,” “left” and “right,” and “here” and “there.” Since the
“corporeal schema” is how we perceive our bodies with respect to horizontal,
vertical, and other crucial environmental coordinates, the lived body cannot
be a mere object existing “under the gaze of a separated spirit” because that
body is already subjectivized, or in-spirited, so to speak. It consists of our
permanent perspective on the world around us, other people, and perceptual
objects. As such, it consists of “the place where the spirit takes on a certain
physical and historical situation” (UI 5/403).
Finally, the lived body possesses the ability to integrate instruments,
tools, and other objects into its spatiality—for example, the blind person’s
cane, the pianist’s or typist’s keyboard (PhP 154/180). The “body image” is
an openness to the world (Ibid., 143, n. 3/168, n. 1) and provides us with
the “mental and practical space” required to establish a stable equilibrium
between the body and its environment. This equilibrium comes about as a
result of habitual patterns of behavior that obviate the need to think our
way through each new situation (Ibid., 87/103).
14. Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between space as an object of reflection and objective measure-
ment and the spatiality of the lived body owes much to Heidegger’s differentiation of space (der
Raum) and spatiality (die Räumlichkeit). See, for example, Being and Time, ¶ 24 (1962, 145–48).
Nevertheless, it appears that Merleau-Ponty considered the latter’s expression, in-der-Welt-Sein,
insufficient to distinguish the spatiality of the lived body from that of a container-contained
relationship. Hence the substitution of “au” for “dans.”
15. For Merleau-Ponty, a synonym for “corporeal schema,” or at least a very close cognate,
is “body image.” This expression first appeared in Henry Head’s Studies in Neurology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1920), and was taken up in the notion of the “corporeal schema” by
“Wallon, by certain German psychologists, and has finally been the subject of a study in its own
right by Professor Lhermite in l’Image de notre corps.” Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations
with Others” (PrP 117). This text was cited from the 1960 Cours de Sorbonne publication. See
also the later publication of these lecture notes in the Bulletin de psychologie, 236 XVIII 3–6
(novembre 1964), 295–336, esp. 298–99. Likewise important in this regard is Paul Schilder’s
classic work, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1950), which Merleau-Ponty
certainly knew well before his 1960 course at the Sorbonne. Schilder had published a small
study of the “Körperschema” in 1923, which Merleau-Ponty cites at PhP 77, n. 4/92, n. 2; and
99, n. 1/115, n. 1.
20 NATURE AND LOGOS
As a result, our knowledge of our body image as it gets expressed in

habitual patterns of behavior is not primarily theoretical. A meaning is
grasped in the development of a habit, but it consists of “the motor grasp-
ing of a motor significance” (PhP 143/167). For example, we may not be
able to say where a certain key on a typewriter keyboard is located, but our
fingers can find it (PhP 144/168). If asked the location, we will typically not
answer with the keyboard coordinates, but rather hold up the appropriate
finger. Conversely, we can know intellectually the location of a certain key
on a foreign keyboard, but this cognition is ineffective against and “neutral-
ized,” so to say, by bodily memory. This is because typing is “knowledge in
the hands,” which is disclosed only as a result of the habitual employment
of the hands (Ibid.). Something very like this also happens in speaking
a foreign language. Without the speaking context, the speaker may have
cognitive trouble finding a certain word or expression that comes to mind
(and tongue) spontaneously in situ.
For Merleau-Ponty, the development of bodily habits generates sedi-
mented meanings16 that, among other things, create the power of staying
actively engaged with the world. The habitual body provides the spontaneity
and energy of our motor projects with practical, patterned contexts in which
they can successfully operate. We require stability “in durable institutions”
in order to increase our freedom through which meanings are created (UI
4/403), and bodily habits comprise a key element of such institutions. In
this way, inhabiting the world therefore literally becomes in-habiting.
In turn, our motor intentionality adds creatively to those sedimenta-
tions through seeking additional optimal solutions in changing circumstances.
To paraphrase Kant, spontaneity without habit is empty of enduring commit-
ment, while habit without spontaneity is blind—without orientation to new
situations. However, as against Kant, for whom “Man is antiphysis” (Freiheit)
(N 26/47), freedom and Nature are not antithetical for Merleau-Ponty. It
is not a question of freedom versus Nature, but rather the incarnation of
freedom in the lived body’s motor intentionality that unites bodily spatiality
and the space of the external world in a “practical system.”
Further, although Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the habitual body
takes place in a chapter ostensibly about spatiality, temporality is likewise
implied by the depth of experience required for sedimentation. Later, in the
Passivity lectures, he speaks to this explicitly in the course of comments on
Proust, and concludes, “Time reads itself in the corporeal schema . . . time
is incorporated and sedimented in it” (IP 255, 256).
16. Sedimentation is a Husserlian concept, though the habitus that he has in mind “pertains
not to the empirical, but to the pure Ego” (Husserl 1989, 118). See also 233, 324, and 344ff.
Merleau-Ponty seeks to illumine motor intentionality and the habitual

body through various and, by now, familiar, cases of pathological behavior.
One such case will suffice here to articulate the philosophical importance
that he attaches to such cases. Schneider, a World War I soldier who suffered
a brain lesion in the occipital region caused by a shell fragment, exhibits a
“morbid mobility” (PhP 103/119). In part, this means that he is incapable
of abstract movements, such as pointing to a certain place on his body,
because, contrary to the normal bodily spatiality just described, “the order
has [only] an intellectual significance for him and not a motor one” (Ibid.,
110/128). He can move his body, and his thoughts can represent move-
ments to him, but normal motor intentionality exists between movements
seen from a third-person perspective and intellectual representations (Ibid.).
This is because the world presents itself to Schneider “only as ready-made
or congealed” (PhP 112/130). He does not lack any sensory data, but tactile
impressions, for example, fail to call forth any sense of potential responses
as they do in normal motility. Rather, they are “opaque and sealed up”
(Ibid., 109/127).
For Merleau-Ponty, the difference between normal and pathological
motility is not identical to that of completeness and incompleteness, because
pathological motility is not normal motility with only one or two features
missing. Rather, the patient, just as the child or someone with a “ ‘primi-
tive’ mentality,” possesses a “complete form of existence” (PhP 107/125).
Rather than lacking any sensory data, it is a question of what Schneider
must do with them—intellectual calculations to make abstract movements
and to interpret visual impressions—and what he cannot do with them
through spontaneous, pre-reflective, meaningful bodily intentionality. Since
he is not open to possibilities, he cannot selectively structure a perceptual
field and articulate its intelligibility. Schneider lacks “the concrete liberty”
(Ibid., 135/158) of being able to initiate situations; he has no “horizons of
possibilities” (Ibid., 135, n. 3/157, n. 5).
Merleau-Ponty also briefly expresses Schneider’s “morbid motility” in
terms of the concept of an “intentional arc” that he borrows from Franz
Fischer (PhP 136/158). This “arc” is said to subtend “the life of conscious-
ness—cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life,” to project around
us our temporal and “human” settings, “including our physical, ideological
and moral situation” (Ibid.). Merleau-Ponty ascribes to this “intentional
arc” an explanatory power for “the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of
sensibility and motility. And it is this which ‘goes limp’ in illness” (Ibid.).17
17. “qui fait l’unité des sens, celle des sens et de l’intelligence, celle de la sensibilité et de la
motricité. C’est lui qui se ‘détend’ dans la maladie.”
22 NATURE AND LOGOS
However, as de Saint Aubert points out, despite the apparent importance

of this concept for Merleau-Ponty, he uses the expression only three times
(at PhP 136/158 and 157/184) and then, “without any explanation of its
alleged explanatory power, forgets it purely and simply” (ESA II: 138). In
the absence of any explanation, it seems appropriate to think of it as a
tentative, incomplete attempt or as a restatement, quickly abandoned, of
the living, motor-intentional connection between perceiver and perceived.
For Merleau-Ponty, Schneider also demonstrates the falsity of two
interpretations of normal perception and behavior. The first one consists of
the causal analysis mentioned above—by which he always means mecha-
nistic causality—which cannot account for the ways that normal motility
structures an environment and therefore also the “stimuli” that are supposed
to be the cause of the perceptual, behavioral “response.”
The second mistaken interpretation is that the perceptual, behav-
ioral significations that are crystallized in the body’s normal openness to the
world result from cognitive acts imposed on meaningless sense data. Various
forms of this interpretation pervaded and distorted modern philosophy, had
decisive and destructive ontological consequences in terms of the separa-
tion of mind and body, and were rejected by Schelling and then by Hegel.
This account of perception lasted well into the twentieth century in doc-
trines of phenomenalism, logical atomism, and in both the mechanistic and
intellectualist accounts of perception with which Merleau-Ponty contended.
Sometimes called a “form/matter” analysis of experience (PC II: 20), it holds
that experience is made up of unintelligible sense data—the “matter”—that
receive their meaning by the imposition of rational judgments—the “form.”
In the Cartesian version, coupled with a mind/body dualism, the “form”
becomes a mental representation of sensory data. Without this principle of
intelligibility, experience would be incoherent: in William James’s famous
expression, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (1904, I: 488).
As opposed to these mistaken interpretations, for Merleau-Ponty
normal bodily motility can only be correctly grasped by a different kind
of thought, “that which grasps its object as it comes into being” for the
percipient “with the atmosphere of meaning then surrounding it” (PhP
120/139–40), and which attempts to slip into that “atmosphere” in order
to discern, beneath apparently disconnected “facts and symptoms, the sub-
ject’s whole being, when he is normal, or the basic disturbance, when he
is a patient” (Ibid.).18
Nor is it the case that normal percipients use the same procedures
much more rapidly because of continual use (Ibid., 108/125). Normal motil-
ity is such that we do not have to reason inductively to reach an interpreta-
18. “derrière les faits et les symptômes dispersés, l’être total du sujet, s’il s’agit d’un normal, le
trouble fondamental, s’il s’agit d’un malade.”
tion of “opaque and sealed up” sensory data. In normal motor intentionality,
as the Gestaltists showed, the incarnate cogito opens itself to a perceptual
field and, in complicity with it, arrives at meanings that are already sketched
“in outline” (“en pointillé”), as Merleau-Ponty often says, anterior to the
imposition of acts of interpretive judgment. These meanings are open rather
than “sealed up,” available for discernment rather than “opaque.”
Therefore, the potentiality that characterizes normal motility is really
a double and symmetrical one inherent in the system of percipient and
perceived. Both are open to each other, a conception that becomes radical-
ized in Merleau-Ponty’s last ontological writings about Nature. On the one
hand, material things, other people, and the world around us are such that
we can relate to them intelligibly; they are open to all the diverse ways
that we engage them through our motor intentional projects. On the other
hand, what it means to be a lived body is to be open to material things,
other people, and the world at large. Our bodily projects fit them like, to use
again one of Merleau-Ponty’s favorite images, engaging gears (PhP 160/186).
Therefore, on his view, the meaningfulness of the world is neither fully
formed, waiting to be discovered by consciousness, even a bodily one, nor
produced within consciousness to be applied to an inherently meaningless
world. Rather, through bodily motility, meaning is developed in a way that
is analogous to how a photograph is created in the developing fluid.19 The
paradox of the world, as of each perceptual object, is that it is “already there”
(déjà-là) before we take it up in any given situation, but it is also a world
that “only exists as lived by me or by subjects such as me” (PhP 333/384).
A perceptual object is, therefore, a paradoxical “in-itself—for-the-percipient,”
and Merleau-Ponty counts it as “probably the most important achievement of
phenomenology” that it has found a way to unite “extreme subjectivism and
extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality” (Ibid., xix/xv).
In this context, Schneider’s case contains a crucial epistemological
significance concerning the second mistaken interpretation of normal per-
ception and behavior, namely, that their intelligibility is imposed on mean-
ingless sense data by cognitive acts. Since in a representational theory of
perception, the intelligibility of sense data derives from an “act of under-
standing” (PhP 131/152), on this theory, “perceptual disturbances” could
only be disorders on one side or the other of the experience. However, what
patients such as Schneider show us is that the disturbance is situated at the
intersection of both perception and meaning (Ibid.). As a result, Schneider,
19. The image of photographic development is too simple to express all the richness of
Merleau-Ponty’s conception of sense making. We mention photographic development here
only to underscore his view that sense is not imposed on unintelligible matter, but rather that
meaning is already sketched out in advance. When we come to discuss the logos proforikos in
Merleau-Ponty’s late writings, we will see that there are at least five intertwined images of sense
making throughout his works, images that apply to perception, language, art, politics, and science.
24 NATURE AND LOGOS
“verifies mediately and clarifies his hypothesis by cross-checking facts, and

makes his way blindly towards the one which co-ordinates them all” (Ibid.,
131/152–53).20 By contrast, in normal experience the perceived “speaks” and
is inherently meaningful; the signification does not have to be imported from
outside. As opposed to the form/matter analysis of experience, “matter” is
already pregnant with its “form,” to use the Gestaltists’s language.21
Yet, Merleau-Ponty at this stage does not go far enough here. For phi-
losophers such as Descartes, Hume, and Kant, although their accounts differ,
the form/matter analysis is only that—an analysis. It is not a description
of what anyone is said to experience, but rather a reflective “unpacking” of
what had to occur in order for there to be coherent, intelligible experience.
However, with Schneider, it is a description of what he lives.
The emergence of new meanings implies expression, and Merleau-Ponty’s
writings about the body in its relation to nature and culture always empha-
size creative expression,22 whether in connection with perception, the emo-
tions, behavior, or cognitive life. In fact, “every human use of the body is
already primordial expression” (S 67/84). So far, we have been concerned with
perception, but emotions constitute another level of creative expression in
the mutual openness of perceiver and perceived. Emotions such as love,
anger, joy, and sorrow are not inner “psychic facts”—“confused ideas”—of
which behavior is only a meaningless physical re-presentation. Rather, emo-
tions exist and are expressed only in and through speech and gesture. They
“exist on this face or in these gestures” (SNS 52/94). Rather than being
concealed behind such gestures, an emotion is “a variation” in the ways that
our “bodily attitudes” display how we relate to the world around us and to
others within it” (Ibid., 53/95).23 Emotional expression is one manner in
20. “vérifie médiatement et précise l’hypothèse par le recoupement des faits, il chemine aveuglé-
ment vers celle qui les coordonne tous.”
21. In the unpublished preparatory notes for the 1953 Collège de France course on “The
Sensible World and the World of Expression,” Merleau-Ponty writes: “[T]here is no matter
without form and inversely.” “[I]l n’y a pas de matière sans forme et inversement.” He then
goes on to discuss “the Gestalt as opposed to matter or to form” (ESA III: 26).
22. One of the strengths of Hass’s overarching summary of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
consists of its emphasis on the centrality of creative expression throughout Merleau-Ponty’s
accounts of perception, language, art, the construction of geometrical proofs, and in cognition
generally. See particularly Chapters 6 and 7. However, what we discuss here and elsewhere in
this work is, for the most part, missing from Hass’s text. This is especially true with regard to
all the unpublished writings that de Saint Aubert has made available since 2004.
23. Cf. C 63/45, 46: “[T]his malice, this cruelty that I read in the looks of my adversary,
I could not imagine them separated from his gestures, from his speech, from his body. . . .
[F]inally anger inhabits it [his face].” “[C]ette méchanceté, cette cruauté que je lis dans les
regards de mon adversaire, je ne puis les imaginer séparées de ses gestes, de ses paroles, de son
corps. . . . Mais enfin la colère l’habite.”
which there is an interchange between the ways that the other sees me,
and how “the image of the other can be immediately ‘interpreted’ by my
corporeal schema” (PrP 118).24 And just because we can see, all other visible
bodies can participate in this schema. It thereby becomes, as he describes
it toward the end of his third course on Nature, “a lexicon of corporeity in
general” (RC 129/178).
It is part of this expressivity that motor intentionality constitutes our
“impulse of being in the world” (PhP 75/92), and what puts “the patient’s
being, his power of existing” (Ibid., 134/156) in question. Because reflexes
are meaningful expressions of how we orient ourselves to our situations
rather than passive, determined reactions to “stimuli,” in normal behavior
they “adjust themselves to the ‘direction’ of the situation” (Ibid., 79/94),
in the double senses of “le sens,” meaning and spatial orientation. For
Merleau-Ponty, this orientation and the “impulse of being in the world”
behind it lie primarily in emotional rather than cognitive life, anterior to
the achievements of a Cartesian cogitatio or a transcendental, constituting
consciousness. For a patient with a phantom limb, for example, the emo-
tion involved amounts to being part of a situation that he cannot hon-
estly accept, but from which also he does not want to flee. “The subject,”
Merleau-Ponty says, “caught in this existential dilemma, breaks into pieces
the objective world which stands in his way and seeks symbolical satisfac-
tion in magic acts” (Ibid., 86/101–102).25 One “existential attitude” solicits
another and, in the case of the phantom limb, forms an indivisible unity
with memory and emotion (Ibid., 86/102).
Expressivity is also central to normal motility in more diverse ways,
and Merleau-Ponty usually discusses it in terms of styles of actions. In our
“being at the world” (être-au-monde), styles represent the mélange of matter
and form, third-person physiological processes and first-person psychic acts.
Styles thus become Merleau-Ponty’s version of Hegel’s notion of the Inhalt,
or content, according to which, “Matter contains form locked up within it
and is absolute susceptibility to form only because it has form absolutely
within itself only because form is its implicit determination” (Hegel 1969,
24. The citation is from the 1960 publication of “The Child’s Relations with Others.” In the
1964 French publication, Merleau-Ponty states, “[T]he perception of my body can be transferred
to the other and the image of the other can be immediately ‘interpreted’ by my corporeal
schema” (298). “[L]a perception de mon corps peut être transférée à autrui et l’image d’autrui
peut être immédiatement ‘interprétée’ par mon schéma corporel.”
25. “Plutôt que d’accepter l’échec ou de revenir sur ses pas, le sujet, dans cette impasse exis-
tentielle, fait voler en éclats le monde objectif qui lui barre la route et cherche dans les actes
magiques une satisfaction symbolique.”
26 NATURE AND LOGOS
451–52).26 For Merleau-Ponty, it is through styles of behavior that the body

as a “lexicon of corporeity” can be read.
For example, walking embodies a certain manner of inhabiting and
interpreting the world in robust health or when sick or injured, by means of
types of clothing, lithe or stumbling movements, hesitations, and the like.
In these and other cases, form and matter are united; the bodily intelligi-
bility of each situation is not added by cognitive acts to a series of causes
and effects whether construed mechanistically or not. Rather, the style is
already incarnate in the movements. Just as emotions exist “on this face or
in these gestures,” behavior is not a meaningless sign of the signified hid-
den behind it.27
Merleau-Ponty elaborates this unity of matter and form in behavior
in terms of two key concepts that retain their importance in the “new”
ontology. The first concept is Paul Claudel’s notion of “co-naissance,” a
term that he coins in Art poétique.28 Claudel’s neologism is designed to stress
the primacy of the perceptual, behavioral relationship over the relata, and
Merleau-Ponty appeals to it in order to reinforce the view that percep-
tion and behavior have an inherent intelligibility. Claudel’s term is meant
to describe sensory experience by joining together the concepts of birth
(naissance) and knowledge (connaissance). As de Saint Aubert remarks,
co-naissance expresses “a radical conception of the life of perception as
experience [épreuve] of being, in the double passive-active sense of the verb
‘to experience’ [éprouver] (to feel and to put to the test, to perceive and
interrogate)” (ESA I: 238).
In this situation of co-naissance, our experiences of our own bodies
prefigure our experience of objectivity in a kind of “sensuous reflection”29—a
26. J. N. Findlay observes that Hegel’s notion of Content (Inhalt) “can indifferently be taken
to represent Materialized Form or Formed Matter. . . . The Content of a thing in the sense
used by Hegel is inseparably one with its Form: Romeo and Juliet could not have had the same
Content if produced in prose or some non-verbal medium” (1958, 196).
27. We noted earlier that the body’s motor intentionality is invested in symbolic functions of
increasing complexity. Styles of behavior comprise a fairly minimal level of such functions, and
we shall see later that in the Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty elaborates on similar behavior for
different animals as well. For human beings he details the upper reaches, so to speak, of these
symbolic activities in terms of language, art, politics, law, and other dimensions of the social
world. For a more detailed study of these subjects with reference to Merleau-Ponty and the
lived body, see Hamrick, 1987, especially Chapters I–IV; and 2002, especially Chapters 1–4.
28. Further details of Claudel’s influence on Merleau-Ponty may be found in ESA I: 234–55.
Among other things, we learn that, in Merleau-Ponty’s own library, “Art poétique is the most
worked over and one of the most annotated volumes. . . . Merleau-Ponty discovers this text
in October 1935, at a time in which his conception of philosophical knowledge [connaissance]
was already forged against the idealism of Léon Brunschvicg” (Ibid., 236). See also the refer-
ence to Claudel at N 97/134.
29. Bernet (1993, 60). For Merleau-Ponty, the primary importance of co-naissance is that it
reinforces the primacy of relationships over the relata. In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,”
he also interprets Husserl in that way (S 177/223–24).
concept that derives from Husserl’s descriptions of touching-touched rela-

tionships in Ideas II (§36), and of which Merleau-Ponty made much use in
both his earlier and later writings. This type of reflection is exemplified in
the familiar case of one hand touching the other. For the touching hand—or,
more exactly, for the body consciousness following the hand—it is a ques-
tion of the subjective body experiencing part of itself as object. However,
when the touched hand changes into a hand touching the previously touch-
ing one, the relationships are reversed. The body becomes both subjectiv-
ized object and objectivized subject, which reflects exactly Merleau-Ponty’s
descriptions of Nature itself in his early writings.
Merleau-Ponty sometimes speaks of the symbolic functions of the
body in terms of “pregnancy,” a pregnancy that precedes acts of expression
(creation).30 In this context, he appropriates a second concept to reject
the bifurcation of form and matter, Ernst Cassirer’s notion of “symbolic
pregnance”—a phrase coined to describe “the way in which a perception
as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive
meaning which it immediately and concretely represents” (Cassirer 1957,
III: 202). In Merleau-Pontian parlance, Cassirer uses the phrase to depict
“the absolute simultaneity of matter and form” (PhP 127, n.2/148, n.2),
the separation of which Cassirer describes as “untenable” (1957, III: 198).
For Cassirer, as for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology shows that “there
is no more a ‘matter in itself’ than a ‘form in itself’; there are only total
experiences” (Ibid., III: 199). “Pregnance” denotes the “interwovenness” of
perception and meaning—the fact that perception, in its totality and full-
ness, “is a life ‘in’ meaning” (Ibid., III: 202). Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty
also describes the inherent intelligibility of perception, its capacity to be a
“nascent logos,” in terms of pregnancy. For example, in regard to synesthesia,
he depicts sight and hearing as being “pregnant one with the other” (PhP
235/272), a conclusion based as much on Cassirer’s symbolic forms as it is
on Gestalt psychology. The latter goes on to say that, as part of this life,
we anticipate the future in the present: “The now is filled and saturated
with the future: praegnans futuri, as Leibniz called it” (1957, III: 202).31
30. In this relationship of pregnancy and creation, it is possible to hear an echo of Diotima’s
speech in Plato’s Symposium, especially when she says, “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, both
in body and in soul, and, as soon as we come to a certain age, we naturally desire to give
birth” (206C) (1989, 53).
31. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges his debt to Cassirer at several places in Phenomenology of Per-
ception. See especially 127 n.2/148 n.2, 235 and n. 2/272 and n. 1, and 291/337. Merleau-Ponty
appropriates Cassirer’s distinction between “phenomenon of expression (Ausdruck),” “verbal
expression (Darstellung),” and “intellectual significance” (Bedeutung)” (PhP 235/272) to argue for
the mutual pregnancy of “visual and auditory experiences.” He also uses Cassirer’s distinction
to maintain that expressive experiences are “anterior to ‘sense-giving acts’ . . . of theoretical
and positing thought,” that “expressive significance” precedes “sign significance,” and finally
that “the symbolical ‘pregnancy’ of form in content” is prior to “any subsuming of content
under form” (Ibid., /291/337).
28 NATURE AND LOGOS
Merleau-Ponty notes approvingly that this sense of pregnancy, overlooked by

psychologists, consists in the “power to break forth, productivity (praegnans
futuri), fecundity” (VI 208/262).
At the same time, the body’s symbolic system is always a dedication
to the world that counterbalances it by soliciting it to fulfill the body’s
expressive possibilities. The Nature of the body’s surrounding world32 has
what Husserl called “affective force” (affektiver Kraft) (Steinbock 2000, 66)33
that draws us to make some features of our environment stand out as “figure”
and relegate others to the “background.” When this happens, the figure
becomes “prominent because it says something to us in a way that makes a
difference, and does not achieve prominence in an indiscriminate manner”
(Ibid., 68). For example, what we call “familiar terrain” consists of “an
affectively optimal, orientated environing world” (Ibid., 69). It is part of
Husserl’s notion of an “aesthetic logos” of the life world that helps create
an intimate bond between the body and consciousness.
The fact that the natural life of the body is “the bearer of an indefinite
number of symbolic systems” expressively adapted to the practical tasks of
daily life has another important implication. Namely, it follows from the
mutual openness of the experient and the experienced—le sentant et le sen-
sible—that the Nature that beckons affectively must also be in some sense
a symbolic system(s), or to some degree subjectivized. There are indeed
suggestions of such a view of Nature in the Phenomenology, though, unlike
his later ontology, the perspective adopted is still that of a philosophy of
subjectivity.34
The suggestions emerge in the way that the Phenomenology prefigures
the later language of reversibility by describing things gazing at us and at
each other, just as we gaze at them. For example, if we look at an object
on a desk, we take it to have not only directly visible qualities, but also
those that the wall behind it can “see.” The back of the object, say, a lamp,
“is nothing but the face which it ‘shows’ to the chimney” (PhP 68/82).
Therefore, “every object is the mirror of all others” (Ibid.), and our very
ability to perceive an object presupposes that “objects form a system or a
world” and that the permanence of any object is underwritten by this abil-
ity of other objects to be “spectators of its hidden aspects” (PhP 68/83).
32. Both symbolic systems as well as the notion of a “surrounding world” (Umwelt) are present
in many forms of (other) animal life as well. See N 168/220 ff.
33. Steinbock also notes (2000, 66) that “this affective force of something prominent is linked
to the discriminating experience of optima” in the sense described above for Merleau-Ponty. It
“summons me” to a more complete perception of the object (Ibid., 65) and its context, and
where “the affective force is strongest, it provides ‘favorable conditions’ and summons privi-
leged comportment in relation to which it can become prominent and optimal” (Ibid., 67).
34. For a more complete discussion of this theme, see Bernet (1993, 64 ff.).
For Merleau-Ponty, things have an expressive power, an ability to “display

themselves” (PhP 68/82), but within this philosophy of subjectivity, it is our
gaze wandering among things that releases that expressive power and ability.
The upshot of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of Nature is a “natu-
ralization of the subject [that] goes hand in hand with a subjectivization of
Nature” (Bernet 1993, 65), an intertwining that effectively erases any sharp
dividing line between the two. The body has “an all-embracing adherence
to the world” anterior to any synthetic apperception of a given manifold
of data or the conscious positing of objects. “Nothing here is thematized”
(PhP 241/279).
MERLEAU-PONTY’S SPARRING PARTNER: DESCARTES
In the discussion following his 1946 address, Merleau-Ponty states that phe-
nomenology could not have preceded all other philosophies, but rather that
it emerges as a corrective to the “rationalist tradition” and “the construction
of science” (Prim.Percp. 29/137). As noted in the Introduction, on his view
phenomenology functions as a means of restoring or rehabilitating the sen-
sible, which we have followed in the previous section to describe his early
view of Nature. We have traced the ways that he positions phenomenology
as an antidote to a cluster of closely related doctrines associated with “the
rationalist tradition” and “the construction of science” that pervade mod-
ern philosophy from Galileo to Kant. These doctrines include mechanistic
causal accounts of perception and behavior, intellectualist constructions of
their meanings, the form/matter analysis of experience, representational
theories of perception, a dualism of mind and body and, as described in
the Introduction, the bifurcation of Nature and the ontology of the object.
Although a variety of thinkers throughout the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries subscribed to diverse versions of these doctrines, and despite
the fact that Merleau-Ponty comments on almost all of them, Descartes has
a special prominence in his criticisms. As we have seen, it is specifically
Descartes against whom Merleau-Ponty sets himself at the beginning of his
first course on Nature. Moreover, beyond the subject of Nature, Descartes is
present in Merleau-Ponty’s writings from one end to the other. Indeed, the
notes found on his desk the evening of the day he died dealt with Descartes
(ESA II: 23), in all probability because the subject of Merleau-Ponty’s last
course at the Collège de France was “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology
Today” (January-April 1961).
How to explain this Cartesian preeminence in Merleau-Ponty’s
thought? Almost all explanations focus on Merleau-Ponty’s many (justi-
fied) criticisms of Decartes. Hass, for example, is only the latest to express
the view that
30 NATURE AND LOGOS
there is no question that Descartes is Merleau-Ponty’s nemesis. Few

thinkers have taken Descartes more seriously than Merleau-Ponty; few
have studied him more closely or criticized him more exhaustively.
This is because, for him, Descartes’s epoch-shaping philosophy is
responsible for the dualistic and mechanistic categories that continue
to haunt western ways of thinking. (2008, 10)
This is perfectly true, yet despite the usual stress on Merleau-Ponty’s nega-
tive relationship with his precursor, there must be more to Merleau-Ponty’s
continual return to Descartes than obsession or the reiteration of criticism.
If that were the whole story, it would have been much simpler and easier
for him to refer to his earlier critiques.
We believe that this negativity misses at least two key facts. The
first is that Merleau-Ponty was certainly aware of the perennial relevance
of Descartes’ philosophy. Claude Lefort expresses this well when he says
that there is a natural connection between Descartes and us because we
share the same problems that stem from the same source, namely that “it
is always a question of time, space, things, and bodies that are and are not
things, and of what one calls thinking, feeling, desiring, communicating”
(NC 16). Lefort then states that, whereas Merleau-Ponty creates an ontology
to contrast with that of Descartes, we must realize that “the contrast is not
given, and that he takes it upon himself to establish it” (Ibid.).35
The second missing part of the explanation consists of what
Merleau-Ponty finds of positive value in Descartes’ philosophy. He locates
in Descartes both the best and the worst of a philosophy of embodied exis-
tence. In his unpublished La Nature ou le monde du silence (probably in
the autumn of 1957), Merleau-Ponty writes, “Descartes is simultaneously
the most profound and the least satisfying of philosophers” (ESA III: 125,
n. 1). The worst is the strict demarcation of body and soul, which produces
“ontological positivism or ontology of the object, ontological negativism
or ontology of the subject, . . . ontological diplopia, i.e. instability and
35. Perhaps to stress the continuing relevance of Descartes for Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl
states, in the discussion following the presentation of “Man and Adversity,” “Descartes, great
precursor of Merleau-Ponty—and there is no irony in my words” (PC II: 326). Lefort notes
that the course on “The Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today” describes the purpose of the
course as the formation of an ontology “that remains implicit, in the air . . . by contrast with
the Cartesian ontology (Descartes and successors)” (Ibid., 166). In the unpublished “scraps” of
radio interviews with Georges Charbonnier during the spring of 1959, Merleau-Ponty indicated
that the philosophical problem that oriented all of his research ever since his school days was
“the relations of the soul and the body,” and that even as a student he was always struck by
the fact that his teachers, such as Léon Brunschvicg, were Cartesians. ESA II: 17 n. 4. L’Œil
et l’esprit is probably Merleau-Ponty’s best effort to come to grips with Cartesianism despite
the course on Cartesian ontology the following year.
dialectic between appearance and reality36 (Ibid.). And it is precisely this

“instability and dialectic” that are implicated in what Whitehead called the
“bifurcation of nature.”
However, what Merleau-Ponty considers the best of Descartes’ philoso-
phy consists of the descriptions in Meditation VI and elsewhere of the ways
that body and soul are thoroughly mixed up with each other—“confondu
et mêlé”—as, say, by means of feelings of hunger and thirst. This second
understanding of the “Cartesian idea of the human body . . . is perhaps the
most profound idea of the union of the soul and the body. It is the soul
intervening in a body that is not of the in itself” (VI 234/288).37 It is but
another dimension of the natural ambiguity of the body: it is and is not an
object and soul and body ambiguously blend with each other.
There are in fact three different kinds of confusions for Descartes on
which Merleau-Ponty never ceased meditating and commenting: “ontological
confusion (the soul and the body, being and nothingness), epistemological
confusion (confused thought),” and “carnal confusion, that of feeling and
desire” (ESA II: 32). The existence of these “confusions,” as Merleau-Ponty
often points out, gives rise to two different meanings of Nature for Descartes,
to which two different ontologies correspond. The first sense is that of the
“natural light” of reason, from which Descartes believes the “ontology of
the object” follows (because of the clear and distinct ideas of material and
mental substances).
The second sense is that of “natural inclination,” which derives from
the “confusions,” and which expresses an “ontology of the existent” (RC
88–89/125–26). The Cartesian “ontological diplopia” produced by such con-
fusions stems from the fact that the natural light of reason leads us to believe
in the separation of mind and body, which is what Descartes teaches us
in the first three Meditations, while natural inclinations disclose the unity
of mind and body, which is the lesson of the last three Meditations, and
especially Meditation VI (ESA II: 26). However, since it is impossible that
36. “positivisme ontologique ou ontologie de l’objet, négativisme ontologique ou ontologie du

sujet, . . . finalement diplopie ontologique, i.e. instabilité et dialectique de l’apparence et de
la réalité.” Merleau-Ponty borrows the notion of “ontological diplopia” from Maurice Blondel
(1935) (RC 90/127).
37. “L’idée cartésienne du corps humain en tant qu’humain non fermé . . . est peut-être la
plus profonde idée de l’union de l’âme et du corps. C’est l’âme intervenant dans un corps qui
n’est pas de l’en soi.” In Meditation VI, Descartes puts it this way: it is by means of “feelings
of sadness, hunger, thirst, etc.” that “nature teaches me . . . that I am not only lodged in my
body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am very closely united to it, and so to speak so inter-
mingled with it that I seem to compose with it one whole” (1967, I: 192). For Merleau-Ponty,
a crucial rehabilitative function of phenomenology is to remove Descartes’ “so to speak” and
“re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world” as against bifurcations of an
autonomous consciousness from perception and behavior construed as the result of mechanical
causation (UI 3–4/402).
32 NATURE AND LOGOS
a Cartesian understanding could possibly conceive of a mélange of mind and

body, and since there is always an “inextricable confusion” (PhP 454/518)
between them, as well as between ourselves and the world, and ourselves
and others (OE 176/54), it follows that some other way must be found to
think their unity.38
In the following section we will revisit this same confusion and prob-
lem of understanding with regard to Jean-Paul Sartre. In this regard, it is
worth citing here vis-à-vis both Descartes and Sartre a retrospective state-
ment by Merleau-Ponty that reaffirmed both his desire to account for human
experience and his opposition to dualisms. In his fifth radio interview with
Georges Charbonnier, first broadcast on June 19, 1959, he explained that
ever since his student days, what interested him was
the connection of mind with the rest—with the body, with society,
with everything social. . . . It’s always the connection of being and
nothingness, or the mélange of being and nothing, that has interested
me. . . . [Sartre’s philosophy] was and remained in large measure
closely tied to the Cartesian position of the Cogito. . . . mind, if
one can think it in itself, [and] liberty, so to speak, face the world,
and not tied to the world. The idea of connection is an idea that
he does not like (ESA I: 111).39
38. This is why Merleau-Ponty much prefers Montaigne to Descartes: “Montaigne’s realm,
on the contrary, is the ‘mixture’ of the soul and body; he is interested only in our factual
condition, and his book endlessly describes this paradoxical fact that we are” (S 201/254).
“Le ‘mélange’ de l’âme et du corps est au contraire le domaine de Montaigne, il ne s’intéresse
qu’à notre condition de fait, et son livre décrit à n’en plus finir ce fait paradoxal que nous
sommes.”
39. “le lien de l’esprit avec le reste—avec le corps, avec la société, avec le tout social. . . . C’est
toujours le lien de l’être et néant, ou le mélange de l’être et néant, qui m’a intéressé . . . [la
philosophie de Sartre] était à ce moment-là, et est restée dans une large mesure dans la suite,
très solidaire de la position cartésienne du Cogito. . . . l’esprit, si on peut la penser en elle-même,
la liberté, sont pour ainsi dire en face du monde, et non pas liés au monde. L’idée de lien est
une idée qu’il n’aime pas.” See also Merleau-Ponty’s comments to Charbonnier that he had
always found “shocking” the idealist contention that thought was complete immanence cut
off from the world and other people, and that he had long since set himself the problem to
make those connections “thinkable” and “comprehensible” (ESA I: 111, n. 2). See also here
Patrick Burke’s “Introduction” to the English translation of UAC, especially p. 17. Still, it is
certainly unfair to Sartre to say that, for him, “mind, if one can think it in itself, liberty, so to
speak face the world, and are not tied to the world.” The for itself is ineluctably tied to the
world from which it is nevertheless radically different. Here Merleau-Ponty appears to conflate
connection with mélange. Also, to say “The idea of connection is an idea that he does not
like” appears to conflate “like” with “accept.” De Saint Aubert repeats all of this uncritically,
and also never takes into account Sartre’s remarks about moral responsibility in, say, Exis-
tentialism is a Humanism. Nor does Merleau-Ponty link his remarks to Charbonnier to that
text.
For Descartes, the natural light of reason shone most brilliantly in math-
ematics. Like Galileo,40 Descartes also held that “Geometry or abstract
Mathematics” explains “all the phenomena of nature” (The Principles of
Philosophy, Part Two, Principle LXIV) (1967, I: 269) and that, “of all the
sciences known as yet, Arithmetic and Geometry alone are free from any
taint of falsity or uncertainty” (Rules for the Direction of the Mind) (1967, I:
4). In sharp contrast to this intellectual knowledge, imagination, “a certain
application of the faculty of knowledge to the body” (Ibid.), is confused
and unclear. The former takes as its object all of the quantitative aspects of
our experience. The latter concerns sensory qualities, the apprehension of
which are “confused thoughts” (The Principles of Philosophy, Part IV, Principle
CXCVII) (1967, I: 294).
This epistemological distinction is important for Descartes’ ontological
conviction that, as with Galileo, what John Locke (1969, II, 8, § 23, 71)
would call “primary qualities” exist in material objects, whereas (Lockean)
“secondary qualities” “represent nothing to us outside of our mind” (The
Principles of Philosophy, Part I, Principle LXXI) (1967, I: 249–50).41 In
Whiteheadian terms, they are “psychic additions” to nature. In Descartes’
famous example of the melted wax in Meditation II, the reason that he gives
for this conviction is that quantitative factors comprise the only permanent
characteristics of the wax: its spatial extension, flexibility, and mobility.
Those are the objects of intellectio, whereas, he tells us, “nothing of all that
the senses brought to my notice” could reveal its nature (1967, I: 154).42
40. For Galileo, the sensory world consisted of delusory appearances that became intelligible
only through the intervention of mathematics (1964, 271). His universal mathesis of nature
and his view of the relationship of primary and secondary qualities have had momentous
epistemological, moral, and metaphysical consequences for the history of Western philosophy
and societies alike. He reversed the double assumption that human beings and external na-
ture are part of a seamless whole and that human beings comprised its most important part.
In Descartes’ hands, Galileo’s mathematical science of “local motions” became a full-fledged
“mechanistic despiritualization of Nature” (Windelband 1926, 403). Not only that, whereas Galileo
was content to relegate final causes to the spiritual life and to God—his view, as expressed
well by Cardinal Baronius in 1598, was that the Bible shows us “how to go to heaven, not
how the heavens go”—Descartes, in a prefiguration of unknowable Kantian noumena, holds
that God might have purposes, but they likewise cannot be known. Moreover, none of his
descriptions of human mental life ever refer to purposes.
41. Berkeley held the same view in identifying “esse” with “percipi,” but of course linked to
the radically non-Cartesian rejection of matter.
42. Hass rightly points out that Descartes uses the example of the wax to defend a repre-
sentational theory of perception inasmuch as what is perceived (read: conceived) as constant
is an idea of the wax as solid and then as melted (2008: 14–15). Perception for Descartes
becomes judgment. Hass could have added that Descartes had a scientific explanation at hand
to justify, or at least reinforce, his representational theory. As Whitehead points out, with the
development of transmission theories of light and sound, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
philosophers argued that a secondary quality such as color emerged from the transmitted waves
of light, and so was not itself in the object or the light waves projected from it (CN 26–27).
34 NATURE AND LOGOS
However, Descartes’ argument from permanence suffers from the fatal

flaw that, regardless of changing color and composition, some color and
resistance remain in whatever shape the wax takes. “The fact is, and this is
of central importance,” as E. A. Burtt points out, “Descartes’s real criterion is
not permanence but the possibility of mathematical handling” (1954, 117). From
that point of view, it is instructive that, as David Abram points out (2007,
156), Descartes’ strict separation between primary and secondary qualities
and dualism of bodies and minds, was necessary to deal with Copernicus’s
and Galileo’s stupefying disclosure of the untrustworthiness of our senses.
The Copernican worldview required that the mind had to distance itself as
clearly as possible from the body as a locus of sensation.
This withdrawal, crystallized in the ontology of the natural light as a
mental substance, becomes, like Kant’s transcendental ego, an anti-physis.
As with Galileo, the “world-machine” (Burtt 1954, 165), becomes a posi-
tive infinite, an objective plenum of matter in which quanta of matter exist
as particular, self-contained, delimited magnitudes of space existing in the
partes extra partes relationships described above. They differ from each other
only as modes of extension.
Partes extra partes relations between quanta of matter are also temporal.
Time on this view consists of a series of isolable, self-contained “instants,”
or present “nows,” each of which is cut off from its predecessors and succes-
sors. Here also, each quantum is self-contained and therefore not implicated
in the existence of any other quanta. Moreover, what is true of external
nature is also true for the internal. As Descartes tells us in Meditation III,
“all the course of my life may be divided into an infinite number of parts,
none of which is in any way dependent on the other; and thus from the
fact that I was in existence a short time ago it does not follow that I must
be in existence now” (1967, I: 168).
This temporal schema is also central to Descartes’ view of mind-body
interaction. This is because, in the “machine of our body” (Descartes 1989,
26), sensations that are carried along nerve pathways to the brain cause
nerve excitations at discrete instants, and finally are transmitted to the
mind via the pineal gland such that the corresponding mental representa-
tion also occurs as a discrete event—and vice versa for mentally directed
bodily movements. Along the chain of these discrete events, “the passions”
of the soul, consist of “all the sorts of cases of perception and knowledge to
be found in us” that the soul “receives . . . from things that are represented
by them” (1989, 28).
Descartes’ explanation of mind-body interaction begs two intertwined
and well-known questions about a putative connection between a material
body and an immaterial soul. Since Descartes obviously thinks of this con-
nection in terms of cause and effect through contact, what mode of contact
could there be between material and nonmaterial entities, and what would
such a contact mean? Descartes never addresses the more basic question of
meaning, but he does consider that of verification, and in a way that is most
enlightening for the relationship of phenomenology and ontology. Elizabeth
wrote to Descartes, June 20, 1643, that she could not understand how the
soul could move the body. “ ‘I must admit,’ she wrote, ‘that it would be
easier for me to attribute matter and extension to the soul, than to attribute
to an immaterial being the capacity to move and be moved by a body’ ”
(1970, 140). His answer, dated June 23, 1643, stated that she should “feel
free to attribute this matter and extension to the soul because that is simply
to conceive it as united to the body” (cited at UAC 34/14).
Descartes goes on to say that pure intellect and/or imagination can
only obscurely express the union of body and soul. For that we need the
senses, and that is the reason that non-philosophers, guided solely by their
senses, have no trouble believing in body-soul interaction and understand
them as a unity. In other words, it is only by avoiding reflective thought that
we can somehow understand the unity of material and immaterial entities.
It is this unsatisfactory state of affairs that drives Merleau-Ponty to conclude
that, if it is a mental confusion to think of the unity of mind and body,
how could we ever arrive at the notion of the cogito, and if we do arrive at
it (through unconfused thought), “how can I be the unreflective subject of
the Sixth Meditation” (UAC 35/16)?
Elizabeth very likely reached a similar conclusion, for she answered
Descartes’ letter of June 28, 1643, as follows: “ ‘The senses teach me that the
soul moves the body . . . but neither they nor the intellect nor the imagina-
tion teaches me how. Perhaps there are properties of the soul unknown to
us which will overturn the conviction of the soul’s non-extension” (1970,
144).43
Doubtless, Elizabeth considered Descartes’ definitions of mind and
body so radically different that their unity would be miraculous. Equally
miraculous in such a dualism is Descartes’ astonishing claim in a letter to
Mersenne (April 1, 1640) that, since the pineal gland is “not at all suitable”
for storing old memories, part of the memory of the lute player is “in his
hands”! The reason is that “the ease of bending and disposing his fingers in
various ways, which he has acquired by practice, helps him to remember the
passages which need these dispositions when they are played” (1970, 71).44
43. It should also be noted here that, in a letter to More dated April 15, 1649, Descartes
distinguished an “extension of substance” (matter) from an “extension of power” that suppos-
edly belongs to the soul (cited in UAC 34/15). However, the latter extension appears to be a
description of body-soul interactions rather than an explanation of them.
44. It is very strange that Merleau-Ponty does not refer to this letter. It is neither obscure
nor difficult to find, to say nothing of the addressee. And it is highly improbable that he did
not know the letters thoroughly.
36 NATURE AND LOGOS
Unfortunately, Descartes does not venture an explanation for the pos-

sibility of such motor intentional memories, and the rest of his philosophy
provides two powerful reasons against it. First, there is literally no place in
the bodily machine for memories, and the mind is the source of all intel-
ligibility, including that of memory. Therefore, second, what we sense, what
the lute player would feel with his hands, is but a sign whose significance
comes from thought laid over it, a bifurcation of matter and form.
Furthermore, because ideas are mental representations of sensory rep-
resentations of supposedly external objects, nothing in the ideational act
could certify the correctness of the representation. Thus, when, via “the
mediation of the nerves,”
we see the light of a torch and hear the sound of a bell, the sound
and the light . . . [excite] two different movements in some of our
nerves and thereby in the brain, impart to the soul two different
sensations, which we refer to the subjects we suppose to be their causes
in such a way that we think that we see the torch itself and hear
the bell, and not that we only feel the movements proceeding from
them. (1989, 31; emphasis added)
There is, therefore, a double problem of unverifiable reference: the sensa-

tion to the external object that is its supposed origin and the idea to the
sensation that it putatively re-presents. Clearly, one attraction of conceiving
nature to be what can be known mathematically is that it offers a way to
avoid facing such insoluble problems of correspondence.
A LATTER-DAY CARTESIAN: JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Sartre does not hold a representational theory of perception, but his early
philosophy is nonetheless closely allied with that of Descartes to such an
extent that Merleau-Ponty develops his phenomenology of Nature, as well
as almost everything else in his philosophy, against both of them together.
Moreover, he has an equally complicated relationship with both. Sometimes,
as we have seen, this leads him to quite unfair criticisms of Sartre. Another
instance is his claim that in Sartre’s philosophy there is “no place for a
conception of Nature or for a conception of history” (N 70/101). In fact,
he has both. As regards history, we immediately think of the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, the first volume of which was not published until a year
before Merleau-Ponty’s death. Yet, history as embedded in sociopolitical
phenomena is not absent from Sartre’s early writings, not even from Being
and Nothingness. Inversely, consciousness is not completely absent from the
Critique—though, there, its author is more interested in “the life, the objec-
tive being, of the investigator” (1976, 51)—and freedom is associated with

action and praxis instead of being identical to consciousness. Therefore,
just as Merleau-Ponty’s early thought is still present in his later writings,
so, also, is that of Sartre.
Merleau-Ponty wrestles throughout his entire professional life with
Sartre’s “phenomenological ontology,” to use part of the subtitle of Being and
Nothingness, and this includes the theme of Nature. Whereas Phenomenology
of Perception is extremely deferential to Sartre and offers only the gentlest of
criticisms, the tone changes considerably over time until the trenchant criti-
cisms of “Sartre et l’ultra-bolshevisme”—the last chapter of Les Aventures
de la dialectique—spelled the decisive break between the two. (See also the
“Introductory Pages” for the La Nature ou le monde du silence in ESA IV:
44–52.) Despite the famous rupture, however, both Sartre’s influence on
Merleau-Ponty as well as the latter’s attempts to provide a definitive answer
to the former’s ontology of being and nothingness, endured right to the end
of Merleau-Ponty’s life.45
We will study later the ways in which Merleau-Ponty continued his
one-sided conversation with Sartre in the Nature lectures and in the unfin-
ished ontology of The Visible and the Invisible. Our concern here, by contrast,
is the way that Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology criticizes Sartre’s views
of consciousness and Nature, and of their bifurcation, how he accepted the
validity of Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions, but disagreed with their
philosophical conclusions and implications.
Those phenomenological descriptions, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, “pose
the central problem of philosophy” in the light of the development of mod-
ern philosophy, and they do so directly and with new depth (SNS 73/145).
Descartes has shown us, he holds, the fundamental difference between exist-
ing as consciousness and existing as a thing, and nineteenth-century teach-
ings about the “historicity of the spirit” have shown us that “consciousness
always exists in a situation” (Ibid.). Given both of these intellectual acquisi-
tions, we must try to comprehend them together.
As regards the relationships of human existence to Nature and the life
world in general, Merleau-Ponty underscores the value of Sartre’s avoidance
of two classic positions: that human beings as parts of Nature are reduc-
ible to the effects of various natural and social causes, and that human
45. Not only is Sartre’s philosophy the subject of the longest chapter of The Visible and the
Invisible (“Interrogation and Dialectic”), and amply present in its “Working Notes” as well,
but also this chapter title described their personal lives as well. For instance, Michel Contat
related to one of us (Hamrick) an interesting event shortly before Merleau-Ponty’s death. The
latter told Contat at an exhibition in a Paris art gallery that he had viewed the paintings
once with little comprehension, but that, after having read Sartre’s review of the exhibit, he
now understood it.
38 NATURE AND LOGOS
existence is a “constituting consciousness” with an “a-cosmic freedom” (SNS

71–72/142). Fleeing from the inescapable difficulties in the first view is not
a sufficient warrant for embracing the second, and Merleau-Ponty sees Sartre
as giving us another way to understand human existence, existence defined
as “the movement” by means of which we involve ourselves “in a physical
and social situation” (SNS 72/143). As with Husserl, this new way consists
of viewing subject and object as drawn together in a “relationship of being”
(SNS 72/143–44). (How this “relationship of being” differs from the idea of
connection that Sartre purportedly does not like is unclear.) Also, in terms
of phenomenological descriptions, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the lived
body is largely indistinguishable from that which Sartre advances in Being
and Nothingness. For example, both thinkers portray the expressive body in
identical ways and both hold that emotions are not internal mental realities
re-presented in external behavior.
However, on an ontological plane, to say that consciousness, or
“human reality,” as Sartre interchangeably refers to it, is “être-au-monde”
bears only a verbal similarity to Merleau-Ponty’s own view, even in his early
texts. The reason is that Sartre’s conception of consciousness not only medi-
ates our contact with Nature, as if it were a lens through which Nature is
revealed, but does much more than that. Sartre defends the much stronger
claim that what Nature itself is becomes determined through consciousness
as he understands it.
His conception of consciousness is, of course, nothingness (“le néant”),
negation, nihilation, freedom, pure flux, flight out of itself, project (from
pro-iacere, to throw forward), (self-) transcendence—and other well-known
descriptors elaborated in great detail throughout Being and Nothingness. In
that work, for Merleau-Ponty, “the subject is freedom, absence, and negativ-
ity and . . . nothingness” (SNS 72–73/144).
This nothingness, however, is not a mere absence of being. It is also
a process of temporalization, just as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger described
the lived body and Dasein, respectively. Sartre says that consciousness “tem-
poralizes itself by existing” (1956, 136), that “freedom, choice, nihilation,
temporalization are all one and the same thing” (Ibid., 465). This process of
temporalization is also at odds with “the magic duration of Bergson’s philoso-
phy” (Ibid., 170), which is inconsistent with Sartre’s view that consciousness
and decision, or choice, are identical (Ibid., 462). “Bergson with his dura-
tion, which is a melodic organization and multiplicity of interpenetration [of
past and present], does not appear to see that an organization of multiplicity
presupposes an organizing act” (Ibid., 135). Bergson, he continues, was cor-
rect to discard the Cartesian notion of the instant, but Kant was more right
than Bergson to insist that “there is no given synthesis” (Ibid.).
Since, for Sartre, the subject “is only nothingness,” it therefore has only
“being for itself” and not, as a thing, “being in itself.” As “for-itself” instead
of “in-itself,” it, like Husserl’s transcendental ego or Heidegger’s Dasein, can-

not “come into the world” (AD 142/190, 191). There can be no genesis of
the subject in Nature because the for-itself is not part of its warp and woof,
but rather a “rift in the fabric of the world” (SNS 73/146). In the last analy-
sis, for Sartre, “there is pure being, natural and immobile in itself”—things in
themselves, plenitude, pure Bergsonian positivity, completeness—and there
are transparent consciousnesses that exist in tandem with it (AD 142/191).
As with Bergson, as we shall see in Chapter VI, negativity is a function of
consciousness, never of (positive) facts, the in-itself. For example, if we say
that our friend has not yet arrived at the café or that the lunar eclipse is
not yet complete, these “not yets” are introduced by the subject who disrupts
the plenum of the world, creating a “rift” in its fabric.
The point of rehearsing these familiar descriptions of Sartre’s early
philosophy is to emphasize that, in place of a natural genesis of the subject,
Sartre gives us a dualism of interiority and exteriority, negativity and posi-
tivity, nothingness and things. It is therefore impossible for consciousness
to be inscribed in things. There can be no unity with Nature, let alone,
as Merleau-Ponty said, an “indivision” with it. In radical contrast to the
role that objectification plays for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty—what Bernet
terms “sensuous reflection”—for Sartre, if the for-itself became the in-itself,
this reification would amount to the death of consciousness. To be anything
would objectify and thus destroy the subject.
More than this, however, reification is a threat for Sartre because the
for-itself has a deeply conflicted relationship with the in itself. On the one
hand, consciousness preserves its freedom—or, rather, is freedom—because
it comprises an unending series of acts of negation of the in-itself. On the
other hand, the subject, since it is solely negativity, therefore lacks the
being necessary to support itself (SNS 73/144). Thus, the for-itself needs the
in-itself that it constantly flees. The in-itself then presents itself as enticing,
or tempting. It offers consciousness what it lacks: stability, order, and justi-
fication. Corresponding to the “affective force” of objects in the life world
for Husserl, this aspect of the in-itself presents the world as “promise” in
addition to being a “threat” to the subject. It is “the world which sets traps
for, seduces, or gives in” to the for-itself (S 155/196). Hence, the dialectical
relationship between the subject and the in-itself consists of an ontologically
necessary one of repulsion and attraction, flight and desire, rejection and
envy. Intentionality for Sartre always leads consciousness toward a unity
with things that can never be completed; it is an impossible synthesis (SNS
76/151).
The repulsion side of this contradiction is why in Sartre’s dualism,
unlike that of Descartes, Nature is not only radically other than conscious-
ness, but also frightening. In fleeing from its own death by “nihilating” the
in itself, the subject experiences Nature as totally alien to its own sort
40 NATURE AND LOGOS
of being. This quality of being completely other is experienced as shock-

ing, ugly, and disgusting. Merleau-Ponty expresses Sartre’s view well when
he quotes Pascal’s famous statement, “The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces terrifies me” and adds, “there is something horrible, repulsive, and
unchallengeable about things which simply are, which mean nothing” (SNS
75/149; translation altered).46
The locus classicus of Sartre’s depictions of nature is the scene in La
Nausée in which the narrator, Antoine Roquentin, is finally struck by the
contingency and gratuitousness of not only his own life and freedom, but
of the in-itself in general. However, this is no mere fiction for Sartre. For
he states in his autobiography, Les Mots, “I was Roquentin, I showed in
him, without the desire to please anyone, the web of my life” (1964, 210).
He realizes that he and everything else are “de trop,” superfluous, without
justification. In this passage, he can no longer tolerate the close proximity
of things, so he descends from his tram before it stops. In the public garden,
he sits on a bench and sees the dark tree trunks stretch toward the sky and
the dark root of the chestnut tree under his feet.
What he recognizes is that, like most people, he had never before
understood what existence meant. Now he sees things “naked, with a
frightening and obscene nudity” (1938, 180). This thunderbolt of illumi-
nation, as Nietzsche might express it, extends even to his own eventual
corpse. Returned to the dust of the earth one day, he would be “de trop pour
l’éternité.” Sartre will later describe this feeling of “fundamental absurdity”
(Ibid., 182) as an ontological nausea, which is an “insipid taste which I
cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from
it” (1956, 338), and which is foundational for all empirical nauseas. This
basic nausea is the insipid taste of contingency and facticity.
The utterly alien and threatening character of Nature bifurcated from
consciousness also manifests itself in the phenomenon of the disgusting,
particularly in relation to the viscous, or slimy. The threat here is one of
dissolution, and we react with disgust because we resist being absorbed in
the in-itself “as ink is absorbed by a blotter” (1956, 610). Sartre observes
that we can dive into water without fear because the liquid environment
does not threaten our solidity. Everything about water makes us think of
the for-itself, so much so that “psychologists (James, Bergson) have very
often compared it to a river” (Ibid.) However, with slime, we lose that
assurance “because the slimy is in process of solidification” (Ibid.). We lose
46. “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraye . . . il y a quelque chose d’horrible, de
repoussant et d’irrécusable dans ces choses qui sont simplement et ne veulent rien dire.” The
English translation, “express nothing,” is too weak for “ne veulent rien dire” because the reason
why, for Sartre, things cannot express anything is, as Merleau-Ponty’s text plainly states, they
“do not mean anything.”
our equilibrium because we are haunted by the threat of “a metamorphosis”

(Ibid.).47 On Sartre’s view, the slimy is such a horrible image because “it
is horrible in itself for a consciousness to become slimy” (Ibid.). Such a
transformation would destroy the for-itself’s temporality in that it could
no longer be a free flight out of itself toward a future, but would rather be
sucked back into the past.
Yet the slimy threatens the for-itself with becoming a type of being
that cannot actually exist. A sticky consciousness, so to speak, would be
exactly the structure that Merleau-Ponty attributes to every perceptual
object—an “In itself-For-itself,” which “is only represented by the slimy”
(1956, 611). The slimy is therefore an unrealizable but dangerous type of
being for consciousness, and which always haunts us with the threat of
being sucked into it. In addition, there is more than one kind of context
in which we worry about getting “stuck.”
Just as Sartre distinguishes between ontological and empirical nauseas,
so, too, does he differentiate experiences of sliminess from their “valid onto-
logical pattern beyond the distinction between psychic and non-psychic,
which will interpret the meaning of being” (1956, 611). Sartre holds that it
is present in different types of sliminess. For example, even a child experi-
ences “the kind of sticky baseness which we figuratively name ‘slimy’; it is
there near him in the very sliminess of honey or of glue” (1956, 612). In
the adult world as well, any type of object can suggest sliminess whenever
this mode of being arises, and this may also be why we are repulsed even
at “slimy,” unctuous, fictional characters in literature, such as Uriah Heep
in Dickens’s David Copperfield.
In The Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty notes the “apparent
paradox” that Sartre became famous precisely for his descriptions of the
unrealizable “middle ground” between the for-itself and the in-itself, such as
“the root in Nausea” or “viscosity” (the slimy) (AD 137/185). It is not clear
why Merleau-Ponty includes the former example here, since the description
of the narrator’s experiences betrays no evidence of a “vague, soft effort”
to suck him into it. On the contrary, the gnarled, dark root horrifies him
because it becomes the visible presence of his superfluity. However this may
be, Merleau-Ponty correctly observes that the paradox is “only apparent”
because it requires a for-itself as Sartre describes it (AD 138 n. 78 /185 n.
1), and that a different conception of consciousness, namely his own that
emerges in the “confusions” of mind and body, could dissolve the paradox.
47. Many years ago, in a source long since forgotten, an unknown philosopher made the point
that Sartre’s argument provides an explanation for an otherwise strange but common experience.
People who feel no disgust or threat in the phlegm in their own throats usually cannot abide
looking at it, let alone touching it, after it has been expectorated, even immediately afterward.
42 NATURE AND LOGOS
Nonetheless, the earlier Sartrean view of freedom and consciousness

follows its Cartesian forerunner that construes Nature more according to
the “natural light” of reason than it does following the “confusions” of
mind and body. In both cases, as with Kant, it is a question of freedom
against, rather than within, Nature. Too, there are several close similarities
in Kant’s and Sartre’s views of freedom. Both thinkers strongly underscore
personal autonomy and responsibility for one’s own choices, and both agree
that responsibility cannot be imposed on the will from the outside. For
Kant, outside (“heteronymous”) forces are inconsistent with autonomy, while
Sartre views them not as forces, but rather as the constant temptation to
pretend that there are limits to freedom and hence “bad faith.” “Without
any help whatsoever,” Sartre writes, human reality “is entirely abandoned to
the intolerable necessity of making itself be—down to the slightest detail”
(1956, 440–41).
Sartre holds this view as a result of the way that he attempts to counter
criticism from Gaston Bachelard that phenomenology does not adequately
appreciate “what he calls the ‘coefficient of adversity’ in objects. The accusa-
tion is just and applies to Heidegger’s transcendence as well as to Husserl’s
intentionality” (Ibid., 324–25). Yet contrary to what Bachelard had in mind,
for Sartre we are the coefficients of our own adversity. This is because
“causes and motives have only the weight which my project—i.e., the free
production of the end and of the known act to be realized—confers upon
them” (Ibid., 450–51).
This is an entirely consistent claim for the author of Being and
Nothingness to make, but it hardly seems what the narrator/author of La
Nausée would hold. It would have been a good deal more shocking than
the dark, gnarled root itself if M. Roquentin had got off his park bench
and entered into a cognitive process of affirming his liberty by negating
the weight of that disconcerting part of the in-itself. The truth is that he
finds the root to be oppressive rather than making it so. Consequently,
Merleau-Ponty certainly would argue here that (1) such valuations presup-
pose a more fundamental, corporeal involvement with the world and oth-
ers, and (2) such experiences present clear examples of how we enter into
complicity with the world to realize its meaningfulness rather than impose
intelligibility on it.
It is also remarkable that nowhere in Sartre’s early writings does he
appear to acknowledge the fact that our motives—the free, protentive desires
of a certain future that are supposed to constitute the past causes of our
actions as such—are themselves to some degree predictable. Following that
line of thought would eventually have shown him that it cannot be the free
project of the for-itself that assigns all “weight” to Nature. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Merleau-Ponty notes that what Being and Nothingness lacks is
“a theory of passivity” (SNS 77/133), institution, not constitution—which

Sartre remedied in his later works.
There is one final aspect of Sartre’s early writings: intersubjectivity,
to which Merleau-Ponty reacts, and which will be carried forward in the
“new” ontology. For Merleau-Ponty forms his own phenomenological view
of intersubjectivity in the light of Sartre’s position as much as he did in
that of Husserl. Sartre states that the latter has demonstrated that “the
ontological structure of ‘my’ world demands that it be also a world for oth-
ers” (1956, 272), but whereas Husserl found it necessary to reason from
the constitutive activities of a transcendental ego to the existence of the
Other, the problem for Sartre is that others are insistently, invasively there
to begin with. For, along with the in-itself, it is others that pose the most
important threat to consciousness. This occurs through what is the primary
form of communication between them—“the look” (le regard) that attempts,
through its various modes of objectification, to pin down, freeze, congeal,
classify, and categorize the other’s free-flowing for-itself in order to turn it
into something—an in-itself.
Sartre provides a number of insightful, fascinating, and well-known
descriptions of the experience of being looked at (1956, 252ff.), perhaps the
most famous of which concerns the experience of shame in being caught
looking through a keyhole (Ibid., 259). However, from the perspective of the
bifurcation of Nature and consciousness, what is important for Merleau-Ponty
in such experiences is the way that they replicate the antagonistic dialectic
between the for-itself and the in-itself—this time, through the danger of
self-objectification. Self-objectification is not for Sartre knowledge of the
self as consciousness through self-mediation—as, for example, on Schelling’s
view—or even in Husserl’s “Art von Reflexion” (touching-touched relations),
but rather the death of consciousness. Thus, shame becomes “the recogni-
tion of the fact that I am indeed that object [a voyeur] which the Other is
looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me
in order to become a given object” (Ibid., 261).
The appearance of the other in my world amounts to the complete
disruption of my already anxious relationship of attraction to and repulsion
from the in itself. For Sartre, this destructive relationship stands over against
Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as “being-with” others because, for Sartre,
the best symbol of Heidegger’s “being-with” “is not that of a conflict but
rather a crew. The original relation of the Other and my consciousness is
not the you and me; it is the we” (1956, 246). Moreover, even if it could be
proved that “being-with” were an “essential and universal capacity” (Ibid.,
248) of the for-itself, Sartre holds that such an ontological structure could
not explain concrete examples of “being with” that include conflict (Ibid.,
247).
44 NATURE AND LOGOS
Prior to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty made one com-
prehensive objection, elaborated in diverse contexts and for different pur-
poses, to Sartre’s dualism of for-itself and in-itself and to the conceptions
of (ontological) liberty and intersubjectivity that its bifurcation of Nature
from consciousness implies. The objection is that, despite the accuracy of
many of Sartre’s descriptions of the relationships of consciousness and things,
freedom, and myself and the Other,48 Being and Nothingness “remains too
exclusively antithetic” in its treatment of how we see ourselves as opposed
to how others see us, and the fundamental antithesis of the for-itself and the
in-itself in place of “the living bond and communication between one term
and the other” (SNS 72/144). Everywhere in his philosophy Merleau-Ponty
sought an adequate explanation for this “living bond and communication,”
and we will later examine his final attempt in his “new” ontology.
For Merleau-Ponty, there is one basic problem that underlies all these
too exclusive antitheses. It is not that there is no distinction between con-
sciousness and things, or that we should reject negativity and subjectivity
per se. Indeed, subjectivity is one of those ideas “which make it impossible
for us to return to a time prior to their existence, even and especially if we
have moved beyond them” (S 154/194).49 Rather, the fundamental error
is the conception of being (in the sense of the in-itself) as pure positiv-
ity—as noted above, the same problem at the heart of the possibly mythic
Marxist conception of Nature as pure en-soi, “everywhere and nowhere”
(RC 64/93)—and consciousness as pure negativity. It is that conception that
prevents consciousness from emerging from Nature, blocks communication
and any kind of unity or identity between them, makes intersubjectivity
problematic, and finally puts human existence in the “impossible situation”
of being a “useless passion” (N 136/183).
Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that everything is a “failure” (Ibid.) for
Sartre because, unlike Heidegger, his conception of human existence is not
defined as “opening to Nature or to History” (Ibid., 137). Rather, for Sartre
as well as Descartes, the plenum of Being in itself contains no possibilities.
It forms a barrier against and around consciousness. There is no Offenheit for
Sartre, as there is for Heidegger, because the for-itself cannot open itself to
the in-itself, “non-being and being,” which are “notions at bottom Cartesian
and pre-phenomenological” (NC 104). By contrast, both Merleau-Ponty
48. Merleau-Ponty holds that there is a “profound truth” in Sartre’s analysis of the objecti-
vating look—e.g., at the keyhole. “But it is a particular case of a more general relation” (N
280/348). “Sartre himself sets up the example this way,” he continues, “by providing the scene”
(Ibid.). That is, the voyeur has been trapped only because he has attempted “to surprise or to
overtake” the other visually (Ibid.).
49. “une de ces pensées en deçà desquelles on ne revient pas, même et surtout si on les dépasse.”
and Heidegger argue for a fundamental “belonging to Being” (Ibid.), and

it is through our openness to being, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, that
nothingness and being can be understood—and not the other way around.
For Merleau-Ponty, then, on the side of the Sartrean for-itself are all
clarity and signification; on the side of the in-itself, all opacity and unin-
telligibility, whereas in reality, there is both intelligibility and opacity in
Nature and the life world, and both clarity and opacity in consciousness.
Hence, the latter ought not to be taken as a dualistic opposite of Nature,
but interwoven with it. In this intertwining, meanings are “open and incom-
plete” rather than closed and fixed (AD 198/267). This is so regardless of
whether it is a question of a perceptual object, an ideal meaning expressed
in language, or the sense(s) of historical events and movements. All three
are tied together in a unitary life in concert with things, not against them:
“[A]ll these perspectives already depend on a truth in which they would be
integrated” (AD 199/268–269).
Given this unitary life in which meaning is solicited from things, other
people, and the world around us, Alphonse DeWaelhens is correct to argue
in his Preface to The Structure of Behavior that Sartre’s dualism provides
only the possibility of knowing or not knowing, but does not allow different
ways of knowing or ambiguous relationships between the for-itself and the
in-itself. Pace Sartre, our “collaboration” and “involvement” with perceptual
objects “are what give to sensible knowledge a character of constant and
intrinsic incompletion, a necessity of being perspectival” (SC xxi/viii). The
problem is that, for Sartre, meaning giving is a matter of consciousness
imposing its significations on the world rather than things soliciting from
consciousness the completion of their meanings. Sartre’s dialectic between
perception and things is “invoked and posited rather than included in the
phenomenon of perception itself” (Ibid.). Furthermore, DeWaelhens rightly
points out that, qua phenomenologist, Sartre is perfectly aware of our “col-
laboration” with perceptual objects—and others as well, as in the “crew”
image attributed to Heidegger—but that his metaphysics cannot justify such
cooperation.
DeWaelhens is also right that similar problems of inconsistency arise
between Sartre’s “phenomenology of the body” and his “metaphysics” (SC
xxii/ix). Sartre states that there are certain “privileged experiences,” such
as physical pain, that reveal the normally concealed intimate connection
of consciousness and its body—“coenesthesia”—“in all its purity” (1956,
331/396). Thus, the for-itself, although a néant, exists in some type of “inher-
ence” with an in-itself, the body, “and in this way carves out a facticity of its
own” (DeWaelhens, SC xxiii/x). This is but another way of illustrating the
Cartesian “confusions” of mind and body that Merleau-Ponty embraces. But
then, how can the nihilating acts of the for-itself establish such a bond with
46 NATURE AND LOGOS
facticity, how, “if the for-itself is only the distance of a gaze without being”
(Ibid., xxiii/xi), could any facticity “weigh at all” (Ibid.), and how could
Sartre distinguish between a facticity that is really mine from any other?
These are all experiences that Sartre, the phenomenologist, acknowledges,
but which his bifurcation of consciousness and things cannot explain.
Though correct, DeWaelhens does not go far enough. This is because
there is a more fundamental difficulty for the early Sartre, which applies to
Descartes as well. It is that they cannot offer any explanation of how the
for-itself exists in the first place—that is, how it came into the world. Since
it is not a part of Nature, no causal explanation can apply to it. Since a
Sartrean for-itself is pure negativity, any explanation that would objectify it
in relation to other things would be equally mistaken. In a certain sense, it
does not even have a presence that can be explained.
Moreover, this criticism can be extended and adapted to Merleau-Ponty
himself. His early phenomenology does not address the question of the origin
of the pre-reflective body. How do intentionality and subjectivity begin to
exist? All this is taken for granted, and it is only in the late ontological
writings, beginning with the Nature lectures, that he begins to address the
question in terms of the emergence of consciousness from Nature. That
is why he thinks it essential to “a valid concept of Nature” that we “find
something at the juncture of Being and nothingness” (N 70/102) and that an
adequate philosophy must find a way to understand “the subjective-objective
that Nature will always be” (Ibid.). What turned out to be his final answer
consisted of “an ontology of the perceived world going beyond sensible
nature” (RC 46/66). It remains now to articulate what he found and how
it can be understood.
II
FROM DUALISM
TO A TWOFOLD ONTOLOGY
In formulating his “new” ontology, Merleau-Ponty benefited from many

sources, including Whitehead’s critique of scientific materialism. He saw
that they came together for similar reasons and reacted to the conception of
Nature in modern philosophy and science in the same ways. As a mathema-
tician, Whitehead was both fully aware of the impact of seventeenth-century
science on modern philosophy, and was well qualified to point out that that
science could not have progressed apart from simultaneous mathematical
advances. As he indicates in Science and the Modern World, “Mathematics
supplied the background of imaginative thought with which the men of sci-
ence approached the observation of nature” (SMW 30).1 It is in this stress
upon the importance of the scientific outlook on reality for understanding
the impasses of modern philosophy that Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty meet
one another.
We have already seen in the Introduction that Merleau-Ponty felt
some consonance with key Whiteheadian concepts and the discussions
behind them that Whitehead mobilized to counter the bifurcation of Nature.
Before we see how Merleau-Ponty makes use of these concepts in his “new”
ontology, we need to provide a brief discussion of what Whitehead means
by them.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND WHITEHEAD:

A COMMON CRITIQUE OF SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM
In arguing against the bifurcation of nature both in his earlier writings and in
his later systematic process metaphysics, Whitehead advances several closely
1. See also Butterfield (1957, 101).
47
48 NATURE AND LOGOS
related arguments against the Galilean, Cartesian, and, later, Newtonian

concepts of nature. As we have seen, this is nature as “a succession of
instantaneous configurations of matter” (SMW 50). Such matter, he adds,
criticizing the whole idea of material substance and the mechanistic view
of nature, “is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It does just what it does do,
following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring
from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific
materialism’ ” (SMW 17).2
For Whitehead, this modern philosophical concept of nature rests on
two fallacies. The first is that of “simple location,” which means “to be
here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for
its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time” (Ibid., 49).
Anything that possesses this property of simple location is what Whitehead
designates as “matter, or material” (Ibid.). The second fallacy, of which sim-
ple location is an example, is that of “misplaced concreteness,” which means
“the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete” (Ibid., 51).
Whitehead holds that the notion of simple location is vulnerable to
several distinct but related arguments. The first one is based on the experi-
ence itself of nature as process: actuality is not static, and its essence includes
the “historic character of the universe” (MT 123). Individuated existence
implies process and vice versa (MT 131), and as a result, a durationless
temporal instant is “an imaginative logical construction” (SMW 65).
The second argument stems from twentieth-century science. It is that
physics has abandoned the notion of the simple location of bits of matter
existing in external relations with each other. Rather, relations and relata
mutually imply and modify each other. The relationship is itself “a concrete
fact with the same concreteness as the relata,” which we can tell from the
ways that causes are immanent in their effects (AI 157). Instead of ascrib-
ing simple location to physical objects, there exists “a focal region, which
in common speech is where the thing is. But its influence streams away
from it with finite velocity throughout the utmost recesses of space and
time” (Ibid.). Also, with the denial of simple location comes the recogni-
2. Whitehead, if not Merleau-Ponty as well, is typical of those philosophers who reject the
notion of substance because the “emasculated versions . . . were the only ones familiar to
them from classical modern philosophy.” W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (1996, 14). For Clarke, the
emasculation consisted of “three major distortions” that “broke the connection” with Thomistic
and Aristotelian concepts of active and dymanic substance: “(1) the Cartesian notion of the
isolated, unrelated substance, ‘that which needs nothing else but itself (and God) to exist;’ (2)
the Lockean static substance, the inert substratum needed to support accidents but unknow-
able in itself; and (3) the separable substance of Hume, which, if it existed, would have to
be empirically observable as separated from all of its accidents, and hence is an impossible
fiction” (Ibid.).
FROM DUALISM TO A TWOFOLD ONTOLOGY 49
tion that “within any region of space-time the innumerable multitude of

these physical things are in a sense superposed.” As a result, in any focal
region of space-time, a particular “physical fact” is the compilation of the
significance of all other “physical entities . . . for that region” (Ibid., 158).
Third, simple location cannot account for the solidarity and, in turn,
the coherence of the universe. If isolable units of matter require nothing
else to be thought of, their external relationships to other material quanta
would be only incidental to their essence. In themselves, such “bits” of
matter would bear no reference to others, and would thus lack connections
with the whole. Therefore, the universe’s coherence depends on the fact that
we cannot conceive of any being as totally abstracted from the universal
system: “the unknowable is unknown” (PR 4).
A second argument about coherence concerns the notion of time as
a series of durationless instants and the bifurcation of nature into causes
and produced appearances. The notion of durationless instants embodies
the fallacy of misplaced concreteness because time is “an abstraction from
the passage,” “development,” and “creative advance” of natural events (CN
34). Also, since isolable “nows” keep separate the “nature apprehended in
awareness and the nature which is the cause of the awareness” (CN 31),
they also emphasize the separation of the mental and the physical.
For example, there is the experience of the redness and warmth of
a fire and the “agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen, with the radiant
energy from them, and with the various functionings of the material body”
(CN 32). The mind would thus serve as their putative juncture, “the causal
nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent” (CN 31).
For Whitehead, on the contrary, an adequate philosophy of nature must be
able to combine both, “the concrete relatedness of physical functionings
and mental functionings, [and] of the past with the present” (AI 157).3
By contrast, he considers that the account of appearances in modern phi-
losophy, beginning with Descartes, contributes to the additional incoher-
ence of conceiving mind and body as two different kinds of substance. He
thinks that modern philosophy was “ruined” (SMW 55) by the ontology
of the object—in his parlance, “the theory of a materialistic, mechanis-
3. Curiously, Galileo defined “heaviness” as an objective property of objects instead of referring

to a percipient for whom a body is heavy (1960, 151, 170–71). Anything mental for Galileo
was, in Whitehead’s language, a “psychic addition.” “Secondary qualities” such as color were
distinguished from inertia, heaviness, and “pushiness” held to be “primary” qualities. However,
as Whitehead notes, this distinction inconsistently privileges touch: “Perceptions of push are
just as much the outcome of transmission [via light waves] as are perceptions of colour” (CN
42). Thus, if color is not in nature, neither should inertia be.
50 NATURE AND LOGOS
tic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds” (SMW 145).4 On Whitehead’s

view, what dualisms of matter and minds fail to take account of are “life,
organism . . . interaction, [and] order of nature, which collectively form the
Achilles heel of the whole system” (SMW 57).
Descartes’s account of appearances of course flows from his representa-
tional theory of perception, which Whitehead rejects as subscribing to “the
subjectivist principle,” namely, that “the datum in the act of experience can
be adequately analysed purely in terms of universals” (PR 157). On this
view, the mind is a particular that is qualified uniquely by universals and
has no real connection to other particulars.5 To use the previous example
of seeing the fire of a torch and hearing the sound of a bell, for Descartes
we mistakenly believe that we perceive the torch and bell themselves. The
torch and bell do not enter into our experience, but only a certain shape
and color of light and a sound of a particular tone. From those sensations,
as noted above, ideas as copies arise in the mind.
However, Whitehead as well as Merleau-Ponty defends a realist theory
of perception (PR 119–20) in the sense that we perceive things directly
rather than as mediated by, and intellectually constituted from, their re-pre-
sentations in the appearances of atomistic sensations. As Merleau-Ponty
puts it, the perceptual object is never given completely—it is always and
necessarily incomplete, but nonetheless, it is the thing itself really given to
perception in and through its perspectival appearings. The definition of a
thing is the “presumption of a completed synthesis” (PhP 388/445), and not
a subjective “Abschattung of it.” Hence, Merleau-Ponty effectively endorses
Whitehead’s rejection of the “subjectivist principle.”
For Whitehead, Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic and Descartes’s sub-
stance-attribute ontology reinforced the view that secondary qualities are
not inherent in the things themselves, and are just “subjective” qualities
attributed to it (PR 30). As Aristotle noted in the Categories, what we term
substance “most strictly, primarily, and most of all,” is not said of some-
4. Correlative to the ontology of the object, this surveying activity is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty
describes as a “pensée de survol” (OE 160/12, VI 222/276), “overlooking thought” or “high-altitude
thinking.” The latter expression is due to Benita Eisler in her translation of Volume IV of
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations (1965, 229). Although Merleau-Ponty used “survoler” earlier on,
the term survol first appears in his 1953 course at the Collège de France, “The Sensible World
and the World of Expression.” He borrows it directly from “survol absolu,” an expression used
by Raymond Ruyer, the fervent admirer of Leibniz (ESA II: 195). See also VI 13/30, 88/121,
and OE 178/59, and Chapter II of VI generally—especially pp. 77–78/108–109—for a critique
of Sartre as being restricted to a pensée de survol.
5. In this regard, Whitehead gives little attention to the Cartesian “confusions” of mind and
body. He generally passes over what most interests Merleau-Ponty in terms of the mind-body
relationship and concentrates instead on the dualism of substances. See also here the discussion
of Whitehead’s view of substances in Chapter I.
thing else, but is that to which attributes are given—“e.g., the individual
man or the individual horse” (1963, 5). Also, as Whitehead sees it, the
belief that subject-predicate propositions embody “metaphysically ultimate”
truths underwrites and reinforces the fallacy of simple location insofar as it
stresses “the individual independence of real facts” (PR 137). In contrast,
Whitehead’s own “philosophy of organism” seeks to avoid the incoherence
of the Cartesian dualism by converging more on Spinoza’s thought, except
that he understands Substance as a whole of “dynamic processes” (Ibid.,
7). As noted above, these processes do enter into each other’s constitution
and thus explain the solidarity of nature. There is no togetherness of things
unless in experience, and indeed, “no things are, in any sense of ‘are,’ except
as components in experience or as immediacies of process which are occa-
sions in self-creation” (AI 236).
What gives rise to the subjectivist principle, for Whitehead, is the clar-
ity of sensory experience that therefore has caused sensation to be construed
as the whole of experience. This is the “sensationalist principle” accepted
by Descartes, Locke, and Hume, but not by Kant, that states, “the primary
datum in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of
the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception” (PR 157)—which
Merleau-Ponty would also have rejected because of his reliance on Gestalt
psychology. For Whitehead, sensations are what is most vivid, clear, precise,
and dominant in consciousness. However, on his view, they are also what
is most superficial about experience, and an exclusive reliance on them as
forming the “basis of all experiential activity” has resulted in a “warping”
of modern philosophy by separating mind from body, as Descartes was the
first to do (AI 209–10). This is a separation that has blocked the real con-
nectedness of instances of process (AI 280). Whitehead, like Merleau-Ponty,
wants to rescue perceptual experience from its oversimplified and therefore
impoverished seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions (N 118/159).
The subjectivist and sensationalist principles, the representational the-
ory of perception, the substance-attribute ontology, and the concept of time
as a series of atomistic, isolable instants existing in external relations with
each other, all combine to yield an irrefutable scepticism about induction,
memory, personal identity, and the existence of the external world. This
is the last of Whitehead’s arguments about the incoherence of the mod-
ern philosophical views on the bifurcation of nature. The most important
premise of the argument concerns the instantial concept of time that runs
from Descartes through Locke and Newton to Hume. Since each atomistic
instant is self-contained and exists only in external relations with its pre-
decessors, the past is not immediately present to the present. Therefore,
memory, personal identity, and inductive inferences all would have to rest
on constituting acts of consciousness to establish a putatively veridical con-
nection with the past. As Whitehead observes, either we can derive from
52 NATURE AND LOGOS
some occasion of experience itself the grounds of its connection with other
occasions or else the only alternative is scepticism about memory, personal
identity, and induction (SMW 43–44). In short, if a given occasion of
experience has no internal relationships with any others, the only possible
result is “complete ignorance as to it” (Ibid., 25).
The only kind of (weaker) justification available would consist of veri-
fied inductive predictions of consequences, and so verification for any given
act of memory would always be postponed, never accomplished. Whitehead
believed that Hume showed irrefutably that the subjectivist and sensa-
tionalist principles are inconsistent with such proofs. Absent a Cartesian
reliance on the veracity of God to underwrite certain of our perceptions,
there remains the insoluble problem of verifying the double correspondence
between the sensation and the external object, and between the sensation
and the idea that copies it. The result is inevitably what Santayana termed
“solipsism of the present moment” (1955, 15; cf. PR 81).
To escape that solipsism, modern philosophers would have to make
the subjectivist principle surreptitiously inconsistent (PR 158). Hence,
Whitehead holds that the entirety of modern philosophy turns on the prob-
lematic attempt to use the concepts of “subject and predicate, substance and
quality, particular and universal” to describe the world and our experience
of it (Ibid., 49). Our efforts to do so inevitably distort our “immediate
experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our
purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal
analysis” (Ibid., 49–50). By contrast, the best that Cartesianism can give
us is “solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience” (Ibid., 50).
Likewise, the abstraction of subject-predicate language, together with
the form that the subjectivist principle took with the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities in Galileo, Descartes, and Locke, show that
the mechanistic theory of nature also commits the “fallacy of misplaced con-
creteness” because it is likewise an abstraction from the richness of nature
and our experience of it (SMW 58). For the mechanistic view generates the
highly abstract view that nature is “vacuous reality” (PR 29): “a dull affair,
soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly,
meaninglessly” (SMW 54).
Certainly, as Whitehead points out, the mechanistic view of nature
has been enormously successful in transforming social and individual life (AI
114), yet it is impossible to believe and can be supported only by substi-
tuting abstractions for the concrete reality of daily experience (SMW 54).
Given the rigorous distinction between primary and secondary qualities that
mechanism asks us to accept, we are asked to believe that the abstraction is
the truth and the concrete reality a mental construction. Among the absurd
consequences is that “nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved
for ourselves”: we possess the scent, not the rose; we constitute the song, not
the bird. Therefore, the poets are eluded. They should really praise them-
selves and turn their verses into “odes of self-congratulation on the excel-
lency of the human mind” (Ibid.).6
The mechanistic view of nature is also, for Whitehead, an example of
Bergson’s claim that “the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that it is
to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms
of static categories” (PR 209). However, as we shall see, although Whitehead
endorses Bergson’s claim, he declined to follow his contemporary’s belief that
this distortion is a necessary consequence of “the intellectual apprehension
of nature” (SMW 50). What is needed, rather, is a more adequate “intel-
lectual apprehension” of it.
High abstraction is likewise present in modern philosophy to the degree
that, relying on the clarity and dominance of sense data, it interprets those
sense data as the most important ingredient in experience. Experience gets
explained in an upside-down way by trying to explain experiences that are
“emotional and purposive” on the basis of something like Humean sensory
impressions (PR 162). On Whitehead’s view, sense-perception itself is “the
triumph of abstraction in animal experience” (MT 100) and “a neglect of
essential connections” (Ibid., 101). This is so because sense-perception is the
product of conscious attention that excludes more than it includes, and not
merely other sense-data. Modern philosophers, especially Hume, changed
the ancient philosophers’ question of “What do we experience” to “What
can we experience” (AI 224). This shift produced an attitude of “strained
attention” to sense data that obscures the base of experience from which it
originates and abstracts (Ibid., 155).
For Whitehead, philosophy must criticize such abstractions and, by
overcoming the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” re-establish our con-
nections with nature and our moral, emotional, and purposive experience
(Ibid., 280). It is through this deeper sense of experience that we are rooted
in nature because the “individual, real facts of the past lie at the base of
our immediate experience in the present” (Ibid.). These “individual, real
facts” enter into each new occasion of experience as both its source and,
therefore, what contributes forcefully to its emotions, purposes, and that to
which it “directs its passions” (AI 280).
To sum up, what aligns Merleau-Ponty’s “new” ontology to Whitehead’s
critique of scientific materialism consists of the latter’s view that nature is
process made up of “brute facts,” its insistence on thinking within nature
as against a pensée de survol and the ontology of the object, its defense of
6. In commenting on Descartes, but with no reference to Whitehead’s Science and the Modern
World that he unknowingly but very closely duplicates, Hass states, “. . . without the reduc-
tion of perceptual experience to ‘subjective appearances before the mind,’ the sparse, colorless
world of ‘physical objects’ in mechanistic motion and causality would stand revealed as a total
abstraction” (2008, 23).
54 NATURE AND LOGOS
a system of internal versus external relations, its conception of life and

spirit emerging from nature rather than somehow being added to it, and its
rejection of “simple location,” dualisms of mind and body, the bifurcation
of primary and secondary qualities, and representational thinking.
THE NECESSITY OF A “NEW” ONTOLOGY
Why, though, did Merleau-Ponty not consider his earlier phenomenology

of embodied existence adequate to express in effect these Whiteheadian
positions and therefore to overcome the modern concept of Nature and
its progeny? “We are the compound of soul and body,” he said in Eye and
Mind, “and so there must be a way to think it” (177–78/58). What made
Merleau-Ponty believe that an adequate way of thinking the Cartesian “con-
fusions” had not been found?
Across his various texts, at least three factors appear to have dislodged
him from his earlier phenomenology, which he once identified with philoso-
phy itself, and already considered an ontology. The first is the inescapability
of unaddressed ontological questions. As illustrated in the previous chapter,
within the “confusions” of mind and body, ideas and feelings, and self and
others, there is truth to be grasped that has not yet been articulated. In other
words, the “confusions” are positive rather than negative. Therefore, what for
Descartes constitutes an epistemological failure represents for Merleau-Ponty
an opportunity to escape the bounds of Descartes’s (and Brunschvicg’s) ideal-
ism. What will emerge from these “confusions” is not a claim about the abso-
lute truth of Nature or history, but on the other hand, philosophy will persist
in its perpetual “radicalism, that search for presuppositions and foundations
which has produced the great philosophies” (S 157/198). For this reason, he
also held that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche’s “negation of metaphysics
does not take the place of philosophy” (RC 102/144).
The second reason consists of a final response to the critics of his 1946
address to the Société française de philosophie who viewed Phénoménologie
de la perception as simply psychology with no scientific or philosophical
significance (Prim.Percp. 18/125). Jean Hyppolite also objected that he
saw no “necessary connection” between the first part of Merleau-Ponty’s
presentation, a “description of perception that presupposes no ontology,”
and the subsequent “philosophical conclusions” that Merleau-Ponty extracts
from those descriptions “that presuppose a certain ontology, an ontology of
meaning” (Ibid., 39/149). On the other hand, Jean Beaufret worries simply
that Merleau-Ponty has remained too close to Husserl and to “the vocabu-
lary of idealism” (Ibid., 42/152). The main problem, Beaufret continues, is
to know whether a complete phenomenology does not compel us to follow
Heidegger in rejecting “subjectivity and the vocabulary of subjective ideal-
ism” (Ibid., 41/152). Accordingly, the “new” ontology rejects that vocabulary
and the primacy of subjectivity. Hence, in the “Working Notes” for complet-
ing what became The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I must
show that what one could consider as ‘psychology’ (Ph. de la Perception) is in
reality ontology” (VI 176/230) and “Results of Ph.P.—Necessity of bringing
them to ontological explicitation” (Ibid. 183/237).7
The third reason for Merleau-Ponty’s new ontological grounding of
phenomenology is his growing appreciation for the importance of Nature,8
in the light of which he came to see the opposition of lived and objec-
tive bodies as philosophically inadequate. Still dependent on the (bodily)
consciousness-object distinction, the phenomenological description displays
its deficiency by its inability to explain the relationship between the two
bodies. On the basis of the distinction between consciousness and object,
he concludes that we can never comprehend how “a given fact of the
‘objective’ order (a given cerebral lesion) could entail a given disturbance,
which seems to prove that the whole ‘consciousness’ is a function of the
objective body” (VI 200/253).9
7. “Je dois montrer que ce qu’on pourrait considérer comme ‘psychologie’ (Ph. de la Perception) est
en réalité ontologie.” “Résultats de Ph.P.—Nécessité de les amener à explicitation ontologique.”
Ted Toadvine argues in effect that more than an “ontological explicitation” is necessary and
that it is only “by pushing phenomenology to its limit that we can overcome the bifurcation
of mind and nature” (2009, 118). This is actually what Merleau-Ponty’s “explicitation” led to.
8. Preparatory remarks for the “new” ontology appear in Merleau-Ponty’s first Nature course,
but its extensive development did not begin until the autumn of 1958. During September and
October of that year, he began to write an introduction to ontology based on, among other
things, some themes from the first Nature course. His efforts eventually became “one of three
dossiers of the project soon titled Être et Monde” (ESA III: 167). These unpublished pages
plus others—it was probably in the autumn of 1957 that he began La Nature ou le monde du
silence, which was later placed in the volume, Être et Monde (ESA III: 11)—the author took
up again in March 1959, and titled the ensemble Introduction à l’ontologie. In turn, certain
aspects of this group were developed further and eventually became the first two chapters of
Le Visible et l’invisible (Ibid., 168). The unpublished texts from Merleau-Ponty’s last years and
the “original pages from the Visible itself” show the seamless continuity of Être et Monde and
Le Visible et l’invisible (Ibid.). In fact, Merleau-Ponty placed “Être et Monde” at the top of the
manuscript for the latter, and the entire manuscript was placed in a folder titled “Le Visible
et l’invisible—I. Être et Monde” (Ibid., 169 n.). (See also the working note, “Être et monde,
chap. III” at VI 198/251.)
9. “On ne comprendra jamais, à partir de cette distinction que tel fait de l’ordre ‘objectif’ (telle
lésion cérébrale) puisse entraîner tel trouble de la relation avec le monde,—trouble massif, qui
semble démontrer que la ‘conscience’ entière est fonction du corps objectif.” Elsewhere in The
Visible and the Invisible, the author expresses the inadequacy of consciousness as a foundation
for philosophy by referring to its “blindness (punctum caecum).” By analogy with the “blind
spot” of the retina where “the fibers that will permit the vision spread out into it,” he writes,
“What it [consciousness] does not see is what in it prepares the vision of the rest . . . its tie
to Being” (VI 248/301). “Ce qu’elle ne voit pas, c’est ce qui en elle prépare la vision du
reste . . . son attache à l’Être.”
56 NATURE AND LOGOS
Retaining the philosophy of consciousness, even of a bodily one,

unavoidably involves a type of bifurcation between the two conceptions
of body and their referents, and therefore opens up a gap of understand-
ing between them. Thus, although Merleau-Ponty had written that the
Phenomenology of Perception attempted “to re-establish the implanting
[l’enracinement] of the mind in its body and in its world” (UI 3/402), he
came to see that a new ontological solution was required to explain “the
ties of truth which bind him to the world and history . . . among others”
(E 63/72–73).
In the “new” ontology, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty argues that
minds and bodies, spirit and nature, life and matter, must all be conceived
as reintegrated into a more fundamental unity in order to understand (think)
their relationships adequately. As the La Nature et le monde du silence puts
it, “what one assuredly lacks in beginning with subjectivity, the cogito, or
freedom: that is, primordial being against which all reflection gets instituted
and without which there is no more philosophy” (ESA 2005, 29).10
Similarly, the sensible that we perceive, including all of the richness
of “secondary” qualities, must also be part of this original, or origin-al one-
ness rather than existing as “psychic additions.” The ontological problem
becomes the most important one, Merleau-Ponty says in his second course
on The Concept of Nature (1958), and all other philosophical problems
should be “subordinated” to it (N 134/180). The only way that this ontol-
ogy can progress, he adds the following year in his (untitled) course on
“Philosophy Today,” is to think of Nature without referring to traditional
categories such as “substance, accident, cause, end, power, act, object, sub-
ject, in itself, [and] for itself” (RC 99/141; cf. NC 37).
THINKING THROUGH NATURE
This “new” ontology does not hold that the concepts of subject, object,
cause—and, for that matter, consciousness—are meaningless. Nor, in fact,
are they avoidable. In the case of subjectivity, for example, as the last chapter
pointed out, Merleau-Ponty holds that we cannot go back to a philosophical
era before the concept emerged because, even if we try to think of such
a time, it would always be conditioned by our consciousness of our own
subjectivity. Rather, to use one of Merleau-Ponty’s images of how sense is
made, those concepts must be decentered and recentered (RC 44/64) as
expressions of something more origin-al. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s “new”
10. “ce qu’on manque assurément à commencer par la subjectivité, le cogito ou la liberté: à
savoir l’être primordial, contre lequel toute réflexion s’institue, et sans lequel il n’y a plus de
philosophie.”
ontology will have to include not only a revised notion of subjectivity, but
of objectivity as well.
That original source anterior to distinctions between the subjective
and the objective (NC 77) is Being that he calls, evidently alluding to
Lévi-Strauss, a “brute,” “wild,” (uncivilized, uncultivated) and pre-objective
Being (VI 253/307). This “wild” Being, The Visible and the Invisible tells us, is
to be recovered before “the reflexive cleavage” (95/130) of subject and object
that abstractly separates them, and even before the distinction between
perceiving and perceived.11 We become Nature and Nature becomes us (VI
185/239). “Nature in us must have some relationship with Nature outside us,
and Nature outside us must be disclosed to us by the Nature that we are”
(N 206/267).12 This disclosure occurs in a world that is an open field—in
fact, multiple intersecting fields in which “subjectivities are integrated” (VI
227/281)—for example, those that are “imaginary,” “ideological,” “mythical,”
and “linguistic” (IP 167).13
Merleau-Ponty expresses this “brute” Being as the fundamental “il y
a,” the being that lies at the intersection of the internal and the external
and therefore neither one nor the other. Brute Being and Savage Spirit are
what is truly fundamental and final; they make possible the constructa of
consciousness and their meanings (VI 97/133). Therefore, on Merleau-Ponty’s
view, we must dig beneath the sedimentation of meaning that limits us to
thinking in terms of the in-itself and for-itself, “natural being” in opposition
to “psychic being” (IP 164; italics removed).
Brute Being has some similarities to the way that Leibniz describes
expressive relationships that monads have with each other and how they dif-
fer from each other and the world as “perspectives” (VI 223/276). However,
given the ontological primacy of brute Being and the abstractness of the sub-
ject-object relationship, Merleau-Ponty interprets those expressive relation-
ships as derivative from the brute Being of which we, Nature, and everything
else comprise differential expressions. He also clearly distinguishes his view
from Leibniz’s interpretations of monads as substances in a pre-established
harmony established by God. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of brute Being is
inconsistent with a Leibnizian God furnishing the perspectives of monads
11. The unpublished notes for Merleau-Ponty’s second course on Nature state a desire to
substitute “brute or savage being and ‘foundation’ (Stiftung)” for “perceived being and percep-
tion” (de Saint Aubert 2005a, 40).
12. “Il faut . . . que la Nature en nous ait quelque rapport avec la Nature hors de nous, il
faut même que la Nature hors de nous nous soit dévoilée par la nature que nous sommes.”
13. With regard to opening up these various fields of Being, de Saint Aubert states, “From his
first articles, Merleau-Ponty wants to reopen to philosophy all sectors of life, as against Léon
Brunschvicg, and under the joint influence of Gabriel Marcel and Max Scheler” (ESA II: 49).
It is a question of opening up philosophy to nonphilosophy.
58 NATURE AND LOGOS
as thoughts, and indeed, he regards Leibniz’s view of the relationship of

God to the world as a paradigm case of the ontology of the object with its
accompanying spectator’s pensée de survol.
The “new” ontology seeks to avoid both that ontology and high-alti-
tude thinking, to overcome the bifurcation of Nature, to find a way to think
Being in the light of, among other things, modern physics and biology, and
to pursue this knowledge while maintaining our “astonishment [étonnement]
before the world” that expresses the genuine philosophical outlook (NC 78).
In seeking the meaning of Being, this search for knowledge on an ontological
plane continues both Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the phenomenologi-
cal reduction14 as well as his early view of metaphysical consciousness as a
rediscovery of the basic “strangeness” of the “world, other people, human
history, truth, [and] culture” as well as “the miracle of their appearing”
(SNS 94/165).
In seeking the meaning of Being, Merleau-Ponty often uses “being”
(être) and “Being” (Être) interchangeably, and distinguishes both from par-
ticular “beings” (étants). On the other hand, “Nature” has two very dif-
ferent meanings. As noted in the previous chapter, he began to capitalize
“Nature” at the same time that he was speaking about Schelling in the
first Nature course at the Collège de France (January-May 1957). However,
“nature” also appears occasionally in his later texts, and both “Nature”
and “nature” express both meanings. The first meaning is the ensemble of
sensible beings—streams, rocks, trees, clouds, roses, dogs and cats, human
beings, and so forth. Nature in the second sense, however, is what makes
possible and supports nature in the first sense. This second meaning denotes
Nature conceived—imperfectly, he adds later—as “a leaf or layer of total
Being,” and in this sense, “the concept of Nature is always expression of
an ontology—and privileged expression” (N 204/265). Nature so conceived
is “an object from which we have arisen” instead of being a correlate of
consciousness “in the tête-à-tête of knowledge” (RC 64/94). Because of this,
the “theme of Nature” does not exist apart from other areas of philosophy.
Rather, philosophy has only one subject, “the nexus, the vinculum ‘Nature’—
‘Man’—‘God’ ” (Ibid.).
Nature in this sense is what Cézanne’s paintings tried to express, “the
depth of inhuman nature on which man is installed,” a depth one can feel in
Cézanne’s paintings as he magically depicts the seismic upheavals of forests
14. “The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s as-
sistant, when he spoke of ‘astonishment’ in the face of the world” (PhP xiii/viii). “La meilleure
formule de la réduction est sans doute celle qu’en donnait Eugen Fink, l’assistant de Husserl,
quand il parlait d’un ‘étonnement’ devant le monde.” See also Sartre’s warm remembrance of
Merleau-Ponty’s astonishment in the face of “everything,” even as a child (1964, 282).
and rocks. Only human beings are able to have this vision that extends
“right to the roots [of Being], at the basis of constituted humanity” (SNS
16/30).15 Later, in the beginning of his first Nature course at the Collège
de France, Merleau-Ponty says more about this second sense. He notes that
“Nature” in Greek derives “from the verb, phuo, that alludes to the vegetal;
the Latin word comes from nascor, to be born, to live”; it is derivative from
phuo, “the more fundamental sense” (N 3/19).16 That is because Nature is
“the autoproduction of meaning,” and
nature is everywhere there is life that has a meaning, without this

meaning being posited by thought. . . . Nature is the primordial,
that is to say, the non-constructed, the non-instituted; whence
the idea of an eternity of Nature17 . . . of a solidity. Nature is an
enigmatic object, an object that is not completely an object; it is
not completely before us. It is our ground, that which is before us,
but that which bears us. (Ibid., 3–4/19–20)18
This is not Nature in the Marxist or Sartrean in itself, but rather

Being that is “primordial” (RC 64/94) because it is anterior to the division
of in-itself and for-itself and itself from us, and which therefore “in every
respect disconcerts reflection” (Ibid., 65–66/95). However, Nature is not
something that exists prior to this subject-object division, for that would
make it another object. Nature is neither identical to nor separate from
sensible nature because identification would result in materialism, and radi-
cal separation would lead back to a Kantian unknowable in-itself.
15. It is instructive to compare Cézanne’s landscapes to those of, say, Pissaro, Renoir, or Sisley’s
depictions of the surfaces of placid, bucolic spring days. One of Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms
of Sartre is that, for him, Being has no depths. See, for example, VI 68/97, and we should
remember M. Roquentin in La Nausée who, mentally plunging to the roots of the tree did
react with nausea. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty appreciates and often employs the Bergsonian
image of “plunging to the roots of Being.”
16. “En grec, le mot ‘Nature’ vient du verbe phuo, qui fait allusion au végétal; le mot latin
vient de nascor, naître, vivre . . . il est prélevé sur le premier sens, plus fondamental.”
17. Merleau-Ponty argues against Auguste Comte’s picture of Nature as eternal and self-identical.
Instead, we have “the emergence of a history—or, as Whitehead said, of a ‘process’ of Nature”
(RC 66/96).”
18. “Il y a nature partout où il y a une vie qui a un sens, mais où, cependant, il n’y a pas
de pensée. . . . Est Nature le primordial, c’est-à-dire le non-construit, le non-institué; d’où
l’idée d’une éternité de la Nature . . . d’une solidité. La Nature est un objet énigmatique, un
objet qui n’est pas tout à fait objet; elle n’est pas tout à fait devant nous. Elle est notre sol,
non pas ce qui est devant, mais ce qui nous porte.” Although these are auditors’s notes, this
passage is a good example of others written by Merleau-Ponty in which he uses “nature” and
“Nature” interchangeably.
60 NATURE AND LOGOS
Merleau-Ponty’s alternative is to conceive of primordial Nature as a

power of internal possibility in virtue of which there is “l’être profond” (ESA
III: 164, citing the unpublished Être et monde), “carnal being, as being of
depths” (VI 136/179). This internal principle of possibility, this “inexhaust-
ible reserve of being” (VI 169/223) is a part of Being, but a “total part”
(VI 218/271). This means that it both reflects and, in turn, actively mani-
fests itself throughout the whole of Being. This is a dynamic conception of
Nature, the “unmotivated upsurge of brute Being” (VI 211/264), “an original
productivity that is not ours” and that persists beneath our own and supports
it (N 125/169). This conception of Being/Nature stands to sensible Nature
in something very like the Natura naturans—Natura naturata relationship.
It is what creates, “simply, and at a single stroke, such a coherent structure
of a being” (RC 93/131). In doing so, as we shall see below, it also strongly
resembles Whitehead’s notion of creativity.
As such, Natura naturans resembles Heidegger’s notion of phusis, by
which Merleau-Ponty was so clearly influenced, “self-blossoming emer-
gence . . . opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfold-
ing and perseveres and endures in it” (Heidegger 1959, 14). For Heidegger,
phusis is visible everywhere in the processes of sensible nature, as in “celestial
phenomena (the rising of the sun), in the rolling of the sea, in the growth
of plants, in the coming forth of man and animal from the womb” (Ibid.).
However, phusis is not identical to sensible nature. Rather, it is “being itself,”
“the power of emerging and enduring,” “the process of a-rising [Ent-sterben]”
from the hidden (das Verborgene) (Ibid.). Sensible nature for both Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty is, therefore, “the originating presentation of the unpre-
sentable” (VI 203/257).
How does Merleau-Ponty’s “new” ontology provide for this “originat-
ing presentation” in order to understand the primordial sense of Nature?
It first demands that we avoid all explanations because, as he sees it, they
cannot account for the mélange of body and soul and therefore they make
us incomprehensible to ourselves” (S 241/306). In so saying, it is clear
that Merleau-Ponty criticizes a model for explanations that is Cartesian—
based on clear and distinct ideas that separate their objects from all else,
as in the case of minds and bodies, hence ignoring the real “confusions” of
both—or else framed with regard to Husserlian essences (VI 268/321–22).
Nevertheless, the statement as it stands does not apply to other types of
explanations, such as those that Whitehead’s process metaphysics supplies,
which do take account of the mélange of body and soul.
Second, for Merleau-Ponty, the “new” ontology must also reject all
“isms”—especially naturalism, humanism, and theism. There exists, he states
in his second Nature course, an “extraordinary confusion in modern ideas
of Nature, of man, and of the idea of God” (RC 90/127–28) such that the
words naturalism, humanism, and theism have been emptied of all plain mean-
ing because they continually blend with each other (N 135/180–181). The
task of contemporary philosophers is, therefore, according to the first dossier
of Être et Monde, “to remake philosophical speech touching Nature, man,
and God, on condition of being truly radical” (ESA III: 172).19
Third, to achieve this fundamental clarification, we must articulate a
concept of Being from within the process of Nature that we inhabit because
we cannot possess the visible without being possessed by it. That is, we are
“of it” (VI 134–35/177–78). It is a question of a Being in which we are
“encompassed [englobé]” (OE 178/59; cf. 182/71–72), and which, therefore,
contrary to Descartes, Kant, and Sartre, neither is arrayed before us nor
can our experience of it be formed outside it. Hence, Merleau-Ponty rejects
explanations as Descartes would conceive them and the ontology of the
understanding based on attempts to purify our ideas to rid them of their
“confusions.” This philosophy of pure ideas, as Merleau-Ponty points out, is
necessarily doubt-ridden and afflicted with a “certain strabism” (N 127/171),
a squinting designed to shield the cogito from the “confusions.”
Merleau-Ponty’s position on this matter is thus identical to Whitehead’s
rejection of matter and “psychic additions.” Since thinking takes place “from
the midst of Being” (VI 114/154), ontology becomes “Intra-ontology” (Ibid.,
227/280), and “the ontological problem” becomes “the problem of the rela-
tionship between object and subject” (N 135/182). There is, in fact, nothing
more Whiteheadian than saying, “Even the action of thinking is caught
up in the push and shove of being. . . . Time and thought are entangled
with each other” (S 14/21).20 As such, it demands “a sort of hyper-reflection
(sur-réflexion) that also includes itself and the ways that it influences the
perceived. In this inclusiveness, Merleau-Ponty holds, it would continue to
keep in view “the brute thing and the brute perception” (VIV 38/61; cf.
S 161/204).
Since Being is the source of both consciousness and its objects, the
world, or Nature, does not produce consciousness or the other way around.
Both are “total parts of the same Being” (OE 162/17), and so Nature and
consciousness do not stand outside each other in causal relations. Rather,
they emerge simultaneously (VI 250/304). To express this simultaneity,
Merleau-Ponty again makes use of Claudel’s concept of “co-naissance” in
which the concepts of birth (naissance) and knowledge (connaissance) are
joined together. However, now he applies the concept more widely to the
19. “. . . refaire une parole philosophique touchant la Nature, l’homme et Dieu à condition
d’être vraiment radical.”
20. “Même l’action de penser est prise dans la poussée de l’être. . . . Temps et pensée sont
enchevêtrées l’un dans l’autre.”
62 NATURE AND LOGOS
relationship of the sentient and the sensible, le sentant and le sensible, as he

had earlier employed it to describe the unity of perceptual consciousness
and its objects.
As de Saint Aubert points out, the project of Être et Monde is to use
Claudel’s neologism to develop an ontology of co-belonging and “co-genesis
of man and world (ESA III: 31). In that unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty
also describes his late thought as an “ontology of birth and of co-birth”
[ontologie de la naissance et de la co-naissance]” (ESA I: 210), in order to take
up a position “beyond naturalism and idealism” (ESA III: 31). This view,
as the previous chapter indicated, is already present in Phenomenology of
Perception insofar as the subject of perception is neither totally passive nor
completely active, neither completely impotent nor all-powerful, neither
wholly creating nor created.
The co-genesis of human beings and the world, thinking from with-
in Being, and the rejection of the ontology of the object in favor of the
“ontology of the existent,” are all possible because our primary relationship
with Being is Offenheit, as Husserl described our relationship to the Earth.
Merleau-Ponty also makes use of the closely related Husserlian notion of
“Ineinander,” “the Ineinander of human being, human body, and Nature” (N
214–15/278), to stress the inherence of the self in things and the world
and vice versa, as well as the mutual inherence of self and others. However,
Offenheit has a wider scope in that it expresses the earth as “surrounding
world” (Umwelt) (Husserl 1989, 194–95) and as “ground” (Boden),21 which
Merleau-Ponty regards as a useful corrective for the false but understandable
impression that Husserl’s earlier works had “subjectivized” or “psychologized
the perceived world” (Tilliette 1965, 166/226).
For Merleau-Ponty, the Offenheit that characterizes the “surrounding
world” and “ground” are appreciated by Heidegger, but made impossible in
Sartre’s dualism of for-itself and in-itself (VI 88/121–22).22 The “surrounding
world” is “a lived world; the ground,” or simply, “Earth,” “includes within
21. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Boden relies almost entirely on Husserl’s then-unpublished

manuscript, “Umsturz der Kopernikanischen Lehre in der gewöhnlichen weltanschaulichen
Interpretation. Die Erde als Ur-Arche bewegt sich nicht” from 1934. He had earlier cited this
essay in the Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 71/85 and 429/491. Merleau-Ponty recurs to the
essay at S 177/223 and 180/227–28, and at VI 259/312.
22. “For all of us,” Husserl states in Umsturz, “the earth is the basis and not a body in the
complete sense.” Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty argues that what our experience of the
earth discloses to us has “a philosophical significance” rather than being a mere psychological
curiosity because that experience reveals “a philosophy of the world as Offenheit der Umwelt,
as opposed to the ‘represented’ infinite of classical sciences of Nature” (RC 122–23/170). “une
philosophie du monde comme Offenheit der Umwelt, par opposition à l’infini ‘représenté’ des
sciences classiques de la Nature.” See also VI 185/239 where Merleau-Ponty contrasts Husserl’s
notion of Offenheit with a relationship between “an order of ‘human representation” and an
“order of the in itself.”
itself all these different environing worlds with their modifications and
their pasts.” It is “the life-world of humanity, the all-embracing community
wherein mutual understanding is possible” (Husserl 1973, 163).
The Earth in this primordial sense is not the object of science, an
object conceived as being at rest or in motion,23 because it has not yet been
“converted into a thing and object” (Tilliette, 166/227). It can only be an
object from the perspective of some observer (IP 173–74), a relativization
that would make us forget our “terrestrial roots that nevertheless nourish
everything else” (RC 122/169). And since it is not primordially a relativized
planet conceived from the point of view of a pensée de survol, for Husserl
(1973, 163), its Offenheit must also differ from the Unendlichkeit attributed
to the universe in seventeenth-century science (Tilliette 167/230).24 Earth,
Husserl states, is “pre-object” (Ibid.), the world of pre-scientific experience,
the pre-Copernican Earth of our “primordial contact, the ground of experi-
ence,” “pure fact, the cradle, the basis, and the ground of all experience”
(McCormick and Elliston 1982, 230).
Offenheit, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, does not amount to a posture or
a thetic attitude, as in one sense of the “natural attitude.” Nor is it an
ensemble of meanings constituted in consciousness, or the result of any
acts. Rather, it follows “analytically,” in Kant’s sense of the term, from the
fact that someone is “of” Being—“il en est” (VI 135/178)—and belongs to
it.25 Therefore, no action has to take place to establish our openness to
Being. To think otherwise would presuppose an original separation between
us and Nature, and therefore the return of the objectifying perception of a
spectator. Rather, this openness is an ontological condition of carnal being.
Offenheit is in fact a bilateral relationship in which we are open to
the world because the world is open to us. On the one hand, within Being
perception bears within itself its own transcendence inasmuch as the look
incorporates the sentient in the sensible and searches for itself in the visible”
(VI 131, n. 1/173n.). Yet on the other hand, this can be so only because
perceptual objects and their fields are complicit in our experience. Their
“can be experienced”—what makes them sensible—makes them available to
us, and on Merleau-Ponty’s view, philosophers such as Descartes and Sartre
offer us no way to understand this original availability of the world to us
and our corresponding openness to it (NC 233).
23. See Husserl’s Umsturz, 230.

24. Tilliette references here Ideen II, 299 and 372, and Erfarhung und Urteil, 156.
25. Cf. VI 254/308: “Thought or Consciousness is Offenheit of a corporeity to . . . World or
Being.” “. . . la Pensée ou Conscience est Offenheit d’une corporéité à . . . Monde ou Être.”
Equally important as Husserl in terms of the source of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about our
openness to the world is Proust. See NC 192ff.
64 NATURE AND LOGOS
Although Merleau-Ponty borrows extensively from Husserl’s writings

about Offenheit, he holds that Husserl’s analysis, based as it is on acts of
consciousness, is inadequate to express both the “brute thing” and “brute
perception.” Therefore, he concludes, it becomes necessary to “take up again
and develop the fungierende or latent intentionality which is the intentional-
ity within being” (VI 244/297–98).26 This is also why, for Merleau-Ponty,
our ouverture à l’être can be described in terms of the horizonality of open
fields of Being, but these horizons can no longer be conceived as structures of
consciousness that provide us with potential backgrounds to “fill in.” Rather,
horizons must be seen as the openness of what encompasses and includes us.
Since Offenheit takes place within the flux of Nature, it is itself process
rather than a static relationship, and its process is primarily perceptual, what
Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptual faith.” Perceptual faith is the subject of the
very first section of The Visible and the Invisible and, like Offenheit itself, it is
a given, not a matter of decision. The author’s marginal note opposite the
title of this first section states that the faith he has in mind is pre-positional,
“animal faith” (VI 3/17).27 It is expressed by “formulae” such as “We see the
things themselves, the world is what we see . . . they refer to a deep-seated
set of mute ‘opinions’ implicated in our lives” (Ibid.).28
Such formulae also express an inevitable circularity in our experience
and in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, as pointed out in the
previous chapter. That is, in seeking his path between realism and idealism,
he held that the realists are right to say that the world is “already there”
before any experience takes it up, but the truth of idealism is that the only
world of which it makes sense to speak or think is that of our experience.
The last ontological texts contain statements that apparently make the same
claim. For instance, “the Nature of which we have spoken (this can evi-
dently only be Nature perceived by us)” (N 208/270); “no form of being
can be posited without reference to subjectivity” (VI 167/220); and “the
perceptual life of my body . . . is presupposed in every notion of an object,
and it is this life that accomplishes the primary openness to the world” (VI
37/60).29 Therefore, there is no world, Being, or Nature for us to speak of
except what we can experience.
26. “Il faut reprendre et développer l’intentionnalité fungierende ou latente qui est l’intentionnalité
intérieure à l’être.”
27. It would be interesting to know whether Merleau-Ponty knew George Santayana’s Scepticism
and Animal Faith and, if so, whether he borrowed the last two words of its title.
28. “Nous voyons les choses mêmes, le monde est cela que nous voyons . . . elles [ces formules]
renvoient à une assise profonde d’‘opinions’ muettes impliquées dans notre vie.”
29. “la Nature dont nous avons parlé (ce ne peut être évidemment que la Nature perçue par
nous)”; “nulle forme d’être ne peut être posée sans référence à la subjectivité”; and “la vie
perceptive de mon corps . . . est présupposée dans toute notion d’objet et c’est elle qui ac-
complit l’ouverture première au monde.”
Perceptual faith furnishes us with certainty about this preexisting world

as a whole, but not about any particular being in it. The “difficulties and
contradictions” (VI 3/17) of that world remain in the form of illusions,
hallucinations, and other misperceptions, but the Cartesian hypothesis of
systemic doubt is incoherent. Merleau-Ponty argues in the same vein as J.
L. Austin would later do (1962, 118–19), namely, that complete scepticism
is incoherent because the possibility of being deceived presupposes some
veridical perception with which it can be contrasted and therefore known
as error (IP 108; cf. VI 5/19). Moreover, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, even
false perceptions are not nothing because they do not break the bonds that
hold us close to the world. On the contrary, as Husserl pointed out, they
are, “ ‘crossed out’ or ‘cancelled’ by the ‘new’ reality” (Ibid., 41–42/65).
Perceptual faith is, therefore, even when confronted with contradictions,
ambiguities, and paradoxes, still a positive commitment rather than a nega-
tive substitute for knowledge.
Nor is perceptual faith intuition, Bergsonian or otherwise, in the sense
of a fusion or identification with the immediate, a coincidence with the
past or with Being, along with the elimination of any distinction between
subject and object. Coincidence is necessarily lost because there cannot be
a fusion of rediscovery with a lost “original integrity” (VI 122/162). On
Merleau-Ponty’s view, there are both ontological and empirical reasons for
this impossibility. The former will be explained below; the latter is that, if
we did manage to recover a “lost immediate,” it would be marked internally
with the traces of our labors to recover it, and so would not be immedi-
ate (Ibid., 122/162–63; cf. Prim.Percp. 19/127). On the other hand, if it
retained its pure immediacy, and therefore bore no evidence of our attempts
to recapture it, then we would not have gained access to it. Therefore, as
Bergson indicates, the only possible experience of coincidence with the past
is “a ‘partial coincidence’ ” (Ibid.; cf. VI 124/165).
Instead of systemic doubt, intuition, or a Sartrean nihilating conscious-
ness, perceptual faith is essentially questioning, interrogation, and as such,
defines the method of the “new” ontology. “Philosophy,” he says, “is percep-
tual faith interrogating itself about itself” (VI 103/139), and that is another
reason why perceptual faith is pre-positional.30 Philosophical questioning
asks, “What do I know?” in a very special sense: not as a request for a list
of objects of cognition, but about knowing itself. It is a unique manner of
30. “ ‘To perceive is to question,’ writes Merleau-Ponty in the spring of 1959, speaking of an
“interrogation that is faith (instead of nihilating the in itself),” and adding, symmetrically,
that “faith is interrogation” (ESA III: 56, citing the unpublished Notes pour choses faites
[March-April 1959]). However, it should be noted that interrogation is hardly a new theme
for Merleau-Ponty. In fact, the last paragraph of the Preface of Phenomenology of Perception
states clearly that philosophy must “interrogate itself in the same way that it does all areas of
knowledge” (PhP xxi/xvi).
66 NATURE AND LOGOS
intending something, “as it were a question-knowing” (Ibid., 129/171). The

philosopher, like the painter, finds every day in the world as it presents
itself identical questioning and the “call to which he never stops respond-
ing” (S 58/73).
More specifically, “What do I know?” includes queries about the activ-
ity of knowing, “the identity of the knower (“sur-réflexion”),” what exists,
and “even: ‘what is the there is [the il y a]?’ ” (VI 129/171). As regards the
identity of the knower, Merleau-Ponty states that our bodies, perceptual
abilities, comprehension of language, and ability to speak all provide us
with “measurants (mesurants) for Being, dimensions to which we can refer
it” (Ibid., 103/140). Our relationship to Being is not one of an adequation
of ideas to their objective referents or the immanence of Being within us.
Because we are continually in question, we are constantly in the process
of “taking the bearings of things on our dimensions” (Ibid.). And it is this
fundamentally interrogative attitude, made fully visible in philosophy, that
mobilizes science from within (Ibid.).
The ultimate aim of such questions is the revelation of Being that we
do not posit because we do not have to. It lies silently beneath all proposi-
tions and questions because philosophy accomplishes a double conversion
of silence and speech into each other (Ibid.). Therefore, Merleau-Ponty
concludes the chapter on “Interrogation and Intuition” in The Visible and the
Invisible by quoting Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in regard to a “teleology of
consciousness”: “It is the experience . . . still mute which we are concerned
with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning” (Ibid.; cf. AD 138,
n. 85/186, n. 1). For Merleau-Ponty, this interrogation forms the proper
way of opening ourselves not only to Nature, but also to history and time
in order to realize the perennial objectives of philosophy (RC 165/148).
The results toward which perceptual interrogation aims consist of
descriptive generalizations of all types of beings and what they tell us about
Being itself, beyond the traditional categories of substance, subjects and
objects, consciousness and matter, and the like. In carrying out these descrip-
tive generalizations, Merleau-Ponty wants to distinguish them from not only
explanations, but also philosophical systems as he understood them. Such
systems, he believes, consist of reflection in which all of the paradoxes,
enigmas, and incompossibilities are stripped out of the life of perception
(OE 169/36). Consistent meanings take the place of the life of percep-
tion, which are inconsistent with illusions, hallucinations, and the like (VI
30/51). Perceptual faith takes root in, rather than denies, the “inextricable
confusion” (SNS 36/63) of mind and body and ourselves with others and
with the world around us. Therefore, the unpublished Être et monde criticizes
“la pensée réflective” in holding that “truth is of the order of thought, not
of the order of life” (ESA II: 48). Truth is not what abolishes the Cartesian
“confusions” and breaks through to clear and distinct thought, but what
appears in and through those “confusions”—the world that we inhabit.
Merleau-Ponty further objects to idealistic systems because they also
snuff out philosophical astonishment, and because they smother “metaphysi-
cal consciousness” (SNS 94/166). They do this by affirming an absolute that
would destroy contingency and negate our own opinions and communica-
tions with others, whereas the truth is that it is exactly those opinions and
communications that form the basis for diverse beliefs in an absolute to
begin with. And finally, he states, regardless of appearances, a metaphysical
system has only ever been “a language (and in this respect it has been pre-
cious) for translating a Cartesian, Spinozist, or Leibnizian way of situating
oneself in relation to being” (S 158/199).31
Standing over against systematic thought, perceptual faith, inextricably
rooted in contingency like the Offenheit that it modulates, is pre-positional.
Therefore, it also cannot be reflectively constituted by consciousness. This
fact raises the issue of the relationship of perception and intellection that
appears in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier phenomenology. In particular, what is
the connection between perception and concepts in the “new” ontology?
A full answer to this crucial question cannot take shape without a detailed
examination of his interpretation of the Stoics’ logos endiathetos and logos
proforikos, but provisionally the following points can be made.
First, references to a conceptless perceptual faith and its Offenheit are
not difficult to find. For example, in Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty states
that since color is not, as Descartes thought, merely an ornament, it provides
us with “a deeper opening upon things . . . a conceptless universality and a
conceptless opening upon things (OE 172/43). Further, he also tells us that,
if “Nature is an all-encompassing something, one cannot think it by starting
with concepts” (N 87/122). This does not rule out ending with them, but
they cannot be the point of departure for the “new” ontology. In addition,
given the rejection of the ontology of the object, Being itself cannot be an
object captured in a concept in the way that tables and chairs can be; hence,
one value of modern painting is that it gives us a “conceptless presentation
of universal Being” (OE 182/71).
That said, however, it is still not the case that Merleau-Ponty sought
to develop a conceptless ontology. After all, at several places, and not least
in his course titles, he speaks of “the concept of Nature.” Rather, the key to
understanding his negative remarks about concepts is that his target is almost
31. “. . . un langage (et il était précieux à ce titre) pour traduire une manière cartésienne,
spinoziste ou leibnizienne de se situer par rapport à l’être.” This view is quite similar to William
James’s argument (1928), that philosophical thinking is a personal expression of the thinker.
See especially Chapter I, “The Types of Thinking.”
68 NATURE AND LOGOS
always classical rationalism, from Descartes passing through Kant and Hegel,
to Brunschvicg. They employ concepts in the attempt at an intellectual pos-
session of Being, which is to say by turning it into an object distinct from
the subject as knower—as with Kantian Begriffe, whether a priori or empirical
(RC 73/104). Both presuppose an inner-outer distinction and function by
being applied to the manifold of sensory intuition in such a way as to produce
determinative judgments about objects of sense experience. In other words,
this type of concept is in the service of the ontology of the object (N 83/117).
This is why Merleau-Ponty writes in the unpublished “Notes de
Travail” for what ended up being Le Visible et l’invisible, “Replace the
notions of concept, idea, mind, [and] representation by the notions of dimen-
sions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, [and] configuration” (ESA III: 247,
n. 2).32 All of the notions that he sees as replacements stress our chiasmatic
unity with the flesh as opposed to separation. In that regard, Merleau-Ponty
perceives a convergence between his “new” ontology and contemporary sci-
ence, and in that context also he rejects Kantian concepts as inapplicable
to both relativity theory and quantum mechanics because these theories
are inconsistent with a constituting consciousness, the observer, standing
apart from and unifying a separate manifold of sensory data (N 96–97/134).
We can also note that, at the beginning of his second course on “The
Concept of Nature,” Merleau-Ponty writes that he sees his studies of Nature
as “an introduction to the definition of being” (RC 88/125), and defini-
tions obviously require concepts. Further, in “Everywhere and Nowhere,”
in the course of discussing relationships between philosophy and history, he
expresses the need for “a theory of concepts or significations” for interpreting
philosophical ideas (S 130/163). And later in the same essay, he observes
appreciatively that “Husserl had understood: our philosophical problem is
to open up the concept without destroying it. There is something irre-
placeable in Western thought. The attempt to conceive and the rigor of
the concept remain exemplary, even if they never exhaust what exists” (S
138/174).33 Finally, although perceptual faith might be conceptless, ontol-
ogy cannot do without concepts because, for Merleau-Ponty, it has to be
“indirect, not going straight to being, but to it through beings” (RC 88/125;
cf. N 134/180), and the account of beings requires concepts.34 Thus, for
32. “Remplacer les notions de concept, idée, esprit, représentation par les notions de dimensions,
articulation, niveau, charnières, pivots, configuration.”
33. “Husserl l’avait compris: notre problème philosophique est d’ouvrir le concept sans le
détruire. Il y a quelque chose d’irremplaçable dans la pensée occidentale: l’effort de concevoir,
la rigueur du concept restent exemplaires, même s’ils n’épuisent jamais ce qui existe.”
34. In this respect, Luca Van Zago has nicely written, “It has to be an ontology that takes
seriously into account the fact that the body ‘is of’ the world, and therefore calls for concepts
which, rather than emphasising the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, try to
uncover a more primordial realm in which such a distinction is not (yet) operative” (2003, 66).
example, he admits that it is difficult to think the unity of mind and body,
the sensory life and the perceptible, but he has only managed to formulate
his “first concepts” to express that unity (VI 137/180). As we shall see, the
utility of Whitehead’s process metaphysics in this context is precisely its
ability to open up concepts without destroying them in order to develop
an indirect ontology.
The phrase “indirect ontology” comes from Maurice Blondel’s L’Être et
les êtres. Its subtitle, which could not have failed to attract Merleau-Ponty’s
interest, is Essai d’ontologie concrète et intégrale.35 Merleau-Ponty uses Blondel’s
distinction between Being and beings to criticize what he characterizes
as Heidegger’s “direct” ontology that seeks to go directly to Being, to an
undifferentiated phusis before it is particularized in individuals.36 This is a
critique that appears at several places in Merleau-Ponty’s published and
unpublished writings, and even at the very end of his lectures on Heidegger
in the course titled “Philosophy Today” (NC 148). According to his own
understanding, “expression must be indirect, i.e., that we must show Being
through the Winke de la vie, de la science, etc.” (NC 148).37 Failing to do
this, Merleau-Ponty holds, quickly leads to silence (RC 111/156) and, as
he states in La Nature et le monde du silence, one “does not write books to
teach silence” (ESA III: 116).
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, wants to keep attention focused on the
fundamental while “in contact with beings and in the exploration of regions
of Being,” science and art included (RC 112/156). His “indirect ontology,”
which is “alone conformed with being” (VI 179/233), amounts to “recogni-
tion . . . of a being that always flees when one wants to press it: and which
gives itself when one does not look for it. . . . [O]ne cannot say anything of
it directly, as of an object—It is grasped only indirectly, starting with beings”
(ESA III: 114, n. 3, citing Être et monde).38 And it is Nature that includes
35. Both philosophers wanted to “pry out the ontological cipher of each experience” because
“the access to ‘Being’ must pass through beings and ceaselessly lead back to them” (ESA III:
122). In addition, Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished preparatory notes for his second Nature course
show that both thinkers sought a relationship between Being and beings that neither identi-
fied the two nor placed them in external relationships apart from each other (ESA III: 129).
36. Heidegger claims that “[t]he Greeks did not learn what physis is through natural phenomena,
but the other way around: it was through a fundamental poetic and intellectual experience of
being that they discovered what they had to call physis” (1959, 14).
37. “. . . il [Heidegger] cherche une expression directe de l’être dont il montre par ailleurs qu’il
n’est pas susceptible d’expression directe. Il faudrait tenter l’expression indirecte, i.e. faire voir
l’Être à travers les Winke de la vie, de la science, etc.” See also his discussion at RC 112/156
about Heidegger’s search for “a direct expression of the fundamental at the very moment that he
was in the act of demonstrating that it was impossible” “une expression directe du fondamental,
au moment même où il était en train de montrer qu’elle est impossible.”
38. “L’ontologie: reconnaissance . . . d’un être qui fuit toujours quand on veut le presser: et
qui se donne quand on ne le cherche pas . . . on ne peut rien dire directement, comme d’un
objet—Il n’est saisi qu’indirectement, à partir des étants.”
70 NATURE AND LOGOS
the primary ensemble of beings that, as we have seen for Merleau-Ponty,

provide a “privileged access to Being.” As Être et monde phrases it, Nature
“is more than a preface to ontology . . . [for] it teaches us that that which
is beyond beings is not of another order, and is not the negation of it”
(ESA III: 115).39
In his retrospective summary of the untitled course, “Possibility of
Philosophy,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of the difficulty of retracing “Heidegger’s
path, no less than Husserl’s” (RC 109/153). The same can be said for
Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Heidegger’s ontology and its relation to
Nature. It is incontestable that Heidegger’s thought substantially influenced
Merleau-Ponty’s approach to Being in his last writings. However, this influ-
ence is not so important in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of Nature. Thus, in
La Nature, Merleau-Ponty’s most substantive references to Heidegger occur
within a very brief discussion of his version of humanism as opposed to
that of Sartre (N 137/183–84). Further, in his 1959 course on “Philosophy
Today” at the Collège de France, the long section dedicated to Heidegger
(NC 91–148) has very little to do with Nature.
Merleau-Ponty himself provides a reason for this lack of influence.
In his 1957 course on “The Concept of Nature,” he states that Heidegger’s
“radical opposition . . . between ontic science and ontological philosophy
is only valid in the case of Cartesian science that posits Nature as an
object laid out before us and not in the case of a modern science that
places in question its own object and its relation to the object” (N 85/120).40
Given the rejection of the ontology of the object and the consequent
necessity of understanding Being from within, the distinction between the
ontological and the ontic conceived as Cartesian extension is an artifi-
cial distinction (N 220/282–83) from which seventeenth-century science
emerged.
This is one reason for Heidegger’s lack of influence on Merleau-Ponty’s
thinking about Nature, but de Saint Aubert gives us others that provide
a much more adequate picture of Merleau-Ponty’s complex and evolving
relationship with Heidegger (ESA I: 103–149).41 In rapid summary, what
39. La Nature “est plus qu’une préface à l’ontologie . . . [car] elle nous apprend que ce qui est
au-delà des étants n’est pas d’un autre ordre, n’en est pas la négation.” The passage is from the
unpublished notes for La Nature, Spring 1957.
40. “Aussi l’opposition radicale, tracée par Heidegger, entre la science ontique et la philosophie
ontologique n’est-elle valable que dans le cas de la science cartésienne, qui pose la Nature
comme un objet étalé devant nous et non dans le cas d’une science moderne, qui met en
question son propre objet, et sa relation à l’objet.”
41. De Saint Aubert shows that, from 1945 to1958, Merleau-Ponty did not read much of
Heidegger, toward whose philosophy he displayed a “superficial knowledge” and a “generally
favorable but vague appreciation” (ESA III, 103). In 1958, though, a considerable change in
attitude occurred. With a reduction of his teaching obligations at the Collège de France, he
we find in Merleau-Ponty’s late texts with respect to Heidegger’s view of

Nature—apart from the remark about the latter’s opposition of “ontic sci-
ence and ontological philosophy”—is as follows.
First, he gives Heidegger credit for criticizing the ontology of the
object and being the “initiator of interrogative ontology and of a radical
reform of Western thought” (ESA III: 116).42 He also praises Heidegger’s ear-
ly work that, even from the Preface of Being and Time, sought to use Dasein
as a vehicle for understanding Being because “man is the interrogation of
Being” (RC 109–10/154). This praise extends to Heidegger’s later efforts to
show that we belong to Being through an Offenheit with the world unavail-
able in Sartre’s philosophy. Further, Merleau-Ponty states his belief that
philosophy can only begin once this transcendence has been accomplished
“in a ‘there exists’ [an il y a]” and that the “proper theme of philosophy”
is the “preobjective Being” revealed there (Ibid.). Given his commitment
to total contingency, this “preobjective Being,” like the rose described by
Angelus Silesius, has “ ‘no why” . . . it blooms because it blooms’ . . . it has
neither external cause nor is causa sui either, it is without foundation, it is
on principle the absence of all foundation” (RC 110/154–55).43
was able to face directly the ontological implications of his work on Nature. For this project,
he had to read Heidegger seriously. He purchased a copy of Sein und Zeit in 1957 or 1958,
and this copy (from his personal library) shows that he read the first fourteen sections and
then sections 25–27. His other personal copies of Heidegger’s works show some indications of
passages read, but virtually no annotation (ESA III, 108–109). For a list of all those copies,
see ESA III, 108 n. 8. In fact, 80 percent of Merleau-Ponty’s references to his thought occur
in texts from 1958–1961 (Ibid., 104). However, by this time the main themes of his ontol-
ogy of Nature were well formulated, and he read Heidegger too late and too hurriedly (Ibid.,
108–109). Further, in the 1959 course at the Collège de France, he subjected Heidegger to
severe criticism and from 1959 to 1961, he reviewed Heidegger’s writings “with no real analysis
of precise texts” (ESA III: 112). The most prominent of very few exceptions of Heideggerean
texts read seems to have been Merleau-Ponty’s much-annotated copy of Identität und Differenz,
but those notes were not made until the beginning of 1961—after the course on Heidegger
(Ibid., 141). For more details, see ESA III: 105ff.
42. The text, written in September or October 1958, is from Introduction à l’ontologie, which
became part of Être et monde.
43. The poem, cited by Heidegger in Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske,
1957), 68, runs as follows:
Die Ros ist ohne warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet,
Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.
Merleau-Ponty quotes the poem at NC 107 and then adds: “For Heidegger, being is its own
possible, i.e. there is a continuous auto-creation of the rose and that is the Rose-sein—the
perseverance, the redeployment of the rose” (Ibid., 107–108). “Chez Heidegger, l’être est son
propre possible, i.e. il y a une auto-création continuée de la rose et c’est là le Rose-sein—la
persévérance, le redéploiement de la rose.”
72 NATURE AND LOGOS
In addition, Merleau-Ponty notes appreciatively that Wesen in

Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics has a verbal meaning.44 As we have
seen, this is a signal aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s view of Nature, and it is also
a key reason for the consonance of his thought with that of Whitehead. Like
the rose that “roses,” the meaning of a thing generally for Merleau-Ponty is
indistinguishable from its operation, which results in Being speaking in us
rather than the reverse (RC 111/155).
Merleau-Ponty also criticizes Heidegger—correctly, in our view—for
not taking more of the details seriously, particularly from science,45 and he
is right to say that Heidegger’s criticism of Western metaphysics depends on
treating the ontic within an ontology of the object. Merleau-Ponty continues
to criticize Heidegger for arguing for a “direct” ontology, a “direct expression”
of Being. De Saint Aubert however suggests that Heidegger never made that
claim (ESA III: 115), and there is nothing more Heideggerean than saying
that, as Merleau-Ponty did, Being “flees” when “pressed” by too direct a
search: “[I]f Being is hidden, that itself is a trait of Being” (VI 122/162). De
Saint Aubert notes that the criticism of Heidegger’s “direct” ontology first
occurred when Merleau-Ponty “tried to justify his choice of beginning [his
1957 course at the Collège de France] with an ontology of Nature” (ESA
III: 115). Therefore, we will now plunge into Merleau-Ponty’s own “indirect
ontology” of Nature in order to see how he attempted to overcome the
diverse forms of the bifurcation of Nature in modern philosophy.
44. Heidegger’s description of returning to his high school building is a clear case cited by
Merleau-Ponty (VI 115, n. 2/154, n. 1; cf. 174/228 and NC 105–106). Heidegger records how
the building did not appear as an object so much as it did in terms of its odors and touching
sensations. “You can, as it were, smell the being of this building in your nostrils” (1959, 33).
In other words, the individual style of the building, the unity of the visible and the invis-
ible, expresses its essence. Essences for Merleau-Ponty are verbal; they consist of the styles of
things, the manner in which they exist, rather than “the irreducible kernel of everything that
we experience” (Robert 2005, 359). Essences are “the Sosein and not the Sein” (VI 109/148).
45. Carnality lacks ontological significance for the early Heidegger, as it is apparently “only
a modality of the In-der-Welt-Sein” (ESA III: 198). De Saint Aubert also points out that
Merleau-Ponty’s three years of courses at the Collège de France on Nature “confirmed his
feeling that Heidegger passed by the specificity of modern science” (Ibid., 96) because of the
latter’s equation of science with “calculability and measurability” (Ibid., 97–98).
III
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH*
Merleau-Ponty’s search for what is ontologically prior to consciousness and

the subject-object relation attempts to satisfy two fundamental requirements
of any metaphysics that have been recognized since the ancient Greeks: to
account for the one and the many. He needs a principle of unity to show
how “all things are together” (omou en panta), as he quotes Anaxagoras in
the La Nature et le monde du silence (ESA I: 120, n. 4), and he also requires
a principle of difference to show how the distinctness of individual enti-
ties can be understood. Both principles must be held together; hence, he
contrasts the Clazomenian to both Cartesian and Sartrean bifurcations of
the cogito over against the in-itself (Ibid., 120 n. 4; cf. ESA IV: 49). Such
philosophies cannot account for their own origin (Ibid., 121 n.),1 for which
we need Nature.
Anaxagoras is not the only influence on Merleau-Ponty’s search for
principles of unity and diversity. Another was Leibniz’s monadology, yet
as against his system of external relations between “windowless” monads,
Merleau-Ponty formulates an ontology of flesh in which “all things are
together” in internal relations without effacing individuality and particu-
larity. Although both principles must be satisfied, it is also clear that, since
he seeks to overcome diverse forms of the bifurcation of Nature and the
ontology of the object, he invests much more time and effort on the require-
ment of unity. Therefore, we will begin with the ways that flesh provides
that oneness.
*With apologies to Samuel Butler, whose autobiographical novel of the same title eloquently
illustrated for the nineteenth century what Merleau-Ponty claimed of the early twentieth,
namely that it was an epoch of absolutes, including the “moral gold standard” of “family and
marriage [that] were the good, even if they secreted hatred and rebellion” (S 226/287).
1. Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “the pre-existence of natural being, always already
there, which is the very problem of the philosophy of Nature” (RC 79/111). “la préexistence
de l’être naturel, toujours déjà-là, qui est le problème même de la philosophie de la Nature.”
The English translation of “le problème même” is “the proper concern.” We have changed it
back to Merleau-Ponty’s own wording.
73
74 NATURE AND LOGOS
THE SOURCES AND TWO MEANINGS OF “FLESH”
“Flesh” first appears in Merleau-Ponty’s 1951 essay, “Man and Adversity,”

where he defines it as “the animate body” (le corps animé) (S 227/287) that
has erased the boundary between mind and body. Flesh is not only their
“formative milieu” (VI 147/193), but also that of lived body and objective
body, perception and idea, consciousness and object, and self and others.
Flesh fulfills what Husserl’s Ideen II showed: that we do not have to think
about our situation in the world “in terms of the bifurcation of Nature and
mind” (S 162/205) and that reflection can disclose “a third dimension” that
calls this distinction into question (Ibid.).
Merleau-Ponty first expresses the unifying function of flesh in lan-
guage tinged by a biblical heritage. He writes of “the flesh of my flesh,
alone being able to respond to my flesh and to know it” (ESA I: 171; cf.
VI 127/169 and S 15/22), and “flesh taken from the side of another” (OE
168/34).2 However, flesh is not the ontological equivalent of body, even the
lived body. The latter is now a thing alongside others with the cohesion of
a thing (OE 163/19) because they are made of the “same stuff” (la même
étoffe) as the body and vice versa (Ibid., 163/21; cf. NC 211). Therefore,
body and world cannot be defined apart from each other. Yet at the same
time, the body, as in the early writings, is still not only a thing because it
also sees and is self-moving.
It also follows from this changed view of the body that our fundamen-
tal situation can no longer be understood adequately as “être au monde” in
the sense that the earlier phenomenology gave to that formula. Rather, what
is now most important is that the body is a part of the world, that it belongs
to it—the “j’en suis.” As Être et monde indicates, we understand the world
through our own bodies and vice versa (ESA III: 30) in the simultaneity
of the co-naissance (VI 250/304). The flesh of the world, sometimes called
“universal flesh” (VI 137/181), is what Marcel Gauchet nicely describes as
its “continuous living tissue” (1997, 202).3 There is one Being of which “the
visible world and that of my motor projects are total parts” (OE 162/17),
which replaces the earlier characterization of perceiver and perceived as
2. See ESA I: 172, n. 3 for many references to unpublished writings, and also his “Préface”
to A. Hesnard, L’oeuvre et l’esprit de Freud (Paris: Payot, 1960), reprinted and cited in PC II:
280: “[T]he other, who is born by taking from me or by expansion of me, as Eve is born from
the side of Adam.” “[A]utrui, qui naît par prélèvement sur moi ou par expansion de moi,
comme Ève naquit d’une côte d’Adam.” After discussing Merleau-Ponty’s references to the
“glorious” and “eternal” body, de Saint Aubert remarks, “Merleau-Ponty’s preference seems to
go toward the Johannite flesh, that of remaining one in the other, of transubstantial consumption
[manducation]” (ESA I: 172).
3. We owe this reference to Jocelyn Dunphy-Blomfield. At VI 131, n.1/173n, Merleau-Ponty
states that the body and things are both models for each other, and at 255/309 he describes
the flesh of the world as “indivision of this sensible Being that I am.”
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH 75
dialectical poles of a perceptual, behavioral circuit.

Flesh for Merleau-Ponty is an equivocal notion, one with at least three
intertwined meanings.4 This section takes up the first two meanings, and
the third meaning makes up the subject of the following section. The first
meaning, as illustrated above, is that of carnality. This meaning embraces my
own flesh, the flesh of others, and the flesh of the world, and also stresses
the inescapable “confusion” between them while not denying differences
between individuals.
Examples abound of my indivisible relationships with others, the
Ineinander of flesh to flesh. In speaking situations, for instance, we are caught
up in our linguistic exchanges such that speaking and being spoken to
reverse themselves as the other gets taken up in my speech and vice versa.
In very animated, intimate discussions, it sometimes becomes impossible to
establish clear boundaries between interlocutors, the speaking and being
spoken to.
This Ineinander relation is even clearer in the two other regions of
the “inextricable confusion,” feelings and desires. In the sharing of feelings
such as anger, joy, fear, sorrow, and love, we become so closely implicated
in each other that it is not possible to say where we stop and the other
begins. This indivisibility is even deeper in the case of desire, the ultimate
expression of which for Merleau-Ponty is “coupling” and especially that of
lovers in sexual union, who incorporate themselves as one flesh.5
In all of these cases, between my flesh and the flesh of others there
exists an “implication inextricable” (ESA III: 213), which Merleau-Ponty,
appropriating another term from Blondel, labels “promiscuity” (NC 204).
By this he means the original sense of the word, that is, the confused or
indiscriminate mixing of elements,6 from which the current sexual meaning
4. Hass provides a rapid summary and word counts of these three meanings in an appendix
titled “The Multiple Meanings of Flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Writings” (2008, 201–202).
On his reading, they are “carnality,” “reversibility,” and “an element of Being.” As explained
below, we construe the second meaning a bit differently and, in considerably greater detail
because our main interest, unlike his, is Nature.
5. “Relation to the other = coupling of a body to a body . . . = projection-introjection,” says
the unpublished Notes de lecture pour Le visible et l’invisible (Autumn 1960) (ESA I: 249n.).
Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty argues for the necessity of “a theory of the libidinal body” (RC
129/178). See also N 210/272–73 where he states, “the corporeal schema, the esthesiological
body, the flesh” shows us that “the body as the power of Einfühlung is already desire, libido,
projection-introjection.” Although Merleau-Ponty holds that sexuality is “relationship with the
other, and not only with another body” (230/292), it is a serious deficiency in his account
that he does not make any conceptual distinction between desire and love. See, for example,
PhP 154/180, 166/194, and IP 216–22. He sees sexuality as “a dimension outside of which
nothing remains” (N 282/350–51). For further discussion of this point, see ESA I: 180 and
Hass (2008, 197–98).
6. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, On Historical Principles, 1684. Cf. VI 253/307: the
“integration” of the in-itself and the for-itself “takes place not in absolute consciousness, but
in Being in promiscuity.” See also N 279/346–47.
76 NATURE AND LOGOS
of easy availability is derived. “Sensorality” is therefore an “investment in

the promiscuity of powers, of powers and of others” (N279/347).
There is also an “implication inextricable” between my flesh and the
flesh of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no way to establish an exact
boundary between my body and the world (VI 138/182). As Whitehead
points out in Modes of Thought, the human body is “that region of the world
which is the primary field of human expression” (30). On Merleau-Ponty’s
view, since we belong to Nature, our bodies function in the same way as
do all natural events (N 118/159; cf. OE 162/17). Further, the relations
between parts of Nature are identical to those that exist between my body
and Nature (Ibid.). Both the body and other natural entities, perceivers and
perceived, are particularizations or differentiations of the same ontological
tissue, or natural self-production.
The Ineinander of my flesh and that of the world, “the indivision of
feeling and felt” (OE 163/20), comes about through the mute Einfühlung
that implicates things just as much as others in my flesh through perception,
feelings, and desires. This fundamental implication is why the account of
perception that rests on the “sensationalist principle” is so impoverished.
As Merleau-Ponty notes in L’Œil et l’esprit, the eyes do not merely receive
“lights, colors, and lines”; rather, they are “computers of the world, which
have the gift of the visible as one says that the inspired man has the gift
of tongues” (OE 165/25).7 Elsewhere in the same text he adds, after citing
Cézanne’s statement that “nature is on the inside,” that “quality, light, color,
[and] depth” present themselves to us only “because they awaken an echo in
our body, [and] because it welcomes them” (Ibid., 164/22). As a result, we
find ourselves invested in things and they in us, and their essences consist
more in the way that they speak to us than in what we can observe of
them (C 48/28).
Underlying the visible and the tangible, but not apart from them, flesh
is more fundamentally an “ ‘element’ of Being” as such (VI 139/184), and
this is its second meaning.8 This is “l’être brut,” according to Être et monde,
which is “primordial being against which all reflection institutes itself” (ESA
III: 40), and, as “a prehuman in man” (Ibid.), Merleau-Ponty specifically
opposes it to Sartre’s dichotomy of for-itself and in-itself. As such, it has
its own indivisibility in the sense that it is logically prior to divisions of
culture and nature, subjects and objects, and minds and bodies. To sepa-
7. “des computeurs du monde, qui ont le don du visible comme on dit que l’homme inspiré
a le don des langues.”
8. Merleau-Ponty finds his inspiration for this second meaning in Bachelard’s psychoanalysis
of elements. See VI 267/320 and, for a full explication of this connection, ESA I: 255–70.
The unpublished papers written a bit before and during the writing of the last chapter of The
Visible and the Invisible expressly acknowledge Bachelard as the source (ESA I: 258).
rate them—say, culture and nature—consists of an abstraction because, as

in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier phenomenology, everything about us is equally
cultural and natural because the cultural itself “rests on the polymorphism
of the wild Being” (VI 253/306–307). The task of Merleau-Ponty’s “new”
ontology is, therefore, to find a way to think “wild Being” and our place
within it even though such an enterprise must always be carried out within
a culture and its language.
The locus classicus in Merleau-Ponty’s texts for the second meaning
of flesh lies in what became the fourth and last chapter of The Visible and
the Invisible, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” Referring to our openness
to the world and the reciprocity between “the seer and the visible,” he
describes the flesh as “this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself,
this anonymity innate to Myself,” for which “there is no name in traditional
philosophy” (VI 139/183).9 He then provides a number of negative descrip-
tions of flesh because, since it is not a “what,” it is easier to say what it
is not than to provide its positive description. Thus, we are told that it is
not “matter,” not “some ‘psychic’ material,” not a physical or mental fact
or collection of them, a mental representation, substance or mind (Ibid.,
139/184). Rather, its proper descriptor is
the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water,
air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway
between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of
incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a
fragment of being. (Ibid.)10
Flesh as an element of Being corresponds to Nature conceived as

ontological matrix or source of minds and bodies, subjects and objects. It
is not a unity of separate minds and bodies externally linked to each other,
but rather the “formative milieu of the object and subject” (VI 147/193).
It does not occupy a unique time and place—the “fallacy of simple loca-
tion”—but rather consists of a “concrete emblem of a manner of general
being” (VI 147/194). And since flesh as an element of Being is that from
which both bodies as well as things emerge as differential naturata of the
process of Nature/Being, or natural Being, flesh in this sense becomes the
9. “C’est cette Visibilité, cette généralité du Sensible en soi, cet anonymat inné de
Moi-même . . . il n’y a pas de nom en philosophie traditionelle pour designer cela.” See also
IP 164.
10. “. . . le vieux terme d’ «élément», au sens où on l’employait pour parler de l’eau, de
l’air, de la terre et du feu, c’est-à-dire au sens d’une chose générale, à mi-chemin de l’individu
spatio-temporel et de l’idée, sorte de principe incarné qui importe un style d’être partout où
il s’en trouve une parcelle.”
78 NATURE AND LOGOS
new “irrelative” instead of a Kantian or Husserlian consciousness knowing

the world. It is that to which we belong as “one sole and massive adhesion
to Being” (VI 270/324).
Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the cohesion of experience is the
reverse of a Kantian analysis that begins with disconnected sense data and
explains the cohesion of experience by means of the synthesizing imposition
of pure categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibil-
ity. For Merleau-Ponty, cohesion is guaranteed from the outside in, so to
speak, by elemental flesh outside us, but which already envelops us. This is
what it means to say that we are already implicated in this flesh, an impli-
cation that makes possible our Ineinander relationships with others, things
and, as an ontological generality, Anaxagoras’s togetherness of all things. It
is, Merleau-Ponty says, “what makes the facts have meaning” (VI 140/184).
For instance, in perceiving a cube, we are aware that the hidden sides
show forth someplace else as well as in our own field of vision. We are also
aware that because we, as percipients, equally belong to what is visible, we
are also visible from other places. Therefore, since both the cube and we
are taken up in the same elemental flesh, the cohesion of the experience
outlasts any temporary incoherence (Ibid.). Hence also, as against Cartesian
systemic doubt, flesh as elemental source provides the foundation for our
“co-belonging” to the world, and our perceptual faith in it, to which, as
described above, even non-veridical perceptions testify. The discordances
are, in Husserl’s language, “lined out” (biffées) (VI 131, n. 1/173 n.).
As a result, flesh as element grounds a transcendental aesthetic, the
bodily esthesiology mentioned earlier, which for Merleau-Ponty means tak-
ing seriously the unity of body and soul (N 224/287). Part of what this
serious attention shows is that bodily animation is not the result of a mind
or soul planted in a body, but is “a metamorphosis of life” and that the body
is “the ‘body of the spirit’ (Valéry)” (RC 128/176).
This bodily esthesiology links indissolubly (“l’implication inextricable”)
my flesh with that of others and the world. It is why for Merleau-Ponty
the human body replaces consciousness as the percipient (le sentant) of the
“nature which it also inhabits” (Ibid., 128/176). It is also why, as noted in
Chapter I, “the schema of the lived body” is open to all others as a “lexi-
con of corporeity in general” (Ibid., 129/178). Hence, the late unpublished
papers speak of the “Ineinander des schémas corporels” (ESA II: 99).
This esthesiology is likewise the means whereby my flesh is joined to
Nature, to “brute being.” This is because the relationship is reenacted in
every perception that takes up an immemorial, primordial past. Citing Lucien
Herr’s commentary on Hegel, Merleau-Ponty says that “Nature . . . ‘is there
from the first day’ ” (RC 65/94; cf. PhP 43/54). It presents itself as already
there, yet always new, because it is a question of “brute being” before the
intervention of reflection, a primordial reality anterior to consciousness.

In effect, this aesthetic comprises Merleau-Ponty’s final answer to
Kant’s critical philosophy. For this line of thought runs deeper than a cri-
tique of his representational view of perception, impoverished account of
experience, and the fact that he pays no attention to the “lower degrees of
constitution”11 as the unity of a perceptual object unfolds in passive con-
scious syntheses. Here, rather, consciousness itself is not in play because it
is a question of a fundamental relationship with a non-constituted Nature
that makes the constituting activities of consciousness possible—even the
“lower” ones—and not the other way around.
Merleau-Ponty describes the visibility in which our bodily esthesiology
implicates us in terms of two principal, intertwined characteristics: depth
and verticality. As with most of Merleau-Ponty’s later vocabulary, these
words also have multiple meanings. Depth is both a perceptual phenomenon
and a dimension of experience with much deeper ontological import. With
respect to perception, depth indicates what we do not perceive of things,
both in terms of their hidden sides that are necessarily turned away from us
when we see them from any given perspective, and with regard to the way
that the voluminosity of things wholly or partly conceals others in our field
of vision. Nonetheless, any side of a visible thing can only manifest itself by
concealing others. Therefore, the hidden is still given to us in experience—
present-as-absent, an “operative, implicit presence,” as Merleau-Ponty nicely
phrases it (ESA III: 161)—and visibility consists of “this very transcendence”
(S 20/29). The “latent existence” that is thus always reached in experience
means that “the invisible is the outline and the depth of the visible,” and
neither one evidences any “pure positivity” (Ibid., 20–21/29).
These latent horizons comprise one form of a “fecund,” natural neg-
ativity, what is present as absent, the pregnancy of the invisible in the
visible—“the in-visible” (VI 257/311),12 and in fact it is this notion of
pregnancy that is behind Merleau-Ponty’s choice of the phrase, “flesh of
the world.” Even though the latter is not self-sensing, he still calls it “flesh”
11. These “lower degrees of constitution” are what precede and form a basis for idealizing acts
that, for Merleau-Ponty, are all that Kant is really interested in, particularly those “idealiza-
tions that are science and philosophy” (N 71/103; cf. IP 209). Husserl does pay attention to
these “lower degrees of constitution.” See, among other places, Formal and Transcendental Logic,
316–17). For the substantial differences between Kant and Husserl on synthesis and constitu-
tion, see Gurwitsch (1966, 154f.).
12. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes four different senses of the invisible: (1) what is not now
seen, but could be “hidden things” or hidden “aspects of the thing”; (2) that “relative to the
visible” that does not itself appear as a thing—“the existentials of the visible, its dimensions,
its non-figurative inner framework”; (3) “what exists only as tactile or kinesthetically, etc.”;
and (4) “the lekta, the Cogito” (VI 257/311).
80 NATURE AND LOGOS
in order to designate it as “a pregnancy of possibles, Weltmöglichkeit” (VI

250/304). The noncontradictory duality of visibility and invisibility replaces
the Sartrean contradictories of being and nothingness (S 21/30), and it is
our response to this inviting in-visible latency that breaks up the plenum of
Being characteristic of the ontology of the object (as well as of the Sartrean
in-itself). Breaking up the plenum entails that contact with things and the
flesh of the world is always conjugated with distance, indivisibility with
differentiation, and presence with absence.
Depth has a perceptual primacy for Merleau-Ponty first because of its
originality as the source of all other dimensions and the one by virtue of
which “things or elements of things envelop each other” (PhP 264–65/306).
Furthermore, given its correlation with envelopment, height and width
serve as measures of the ways that things are juxtaposed to each other
(Ibid.). Depth therefore cannot be a dimension that stems from the others,
as Descartes said in the Dioptrics (OE 172/44). Rather, depth stands for a
fundamental voluminosity in which we are already implicated. By contrast,
the space of the Dioptrics is what a geometer would reconstruct as an object
of a pensée de survol.
On Merleau-Ponty’s view, recovering the world as we live it overturns
the methods of “classical art” that are founded on the flat projection of per-
spectival space and that encourage adherence to the ontology of the object
by suggesting the viewer’s separation from the spectacle in front of him. The
painter thus trained would not paint what he sees, but “a compromise,” “the
common denominator” (C 40/20) of perspectives adjusted for each item
included in the painting according to distances established from the viewer.
The sizes become what would be presented to a look oriented toward the
line of a horizon. The landscapes of such paintings would be disengaged
from the viewer, distant from the uninvolved spectator, as opposed to the
way that the world really gives itself to us in perceptual experience. From
Cézanne onward, for Merleau-Ponty, many painters have defied “the law
of geometrical perspective” because they wanted “to render the very birth
of the landscape before our eyes” as well as its “vibration and life” (Ibid.,
41/21). Rather than being what is available for inspection to a detached
spectator, modern painting presents space as “organically linked to us” (Ibid.,
41/22), a space in which we are inextricably involved in its latent as well
as overt meanings.
For Merleau-Ponty, our openness to such meanings is also an openness
to “dimensionality” (VI 217/271) in a sense more profound than perceptual
depth. Each “part” of the world can open “unlimited dimensions,” each
“part” also becomes a “total part” of the world (VI 218/271). Extending his
reliance on Cassirer’s notion of the “symbolic pregnance” of perception,
Merleau-Ponty refers to this dimensionality as the “fecundity” or “preg-
nancy” of Being to emphasize its role as ultimate ground for the possibilities
of things. Such language transcends the perceptual meaning of depth and
invokes its ontological meaning. It is what he means when he states that
the painter seeks the internal animation of the visible “under the name of
depth, of space, of color” (OE 182/71), and when he endorses Giacometti’s
claim that “Cézanne looked for depth all his life” (OE 179/64; SNS 16/28).
This is a search for far more than an accurate pictorial representation of
depth perception. It is a search for “l’être brut” or, as noted above, “the
depth of inhuman nature on which man is installed.” In other words, “the
ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (S 167/211) amounts to restoring
the depths of Being concealed by the “horizontal world” (Être et monde), the
flat projection of geometrical space in Renaissance art (ESA I: 222). In L’Œil
et l’esprit, he goes on to add that, even at this distance from Renaissance
art and Descartes, “depth is always new,” and it is something for which
we, like Cézanne, must search all our lives (179/64). And certainly, in the
phrase “always new,” we can hear an echo of Lucien Herr’s description of
nature’s being there “from the first day”—“brute” or “wild” Nature before
distinctions of subject and object, culture and nature.
Merleau-Ponty finds his greatest inspiration for this search with certain
writers and modern painters, and it is easy to see why he quotes approv-
ingly Paul Klee’s remark from his 1924 Conférence de Iéna, “. . . our heart
throbs to bring us closer to the depths” (OE 187/85).13 Likewise, in his
1961 lecture course on “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today,” in the
section on “Fundamental Thought in Art,” he cites Cézanne’s statement,
“What I am trying to translate for you is more mysterious, and is entangled
with the very roots of being, with the impalpable source of sensations” (NC
167).14 Perceptual overlapping, depth, and envelopment make up the prin-
cipal contours of visibility and tangibility in and through which our flesh
is self-configuring in all of its activities and projects.
13. “Quant à nous, notre coeur bat pour nous amener vers les profondeurs.” A slightly fuller
citation occurs at NC 57 n.: “Quant à nous, notre coeur bat pour nous emmener vers les pro-
fondeurs, les insondables profondeurs du Souffle primordial” (“to the depths, the unfathomable
depths of the primordial Breath”). Here, Klee sounds remarkably like Schelling, as we shall
see below, and Merleau-Ponty refers to the latter on the same page.
14. “Ce que j’essaie de vous traduire est plus mystérieux, s’enchevêtre aux racines mêmes de
l’être, à la source impalpable des sensations.” The sentence appears in J. Gasquet’s Cézanne.
This notion of entanglement is also called “overlapping,” of which we will see much more in
terms of the third definition of flesh. Merleau-Ponty takes the English word overlapping from
two sources. The first is p. 59 of Whitehead’s The Concept of Nature (cited at N 115/157).
The second source is Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative
Eye. Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished papers show that he took “almost 120 pages of notes” on
this text as he prepared to write L’Œil et l’esprit (ESA III: 146).
82 NATURE AND LOGOS
Another way to say this is to recur to the concept of the Gestalt, the
ontological importance of which is that it replaces the Sartrean dichotomy of
Being and nothingness. In an ontology of flesh, they become “its two abstract
properties.” The ontological Gestalt of flesh implies that we form part of
“humanity as a horizon of Being, a surrounding horizon just as things sur-
round us” (VI 237/290–91). The ontological meaning of a Gestalt therefore
transcends the way that it describes the perceptual constitution of a visual,
behavioral field and is anterior to consciousness and cognition (VI 206/259).
To put it another way, Being is the invisible background of the visible, like
a Gestalt of a figure perceived against “a ground that is not visible in the
sense the figure is” (VI 246/300), but which nonetheless encompasses and
permeates the visible. This ground, as we have seen, is depth and latency
of meaning, a “lining of invisibility” that pertains to every visible thing
(OE 187/85) and results in there being, as noted in Chapter I, “no other
meaning than carnal, figure and ground” (VI 265/319).
In addition to art, imagination and desire are also dimensions of
experience in which Merleau-Ponty discusses the ontological significance
of depth. Much of his thought in this regard derives from Bachelard (see
ESA I: 259ff.), as when he speaks of the “imaginary texture of the real” (OE
165/24). Or, as he states it in Être et monde, “The imaginary = the unfelt
stuff of the senses, the ontological milieu that conditions them (Bachelard)”
(ESA I: 258).15 Desire is also, like the imaginary, an important dimension
of latency in experience, and an example of the invisible. Since desire, like
perception and feeling generally, is one of the “confusions” through which
our flesh is implicated in that of others, it also possesses depths well known
and much discussed ever since Nietzsche and Freud. Dreams, desire, and
Eros are closely interwoven, and they have an obvious close connection
with the imaginary. This is a connection elaborated through much literature,
especially by Proust, who had such a profound impact on Merleau-Ponty, in
painting that displays “its oneiric universe of carnal essences” (OE 169/35),
and perhaps especially in psychoanalysis.
For example, and one that ties together the preceding paragraph with
earlier remarks on dimensionality, Freud’s case of the Wolf Man concerns
the triple signification of yellow present in “the memory screen of a yel-
low-striped butterfly,” “yellow-streaked pears,” and which, in turn, bring to
mind a young maid because “Grusha” is both her name and the Russian
name for “pear” (VI 240/293–94). For Merleau-Ponty, this connection shows
that psychoanalytic “associations” are in reality “ ‘rays’ of time and of the
15. “L’imaginaire = l’étoffe insensible des sens, le milieu ontologique qui les conditionne
(Bachelard).”
world” (VI 240/293). That is, ostensibly three memories—of a butterfly,

the pears, and the maid—are actually one memory of “a certain play of the
butterfly in the colored field, a certain (verbal) Wesen of the butterfly and of
the pear—which communicate with the language Wesen Grusha (in virtue
of the force of incarnation of language)” (VI 240/294).16
All three Wesen are bound together at their center by the single ray
of being of yellow, which is therefore not a mere sense datum, but rather
surges up as a defining dimension of the events at issue.17 It is “a quality
pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth” (VI 136/180). Thus, with
“sensorality,” a color such as yellow transcends itself in virtue of its onto-
logical capacity to represent everything (Ibid., 217/271). Similarly, we can
recognize the blue of the sea that we perceive as the same blue that the
other sees. Because of this fact, the blue, just as the yellow in the case of
the Wolf Man, becomes “a dimension and a universal” (Ibid., 142/187–88).
It belongs to the visible as the “surface of an inexhaustible depth” that
is open to the incorporation of the gaze of others as well as our own
(Ibid.).
On the side of the percipient, for Merleau-Ponty, Goethe was right
to emphasize the affective meaning of all colors in and through which they
correspond to the meanings of our other senses (C 46/25–26) through syn-
esthesia, as one can see clearly in cases in which a particular sense does not
function. For example, the color-blind brother of a colleague who viewed
the long desert scene in the film, Lawrence of Arabia, did not get thirsty,
whereas those who could perceive the color of the sand and sky left the
theatre at intermission feeling parched.
The theme of psychoanalysis approached through the experience of
colors continues in Merleau-Ponty’s emergent ontology by expressing his
desire to plunge to the roots of being through a “psychoanalysis of Nature”
as “the flesh, the mother” (VI 268/321). On his view, “an ontological psy-
choanalysis” should replace “an existential psychoanalysis” (VI 270/323) in
order to achieve that objective and to discover the secret of the primordial
functioning of flesh as “an element” of that Being. It should also be recognized
that characterizing Nature as “the flesh, the mother” has led to speculations
on and off, begun by Sartre himself, about the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s
16. “un certain jeu du papillon dans le champ coloré, un certain Wesen (verbal) du papillon
et de la poire,—qui communique avec le Wesen langagier Grouscha (en vertu de la force
d’incarnation du langage).”
17. “The analysis shows in addition that the maid spread open her legs like the butterfly its
wings. Hence there is an overdetermination of the association” (VI 240/294). “L’analyse montre
en outre que la bonne a ouvert ses jambes comme le papillon ses ailes. Donc il y a surdéter-
mination de l’association.”
84 NATURE AND LOGOS
relationship with his own mother for understanding this text. However, the
subject is more complicated than that, as de Saint Aubert shows.18
Just after defining flesh as an element, Merleau-Ponty adds that it is
not “a fact or a sum of facts [simple location], and yet adherent to location
and to the now” (Ibid., 139–40/184). This statement is both an echo of
Claudel’s influence and an index to the fact that depth has a temporal as
well as spatial meaning. In Art poétique, the latter states, “From time to
time, a man lifts his head, sniffs, listens, considers, recognizes his position:
he thinks, he sighs, and, drawing his watch from the pocket lodged against
his chest, looks at the time. Where am I? and What time is it?—such is the
inexhaustible question from us to the world” (cited at VI 121/161; transla-
tion altered).19
Claude Lefort, editor of Le Visible et l’invisible, observes that this pas-
sage appears earlier (VI 103/140), and states that this is “evidence of the
unfinished state of the manuscript” (VI 121, n. 5/161, n. 1). It is obvious
that the manuscript is unfinished; however, the explanation of the repetition
is more complicated and ontologically important than that. The Claudel text
is reproduced in the Passivity lectures (IP 256) and many times throughout
various unpublished writings—including at least thirteen in the preparation
of The Visible and the Invisible (ESA III: 54, n. 5). Clearly the text is sig-
nificant for Merleau-Ponty, and it invites us to pursue further the theme of
temporal depth, which is connected with the meaning of verticality.
Verticality, like depth, is an equivocal term. One meaning is the literal
physical sense. Here Merleau-Ponty stresses the importance of the upright
body for perception, as when he says, in reference to Paul Klee, that vision
brings us not only what is face to face, directly in front of us, but also what
is below and above us—(OE 187/85–86; cf. VI 138/182 and S 20/28–29). It
also brings us others, and the upright body is therefore crucial for intercorpo-
reity. The other is implicated in the same flesh, revealed in “the fungierende
body, flesh, esthesiology” (ESA II: 153, n. 1), as Être et monde puts it. The
experience of the vertical body is “the experience of the other,” and this
18. Sartre’s memorial article for Merleau-Ponty makes two well known and frequently cited
claims: “Merleau told me one day, in 1947, that he was never cured of an incomparable child-
hood” (1964, 190) and that “he suffered from his relationships with others: everything had
been too beautiful too soon; the Nature that first enveloped him was the Goddess Mother, his
mother, whose eyes gave him to see what he saw; she was the alter ego” (Ibid., 197). However,
despite this incontestable influence, Claudel’s Cinq grandes Odes is equally important here: “Your
sources are not sources at all. The same element!/Primary matter! It is the mother, I say, that
I have to have!” (ESA I: 263).
19. “De moment à autre, un homme redresse la tête, renifle, écoute, considère, reconnaît sa
position: il pense, il soupire, et, tirant sa montre de la poche logée contre sa côte, regarde
l’heure. Où suis-je? et Quelle heure est-il? telle est de nous au monde la question inépuisable.”
The English translation for the last part of this citation runs, “such is the inexhaustible question
turning from us to the world.” “Turning” (tournant) does not appear in the French.
is inconsistent with the “bifurcation of the I think and the body considered
as mechanical” (Ibid.).
The second meaning of verticality is a contrast with “horizontal”
being, interpreted in the ontology of the object as the flat projection of
perspectives by a consciousness as spectator. Vertical being is that which we
inhabit, and this sense is equivalent to flesh understood as an element of
Being. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished lecture notes on Descartes,
found on his desk the evening of the day he died, refer to Descartes’s “phi-
losophy of objective, horizontal being, the contrary of our philosophy of
vertical Being” (ESA II: 23).
The third meaning of verticality is temporal depth that has, for
Merleau-Ponty, both an experiential significance as well as deeper ontologi-
cal import. Experientially, much of Merleau-Ponty’s inspiration comes from
Proust who, he thinks, demonstrates that “[t]ime is always lost” (NC 197),
that time cannot be mere succession because it is “simultaneously absence,
dispossession, and by the same token, possession, each man seated on his
own pyramid of time” (Ibid., 49).20
Any given upsurge of time in the present contributes to the temporal
depth of this pyramid, but not by pushing off into the past “the whole pre-
ceding series” conceived as passive. Rather, time is self-constituting—always
to be construed from the perspective of someone who belongs to it. The
present encompasses us. It cannot be grasped “in the forceps of attention”
(VI 195/249),21 and Merleau-Ponty asserts the same paradox with respect
to time as he did with Being: it is “already there,” without us, but cannot
be understood apart from our experience of it. If time were completely
objective, something external always present to us, it would not account
for the experience of time passing. On the other hand, if time were purely
subjective, it would cut off the percipient from the world to which he is
open and in which he is implicated.
Since time encompasses us, the “intentional threads” of a retentive and
protentive consciousness diagrammed by Husserl (1964, 49) are now seen
as the “emanations and idealizations of one fabric, differentiations of the
fabric” of flesh (VI 231/284). Moreover, as noted in the previous chapter,
since they are differentiations, the present consists not of an absolute, but
only partial, coincidence with Being, as Merleau-Ponty likes to cite Bergson.
The deeper ontological import of temporal depth consists of its con-
nection with brute being. The latter is termed “the vertical world” (VI
20. “à la fois absence, dépossession, et par là même, possession, chaque homme assis sur une
pyramide de temps qui est à lui.” The same thought appears at PhP 393/450 and S 14/21.
21. This text, written a little over a year before L’Œil et l’esprit, contains an echo of that later
text’s reference to Paul Klee’s journal entry, later written on his tombstone: “I am ungraspable
in immanence” (OE 188/87).
86 NATURE AND LOGOS
200/254), and this verticality is described as “extended into the past, exis-
tential eternity, savage mind [esprit sauvage]” (Ibid., 175/229). An ontology
of flesh, as against that of the object, articulates that vertical world in terms
of “horizons, dimensionality, Inscription, [and] epochal Memory” (NC 392).
THE CHIASM
So far, we have been examining two of the three meanings (at least) of flesh
in Merleau-Ponty’s “new” ontology. The first was carnality—my flesh and
the flesh of the world—and the second was flesh as an element of Being—
which he understands principally through the overlapping notions of depth
and verticality, both spatially and temporally. The third meaning is flesh as
chiasm, and it is under this broad and complex notion that Merleau-Ponty
attempts to explain the functionings of flesh—that is, how all that has been
discussed thus far actually occurs.
The original meanings of chiasm are two and well known: the rhe-
torical figure according to which the word order in the first part of some
coupling is reversed in the second part, and the physiological meaning of
bodily structures that intersect and cross over. For the literary meaning,
Merleau-Ponty is indebted principally to Paul Valéry, and it is in the course
of discussing the latter, in “L’homme et l’adversité” (1951) (S 231/294),22 that
he first uses the word chiasm (ESA II: 169). However, Valéry himself extends
the chiasm to the perceptual life and intercorporeity as the crossing over of
self and other, as Merleau-Ponty will later.23
The most obvious example of the physiological meaning of the chiasm
is the optic chiasm—the brain structure in which the two optic nerves inter-
sect and at which half of the fibers of each nerve cross over to the other
hemisphere. Merleau-Ponty was much taken by this structure, and used it
as an analogue for feeling-felt (sentant-sensible) relationships. Perhaps it is
also reflected in the title of the last chapter of The Visible and the Invisible,
“Intertwining—the Chiasm” (“L’entrelacs—le chiasme”).24
22. The term also appears in the unpublished notes for his 1953 course on “L’usage littéraire
du langage” and again at RC 14/25, where there is only a brief reference to the passage cited
from Valéry cited in full at S 231–32/293–94.
23. Valéry’s text appears in his Choses tues, VI, Tel Quel, I, in Œuvres, II, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 490–91 (ESA II: 170, n. 1). In Être et monde, Merleau-Ponty
refers again to Valéry as follows: “Thought = ‘to mix oneself up with some object’ and to be
astonished at this confusion (Mon Faust).” “La pensée = ‘se confondre à quelque objet’ et
s’étonner de cette confusion (Mon Faust).”
24. Another chiasmatic example of human physiology that Merleau-Ponty does not discuss
concerns the transmission of life. There is a chiasmatic structure where pairs of chromosomes
stay connected during the second stage of meiosis—cell division that produces two cells each
of which has half the number of chromosomes of the parent cell (e.g., the production of
gametes). At this contact “point,” genetic material crosses over and gets exchanged between
the strands of chromosomes.
Merleau-Ponty’s later published as well as unpublished texts show that

he began to think of the chiasm in terms of the human body and then
generalized the structure as an omnipresent and crucial feature of Being. In
so doing, he brought to light various kinds of chiasmatic relationships and
their philosophical consequences. In general, the chiasm, at the intersec-
tion, is the figure that explains our Offenheit and the Ineinander relation-
ships with the flesh of others, of things, and of the world/Nature—Nature
conceived as the “presence behind, around, and before us at the limits of
our historical field” (S 110/138). Since, as we shall see, the chiasm expresses
all of the Cartesian “confusions,” it becomes the preeminent symbol of
Merleau-Ponty’s last ontology. Since thinking takes place within the process
of Nature, ontology for Merleau-Ponty is the articulation of the visible (with
its invisible) in which it is formulated, inextricably implicated in time and
history (S 21/30).
Moreover, in all of the relationships of flesh, given the verbal nature
of Wesen and Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of co-naissance to express the
relationships of the sentant and the sensible, it follows that one must stress
the relational character of the chiasm and that the relating is a process.
This means that the relation of my flesh to the flesh of others and of the
world cannot be, as with a Husserlian consciousness, one of founding to
founded. Rather, the relation is simultaneous, dynamic rather than static,
a unity of the active and the passive. And since Merleau-Ponty begins
with the self-sensing flesh of the body and then proceeds to make an
ontological generalization about the presence of the chiasm in all other
relations of flesh, it follows that they also are to be conceived as active
processes.
Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the multiple senses of the chiasm
have different sources. One is Husserl’s notion of Ineinander and the previ-
ously discussed descriptions in §36 of Ideas II of the “sensuous reflection”
of touching-touched relationships that we have with our own bodies (see
Chapter I). On the other hand, in keeping with his desire to maintain the
Cartesian “confusions” as the locus of doing philosophy, he positions the
chiasm against the objective of Ideas II to “ ‘disentangle’ ‘unravel’ what is
entangled” (VI 268/321). Disentangling makes things “unintelligible”; what
is required is a kind of intelligibility in and through the world in which we
exist (Ibid., 268/322).
Another source is psychoanalysis. In “Man and Adversity,” for exam-
ple, the author gives credit to psychoanalysis for illuminating the chiasm
as it applies to mind and body (S 229/290) and the desire for the flesh of
the other as described above. He also praises Freud for understanding bet-
ter than philosophers the spirituality of the body and the carnal nature of
mind (S 229/291), and states that Freud makes an “essential contribution”
88 NATURE AND LOGOS
to understanding the corporeal schema because the libidinal is a “dimension”

of the schema (N 218/281).25
A third important source of the chiasm consists of Gabriel Marcel’s
notion of “the mystery of being,” from which Merleau-Ponty takes an impor-
tant descriptor of the chiasm, namely, “overlapping” (empiétement). It is, as
Être et monde puts it, “the ontological mystery that is enclosed in the flesh
of the sensible” (ESA II: 99). For Marcel, a mystery is a problem that has
no rational solution, one in which we are involved, and one that therefore
overlaps (empiète) its own data (empiète sur ses propres données).
De Saint Aubert characterizes this sense of chiasm as “epistemological”
(ESA I: 215), and in a sense it is an answer to the Cartesian epistemologi-
cal confusion of ideas and feelings, though it is not primarily about ideas.
However, Marcel would not have thought of his own examples of love,
creative fidelity, and hope, as epistemologically important. In addition, as de
Saint Aubert points out (ESA II: 99), Merleau-Ponty uses the overlapping,
enveloping relationship in his last unpublished writings to describe both
perceptual life and libidinal corporeity as well.
However, no matter what the source or type of chiasm, Merleau-Ponty
describes the nature of the crossing-over relationship in a number of closely
related terms. They are “reversibility,” “dehiscence,” “coiling over” (enroule-
ment), “feeling-felt” (sentant-sensible), “the fold” (le pli)—“the application of
the inside and the outside to one another, the turning point” (VI 264/317)—
and “intertwining” (l’entrelacs). Besides Husserl’s notion of Ineinander and
Marcel’s empiétement, he makes use of several other descriptors as well. Some
main ones are “envelopment,” “confusion” or “entanglement” (enchevêtre-
ment), “encroachment” (enjambement), and “metamorphosis.”26 The descrip-
tors in this second set are very close in meaning to those of the first set and
are often used interchangeably with them. The only significant difference
25. Merleau-Ponty links these first two sources by intertwining the Husserlian concept of
Ineinander with sexual desire. De Saint Aubert points out (III: 218–19) that Merleau-Ponty’s
last manuscripts articulate the notion of Ineinander and that of implication in Being according
to “a topology of enveloping and enveloped” as expressed in the figures of pregnancy and
coupling. He goes on to observe (219) that these figures and sexuality in general, though
central to “being-with” (Mitsein), are ontic rather than ontological, and thus not included in
Heidegger’s Dasein analytics.
26. The English translator of Le Visible et l’invisible renders “enjambement” as “overlapping” and
“empiétement” as “encroachment.” However, “empiétement” in Marcel’s sense is usually rendered
as “overlapping,” and Stéphanie Ménasé, the editor of Merleau-Ponty’s Notes de cours 1959–1961,
translates Rudolf Arnheim’s “overlapping” as “empiétement.” We will follow Ménasé, though
enjambement and empiétement are used synonymously in several published and unpublished texts
(ESA I: 43, n. 1). “Empiéter” appears for the first time in “Autour du Marxisme” written in
August 1945 (SNS 103/180) (ESA I: 37).
between the two sets is that Merleau-Ponty treats the second set as deriva-
tive from the first in the sense that because, say, touching and being touched
are reversible, they can overlap or metamorphose into each other. In any
event, all of these words describe how the unity present in flesh as carnality
and as “an element of Being” comes about, and for which Merleau-Ponty’s
last ontology has to account. However, there are two other terms of signal
importance, “dehiscence” and the “écart,” which will provide much of the
complementary principle of difference.
Merleau-Ponty begins to articulate the chiasmatic nature of the human
body in terms of its self-sensing abilities before taking up its relationships
with the flesh of others and of the world. The point of departure is the
Husserlian Art von Reflexion, the reversible relations of sentant and sensible
that paradoxically make the body both object and non-object. What makes
this reversibility possible is the process of the body’s divisions into sentant
and sensible. Merleau-Ponty calls this process “dehiscence” (VI 123/165),
a biological term for separating into divergent parts, such as a seed pod
opening, and he also refers to it as “a fission of Being from the inside” (OE
186/81). This “dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and of the visible
into the seeing” (VI 153/201), the touching into the touched and of the
touched into the touching, and so on, is, as noted above, one of his two
main principles of differentiation that avert a fusion or coincidence with
the flesh of others, things, the world/Nature, and the immediate present or
past (Ibid., 123/164–65). Between fusion and disconnection, there is unity
conjugated with difference, indivisibility but not identity. Perception insti-
tutes an exchange of the sentant and the sensible that overlap and envelop
each other (VI 123/165).
Moreover, overlapping and enveloping relationships between the
senses (VI 134/177) appear to be Merleau-Ponty’s late ontological equiva-
lent of the earlier descriptions of synesthesia. For example, both seeing
and touching are inscribed in each other, although touch is primary. That
is why Merleau-Ponty often describes perception as “a palpation with the
look” (Ibid., 134/177).
There is also a chiasm in speaking and being heard that Merleau-Ponty
describes in the unpublished preparatory notes for The Visible and the Invisible
as a “carnal structure of speech” (ESA II: 162). This “carnal structure” is
only a late reference to a predominant theme throughout Merleau-Ponty’s
work, at least since Phenomenology of Perception, particularly the chap-
ter, “The Body as Expression and Speech.” Thus, it is not difficult to
understand why he conjoins the linguistic and physiological meanings of
the chiasm. Even so, references to the physiological meaning of the chiasm
are a comparatively late addition to both his unpublished and published
90 NATURE AND LOGOS
writings.27 In one of the latter passages, he observes that in the chiasmatic

relation of speaking and being heard, there is a “new reversibility” and “the
emergence of flesh as expression” where thought and speech emerge from
“the world of silence” (VI 144–45/190).
Once again taking issue with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty holds that the
process of dehiscence into sentant and sensible creates “the for itself itself
as an incontestable, but derived characteristic” of flesh (VI 191/245). Not
only does this argue against dualistic accounts of for itself and in itself, but
also against Merleau-Ponty’s own earlier account of the phenomenal and the
objective bodies. It even argues against his descriptions of mind and body as
“sides,” or “leaves” of my flesh (VI 137/181), which he himself subsequently
criticizes as the product of high-altitude thinking (Ibid., 137/182). Rather,
both mind and body as well as what were termed the phenomenal and
objective bodies consist of inseparable aspects of flesh, “the body as sensible
and the body as sentient” (Ibid., 136/180).
In this process of dehiscence, ideas, thought, and mind emerge from
flesh as their primordial matrix (VI 145/190–91), and as Merleau-Ponty sees
it, “the most difficult point” to explain is “the bond between the flesh and
the idea” (VI 149/195). Because of the complexity of the topic, we will take
it up separately in the following chapter. Here, though, we can note that, for
the philosopher, as against the pure intuitus mentis of idealist philosophies,
thought consists of a tripartite relationship between self, world, and other
(Ibid., 146/191). In this relationship, each should be seen as “the other side
of the other”; their mutual implication amounts to “projection-introjection”
(Ibid., 263/317).
Further, in terms of self-reflective thought, Merleau-Ponty seeks a
conception of it that will provide intrapersonal coherence. He finds it in a
“central vision” that gathers all feelings “dispersed in my body,” the fleshly “I
think that must be able to accompany all our experiences” (Ibid., 145/191).28
27. De Saint Aubert’s computer scans of both published and unpublished texts show no refer-
ences to the physiological meaning until 1959 (ESA II: 165). He also discovered that, in VI
alone, “chiasm” occurs almost 180 times, with approximately 70 percent of those in November
1960—precisely when “L’entrelacs et le chiasme” was written (ESA II: 160). In addition, “strictly
speaking, the corrected version of the last chapter of The Visible and the Invisible makes no
mention of the chiasm beyond its title, as against 87 mentions in the preparatory manuscripts
for the same chapter (dated in November [1960]), and 30 mentions in the whole of the work-
ing notes (including those that are unpublished) from the same month” (ESA II: 161, n. 1).
28. An interesting literary example of this same problem, with which Merleau-Ponty was surely
familiar, is Diderot’s Le rêve de d’Alembert (1965). The central question is how to account for
bodily unity, that the body is “one system, possessing a consciousness of its own unity” (69)
when all of the parts of the body have their own “private sensations” (71)? How is it possible
that there be “one consciousness in an animal [when] here is an infinity of wills; each organ
to its own” (132)? In short, “we [are] very complicated, but one” (157).
The “synergic body” organizes these dispersed feelings such that each indi-
vidual sensing activity and its particular visible, touchable, or audible,
becomes joined to the others to create “the experience of one sole body
before one sole world” (Ibid., 142/186). This is but another way to describe
the unity, or “confusion,” of body and soul that Merleau-Ponty insists we
must be able to think and, as we shall see, Whitehead’s process metaphysics
provides an explanation of this unity while maintaining the “confusions.”
The process of dehiscence is analogous to Spinozistic attributes par-
ticularizing themselves in the modes of individual minds and bodies. And
just as Spinoza does not offer an explanation of why attributes of the one
substance must take the form of modes, so also does Merleau-Ponty not offer
us an explanation of why dehiscence takes place. Rather, it is a question of
“brute” or “wild Being,” the basic fact that there is something—the “il y a.”
Nevertheless, there is one crucial difference between Merleau-Ponty
and Spinoza on this point. For the latter, mind and body, qua modes of dif-
ferent attributes of substance, can be thought correctly only as distinct, even
though they cannot exist without each other. By contrast, for Merleau-Ponty,
the dehiscence and chiasm of flesh mean that mind and body cannot even be
thought rightly as distinct. In this regard, as we shall see, he was influenced
by Schelling’s critique of Spinoza.
Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of mind and body is at variance
with the Sartrean dualism of a for-itself in the face of an external in-itself
because the for-itself exists in an internal unity with an otherness that is part
of its definition. This is a much stronger claim than Sartre’s contention that
consciousness always exists in relation to the in-itself. Since mind and body
are both expressions of flesh, the mind is defined as a new reversibility: the
body is “the natural face of mind” (S 229/290), and the mind “overflows”
the body in which it is “anchored” (VI 259/313). Therefore, “the ‘modes of
consciousness’ are inscribed as structurations of Being” and vice versa (Ibid.,
253/307). What Merleau-Ponty expresses in such terms, and what he thinks
Sartre always sought, is a way to think the unity of mind and body from
“within Being” (Ibid., 215/268; cf. 193/246).
The chiasmatic structure of flesh provides the principle for not only
our intrapersonal coherence, but also intercorporeal cohesion. For these rela-
tionships also involve, first, the same reversibilities of seeing and being seen,
touching and being touched, speaking and listening, and these reversibilities
open to us intercorporeity beyond the range of my present vision and touch.
Using language in an almost identical way as does Valéry, Merleau-Ponty
writes in his unpublished papers for the 1953 course on “L’usage littéraire
du langage,” “my relationship with my own body passes through the other:
what I do not see of my body, he sees, [and] what he does not see of
his, I see. It is in me that the other completes himself and in him that I
92 NATURE AND LOGOS
complete myself” (ESA II: 171).29 The other thus has an “inherence” in
our existence and vice versa (OE 163/18). Moreover, because the way that
we experience our own bodies and the manner in which we experience
the bodies of others “are themselves the two sides of the same Being” (VI
225/278), there can be “co-functioning” with the other in which mutual
antagonism is neither the whole story of intercorporeity nor what is essential
to it. This “co-functioning” stems from the fact that our corporeal schemas
“all end up at one sole Einfühlung” (N 225/287–88), a position that aligns
Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen, more with Heidegger than with Sartre.
Sartre might respond that an “abyss” still intervenes between
the in-itself and the for-itself, the sensible and the sentient body, and
Merleau-Ponty does admit that how to think “the sensible sentient” is a
problem. However, he also points out that he is forming his “first concepts so
as to avoid classical impasses,” to get beyond “the bifurcation of subject and
object” (Ibid., 137/180), and to be able to think the body as both a thing
and not a thing, belonging simultaneously to both objective and subjective
reality, each of which is an aspect of flesh.
These reversibilities in self-other relationships also characterize the
Cartesian “confusions” of feeling and desire. With feelings such as love and
hate, joy and sorrow, we cross over into the other as object of those feelings,
and the other similarly becomes part of us as the object of our feelings. In
that way, the feelings we express to the other return to us through, say,
the beloved, and vice versa. With regard to the dynamics of desiring and
desired studied in psychoanalysis, there are multiple reversibilities of flesh
in the ballet of the erotic exchange of seeing and being seen, touching and
being touched (the caress), activity and passivity, the inside and the outside.
For Merleau-Ponty, whatever the mode of intercorporeity, the revers-
ibility of the chiasm is essentially the idea that experience is always circular
because “every perception is doubled with a counter-perception. . . . Activity
= passivity” (VI 264–265/318). This circularity of activity and passivity
applies to all possible perceptions: of other people, our own bodies, and
perceptual objects. In every case, experience consists of a dehiscence into
le sentant and le sensible.
With respect to perceptual objects, we have already seen that they
are implicated in our flesh, that we are invested in them and vice versa in
the co-naissance that characterizes our and their ontogenesis. They prolong
our bodies, and vice versa, because they call for(th) certain behaviors (C
48/28). This mutual investment Merleau-Ponty often refers to in terms of
29. “. . . mon rapport à mon corps passe par autrui: ce que je ne vois pas de mon corps, il
le voit, ce qu’il ne voit pas du sien, je le vois. C’est en moi qu’autrui se complète et en lui
que je me complète.”
the “metamorphosis” mentioned earlier in his comments on Valéry, and in

direct contrast to the metamorphosis feared so much by Sartre, as we saw
in Chapter I. The philosophical importance of metamorphosis in the body’s
ontogenesis is twofold. It stands over against the ontology of the object and
the detached perspective of the spectator, and it consists of Merleau-Ponty’s
final alternative to the epistemological primacy of the synthesis of a consti-
tuting consciousness of whatever type. A corollary of this contrast is that
the only models of synthesis with which Merleau-Ponty was familiar were
from philosophies of consciousness. As we shall see below, one great benefit
that a Whiteheadian metaphysics can lend his emerging ontology is an
alternative model of synthesis that is consonant with his own philosophy.
The reversibility of our flesh makes us belong to “the world’s univer-
sal flesh” (VI 137/181), which, as including Nature, is more than things,
but not apart from them. There is, Merleau-Ponty adds, “an extraordinary
overlapping” between the world that we see and our bodies—a mutual over-
lapping that is one of “transgression or encroachment” (enjambement) (VI
248/302) that undercuts representational theories of perception and prevents
the experienced world from being one of “immanence and of ideality” (OE
162/17).
In this regard, painting is again of particular interest to Merleau-Ponty,
and forms the final major source of influence for the concept of the chi-
asm, just as it did for depth, for at least two reasons. The first one is that
it provides a solution to the problem of how to reach “wild Being” given
the inseparability of nature and culture, and for this reason Merleau-Ponty
holds that “any theory of painting is a metaphysics” (OE 171/42). Painting
offers us a privileged access to the “prehuman” world (OE 168/32), the
“monde sauvage” or “l’être brut,” because of its ability to express the mystery
of visibility (reversibility, overlapping, metamorphosis) before any cleavage
between reflection and the pre-reflective. This is why Merleau-Ponty appre-
ciates that, for Cézanne, “Nature is on the inside” (NC 174), and that we
even see the odor of things (SNS 15/26).
The second reason that Merleau-Ponty is particularly drawn to paint-
ing is that he sees the activity of the painter as a prototype of the access to
Being insofar as his acts of painting exemplify the chiasm. Borrowing Valéry’s
statement that the painter “takes his body with him,” Merleau-Ponty adds,
“It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world
into paintings” (OE 162/16),30 and he even characterizes the artist’s work as
“transubstantiations” realized in “an intertwining of vision and movement”
(Ibid.). This is to say that the painter, during the act of painting, “practices
30. “C’est en prêtant son corps au monde que le peintre change le monde en peinture.”
94 NATURE AND LOGOS
a magical theory of vision” (OE 166/27–28) because the painter effects the
reversal of his or her flesh and that of the world by turning the latter into
painting and the painting into world.
This reversibility is such that artists such as Klee report that things
look at them (OE 167/31). Hence, Merleau-Ponty concludes, there is liter-
ally inspiration: “inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being,
action and passion so little discernible that one no longer knows who sees
and who is seen” (Ibid., 167/31–32).31 Therefore, Sartre comments accu-
rately on this text that, for its author, “The painter is the privileged artisan,
the best witness of this mediated reciprocity” (1964, 272). This is also why,
for Merleau-Ponty, painters are so taken with mirrors: they illustrate the
reversibility of the flesh in their enactment of “the metamorphosis of the
seeing and of the visible” (OE 168/34), and which characterizes both our
flesh and their vocation (Ibid.).
This reversibility between the painter’s vision and the visible also
serves as a model of co-naissance. The painter’s vision is a “continued birth”
(Ibid., 167/32), but the importance of this fact sweeps wider than a claim
about artists. The essential point is that the painter’s vision is simply a more
dramatic case of what is true for everyone. All share in the same structures
of visibility and ontogenesis. Thus, the difference between painters and
non-painters is one of degree rather than of kind.
REVERSIBILITY AND TOPOLOGICAL SPACE AND TIME
Painting is likewise closely connected to Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of space

and time. On his view, the notion of space is an example of an idea that
contemporary thought seeks to revise in order to be more experientially
accurate (C 38/17), an accuracy that requires replacing the intertwined
ideas of space as something in itself and its representation in Renaissance
perspective. The former is placed in doubt by the fact that there is no
“experience of pure physics or geometry,” and that, contrary to Euclid, the
“same physico-geometrical ensemble is capable of covering flat and curved
space” (N 103/141). Moreover, to think of space as something in itself is
to recur to the ontology of the object by positioning it as a thing laid out
simultaneously as partes extra partes (OE 173/47) for a Kosmotheoros, not as
the space of our living situations (N 103/141). Space as an object would
imply that our living spatiality would merely derive from something more
ontologically primary instead of being “organically bound up with us” (C
41/22).
31. “. . . inspiration et expiration de l’Être, respiration dans l’Être, action et passion si peu
discernables qu’on ne sait plus qui voit et qui est vu.” As we shall see, this passage evidences
a palpable influence of Schelling’s notion of Konspiration.
It also follows from the fact that space is not a thing in itself that, if we
hold that space is not Euclidean, this does not imply that it is Riemannian or
anything else. The reason is that “Being is polymorphic” (OE 174/48), and
thus “different geometries are metrics, and metrics are neither true nor false
and, therefore, the results of these different metrics are not alternatives” (N
103/141).32 As Merleau-Ponty sees it, “Renaissance perspective,” rather than
revealing an infallible truth about Nature,33 is only a momentary revelation
of the world, a “particular case” of “poetic information of the world” that
persists long after it (OE 175/48).
On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty does not leave it at that, as if we
should choose whatever metric we find most appropriate in a particular situ-
ation. For it is also clear that he favors an account of curved space, which
soon becomes synonymous, or at least closely linked, with “topological
space,” and this for three reasons. First, its employment in relativity theory
demonstrates, pace Euclid, the impossibility of making any strict separation
between space and spatial objects (C 41–42/18–19), to say nothing of the
observer. Second, space as curved answers better to our experience of space.
“Primordial space” is topological because it best describes the “total volumi-
nosity which surrounds me, in which I am” (VI 213/267).
The third reason is that his ontology is more hospitable to topological
space because of the enveloping activity of flesh. Almost all of the words
used to express the chiasm are topological: enveloping, overlapping, encroaching,
coiling over, the fold, and intertwining. It is entirely understandable, therefore,
why Merleau-Ponty writes, “Take topological space as a model of being”34
(VI 210/264). In addition, his unpublished writings make plain that he
32. “Les différentes géométries sont des métriques, et les métriques ne sont ni vraies ni fausses
et, par conséqent, les résultats de ces différentes métriques ne sont pas des alternatives.” White-
head reaches the same conclusion (PANW 669–70).
33. Renaissance perspective is not infallible for another reason. In the lectures on Institution
(IP 80) as well as in Eye and Mind (174/49–50), Merleau-Ponty points out that “the men of
the Renaissance” dishonestly stuck to artificial perspectives required by Euclidean geometry
instead of the natural perspectives that painters knew. But their adherence to Euclid “was
not without bad faith” (OE 174/49) because they disregarded Euclid’s Eighth Theorem. That
theorem disproves the commonly held belief that an object will appear twice as small at twice
the distance. This is true only on a very small scale, as Euclid knew, but the “men of the
Renaissance” discarded that inconvenient fact in order to maintain the “myth” of an “exact
[proportional] construction” (Ibid.).
34. “Prendre pour modèle de l’être l’espace topologique.” In all of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished
writings from October 1959 to September 1960, there are almost eighty references to “la topolo-
gie” or to “la topologique.” They refer to “first, the body,” to the corporeal schema or corporeity,
then to the world, to beings and to being (or Being) (ESA III: 231). In addition, Merleau-Ponty’s
reflections on topological space, that of the chiasmatic reversibility of flesh, have their roots
in his early descriptions of the lived body’s spatiality, body image, and the corporeal schema.
96 NATURE AND LOGOS
interpreted topological mathematics35 as a paradigm case of how modern

science had begun to transcend the ontology of the object and its accom-
panying pensée de survol (ESA III: 232). As Merleau-Ponty puts in Être et
monde, “Topological being” discloses that Euclidean geometry “has roots in
the structural universe” (Ibid.).
Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to say that topological space
is “the relationship of our flesh and the flesh of the world” (NC 209). La
Nature ou le monde du silence phrases this succinctly again in terms of mystery
in Marcel’s sense of empiétement: “I pose a mystery of the extended as [the]
extended of overlapping, without simple location” (in Whitehead’s sense of
the phrase) (ESA II: 37).36 Unlike the flat projections of Euclidean space,
he argues, topological space, joined with a correlative notion of time, is
necessary to account for the depth of Being.
For Merleau-Ponty, painters such as Cézanne, Klee, and Matisse pro-
vide the best evidence for a topological space, and he notes a peculiar
consonance between their works and contemporary physics in terms of the
inability to distinguish spatial change and the content of what changes (C
39/19; cf. OE 180/66). Cézanne uses color to create “the contour and form
of objects as nature generates them before our eyes” (C 39/19). Moreover,
his late water colors display an enveloping, dynamic space that “radiates”
around planes that have no spatial location (OE 181/68). Thus, the unpub-
lished manuscript preparing Eye and Mind states, “Example of Cézanne as
total research, of everything at once. To study space in his work is to study
everything. The outcome: a topological space” (ESA III: 232, n. 4).37
It is not a question of abolishing the line in lieu of color, but rath-
er, like the post-Impressionists, a matter of “freeing the line, of revivifying
its constituting power” (OE 183/74) as it shows itself in the works of, say,
Klee and Matisse. And perhaps while thinking of Cézanne’s water colors,
Merleau-Ponty adds in the unpublished version of Eye and Mind, “Like an
operative or latent line, painting presents us with a shifting that moves by
radiance or vibration and that does not change place” (ESA III: 232, n. 4).38
Merleau-Ponty does not say so, but he could also have discussed how Matisse’s
cutouts comprised his final attempt to allow form to emerge from color.
35. Mathematicians mark the emergence of topology as an identifiable field of mathematics

by the publication of Henri Poincaré’s Analysis Situs in Journal de l’École Polytechnique, Series
2, 1 (1895), 1–123.
36. “Je pose un mystère de l’étendu comme étendu d’empiétement, sans emplacement unique”
(ESA II: 37).
37. “Exemple de Cézanne comme recherche totale, de tout à la fois. Aboutissement: un espace
topologique.”
38. “Comme une ligne opérante ou latente, la peinture nous présente un mouvant qui bouge
par rayonnement ou vibration et qui ne change pas de lieu.”
Just as the Phenomenology of Perception asserted the unity of Nature

and culture, so also in the later writings topological space and time have a
cultural dimension. For example, Merleau-Ponty asks what it means to be a
country. Referring to L’Œil écoute, a 1946 collection of essays by Claudel, he
thinks of it as a certain manner of organizing space and time that involves
history and geography, but also “a formula of inside-outside relationships”
(NC 200). For illustration, he refers to Claudel’s discussion of Dutch paint-
ing (Ibid.; cf. OE 168/32). Personal and national identities take shape in,
and therefore reflect, the enveloping space and time of our lives.
As a dimension or “total part” of our belonging to the world, time
is closely linked with topological space because it also has the chiasmatic
structure of overlapping-overlapped, enveloping-enveloped, a cohesion due
to the fact that “past and present are Ineinander . . . and that itself is the
flesh” (VI 268/321).39 For Merleau-Ponty, painting likewise exhibits this
overlapping and envelopment, “the ‘metamorphosis’ [Rodin] of time”—as,
for example, Gericault’s depiction of horses running in Derby d’Epsom (OE
186/80), that, unlike photographs, does not freeze instants.
There is another crucial ontological dimension of time because it is
central to dehiscence as a metaphysical principle of difference. On the one
hand, for Merleau-Ponty, the percipere does not precede the percipi. On the
contrary, he first tells us, they are simultaneous (co-naissance), and then he
adds that there is a necessary temporal delay between them. The percipi
precedes the percipere in the sense that “the weight of the natural world is
already a weight of the past” (Ibid., 123/164). It is a question of a “a vis-
ibility older than my operations or my acts” (Ibid., 123/164–65).
It is this temporal gap, however minute, that prevents the dehiscence
of my flesh into both sentant and sensible from becoming a fusion with
the flesh of the world in an undifferentiated identity. Merleau-Ponty terms
this difference the “écart,” a word difficult to translate into English that he
sometimes uses as a synonym for “dehiscence” and sometimes for its result.
The word is variously rendered as a “difference,” “divergence,” “separation,”
“shift,” “spread,” “gap,” and “slippage.” It expresses the fact that co-naissance
is not quite “co” (simultaneity). As noted above, the coincidence of sentant
and sensible is only partial (Bergson); therefore, there can be no fusion of
sentant and sensible in one sole experience. Such a perfect coincidence always
lies on the horizon of pastness, as “transcended,” or futurity (VI 122/163).
As we have seen in Chapter I, this is what Husserl’s descriptions of
touching-touched relationships shows, but it equally applies to other senses as
well. For example, when we look into a mirror, it is impossible to see our eyes
39. The unpublished notes for Merleau-Ponty’s course on “L’ontologie cartésienne” state,
“Overlapping = belonging to the same being, to the same time, cohesion” (ESA II: 52, n. 1).
98 NATURE AND LOGOS
seeing. When we make the attempt, we can almost do so, but there is always
a “divergence” (écart) that turns the eyes into the seen rather than seeing.
Seeing and the seen are never exactly the same (VI 254/307; cf. 9/24 and
147/194). The écart produced by dehiscence thus consists of another dimen-
sion of “the fecund negative that is instituted by the flesh” (VI 263/316) that
breaks up the plenum of Being as envisaged in modern philosophy.
What, then, Merleau-Ponty asks, does “this strange adhesion of the
seer and the visible” (VI 139/183) teach us? Since total coincidence in
relationships of touching and touched, seeing and being seen, and so on, is
impossible, the reversibility of the chiasm is “always imminent and never
realized in fact” (Ibid., 147/194). Therefore, this bedrock metaphysical prin-
ciple (chiasm, reversibility) is never fully instantiated and remains always
on the horizon of fulfillment.
We might then be tempted to think that the écart shipwrecks
Merleau-Ponty’s emergent ontology, or at least a considerable part of it.
However, he asserts the contrary (VI 148/194), and correctly, because diver-
gence does not mean disconnection, or—his own particular concern—a relapse
into a Sartrean relationship of nothingness and a plenum of Being. There is
no disconnection because, even though there is a gap between the sentant and
the sensible that prevents perfect reversibility between them, we can experi-
ence “the transition and the metamorphosis of the one experience into the
other” whenever we wish (VI 148/195). This means that the écart does not
constitute “an ontological void, a non-being” (Ibid.); rather, the inclusive
totality of body and world includes it as part of their hidden structure.
This is yet another way of expressing unity that is not identity, and dif-
ference that is not disconnection. Therefore, the negativity instantiated by
the écart establishes a fecund natural negativity that contrasts with Sartre’s
contradictory negativity. The écart that separates the sentant and the sensible
is therefore not a nothingness, but instead an essential feature of the dual-
ity of activity and passivity that makes up the cohesive process of Nature.
For Merleau-Ponty, it is an essential feature of the duality of activ-
ity and passivity that, since perceivers are implicated in the perceived, in
some sense they see themselves seeing. Therefore, “there is a fundamental
narcissism of all vision” (VI 139/183). Likewise, the vision that seers direct
toward things returns to themselves as the seers. This is why, as painters
such as Klee have remarked, they feel things looking at themselves, their
activity is in counterpoise to passivity, and this reciprocity between seer and
seen forms “the second and more profound sense of the narcissism” (Ibid.;
cf. OE 167/31).
For the most part, Merleau-Ponty describes dehiscence in terms of the
body’s reaching out to particular things and other people. However, he also
refers to a dehiscence that makes possible a reciprocity with a generalized
sensibility, at the limits of which he makes a descriptive generalization about

the chiasmatic nature of Being itself. The chiasm is a way of saying that
Being, as flesh, has the property of reversibility that assures our belonging
to it. Hence, the human body is a “prototype of Being” (VI 136/179), and
from this basic structure of Being all of the descriptions of the chiasms
present in self-sensing flesh follow. As Renaud Barbaras nicely phrases it,
for Merleau-Ponty “my flesh becomes the ontological witness of an originary
dimension that exceeds it and of which it is no more than a privileged
modality” (2008, 19).
In turn, this descriptive generalization about the chiasmatic nature of
Being itself gives rise to a kind of transcendental ontology not founded on
consciousness, but rather on the flesh as “the new irrelative.” In a sense,
both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead develop non-Kantian transcendental
philosophies. Merleau-Ponty is concerned to articulate the necessary condi-
tions for our indivision from, but lack of fusion with, the flesh of others,
things, and the world/Nature. Whitehead, as we shall see, develops a specu-
lative metaphysical scheme to explain the possibility and actual existence
of experience in a way that avoids the Kantian cleft between understanding
and sense experience, noumena and phenomena, knowledge and feeling.
The last several pages have attempted to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s
third meaning of flesh, the chiasm. Two final clarifications are now in order.
The first one concerns the need to demythologize, so to speak, his refer-
ences to experiences in which things are looking at us. Such language may
be acceptable for a poet, as well as alarming in a mental patient, but as a
description of normal, everyday perceptual life, what could it mean?
De Saint Aubert argues that it is an example of a convenient fiction
that Merleau-Ponty often uses under the guise of “as if,” and this “comme
si” is especially disconcerting when it comes to the notion of empiétement
that normally would not call for reciprocity. He then goes to say that
Merleau-Ponty uses this fiction to illustrate
the reversibility of the passive and the active in the flesh. . . . By

means of this animistic fiction, which will attain its summit in L’Œil
et l’esprit, Merleau-Ponty willingly cultivates one of the traits of
childlike thought distinguished by Piaget40 and attempts to restore
40. See especially La représentation de l’espace chez l’enfant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1948). For the importance of this work in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about topological space and
empiétement, see ESA III: 231–35. In Être et monde, Merleau-Ponty refers to Piaget “not less
than one hundred times” (ESA III: 231). Cf. Rudolf Arnheim: “As Piaget and Inhelder put it,
early shapes are topological rather than geometrical, i.e., they aim at such general, nonmetric
properties as roundness, closedness, straightness, not at specific, ideal embodiments” (1974, 175).
100 NATURE AND LOGOS
the “magical consciousness” [SC 189/204] that presides over our

“initiation to the world” [VI 35/57]. (ESA II: 115)
Certainly, Piaget influenced Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, though not

uncritically, but there is more to say about describing the reversibility of
empiétement as things looking at us and eliminating the “comme si.” Such
a manner of speaking need signify no more, and no less, than the general
structure of visibility and tangibility according to which my body is adapted
to the flesh of things and of the world in general because the reverse is
equally true. That is, I can lend my body to things and Nature so that
they can “give me their resemblance” (VI 146/192) precisely because they
are adapted to this inscription. Visibility and tangibility mean that things
appear as suited for our bodies in such a way that they solicit our gaze and
touch. Franck Robert states this well when he observes that the tangible
presents itself to us as “no longer only what is touched, but what can be
touched” (2005, 351).
This structure of visibility also explains the otherwise puzzling claim
that things are “an annex or prolongation” of the visible, mobile body,
“incrusted in its flesh . . . because the world is made of the same stuff as the
body” (OE 163/19). How can we understand such a claim in a non-poetic,
mentally stable fashion? One plausible interpretation would be to take his
claim as an analogy with our skin—our “croûte”—and then use the same
argument as in the previous paragraph. Things can be “in-crusted” in us in
the sense that they are “made of the same stuff” and hence adapted to our
touch, vision, and our other senses, and vice versa.
Another way to say this is to redraw the map of “inner” and “outer” in
terms of seeing the unity of the sentant and the sensible in our own flesh, as
well as inscription in it of the flesh of others, things, and the world/Nature.
As already noted, this is a new concept of the unity of activity and passivity.
“Activity = passivity” because, in each metamorphosis of flesh, the “outer” is
already the limit of the “inner,” part of its definition, and vice versa. It is a
question of internal rather than external relations between them. Therefore,
activity and passivity are, like mind and body, two “sides” of the same flesh.
This new conception of activity and passivity is key to Merleau-Ponty’s
rejection of all of the forms of bifurcation in modern philosophy and their
heritage, and forms an unexplored way of conceptualizing his differences from
them. On an experiential level, Descartes comes closest to Merleau-Ponty’s
view of this relationship when pointing to the “confusions” in the Sixth
Meditation, though this profundity is shipwrecked by an inconsistent and
untenable ontology. As regards the unity of mind and body, Merleau-Ponty
would agree with Malebranche that interaction between the two, as the
latter understood them, is an illusion, but for a very different reason: he
rejects that understanding which is predicated on external relationships.
Spinoza’s Natura naturans and Natura naturata are much closer to

Merleau-Ponty’s view of Being and sensible things, respectively. Both Natura
naturans and Being as Merleau-Ponty understands it are “ungraspable in
immanence,” the background from which sensible things and we ourselves
stand out. However, there are three key differences between the two ontolo-
gies. For Spinoza, there is no reversibility between the naturans and the
naturata. As noted above, the substantial attributes of thought and exten-
sion can be thought without referring to each other—no overlapping or
metamorphosis—and contingency and freedom are eliminated. Still, Spinoza
interprets activity and passivity as related internally rather than externally
and here, as in everything else, he stands out as an exception to the other
main figures of modern philosophy.
Leibniz’s critical response to Spinoza shows this. The former’s treat-
ment of activity and passivity conflicts with the flesh in at least three impor-
tant ways. First, apart from the divine arrangement of the preestablished
harmony, activity is internal and restricted to self-changing, “windowless”
monads. Second, relationships with other monads are external only, and
they are passive rather than active. Further, third, this passivity is one of
mirroring in a way that is very different from the mirroring experiences
that Merleau-Ponty describes. Leibniz’s version is indirect rather than direct,
nonreciprocal instead of reversible, the preservation of insularity instead of
empiétement and metamorphosis.
Merleau-Ponty’s view of passivity existing within activity and vice ver-
sa also stands over against representational theories of perception, whether
governed by what Whitehead terms “the sensationalist principle” and/or “the
subjectivist principle.” As noted above, Hume holds both principles, and
Kant only the latter. In the case of Hume, the combinatory and interpre-
tive mental activities applied to the passively received data are separate and
distinct from those data. In Kant’s case, the imposition of the pure forms
of sensory intuition—space and time—as well as the pure categories of the
understanding, are still separate and distinct from the manifold of sensory
intuition. There can be no crossing over between them, no empiétement or
metamorphosis as Merleau-Ponty understands it.
Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s unity of activity and passivity stands in strong
contrast to Sartre’s account of the pour soi and en soi, respectively. It is
a question of activity-passivity of the flesh as opposed to the interminable
attraction and repulsion of nothingness and Being between which no over-
lapping is possible. Moreover, consciousness for Sartre is the exclusive source
of meaning, and therefore its acts impose a sense on the world. It amounts
to a “centrifugal Sinngebung” (VI 181/235), “a centrifugal movement without
opacity or inertia” (AD 198/267), as opposed to a perceptual opening to
the flesh of others, things, and the world/Nature in which it is impossible
to strictly separate the sentant from the sensible (VI 181/235).
In the end, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh is both explicans—of the

unity of the spiritual and the material, mind and body, mentality and the
“brute facts” (Whitehead) of Nature, subjects and objects—and explicandum,
in terms of carnality, as an element of Being, and its dynamic chiasmatic
structure. Connaissance is made possible by co-naissance in the reversible
relationships of le sentant and le sensible.
The same reasoning that resolves these forms of the bifurcation of
Nature applies as well to that between things in themselves—whether know-
able (Galileo, Descartes) or unknowable (Kant)—as against things as they
appear to us. As regards the Kantian position, because thinking takes place
within the flux of Nature and emerges from it, there can be no isolated
realm of unknowable objects across an unbridgeable abyss between them and
the relation of sentant to sensible. In terms of the Galilean-Cartesian posi-
tion, Merleau-Ponty’s view also avoids a dichotomy of things in themselves
as opposed to mental phenomena construed as accurate representations of
them. The reversibility and envelopment of my flesh and the flesh of the
world, and the consequent indivision of sentant and sensible, exclude an
isolated realm of mentality and thus the necessity of re-presentation.
This relation of perception and thought, “the flesh and the idea,” is,
as we have seen, what Merleau-Ponty considers most difficult to understand
about the chiasm. His answer, although unfortunately never completed,
involves several references to the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos,
and to those subjects we now turn.
IV
LOGOS ENDIATHETOS
AND LOGOS PROFORIKOS
To speak of a bond between the idea and the flesh is to imply that mean-
ing, although invisible, cannot be its contradictory; rather it is its “invis-
ible inner framework (membrure)” (VI 215/269). Ideas, for Merleau-Ponty,
as Proust showed us, make up the “lining and depth” of the visible (Ibid.,
149/195). This implies also that every speech act becomes an incarnation,
words made flesh,1 and by the same token, in the expression of the ideas,
flesh is made words. In slightly different terms, “life becomes ideas and the
ideas return to life” (Ibid., 119/159).
We have already seen in Chapter II that, in Merleau-Ponty’s late
ontology, Nature is inherently intelligible anterior to the contributions of
consciousness (N 3/19), and it is intelligible in a stronger way than a mean-
ing sketched in outline (en pointillé) that can be solicited and actualized
through a motor-intentional body. In the later writings, beginning with his
first Nature course, Merleau-Ponty begins to refer to this stronger sense of
natural meaningfulness in terms of the Stoics’ concepts of the logos endiath-
etos and its articulations in the logos proforikos (RC 74/105–106). Nothing
apparently prepares for this adoption of the Stoics’ conceptuality, either
in his published texts or in the unpublished writings cited in de Saint
Aubert’s four volumes. Nonetheless, he does refer to the logos endiathetos
in his own summary of the first Nature course, and to the twofold logos in
the Nature lectures as well as in the “Working Notes” for completing what
would become The Visible and the Invisible.
Notwithstanding the important epistemological consequences that
Merleau-Ponty draws from the two logoi, there has been virtually no discus-
1. For Whitehead, “Expression is the one fundamental sacrament. It is the outward and visible
sign of an inward and spiritual grace” (RM 127).
103
sion of them by Merleau-Ponty scholars.2 In this chapter, we begin to fill that

lacuna and show how the twofold logos allows Merleau-Ponty to overcome
the bifurcation of not only ideas and Nature, but also those between the
realm of values and the realm of facts, and God and the world. To that
end, it will be useful to begin by forming a contrast with his earlier view
of the origin and expression of meaning.
THE LOGOI AND THE EARLIER PHENOMENOLOGY
Merleau-Ponty’s earlier view can best be explained with one of his own
examples. In Phenomenology of Perception, the philosopher states that, when
I construct a triangle, that act of construction makes clear the possibilities
of the figure while guided not by “its definition and as idea,” but rather by
“its configuration” as the latter becomes the objective “pole of my move-
ments” (386/442). However, these are not simple mechanical movements.
They are guided by a certain “intention”: as I regard the triangle, it is for my
body “a system of oriented lines” that give sense to “words such as ‘angle”
or ‘direction’ ” (Ibid.). Further, those words and others in the geometrical
lexicon, such as hypotenuse and secant, take on meaning to the degree that
I have a concrete spatial situation and can orient myself to move from one
point to another. In that way, “the system of spatial positions is for me a
field of possible movements” (Ibid.). It is in this fashion that “I grasp the
concrete essence of the triangle, which is not an ensemble of objective
‘characters,’ but the formula of an attitude, a certain modality of my hold
on the world, a structure” (Ibid.).3
It is not otherwise with geometers themselves. They study relation-
ships between points, lines, curves, and angles, which they can only know
by a motor intentionality. Since the geometer’s thought does not disengage
itself from perceptual consciousness, it follows for Merleau-Ponty that the
essence of triangles or any other object of consciousness is derived from the
perceptual world (Ibid., 388/444). Moreover, since essences do emerge from
2. Toadvine (2009) does not mention them, and two typical examples of those who do are
Martin Dillon (1997) and Douglas Low (2000). Dillon discusses “the logos” at some length,
but always in relation to language, in effect the logos proforikos. He does briefly refer to the
logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos (240–41), but without inquiring into the meaning or
significance of the former. Low devotes an entire chapter to “The Invisible and Logos,” but
never mentions the logos endiathetos or the logos proforikos. The chapter is largely given over
to a discussion of language, and when he describes “the logos,” he states, “broadly speaking,
what Merleau-Ponty means by . . . logos is expression, at first as mute perception, then as
spoken gesture, then as abstract literature” (72). This is not wrong, but submerges and ignores
the logos endiathetos.
3. “. . . je saisis l’essence concrète du triangle, qui n’est pas un ensemble de ‘caractères’ objectifs,
mais la formule d’une attitude, une certaine modalité de ma prise sur le monde, une structure.”
LOGOS ENDIATHETOS AND LOGOS PROFORIKOS 105
the world of perception, they manifest themselves to us in the same way

that perceptual objects appear. Both are “the presumption of a complete
synthesis” (Ibid., 388/445), as we saw in Chapter II, of which our motor
intentionality is a necessary condition.4 From this claim it follows that the
meaning of a triangle or anything else “is necessarily tied to an act of expres-
sion and owes it its appearance of autonomy. It is a cultural object, like the
church, the street, the pencil, or the Ninth Symphony” (Ibid., 390/447).5
Ideas such as triangles, therefore, require the constituting activities of a
body consciousness, not as their source (idealism), but as it is complicit
with things that appear to us so that their sense (essences) might emerge.
In the late ontology, however, although the idea of a certain geometri-
cal shape, for instance, is still arrived at through motor intentionality, its
intelligibility no longer depends on consciousness because the meaningful-
ness of Nature is antecedent to the products of thought. Thus, Merleau-Ponty
writes, “the pregnancy of geometric forms is intrinsically founded (not cul-
turally) in that they permit better than others an ontogenesis (they stabilize
being)” (VI 213/266).6 Therefore, the “intrinsic meaning” of a triangle is
not a cultural artifact, although the triangle itself obviously is. That is why
Merleau-Ponty says that to understand means “to translate into available
significations meaning first held captive in the thing and in the world itself”
(Ibid., 36/58). He refers to the articulation of this intrinsic sense of the
world before consciousness as its logos endiathetos, and it stands to its cultural
articulation, the logos proforikos, in a fondant-fondé relationship analogous to
that between perception and language in the earlier phenomenology.
The logos endiathetos is described in a variety of ways across several
texts. It discloses what is revealed to our “perceptual openness to the world”
(VI 212/266), “meaning before logic” (Ibid., 169/222), the logos of “brute or
wild Being (= perceived world)” (Ibid., 170/223), which is “more than all
painting, all speech, all ‘attitude’ ”—perhaps referring to the passage from
Phenomenology of Perception noted above (Ibid., 170/224). It is the “logos
that pronounces itself silently in each sensible thing” (Ibid., 208/261); it
is “reticent” and “speaks in us rather than that we speak it” (N 212/274).
For this reason, he writes in a Heideggerean vein, it is “being that speaks
in us and not we who speak of being” (VI 194/247). Tightly related to this,
Merleau-Ponty states in the last of the “Working Notes” for The Visible
and the Invisible that, while human beings realize the logos, it is not our
4. See also here Hass (2008), Chapter 6, “Expression and the Origin of Geometry.”
5. “Ce qu’on appelle idée est nécessairement lié à un acte d’expression et lui doit son apparence
d’autonomie. C’est un objet culturel, comme l’église, la rue, le crayon ou la IXe Symphonie.”
6. “. . . la prégnance des formes géométriques est intrinsèquement fondée (non pas culturelle-
ment) en ce qu’elles permettent mieux que d’autres une ontogénèse (elles stabilisent l’être).”
possession (Ibid., 274/328). Hence the last line of the “Working Notes”
for completing The Visible and the Invisible: “Worked-over-matter-men =
chiasm” (Matière-ouvrée-hommes = chiasm) (Ibid., 275/328). It suggests the
Heraclitean “hidden principle of harmony within the universe and the active
principle of its development, accounting thus not only for unity and stability
of Being, but for multiplicity, diversity, and change as well” (Burke 1999,
188–89). These sentences also strongly suggest the Natura naturans that, as
noted above, is consonant with Whiteheadian creativity.
The experience of the logos endiathetos is that of a “dialectic without
synthesis” (VI 94–95/129; cf. IP 163) of activity and passivity: emergence
from the flesh of sound, color, the texture of the tactile (VI 114/152) by
means of “a sort of coiling up or redoubling,” a feeling that one is “funda-
mentally homogeneous with them,” a perception of being “the sensible itself
coming to itself” and, inversely, a feeling that derives from the perception
of the “j’en suis” that the sensible is a “double or extension” of one’s own
flesh (VI 114/153).
The logos endiathetos is silent because it is the “Logos of the natu-
ral, aesthetic world, on which the Logos of language [the logos proforikos]
rests” (Ibid.).7 Parallel to this, Merleau-Ponty says of Giraudoux’s “caryatid
of nothingness” that, whereas the playwright stresses the nothingness, he
will emphasize the caryatid (Ibid., 227/290–91)—the logos endiathetos that
grounds perceptual faith. It is that structure to which Merleau-Ponty appeals
in his first Nature lectures for preferring, as against Kant, the Stoics’s con-
ception of “a brute unity by means of which the universe ‘holds’ and of
which the human understanding is the expression rather than the interior
condition” (RC 74/105–106).8 It is also a “caryatid” that stands over against
Sartre’s in-itself in which there could not possibly be a logos endiathetos.
This logos is buried in things, close to passivity and institution, because
perception is the sharing of my flesh in the world’s flesh. As noted above,
it is the intelligibility of “primordial being that is not yet subject-being nor
object-being” (RC 65/95).
What is the meaning of this “world of silence” (VI 179/233), and
what is its content? To the latter question, Merleau-Ponty does not give a
direct answer, but since it is a question of a logos of l’être sauvage, a logos
of the natural, aesthetic world, its content must be nothing other than all
that has been elaborated so far about the structures of flesh: its visibility
and tangibility, carnality, elemental nature conjugated in terms of depth
7. Merleau-Ponty’s terminology here owes much to Husserl’s phrases, “logic of the aesthetic
world” and “analytic logos” (1969a, 292). See also Tilliette (1992, 167/229–30).
8. “. . . une unité brute par laquelle l’univers ‘tient’ et dont celle de l’entendement humain
est l’expression encore plutôt que la condition intérieure.”
and verticality, and its character as chiasmatic reversibility—which in turn

includes all that Merleau-Ponty discusses under the headings of Einfühlung,
Ineinander, and bodily symbolism.
As for the question of how the “world of silence” is meaningful,
Merleau-Ponty says that he wants to describe a bodily “pre-knowing; a
pre-meaning, a silent knowing” (VI 178/232). He also states that “the
description of the perceptual logos is a usage of the logos proforikos” (Ibid.,
179/233). Hence, the pre-knowing—which is itself a type of knowing that,
as we have seen, he thinks painters are especially able to exemplify—is
directed to the silent perceptual world (La Nature ou le monde du silence).
The latter, in turn, is “an order where there are non-language significa-
tions . . . but they are not accordingly positive. . . . [T]here are fields and a
field of fields, with a style and a typicality” (Ibid., 171/225).9
As we have seen in Chapter I, style consists of the particular way
that something or someone exists in the world. It consists of the unity of
form and content, both the content of what manifests itself and how it
does so—a concrete universal. Style along with dehiscence and the écart
make up Merleau-Ponty’s three principles of difference, whereas typicality is
a principle of unity. Since the silent world of Nature is process and Wesen
should be interpreted in a verbal sense, it is not surprising that Heidegger’s
example of the rose in Silesius’s poem is what Merleau-Ponty would give
as an example of the “style” and “typicality” of these nonlinguistic mean-
ings, or pre-[intellectually formulated] meanings. Of the rose enacting itself
as a rose—“the rose roses”—he writes that it is the “first expression” of
pre-objective, pre-subjective being that is anterior to the distinction between
essence and existence, “fact and essence” (VI 174/228). Moreover, we derive
from such experiences a “general idea” of roseness, the idea of “a species rose”
that emerges from considering the “natural generativity” of the particular
rose (Ibid.).
What, then, does this conception of intelligibility imply for the mean-
ing of geometrical shapes, such as a triangle, with which we began this dis-
cussion? First, a geometrical form would be an articulation, an explicitation
(the logos proforikos) of “meaning first held captive in the thing and in the
world itself”—meaning inherent in the intelligible, silent world of nature,
and which is central to that brute order by means of which the universe
“holds.” Because of those forms of order, with their “sens intrinsèque,” the
triangle has a natural foundation that contributes to ontogenesis by sta-
bilizing being. At the same time, as we have seen above, because of “the
polymorphism of wild Being” (VI 253/307), the fact that one geometry—or,
9. “. . . un ordre où il y a des significations non langagières . . . mais elles ne sont pas pour
autant positives. . . . [I]l y a des champs et un champ des champs, avec un style et une typique.”
more generally, one form of intellectual order—can be creatively expressed

in our interactions with Nature does not imply that it is the only true form
of order.
There is no bifurcation between Nature and the (cultural) idea because
the “pre-knowing” that generates a “birth . . . of meaning” in Nature is
doubled by “its re-birth in knowing (sa re-naissance dans un savoir) (IP 178).
That is, the idea emerges from the interplay of the “je peux” of the corpo-
real schema with the flesh of the world as figures are drawn and connected,
shapes created give rise to the apprehension of angles, lines, and relation-
ships between them. Thus, geometrical ideas and their objective forms, as
correlates of bodily activity, have a history and intelligible roots in Nature.
From all that appears, this natural foundation entails that the logos
endiathetos and the logos proforikos are the ontological radicalization or
descriptive generalization of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier view that “perception
is a nascent logos” (“un logos à l’état naissant”) (Prim. Percp. 25/133). If this
is true, the two logoi together form his final alternative to all philosophies
of consciousness constituting or imposing meaning on Nature (l’idéalisme
de la signification).
Further, as with the example of the rose, it is not just the idea that
emerges from the interplay of flesh, but also its “typicality.” That is, analo-
gous to the way that the idea of the species “rose” is produced, multiple
interactions with the materials of the world eventually brought forth the
sense of, say, “triangle” by itself—distinct but not apart from its multiple
illustrations. Somewhere, sometime, some ancient Greek realized that the
concept of triangularity could be articulated without having to draw figures.
Abstraction was born, but as against Plato, it did not signify accession to
a heaven of Ideas. Rather, it served as a stunning example of one way that
the logos proforikos could clarify the logos endiathetos that, as noted above,
“calls for it” (VI 170/224). It was a movement from the pre-conceptual,
silent world of styles of things to the conceptual precision of this natural
inheritance and foundation.
The relationship between the two logoi also has consequences for
understanding that between the universal and the particular. As the exam-
ple of the rose and the species “rose” demonstrates, for Merleau-Ponty,
universality can be reached only in and through particularity. Rather, we
make of the latter a means of reaching the former “in virtue of that mys-
terious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable” (SNS
92/162). This is an affinity that makes metaphysical consciousness possible
(Ibid., 94/165) because it is that through which our lives are grounded in
Nature.
Furthermore, the ontology of the flesh has shown that the very con-
cepts of universal and particular need to be revised. For if it is true that
the universal can only be known through the particular, it is also the case
that the particular takes on universal significance. This is why in Freud’s
case of the Wolf Man, the color yellow can become a dimension of Being,
which is “universal dimensionality” (VI 236/289). As Merleau-Ponty states
in Signs, “each thing exists beyond itself, when each fact can be a dimen-
sion. . . . Colors, sounds, and things—like Van Gogh’s stars—are the focal
points and radiance of being” (15/22).10
Therefore, the same relationship of invisible meaning and its visible
expression exists in nonhuman flesh as well. To cite the well-known example
from The Visible and the Invisible:
As the vein bears the leaf from within, from the depths of its flesh,
ideas are the texture of experience, its style, first mute [the logos
endiathetos] and then uttered [the logos proforikos]. Like every style,
they are elaborated within the thickness of being. (VI 119/159–60)11
This is also the case, as Proust showed, for musical and literary ideas, for they
likewise present themselves according to a certain style before they are clari-
fied conceptually (NC 193). For example, when we hear the beginning notes
of a Mozart concerto, we are suddenly transported into the world of Mozart
without being able to conceptualize this style. We cannot define what makes
the music that of Mozart, but our bodies resonate to that invisible latency
pregnant in that particular musical “flesh.” In such cases, comprehension
becomes apprehension, which is why Merleau-Ponty states that perception
and understanding are such that comprehension is not constitution “in intel-
lectual immanence,” but instead apprehension by “coexistence, laterally, by
the style” (VI 188/242).
Since meanings are carnal and organic, bound to flesh, it follows that
there is no pure ideality. Pure ideality would be a product of the pensée de
survol and the forgetfulness of thinking in the flesh (VI 97/132). The use
of language, Merleau-Ponty says, is an activity that is always “the other side
of passivity” and a recovery of it (RC 119/165). Ideality is bound to history,
though he also repudiates historicism (RC 116–17/163). That is, meanings,
truths, and values are always of local origin, but are not circumscribed by
a certain time and place.
10. “. . . chaque chose est plus loin qu’elle-même, quand chaque fait peut être dimen-
sion. . . . Les couleurs, les sons, les choses comme les étoiles de Van Gogh, sont des foyers,
des rayonnements d’être.”
11. “Comme la nervure porte la feuille du dedans, du fond de sa chair, les idées sont la texture
de l’expérience; son style, muet d’abord, proféré ensuite. Comme tout style, elles s’élaborent
dans l’épaisseur de l’être.”
So far, we have focused exclusively on the role of the logos proforikos in

clarifying the logos endiathetos. Now we need to examine how Merleau-Ponty
describes the logos proforikos itself as all possible cultural forms of expression.
On his view, “All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short
every human use of the body, is already primordial expression” (S 67/84),12
and Lawrence Hass rightly stresses that Merleau-Ponty’s entire philosophy is
one of expression (2008, 146ff.). These multiple forms of expression possess
a substantial richness and complexity, which Merleau-Ponty describes at an
equally great length.13
Most of Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the logos proforikos focus on
language, painting, literature, science, politics, and history. As he sees it,
there is a mutual intimacy between all forms of expression because they
belong “to one sole order” and, as a result, they bring about “the junc-
tion of the individual and the universal” (S 73/91). Further, it is part of
this belongingness that all of these forms of expression and their creative
development mobilize a bodily esthesiology and, contrary to Descartes, they
consist of a perceptual interrogation of the flesh in which execution precedes
conception.
For example, when we write, we teach ourselves what we want to say.
The words chosen and their order are not the mechanical transcription of
fully formed thoughts. Likewise for the painter, as becomes clear in the case
of the slow-motion film of Matisse painting. The camera revealed the artist’s
brush hesitating over the canvas and attempting “ten possible movements”
before “crash[ing] down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line
necessary” (S 45/57).14
Because they belong to “one sole order,” all of these forms of expression
also exemplify one or more of five ways that Merleau-Ponty describes making
sense, the ways that ideas are brought into being. The first is institution,
which not only embodies the essential historicity of knowledge through the
sedimentation of meanings, but also opens up fields of operations and, as
with a painting, “contains, better than ideas, matrices of ideas . . . symbols
whose meaning we never stop developing” (S 77/96–97; cf. RC 42/63).
This process of development is, of course, temporal, and Merleau-Ponty
12. “Toute perception, toute action qui la suppose, bref tout usage humain du corps est déjà
expression primordiale.”
13. It is beyond the scope of this work to explore more than the major outcroppings of those
descriptions. For much greater detail, see Hamrick (1987, 40–61).
14. Merleau-Ponty’s view that execution precedes conception is best taken as an empirical
generalization that allows for exceptions. For instance, Michelangelo purportedly claimed that
he simply eliminated from the marble what was not David. However, if generalized, such an
account would raise serious difficulties for accounting for novelty and creativity, for the work
would be created before it is created.
takes time itself to be “the very model of institution: passivity-activity, it

continues because it has been instituted” (IP 36).15
The second way that sense is made is that of the Gestalt, the crystal-
lization of clarity against background horizons of indeterminacy. Just as a
figure cannot be torn from its context without changing its identity, so also,
ideas cannot be stripped of their historical and natural contexts without
similar dis-figurement. This fact is particularly visible in the case of values,
and it explains why there cannot be pure ideality. Freedom, equality, forms
of social order such as marriage, the inheritance of property, and the like,
take on different meanings in different contexts such that they can both
reinforce bourgeois power and, in a different matrix of social meanings,
defend the poor against exploitative power.
Merleau-Ponty’s own example of the dependence on context to under-
stand the value at its focal point concerns marriage and the family, just as
Samuel Butler in effect did in The Way of All Flesh. In discussing the ways
that materialism and idealism competed for an account of human beings and
values at the beginning of the twentieth century, Merleau-Ponty underscores
the way that idealists construed values as pure ideals revealed either through
a supernatural source or through human nature. In contrast to that “moral
gold standard” (S 226/287), Ingmar Bergman’s films, such as Scenes from
a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander, have considerable revelatory power
and precisely in terms of flesh and blood relationships between men and
women that assure proper historical and natural context. They vividly dem-
onstrate that our relationships with others are always historically freighted
with meanings—some explicitly acknowledged and many not—which are
nuanced, ambiguous, and open to interrogation.
The third way of bringing meanings into being is a convergence of
perspectives that, in the “Preface” of Phenomenology of Perception, is identi-
fied with rationality itself: “Rationality is precisely measured by the experi-
ences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say
that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges”
(PhP xix/xv).16 This image of sense making is found in both perceptual and
15. “Le temps est le modèle même de l’institution: passivité-activité, il continue, parce qu’il
a été institué.” Cf. IP 37: “Constitution . . . is almost the contrary of institution: the insti-
tuted has meaning without me, the constituted has meaning only for me and for the me of
this instant. . . . The instituted encroaches on its future, has its future, its temporality, [but]
the constituted has everything to do with me.” “Constituer . . . est presque le contraire
d’instituer: l’institué a sens sans moi, le constitué n’a sens que pour moi et pour le moi de
cet instant. . . . L’institué enjambe son avenir, a son avenir, sa temporalité, le constitué tient
tout de moi qui constitue.”
16. “Il y a rationalité, c’est-à-dire: les perspectives se recoupent, les perceptions se confirment,
un sens apparaît.”
cultural phenomena as perspectival content is “filled in” (Erfüllung) in the

apprehension of perceptual objects and for social phenomena such as unregu-
lated financial markets, terrorism, 9/11, the Iraq war, and so on. The process
may take a very short time in the case of confirming a veridical perception,
and a very long time in the case of more complex social phenomena.
Another way in which sense is made consists of “coherent defor-
mation,” a phrase borrowed from André Malraux. For Merleau-Ponty, the
phrase denotes the capacity of a certain form of expression such as paint-
ing or writing, to take up the history and sedimented meanings incarnated
in its traditions, and make them say something new. It rearranges “avail-
able significations . . . in a new sense and takes not only the hearers [in
the case of speech] but the speaking subject as well through a decisive step”
(S 91/114–15).17
The fifth means of making sense, which Merleau-Ponty sometimes
treats as synonymous with coherent deformation (Ibid.), consists of what
he terms “decentering and recentering,” mentioned briefly in Chapter II.
Particularly evident in the advance of mathematics and the sciences, this
process creates meaning by taking up existing views and doctrines—such as
Euclid’s geometry, Newton’s physics, or Marx’s social theories—and, instead
of falsifying them, reintegrating them into a more comprehensive whole
in which they retain partial truth.18 They become “classics,” or “secondary
truth”: “no one takes them literally, and yet new facts are never absolutely
outside their province, but [rather] call forth new echoes from them and
reveal new lustres in them” (S 11/16–17).19
Whether it is a question of discovering unsuspected dimensions of
meaning from the past, or opening up new fields of investigation in the
future, Merleau-Ponty provides an insightful description of at least one
experience of the achievement of clarity in what he later called the logos
17. “. . . des significations disponibles qui les ordonne à un sens nouveau et fait franchir aux
auditeurs, mais aussi au sujet parlant, un pas décisif.”
18. “Non-Euclidean geometries contain Euclid’s geometry as a particular case but not the inverse.
What is essential to mathematical thought, therefore, lies in the moment where a structure
is decentered, opens up to questioning, and reorganizes itself according to a new meaning
which is nevertheless the meaning of this same structure” (PM 127/178). “Les géométries non
euclidiennes contiennent celle d’Euclide comme cas particulier, mais non l’inverse. L’essentiel
de la pensée mathématique est donc à ce moment où une structure se décentre, s’ouvre à
une interrogation, et se réorganise selon un sens neuf qui pourtant est le sens de cette même
structure.” See also RC 44/64–65.
19. “On les reconnaît à ceci que personne ne les prend à la lettre, et que pourtant les faits
nouveaux ne sont jamais absolument hors de leur compétence, qu’ils tirent d’eux de nouveaux
échos, qu’ils révèlent en eux de nouveaux reliefs.”
proforikos. This description is an appropriate portrayal of the emergence of

sense by whatever means it is attained:
This experience of an event that suddenly becomes hollow, loses its

opacity, reveals a transparency and makes itself meaning forever, this
is constant in culture and in speech, and if one wanted to contest
it, one would no longer even know what one seeks. (PM 121/170)20
This is the experience of meaning liberated in ideality, no longer held cap-

tive in the thing and Nature.
If the activity of the logos proforikos presents us ever anew with “sym-
bols that we never stop developing” in our openness to the world, is there
a measure of intellectual progress? The last paragraph of Eye and Mind states
bluntly that “we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilizations or speak of
progress—neither in painting nor in anything else that matters . . . no
painting comes to be the painting . . . no work is ever absolutely completed
and done with” (OE 190/92).21 Yet, “each creation changes, alters, enlight-
ens, deepens, confirms, exalts, [and] recreates or creates in advance all the
others” (Ibid.).22
The impossibility of progress is the wrong answer even on
Merleau-Ponty’s own grounds because it is not the only concept of progress
or even the most defensible one. Merleau-Ponty is truer to his intuitions at
the end of his “Preface” to Signs. After surveying the contemporary political
situation, he concludes: “There circulates more truth than there did twenty
years ago in world capitalism and in world communism and between them.
History never confesses, not even its lost illusions, but it does not resume
them” (S 35/47).23 The concept of progress operative here is not one of
secure acquisition. Rather, it is negative in the sense of excluding answers
that do not work or are less open to a rich and diverse future than others.
This concept of progress has some similarities with Sir Karl Popper’s view
20. “Cette expérience d’un événement qui soudain se creuse, perd son opacité, révèle une
transparence et se fait sens pour toujours, elle est constante dans la culture et dans la parole,
et, si l’on voulait la contester, on ne saurait plus même ce que l’on cherche.”
21. “. . . ni en peinture, ni même ailleurs, nous ne pouvons établir une hiérarchie des ci-
vilisations ni parler de progrès . . . nulle peinture n’achève la peinture . . . nulle œuvre ne
s’achève absolument.”
22. “. . . chaque création change, altère, éclaire, approfondit, confirme, exalte, recrée ou crée
d’avance toutes les autres.”
23. “Il circule plus de vérité qu’il y a vingt ans dans le capitalisme mondial et dans le com-
munisme mondial et entre eux. L’histoire n’avoue jamais, et pas même ses illusions perdues,
mais elle ne les recommence pas.”
of the process of scientific discovery as one of “falsification” rather than

“verification,”24 and also characterizes the life of philosophy itself.
AMBIGUITIES
To conclude, there are two puzzles about Merleau-Ponty’s view of the twofold
logos that should be brought to light. The first one concerns achieving more
clarity about how for Merleau-Ponty the logos proforikos takes up and cre-
atively elaborates the logos endiathetos. For example, in the Nature lectures,
he asks whether the symbolism of language can shed light on the natural
symbolism of the body, since they appear to be of two different orders.
His answer is yes, because perception is a “language before language,” and
the “silent language of perception” is also interrogation and response. He
does not put it this way, but he could have phrased the same view as one
of chiasmatic reversibility: spoken language can take up and modulate the
“silent language of perception” because the latter’s structure of interrogation
and response lends itself to that articulation. What he does go on to say
is that “[i]t is in this sense and with these reservations that we can speak
of a logos of the natural world,” of which language is “a resumption . . . in
another architectonic. And all of historicity also” (N 219/282).25 However,
if language is indeed simply a resumption of the “silent language of percep-
tion” because they have similar structures of interrogation and response,
how can they belong to two separate orders? More clarity is needed about
their organic connection through their differences.
The author himself recognized this need. For instance, the penultimate
sentence of his retrospective summary of the third Nature course asks the
question, “What could indeed be the relationship of this tacit symbolism or
that of indivision, and the artificial or conventional symbolism that appears
to have the privilege of opening us to ideality, to truth?” To this question
he adds the final sentence, “The relationships of the explicit logos and the
logos of the sensible world will be the object of another series of courses”
(RC 131/180; translation altered).26
24. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson: 1959). See, for example,
N 86/120: “Certainly we do not ask science for a new, ready-made conception of Nature, but
we find in it what [we need] to eliminate false conceptions of Nature.” “Certes, il n’y a pas à
demander à la science une nouvelle conception de la Nature, toute faite, mais nous trouvons
en elle de quoi éliminer de fausses conceptions de la Nature.”
25. “C’est en ce sens et sous ces réserves qu’on peut parler d’un logos du monde naturel. . . . Le
langage comme reprise de ce logos du monde sensible dans une architectonique autre. Et toute
l’historicité aussi.”
26. “Quel peut bien être le rapport de ce symbolisme tacite ou d’indivision, et du symbolisme
artificiel ou conventionnel qui paraît avoir le privilège de nous ouvrir à l’idéalité, à la vérité?
Les rapports du logos explicite et du logos du monde sensible feront l’objet d’une autre série
de cours.” The English translation of the last sentence mangles it as follows: “The relation
between the explicit logos of the sensible world will form the topic of another series of courses.”
From all that appears, Merleau-Ponty was approaching a tentative

formulation of L’Origine de la vérité, announced as early as Sense and Non
Sense and the original title for what became The Visible and the Invisible,
namely, the task of “describing precisely the passage from perceptual faith to
the explicit truth that one encounters at the level of language, the concept,
and the cultural world” (SNS 94, n.13/165, n.1).27 Most unfortunately, death
prevented those courses from being given. Therefore, what may we deduce
from his course notes about what he could have added to a more precise
description of the linkage of the two logoi?
We believe that Merleau-Ponty’s texts permit us at least three preci-
sions. First, since the logos proforikos emerges out of the logos endiathetos,
the passage is not from relata existing in external relations with each other.
Rather, there is an internal relation of overlapping between the two. For
the same reason, the “passage” from the one to the other cannot consist of
the logos proforikos imposing meaning on a world without a logos endiathetos.
Inversely, second, since there is a real intelligibility about Nature that we
do not create, the “logos of the sensible world” that expresses it consists of a
“pre-knowing” whose object consists of a set of possibilities for the actualiza-
tion of cultural expression. What is actualized in creative expression does
not exist fully before it is brought into existence. Therefore, the twofold
logos consists of the ontological radicalization of
the two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung:

the founding term,—time, the unreflected, the fact, language, per-
ception—is first in this sense that the founded presents itself as
a determination or an explicitation of the founding, that which
forbids it to ever reabsorb it, and yet the founding is not first in
the empiricist sense, and the founded is not simply derived from it,
because it is across the founded that the founding manifests itself.’ ”
(PhP 394/451; translation altered)28
Therefore, a given geometrical object, its “intrinsic meaning,” does

not exist in Nature before its idealization. The triangle or the Pythagorean
Theorem, say, was not somehow fully formed and articulated, and waiting
27. “. . . de décrire précisément le passage de la foi perceptive à la vérité explicite telle qu’on
la rencontre au niveau du langage, du concept et du monde culturel.”
28. “. . . ce rapport à double sens que la phénoménologie a appelé Fundierung: le terme fon-
dant,—le temps, l’irréfléchi, le fait, le langage, la perception—est premier en ce sens que le
fondé se donne comme une détermination ou une explicitation du fondant, ce qui lui interdit
de le résorber jamais, et cependant le fondant n’est pas premier au sens empiriste et le fondé
n’en est pas simplement dérivé, puisque c’est à travers le fondé que le fondant se manifeste.”
The English translation inserts words not in the original text. E.g., “Fundierung: the founding
term, or originator.” The translation also never employs “founded” for “le fondé,” substituting
“the originated,” and uses “originator” for the “le fondant.”
to be disclosed through mathematical reasoning. Thinking that “the math-

ematical being had these properties before one even discovered them, [the]
passage to the world of essences, is retrospective illusion” (IP 96–97).29
To the objection that, say, trees had trunks of equal radii before geome-
try existed, Merleau-Ponty responds that such a claim would be meaningless.
In the perceived world, before geometry existed, there were no equal radii.
A radius is an idealization, and “there are no equal radii before idealiza-
tion” (Ibid., 97). The logos proforikos stands to the world of the sensible “as
Gebilde, with the ‘Logic’ that we produce” (VI 170/223).
At the same time, third, because the logos endiathetos calls for the logos
proforikos, “language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished
and did not obtain” (VI 176/230).30 The meaning, apparently, is that there
is something in the Natura naturans that pushes toward cultural expression,
that there is an empiétement that is also chiasmatic reversibility, a “dialectic
without synthesis” between Nature and culture, each transforming the other
(S 123/154). One urges the other toward fulfillment, and under its insistent
influence, the other brings it clarity and creative elaboration. Therefore,
even though the fully articulated triangle and its individual properties do
not exist in Nature apart from the logos proforikos of geometry, Nature still
has a basic meaning-in-outline that can be, and pushes to be, so expressed.
As noted above, “the pregnancy of geometric forms is intrinsically founded
(not culturally)” (VI 213/266). Not every expression is possible or equally
valuable, yet “the expression of what exists is an infinite task” (SNS 15/26).
The second puzzle, far more difficult to address, is the fate of the
logos endiathetos if human beings did not exist or else disappeared. Would
Nature still be meaningful? The fact that we do not impose sense on Nature
somehow suggests that our conscious activities are not a sufficient condition
of Nature being inherently meaningful, but is our existence a necessary
condition of such meaning?
Merleau-Ponty did not address this question directly, yet there are
some significant hints in Phenomenology of Perception. “In a certain man-
ner,” he writes, “all the triangles that will ever exist through encounters
with physical causality will have a sum of angles equal to two right angles,
even if men have unlearned geometry and if no one would remain who
knew it” (391/448).31 And we do know that he held that there could be
29. “L’idée [que] l’être mathématique avait ces propriétés avant même qu’on les découvrît, [le]
passage au monde des essences, c’est l’illusion rétrospective” (bracketed words in the original).
The reference here is to Bergson’s notion of “the retrograde movement of the true,” which we
will take up in Chapter VI, and which Bergson rejected.
30. “. . . le langage réalise en brisant le silence ce que le silence voulait et n’obtenait pas.”
31. “D’une certaine manière tous les triangles qui existeront jamais par les rencontres de la
causalité physique auront une somme d’angles égale à deux droits, même si les hommes ont
désappris la géométrie et s’il n’en reste pas un qui sache.”
and could have been a world without us, “a primordial being that is not
yet subject-being nor object-being” (RC 65–66/95; cf. IP172–73). There
is, on his view, a “primordial being” and, “as Schelling said, something
in Nature that makes it impose itself on God himself as an independent
condition of his operation. Such is our problem” (RC 65–66/95–96).32 The
flesh of the world produces us, and not the other way around. The preced-
ing discussion has also shown that, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, meanings are
objectively grounded—they are articulated culturally, but they emerge from
Nature. Therefore, the intelligibility of Nature is not a “psychic addition”
in Whitehead’s sense, and Nature pushes us to recognize its intelligibility
and to develop it creatively.
These facts point to the conclusion that, in the absence of human
beings as we know them, Nature for Merleau-Ponty would retain its inherent
intelligibility. Further, the likelihood that this would be his considered view
increases by way of a contrast with his earlier phenomenology. From the per-
spective of a philosophy of consciousness, a “world without consciousness”
would be either a world-with-subject-removed—that is, an abstraction—or
else a world as intentional correlate of consciousness without a consciousness
to sustain it, which is to say, a self-contradiction.
However, this line of reasoning does not settle the question of a logos
endiathetos without human beings because support for the opposite position
can also be mustered. It revolves around the facts that Merleau-Ponty fre-
quently says that the only Being of which it makes sense to speak is the
Being that we experience (l’Être perçu), and that he consistently seeks a
path between realism and idealism. Therefore, to say that an logos endiath-
etos could exist without any subject for whom it is there, seems to be a
too-realistic interpretation of meaning for him to endorse.
Attacking the problem indirectly can provide us at least with a pos-
sible solution, and supports the conclusion that, for Merleau-Ponty, the logos
endiathetos could exist “without us.” The solution turns on reinterpreting the
“us” from his earlier view of a transcendental, constituting consciousness, to
that of beings rooted in a long cosmological and biological history which
brought us about. For the question of the objective existence of Nature’s
intelligibility, the changed meaning of “us” emphasizes the interrelatedness
of everything in Nature, including ourselves. In turn, that interrelatedness
implies that this universe, this Nature, could not exist in its present form
without us as woven into it. Indeed, the capacity of Nature to generate
human life is one crucial part of the logos endiathetos that pushes for fulfill-
ment. On the other hand, this argument does not reach to possible universes
32. “Comme disait Schelling, il y a dans la Nature quelque chose qui fait qu’elle s’imposerait
à Dieu même comme condition indépendante de son opération. Tel est notre problème.” The
English translation does not capitalize “Nature.”
without sapient life forms. Whether Merleau-Ponty would hold that they
are also informed by a logos endiathetos is an open question.
However, we do know that Merleau-Ponty rejects one way of account-
ing for the objective intelligibility of Nature. This view consists of a God
as external spectator, “un penseur absolu du monde” (SNS 96/168), imposing
meaning on the world, including the finalism of a pre-formed teleology. It
is true that Merleau-Ponty, like Descartes or, very differently, Pascal, “finds
himself with the idea of God” (Bannon 1967, 169), but even though it is
“proper” for human beings to “think of God,” this “is not the same thing
as to say that God exists” (Prim. Percp. 41/151). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty
does not have the idea of God because of a lumen naturale, but because of
his academic context and personal history of growing up in Catholicism. His
personal history, including his reasons for breaking with the church, are not
relevant here. What is pertinent are his philosophical reasons for rejecting
the God of traditional (Christian) theism and what, if anything, he wished
to substitute for it. (His arguments do not extend to non-Western religions.)
Across Merleau-Ponty’s frequent references to God in both published
and unpublished writings, he gives three main reasons for rejecting the tra-
ditional concept of God as ens realissimum. First, as mentioned in passing
in Chapter II, the view of God as the absolute, eternal Spectator of the
universe is the ultimate form of the ontology of the object. To say that the
invisible is in the visible as its “lining and depth” is to reject an invisible
that would be wholly transcendent. Here, Merleau-Ponty sides more with
the view of the Logos as immanent, as in Stoic philosophy, than with the
traditional understanding of God as transcendent Creator of the Universe.
So his usage of the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos does not per se
involve a theistic interpretation, though the distinction between the two
logoi was important in early Christian theology.33 As we have seen, on his
view Leibniz’s philosophy is on the one hand the most extreme example of
the ontology of the object, and an unpublished note written a few weeks
before his death criticized Leibniz for being trapped in an ontology of the
object that prevented him from understanding the lived world, “the carnal
world,” “the chiasm and the Ineinander” (ESA II: 192). Yet, Merleau-Ponty
does admit that something changes with Leibniz when God is linked to the
system of monads and is bound to choose the best possible world. However,
33. “Logos” for the Stoics “designates as much the faculty of thought, interior to a man
(endiathetos), as the exterior expression (proforikos) of this thought through words and reason-
ing. Christian thinkers, such as Irenaeus or Tertullien, had perfectly grasped the Greek idea”
(Spanneut 1957, 310–11). Spanneut then cites scholarly disagreement about whether for the
Stoics there was “a religious resonance of this distinction between the interior logos and the
manifested logos.” Regardless, “the Fathers of the Church” made use of “these two steps of the
human logos and applied them, more or less easily, to the divine logos in order to explain the
generation of the Verb to pagan philosophy” (Ibid., 311). Theophilus was “the first to appeal
explicitly to the Stoic terms in his trinitarian theory” (Ibid., 314).
as opposed to the latter’s conception of how God is linked to the world,

Merleau-Ponty states in his essay, “Foi et bonne foi,” “The Incarnation
changes everything” (SNS 174/310).
The second reason is that the deity of traditional Christian theism is
inconsistent with the radical contingency of what exists. For Merleau-Ponty,
as we have seen, metaphysical knowledge reveals Nature as total contin-
gency, which is inconsistent with “the manifest content of religion and with
the positing of an absolute thinker of the world” (SNS 96/168).34
The third reason, closely linked to the previous one, is that God as
the “absolute thinker of the world” is inconsistent with moral consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty rejects externally imposed teleology—Leibniz’s pre-established
harmony is his standard example—partly because of his commitment to total
contingency, partly because of his view that life, consciousness, intelligence,
and so on, emerge from Nature, and perhaps especially because of its intoler-
able moral consequences. (Merleau-Ponty’s own “truth of the pre-established
harmony” is the chiasm [VI 262/315].)
More precisely, Merleau-Ponty regards Leibniz’s theodicy as the most
complete example of “explicative theology,” the enterprise of explaining
God’s relationship with the world by substituting a system of explanations
that “makes all the aspects of experience immediately compatible and com-
possible” (SNS 94/166). The cost of this compatibility and lack of contradic-
tion is the elimination of all paradoxes, dilemmas, irresolvable but legitimate
conflicts of interest, tragedies, and anguish in the moral life. In this regard,
Merleau-Ponty points out in his inaugural lecture to the Collège de France
that Jacques Maritain also rejects the idea of God as the author of cosmic
order and “who would consecrate not only all the world’s goodness but all the
world’s evil as well, who would justify slavery, injustice, the tears of children,
the agony of the innocent by sacred necessities, who would finally sacrifice
man to the cosmos as ‘the absurd Emperor of the world’ ”(E 47/64).35 He
then states that, for Maritain, the God of Christian believers is “the active
negation of all this” (Ibid., 64–65). Nonetheless, for Merleau-Ponty, the phi-
losopher has to keep pushing for an answer to the question of whether “the
natural and rational concept of God as necessary being is not inevitably that
of the Emperor of the world, whether without it the Christian God would
not cease to be the author of the world” (Ibid., 65).36
34. “Une telle métaphysique n’est pas conciliable avec le contenu manifeste de la religion et
avec la position d’un penseur absolu du monde.”
35. “. . . qui consacrerait tout le mal comme tout le bien du monde, qui justifierait l’esclavage,
l’iniquité, les larmes des enfants, l’agonie des innocents par des nécessités sacrées, qui, enfin,
sacrifierait l’homme au cosmos, et serait ‘l’absurde Empereur du monde.’ ”
36. “On doit se demander si le concept naturel et rationnel de Dieu comme Être nécessaire
n’est pas inévitablement celui de l’Empereur du monde, si sans lui le Dieu chrétien ne cesserait
pas d’être l’auteur du monde.”
Merleau-Ponty holds that both contingency and the concept of the

“best of all possible worlds” create problems for a theodicy, which “has not
advanced a step since Leibniz” (Ibid., 96/268).37 Therefore, in his unpub-
lished notes for his course on “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today,” he
concludes, “The God of Aristotle thinks itself. The God of Leibniz thinks
the world . . . in order to come to know Being; we must cease to think start-
ing from the ens realissimum . . . show the whole weakness of Theodicies”
(ESA II: 226).38 What is to be emphasized is “the existence of this world
as an unsurpassable fact which from the first solicits creative actualization
and therefore . . . [disallows] the point of view of a worldless God” (SNS
96/168).39
What instead of the worldless God? Is Merleau-Ponty’s position one of
a simple atheism? The answer is no, but at the same time, his reply is not
simple. In the discussion following his presentation of “Man and Adversity,”
Merleau-Ponty tells his interlocutors that he does not go around telling
people that he is an atheist because “that would transform into negation an
effort of [a] completely positive philosophical consciousness” (PC II: 369).
However, he adds, if people force him to declare whether he is an atheist,
he says “yes” (Ibid.). On the other hand, a bit later in the discussion, in
response to an opinion that the meanings of “atheist” and “atheism” are
context-dependent, Merleau-Ponty replies, “I only use it [“atheist”] when I
am provoked” (Ibid.). He then continues, “I have never written in black
and white: ‘I am an atheist.’ But the epoch is such that one is considered as
a believer until proof to the contrary. . . . The notion of [being an] atheist
has many historical connotations that it drags along with it, [and] that is
why I don’t speak of it” (Ibid., 370).40
In the end, it is more difficult to say what he holds than what he
rejects because he was always searching for novel ways to overcome the
37. As regards the “best of all possible worlds,” Merleau-Ponty argues in the unpublished
preparatory pages for his second Nature course that Descartes, unlike Leibniz, initially thought
this world to be the most perfect but changed his mind in the face of error. Descartes’ God
“is not the monarch of the best possible world” (ESA II: 222, n. 4).
38. “Le Dieu d’Aristote se pense. Le Dieu de Leibniz pense le monde . . . pour faire con-
naissance avec l’Être, il faut cesser de penser à partir de l’ens realissimum . . . montrer toute la
faiblesse des Théodicées.”
39. “. . . l’existence de ce monde-ci comme un fait insurpassable qui attire dès l’origine le
devenir créateur,—et donc . . . [récuse] le point de vue d’un Dieu sans monde.”
40. “Je n’ai jamais écrit noir sur blanc: ‘Je suis athée.’ Mais l’époque est telle que l’on est
considéré comme croyant jusqu’à preuve du contraire. . . . La notion d’athée a quantité de
connotations historiques, qu’elle entraîne avec elle, c’est pourquoi je n’en parle pas.” Later in
the discussion, Merleau-Ponty adds, “For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to
that which has long been crystallized under this name of God” (PC II: 371). “Pour moi, la
philosophie consiste à donner un autre nom à ce qui a été longtemps cristallisé sous ce nom
de Dieu.”
bifurcation of God and the world. For example, Être et monde states explicitly
that he prefers Pascal’s “hidden God” to that of Leibniz (ESA II: 225, nn.
4–5), and it is equally clear that, for Merleau-Ponty, this must be a “God”
hidden in the world, the Invisible dimension of the visible. It is also true
that Christianity continued to attract him to some degree because it was
uniquely about the Word made flesh and His death. This deity who assumed
the human condition stands over against the God of the philosophers as a
God who is on our side—the God for whom Bergson was searching, “the
God who is hidden in the suffering of the persecuted” (E 31/45), such that
“transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privi-
leged bearer” (S 71/88).41
In his 1958 interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Merleau-Ponty also
stated his belief that, although Catholicism is “closely tied to the ontology
of the object” and that he could not see how any other ontology would be
“compatible with the traditional forms of theology,” it remained true that
their best students in those days knew to reject traditional theology along
with other forms of absolute thought guided by ontologies of the object: they
recognized that “neither the philosophy of the Enlightenment, nor Marxism,
nor the philosophy of the ens realissimum is the truth” (TD 11/PC II: 298).42
However, he also believed that in practice, Catholicism, for example, is a
compromise between these traditional forms and a recognition of contin-
gency and facticity. Thus, he writes in La Nature, ou le monde du silence,
“The debate here is not between theology and non-theology . . . there are
theologians who see facticity [and] non-theologians who do not see it” (ESA
III: 157, n. 2).43
From all of this we can conclude that Merleau-Ponty rejected the
traditional God—Emperor of the World, Cosmic Spectator—but also that
he was not totally closed off to a new conception of God.44 In other words,
our Offenheit extends even to the notion of God as a subject for interroga-
tion. As Sartre reports in his memorial article, Merleau-Ponty “dreams of
this All-Powerful [Being] who would need men, who would be in question
in the depths of each of them and would remain total Being, the one that
intersubjectivity does not cease to institute infinitely, the only one that
we would lead to the end of his being and who would share with us all
the insecurity of the human adventure” (1964, 274–75). That sounds very
41. “La transcendance ne surplombe plus l’homme: il en devient étrangement le porteur

privilégié.”
42. “. . . ni la philosophie des lumières, ni le marxisme, ni la philosophie de l’ens realissimum
n’est la vérité.”
43. “Le débat n’est pas entre théologie et non-théologie . . . il y a théologiens qui voient la
facticité [et] des non-théologiens qui ne la voient pas.”
44. For more on this subject, see Van der Veken (1989, 205 ff.).
much like what attracts Merleau-Ponty to Bergson, but then Sartre adds,
“It is only a question, evidently, of a metaphorical indication” (Ibid., 275).
This addendum raises more questions than it answers. Does it mean
that the “Tout-Puissant” is a metaphor? That a God of any kind can be
on our side? That intersubjectivity—or, in the language of the later texts,
intercorporeity—can “institute infinitely” this God? And whatever “meta-
phorical” does denote here, is it true? There are no ready answers, but there
is one tantalizing clue. In the “Annexe” to The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty indicates that he examines human experience in order to
determine how “it opens us to what is not ourselves” (VI 159/211). Then he
says, “this does not even exclude the possibility that we find in our experience a
movement toward what could not in any event be present to us in the original and
whose irremediable absence would thus count among our originating experiences”
(Ibid.; italics in the original),45 although we should first “fix our vision on
what is apparently given to us” (Ibid.). Perhaps in the end we can get no
farther in understanding his openness to religious meanings than his remarks
in Eye and Mind, “the being of God is for us [the] abyss” (OE 177/56) and
“unfathomable God” (Dieu insondable) (Ibid., 177/57).
Whitehead does try to fathom the nature of God, but we will not
enter into that discussion here because it requires an explanation of his
process metaphysics. Instead, we now turn to two thinkers who have already
entered our reflections, substantially influenced both Merleau-Ponty’s and
Whitehead’s views of Nature, and form a bridge between them: F. W. J.
Schelling and Henri Bergson.
45. “Il n’est pas même exclu par là que nous trouvions en elle un mouvement vers ce qui ne saurait
en aucun cas nous être présent en original et dont l’absence irrémédiable compterait ainsi au nombre
de nos expériences originaires.”
V
THE SCHELLINGIAN
AND BERGSONIAN HERITAGE
The previous chapter has shown that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh

derives as much from literary figures and favored painters as it does from
specific philosophers. Yet, Schelling and Bergson served as especially impor-
tant formative influences for Merleau-Ponty’s views of Nature, the various
forms of its bifurcation, and the ways that he argued against the ontology
of the object and high-altitude thinking.
SCHELLING
Almost all of Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of Schelling occur in his retrospec-
tive summary of the Collège de France course on “The Concept of Nature”
(January–May 1957) and in its much longer exposition in Chapter IV of La
Nature, “The Romantic Conception of Nature.” How much he was able to
consult Schelling’s original texts (1856–1861) is not clear, but he does make
frequent use of Karl Jaspers’s Schelling, which appeared two years before the
course, and Karl Löwith’s Nietzsche, Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the
Same, which links the title figure’s thought to Kant, Hegel, and Schelling,
and which appeared the year before the course. Merleau-Ponty also had at
his disposal S. Jankélévitch’s Schelling. Essais (Paris: Aubier, 1946). This col-
lection comprised the sole French translations of Schelling’s writings that he
could access, and contained excerpts from several works from different periods
of Schelling’s life.1
1. These works include: “The System of Transcendental Idealism . . . Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature . . . Von der Weltseele . . . Darstellung des Philosophischen Empirismus . . . and Philosophical
Investigations Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom. . . . In addition, Jankélévitch prepared
a partial translation of the 1811 version of Schelling’s Die Weltalter. These translations are
generally acknowledged to be inadequate” (N 290, n. 5 [translator]). This listing is mostly
correct. Von der Weltseele appeared in 1798 and was later combined with an 1806 essay titled
“On the Relation of the Real and the Ideal in Nature.” Of the two works, only the latter
article is included in Jankélévitch’s book (Marquet 1992, 2087a).
123
These bibliographical details are important because those diverse works

embodied different philosophical projects with their own logics.2 Although
there are links between them, they cannot be harmonized. Merleau-Ponty’s
commentary on Schelling does not recognize this fact, and instead takes
from different texts what he finds valuable for his own ontology. In what
follows, we will trace the principal themes of the discussions of Schelling
in La Nature and the Résumés de cours. We shall see that Merleau-Ponty
is primarily interested in the earlier Naturphilosophie (1797–1800) of this
“prince of romanticists” (Royce 1892, 151), but there are also references
to the subsequent transcendental idealism. In addition, later texts such as
the Freedom essay of 1809 contain passages that express themes central to
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh.
In La Nature, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Schelling begins with his
point of departure in Kant’s critical philosophy, especially in the Critique of
Judgment. Merleau-Ponty observes that, as noted in Chapter II, Kant did not
manage to extricate himself entirely from the Cartesian concept of nature
(N 36/59). Nature remains a constructum, but by consciousness (the subject)
rather than by God. By contrast, Kant argues against God as Natura naturans
through his criticisms of the cosmological argument. For Kant, as the First
Critique expresses it, “[u]nconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably
require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable
abyss [Abgrund]” (A 613/B641).
Speculative philosophy, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, is unable to know
or even to conceive God except negatively. Yet Kant does not resort to a
negative theology any more than he does to a negative knowledge of things
in themselves. Since, on his view, (conceptual) knowledge is limited to the
data of sensory intuition, another unbridgeable abyss opens up between the
phenomenal object, or consciousness, and the realm of noumena. This abyss
is what lies between the realm of truth—that is, what can be known via
the application of the categories of the understanding and the pure forms of
sensibility to the manifold of sensory intuition—and the noumenal realm of
goodness, or value. As he indicates at the end of Part II of his Introduction
2. Roughly speaking, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie spanned the years 1797–1800, which then led
to his system of transcendental idealism (1801–1809), which then developed into his “identity
philosophy” (1809–), and ended with The Ages of the World of 1811, 1813, and 1815, which
then turned into his late philosophy. One key example of the differences is that, in the early
texts, the transcendental Fichtean perspective is combined with the Naturphilosophie as two
sides of the same project. The productive force of the I reflects the productive activity of
Natura naturans. Yet, in the Ages of the World, within the period of the Identity philosophy,
transcendental and natural philosophies are combined in one single perspective. (We are
indebted to Antoon Braeckman for this information.) The Identity philosophy was developed
to provide a foundation for the earlier Naturphilosophie.
THE SCHELLINGIAN AND THE BERGSONIAN HERITAGE 125
to the Third Critique, no “transition from the sensible to the supersensible”

is possible (14–15). However, he immediately adds that the noumenal realm
of the Good, as the seat of moral imperatives, should contribute to our
knowledge of what is true and bring the True under the influence of the
Good—“i.e., the concept of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense
the purpose enjoined by its laws.” Therefore, he concludes, there must be a
principle of unity for “the supersensible [things in themselves] that underlies
nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practi-
cally” (Ibid., 15). Hence, the fact that we are free offers us a living symbol
of the possibility of knowing things in themselves, including God. “In the
end,” Merleau-Ponty observes, “by way of morality, Kant lets the old ontol-
ogy subsist” (N 37/60).3
For Schelling by contrast, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, what Kant
termed the “abyss” is God. Or rather, God is not simply an abyss, but he is
“what exists without reason [grundlos Existierende],” as Jaspers puts it (1955,
129). As with Spinoza’s concept of Substance as causa sui, Schelling’s God
“is a sort of pure, unmotivated surging-forth,” the motive of which cannot be
explained by any appeal to essence” (N 37/60). Correlatively, for Schelling,
speculative reason could no longer be satisfied with the Kantian idea of an
ens realissimum. Speculative reason opens itself to an infinite of existence in
which the finite has a dignity that comes from being produced within the
infinite—as Merleau-Ponty phrases it, “by an internal scission, the result of
a fecund contradiction” (N 37/60).
Because for Schelling the finite is not a negation of the infinite—
Omnis determinatio est negatio—the former cannot be deduced logically from
the latter. This means that, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the relationship of
Natura naturans to Natura naturata cannot be an intransitive, “one-way” rela-
tion (“n’est plus à sens unique”) (N 37/61). Second, because the infinite is
the abyss, the Natura naturans-Natura naturata relationship needs the world
as its contradiction to which it will give rise. “The naturata is not a dead
effect, and Nature is not a product” (N 38/61).4 Therefore, Nature is both
active productivity and passive product, never-ending productivity of life
expressed in its individual products that, however, it always overflows. This
it does by an internal division against itself; there is a “double movement
of expansion and contraction,” and Merleau-Ponty cites with approval Karl
Löwith’s description (1997, 148) of this double movement as “respiration”
3. “Finalement, par le biais de la morale, Kant laisse subsister la vieille ontologie.” “Way” is
too nondescript a translation of “biais.” “Expedient” or “device” would have been much closer
to Merleau-Ponty’s meaning.
4. “Par sa définition, comme Abgrund, il appelle le terme contradictoire qu’il va produire. Le
naturé n’est pas un effet mort, et la Nature n’est pas un produit.”
(N 38/61),5 which finally ends only with death. Here, then, we have a rich
source for Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of l’être brut,6 reversibility, activity =
passivity, and the inspiration and expiration of Being.
Much after the period of the Naturphilosophie, in the 1809 Freedom
essay, Schelling’s own word for this movement of inspiration and expiration
is “Konspiration.” He describes it as a “unity and conspiracy.” He compares
the feeling of being “out of accord with the whole” to being “inflamed
by inner heat of sickness” (2006, 70). Drawing on its etymological root,
“spiritus”—“spirit” or “breath”—or Geist, is the “breathing out of the dark
abyss of nature into form and the simultaneous inhaling of this ground, the
retraction of things away from themselves. The conspiracy is a simultaneous
expiration and inspiration, and each thing of nature is both inspired yet
expiring” (Wirth 2003, 2).
The third reason why Schelling rejects Spinoza’s interpretation
of the Natura naturans-Natura naturata relationship is also resumed in
Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology. Whereas for Spinoza all particular modes
of substance are manifestations of the distinct attributes of either matter
or spirit, for Schelling, any given phenomenon of Nature contains both
“reality” and “ideality”: “The circulation between the corporeal and the
spiritual . . . is one and the same substance. . . . An image or inner spirit
of life constantly emerges out of the corporeal and it always again becomes
embodied through a reverse process” (2000, 62).7
In this light, the detachment from Nature that is characteristic of the
“pensée de survol” and the resulting ontology of the object is unhealthy for
both ourselves and for the Nature that gets degraded into mere objectivity.
Hence, the title of the present work is meant to reflect both the subjectivity
of Nature as well as caring for it in order to avoid that unhealthy detach-
5. Merleau Ponty refers to the French translation of Löwith’s text. Compare also Merleau
Ponty’s description of falling asleep: “I am breathing deeply and slowly in order to summon
sleep, and suddenly it is as if my mouth were connected to some great lung outside myself
which alternately calls forth and forces back my breath. A certain rhythm of respiration, which
a moment ago I voluntarily maintained, now becomes my very being” (PhP 211–12/245). “Je
respirais lentement et profondément pour appeler le sommeil et soudain on dirait que ma
bouche communique avec quelque immense poumon extérieur qui appelle et refoule mon
souffle, un certain rythme respiratoire, tout à l’heure voulu par moi, devient mon être même.”
6. Schelling’s recognition of “l’être brut,” that “primordial being” in which we are enveloped
antecedent to distinctions between subject and object, is one of many subjects on which
Merleau-Ponty felt a strong affinity with his predecessor. This theme, discussed early in the
first Nature course, reflects Merleau-Ponty’s belief that Nature is a necessary and privileged
access to ontology.
7. An extremely important consequence of Schelling’s reinterpretation of Spinoza consists
of “the revelation of deep ecology, of the absolute subjectivity of nature. Schelling sought to
replace ‘dead, blind substance’ with ‘living substance’ ” (Wirth 2003, 93). Elsewhere, he adds
that “Nature, the infinite complication of bodies,” consists of “an endlessly creative expres-
sion” (Ibid., p. 151).
ment. From that perspective, there is something wonderfully symbolic about

Antoine Roquentin in La Nausée who does get nauseated as he confronts
Nature (the dark roots of the chestnut tree) as pure en soi. Schelling and,
we believe, Merleau-Ponty as well, would agree with Heidegger that a new
Gestell is necessary for Nature to replace the current paradigm of a “stand-
ing reserve” (Bestand) of usable resources, which so clearly depends on the
ontology of the object (1977b, 17). It is not certain what Merleau-Ponty
would say on this score, but the Schellingian view is certainly consistent
with his ontology of Nature.
This rift in the unitary fabric of matter and spirit also leads to the
sterility of philosophy itself. Schelling writes, “The entire new European
philosophy since its beginning (with Descartes) has the common defect
that nature is not available for it and that it lacks a living ground” (2006,
26). Both “Spinoza’s realism” and Leibniz’s “idealism” are equally abstract.
For Schelling, idealism “is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only
both together can constitute a living whole” (Ibid.).
In the earlier Naturphilosophie, which provides Merleau-Ponty with
much inspiration for his concept of l’être brut and the depths of Being,
God is the ground of life, and this life within God is termed erste Natur.
Merleau-Ponty describes it as “beyond the World and on this side of God”
(N 38/61). Erste Natur is the “basic material of all life and existence, accord-
ing to Schelling and Nietzsche alike [that] is the terrible: a blind power
and force, a barbaric principle that can be overcome but can never be
eliminated” (Löwith 1997, 149).8
Because it can never be eliminated, this dark, barbaric Nature “can-
not remain outside phenomenology” (S 178/225), and in The Visible and
the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty attempts to include it by portraying “flesh,”
that “element” and “basic ‘stuff’ of all Being” (VI 139/184), in very similar
terms. For example, in a working note from November 1960, he describes
Nature (the title of the note) as “Existential eternity. The indestructible,
the barbaric Principle” (VI 267/321). This “barbaric Principle” is very close
to Whiteheadian creativity that has no form of its own.
Much after the early Naturphilosophie, Schelling would add that Nature
“comes out of what is blind, dark, and unspeakable in God. . . . Nature is not
God. For nature only belongs to what is necessary in God and, strictly speak-
ing, God is called God only in accordance with its freedom” (2000, 31). On
his view, this “barbaric principle . . . when overcome but not annihilated, is
the foundation of all greatness and beauty” (Ibid., 106). The internal scission
through which the ceaseless productivity of erste Natur expresses itself in its
passively resisting products that it overflows is inherently conflictual. That is,
it inserts an inevitable destruction and chaos into creation.
8. Merleau-Ponty paraphrases this text, the correct version of which, cited above, is provided
in the English translation of La Nature at p. 290, n. 8.
Erste Natur stands opposed to philosophies of reflection; it is the Being

that precedes all reflection on it, and here also, it is not difficult to grasp its
impact on Merleau-Ponty. As the oldest element, it makes up “an abyss of
the past” 9 that persists in us and in all other entities. It is thus the key for
comprehending what Schelling later referred to as his earlier “negative phi-
losophy” in which he led every rational enterprise to its dark, unintelligible
source in an attempt to show that the first principle of any discourse cannot
itself be founded or constituted by reason. As the Freedom essay phrases
it, the erste Natur “is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the
irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest
exertion but always remains in the depths” (2006, 34).
Erste Natur therefore raises questions of both knowledge and value.
For Schelling, it is at the basis of a unity of the True and the Good, fact
and value, unavailable to Kant’s critical philosophy, and Merleau-Ponty is
concerned with both halves of this unity. On the one hand, he tells us that
Schelling seeks the explanation of this “pre-being,” which, as soon as we
appear, is always “already there.” This “pre-being,” what exceeds our “con-
sciousness of Being,” is for Merleau-Ponty what Schelling wants to make
the object of rigorous thought (N 38/61–62)—though it is not clear what
“think” means here. We shall return to this problem below. On the other
hand, in terms of value, Merleau-Ponty follows Schelling in noting that
goodness is entirely consistent with the terrifying character of erste Natur.
Schelling holds that erste Natur is “in God as a preliminary condition,”
and its terrifying character can take the form of divine anger and “destruc-
tive fire.”10 Schelling therefore reproaches eighteenth-century thinkers for
having forgotten the terrifying, barbaric character of erste Natur, a judg-
ment with which Merleau-Ponty concurs by characterizing the eighteenth
century as “the epoch when we lost sight of the principle of anger and
selfishness” (N 38/62), and he cites with approval Schelling’s opinion that
the eighteenth-century drive toward knowledge and enlightenment made
people into mere images.11
9. Merleau-Ponty cites Löwith (1997,146) for this description. However, Schelling himself
writes, “Nature is an abyss of the past. This is what is oldest in nature, the deepest of what
remains if everything accidental and everything that has become is removed” (2000, 31).
10. Jaspers (1955, 380), cited at N 38/62 (but the reference is missing in the English transla-
tion). Schelling himself discusses God’s “devouring fire” (e.g., at Exodus 24:17 and Deuteronomy
4: 24) in The Ages of the World (2000, 21).
11. It is remarkable that neither thinker qualifies his claim with any discussion of, or even
reference to, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 or the terror following the French Revolution—
and this in spite of the fact that, as seminary students in Tübingen, Schelling, Hegel, and
Hölderlin had a keen interest in the French Revolution and its repercussions. See Schelling,
Sämmtliche Werke (1856) I: 243.
How does this intuition of erste Natur apply to the Natura naturata
that we find before us? Schelling uses §76 of the Critique of Judgment as
the point of departure for his answer. In that text Kant argues that the
phenomenon of life could not be explained mechanistically because the
whole organism has a priority over its parts. What can be explained, natu-
ral (mechanical) causality, applies only to relationships between the parts
and cannot be added from the exterior to the interior of the organism to
make its development intelligible. For Kant, such knowledge would be but
a “dream,” as Schelling notes.
Schelling, by contrast, “wants to think this blind production, the
result of which has the air of being built with concepts [that is, as if it
were externally designed]” (N 39/63).12 Merleau-Ponty then notes that, for
Schelling, although this natural production may seem teleological, it is actu-
ally a “blind mechanism” (Ibid.).13 Likewise, Merleau-Ponty adds, Bergson
holds the same idea in Creative Evolution when he rejects “both mechanism
and finalism equally” (Ibid.).
Merleau-Ponty does not spend much time discussing this aspect of
Schelling’s thought, but we should note that the kind of teleology that
Schelling and Merleau-Ponty reject—and Bergson as well—consists of what
Merleau-Ponty usually refers to as “finalism.” That view holds that the end
of the whole of Nature is already contained in the beginning and/or that
particular fixed ends already exist before the observable stages of the natural
processes that lead up to them. It is the view that “the concept of this pur-
posiveness must have preceded [natural] production itself” (Schelling 1978,
216).14 Refusing to accept this doctrine is not inconsistent with holding that
there is purpose operating in Nature—for instance, that certain animals
would develop hands or a certain color of skin or feathers because of their
survival use value. Moreover, Schelling’s portrayal of the “deduction of the
dynamic series of stages” of Nature shows it to be far more tentative and
open, so to say, than finalist explanations would allow:
12. “Schelling, au contraire, veut penser cette production aveugle dont le résultat a pourtant
l’air d’être bâti avec des concepts.”
13. Schelling’s own text runs as follows: “For the peculiarity of nature rests upon this, that in
its mechanism, and although itself nothing but a blind mechanism, it is nonetheless purposive”
(1978, 215). The earlier Naturphilosophie puts it this way: “[Y]ou destroy all idea of Nature from
the very bottom, as soon as you allow the purposiveness to enter her from without, through
a transfer from the intelligence of any being whatever . . . the unity of things . . . can have
become teleological in your own understanding” (1988, 34).
14. For Merleau-Ponty, the conception of teleology as finalism “shares the fate of mechanism:
these are two artificial ideas [that is, by purpose or by chance]. Natural production remains
to be understood otherwise” (RC 83/117). “partage le sort du mécanisme: ce sont deux idées
artificialistes. La production naturelle reste à comprendre autrement.”
Organization and life are entirely dependent upon chemical condi-

tions. Already long ago, Nature made the first chemical sketches in
the so-called inorganic world for the formations which it produces
in the organic. The universal natural operations and those processes
which are constantly underway must be seen as the first rudiments
of all organization. (2004, 57)
It is true that Schelling tries to show how an earlier stage of life is a pre-
liminary one for the stages following, and he interprets natural forces as
ultimately leading to organic life, but this is quite different from, and does
not imply, finalism.
Second, in a parallel way, Schelling rejects mechanism as a complete
account of Nature, yet he also holds that Nature is a “blind mechanism.”
That is, mechanism as a doctrine is not entirely false, but since all of Nature
is both real and ideal, material and spiritual, mechanism is an abstraction
from the whole. For Schelling, as Jason Wirth states, “mechanical movement
is a special case of life itself. . . . [I]f one begins with the Organism, with
the idea of nature as a Whole, then the illusion of mechanical life is just
a special case of the conspiracy of life” (2003, 95).15 As a result, Schelling
reversed the eighteenth-century view that, if one begins with some type of
mechanical motion, life can be best understood as a supplemental animat-
ing principle added on. Merleau-Ponty also rejects this view because adding
life to matter is inconsistent with his conception of mind and body as dual
expressions of flesh.16
Schelling then states that, in a passage that sounds very like
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of empiétement, it would be equally difficult to
comprehend how we could ever realize our purposes freely and consciously
in the external world, “unless a susceptibility to such action were already
established in the world, even before it becomes the object of a conscious
act, by virtue of that original identity of the unconscious [necessity] with
the conscious activity [freedom]” (Ibid., 214).
15. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s comment that “Mechanism affirms a natural artificial, and final-
ism affirms an artificial natural” (N 85/119). “Le mécanisme affirme un artificiel naturel, et le
finalisme affirme un naturel artificiel.”
16. There is a echo of Schelling’s view in some contemporary attempts to avoid “additive”
theories of mind, as well as in Henri Bergson’s protest against privileging “inert” matter to which
“life” would be added. For the former, see, for example, John McDowell (1998). Schelling also
rejects mechanism on a divine scale as well. He adds that “God is not a god of the dead but
of the living. It is not comprehensible how the most perfect being could find pleasure even
in [producing] the most perfect machine possible. . . . The procession [Folge] of things from
God is a self-revelation of God” (2006, 18). Bergson also argued against the primacy of inert
matter to which life would be added. See, for example, La pensée et le mouvant (2005, 101).
For Schelling—and Merleau-Ponty—if all of consciousness is purpo-

sive, then the unity of consciousness and unconsciousness can appear “only
in a product that is purposive, without being purposively brought about” (2003,
215). Nature is just this kind of product, and this is, in fact, the basis of
teleology itself. On Schelling’s view, it is only in Nature that we can learn
how to understand the original unity of freedom and necessity. Nature,
although not produced freely or according to a purpose, manifests itself as
purposeful production.
On Schelling’s view, only transcendental idealism can explain the
contradiction “whereby one and the same product [of Nature] is at once a
blind product, and yet is purposive.” These can be joined only in a kind of
natural production “in which conscious and unconscious activity are united”
(Ibid., 216, 217). Consciousness and unconsciousness, freedom and necessi-
ty, mechanism and purpose unite in what he calls an “intellectual intuition”
(Ibid., 214), a phrase he took over from Fichte but which he applied to all
of Nature, in contrast to a Kantian sensible intuition. Therefore, Schelling
holds, “Nature, in its blind and mechanical purposiveness” presents “an
original identity of the conscious and unconscious activities,” and the objec-
tive of his entire science was precisely to explain “how the ultimate ground
of the harmony between subjective and objective becomes an object to the
self itself” (Ibid., 217).17 It is in an intuition that is “exhibitable in the intelli-
gence itself” that this occurs, and it is by means of such an intuition that the
entire problem of transcendental philosophy can be resolved, that is, “that
of explaining the congruence between subjective and objective. . . . Every
organism is a monogram of that original identity, but in order to recognize
itself in that reflected image, the self must already have recognized itself
directly in the identity in question” (Ibid., 218).
We cannot investigate Schelling’s transcendental idealism in detail
because that would diverge too far from Merleau-Ponty. Instead, we will
restrict ourselves to the question of knowledge involved in Schelling’s proj-
ect of thinking the “pre-being” of erste Natur. First, he holds that such think-
ing cannot proceed by means of explanations. As he sees it, explanations
inevitably fail because they are based on concepts, which are constructs of
the intellect. On his view, eighteenth-century thinkers mistakenly identified
understanding with explanation and Reason with intellect, such that Nature
was transformed into a detached Object for investigation and manipulation.
In other words, the reduction of understanding to explanation and Reason
17. J.-F. Marquet points out that Schelling copies “rather clumsily [gauchement] the dialectic
of ‘observed self’ and ‘observing self’ so characteristic of the Wissenschaftslehre [of Fichte], and
which, here, badly recovers the dynamic schema of ‘powers’ (Potenzen) where the philosopher
recognizes more and more the nerve of his own method” (1992, 2087a).
to intellect lay at the origin of the ontology of the object. By itself, for
Schelling, the intellect cannot penetrate the external shell of reality to
its terrible core; to do so requires a bit of madness to experience. A gap
opens up between explanation and understanding (2003, 103).18 Therefore,
Merleau-Ponty concludes that, despite his claim that Schelling sought a way
to think our connection with erste Natur, Schelling’s alternative to explain-
ing the erste Natur was to “live and feel” this Being—“Il faut la vivre et
l’éprouver” (N 39/63).
Commenting on this passage, Robert Vallier asks, “How can a reflexive
philosophy of consciousness ever secure a purchase on it [Nature]?” Does
not such an enterprise transmute living Nature into a “dead product” of
thought? He then praises Schelling “as a true phenomenologist” because
“for him, the question is not to think this activity . . . but rather ‘to live
[leben] and to experience [erleben] it’ ” (2000, 92).
There are two basic problems with this way of conceiving the rela-
tionship of reflection and Nature. First, to ask how reflection can “secure a
purchase” on Nature already implies a fundamental separation, establishing
external relations between them. The second problem is that living and
experiencing Nature may be the first thing a phenomenologist does, but
it is certainly not the last, because the phenomenologist is a philosopher.
As Merleau-Ponty himself puts it, philosophy “is the invitation to re-see
the visible, to re-speak speech, to re-think thought.” Adhering “simply to
each visible, to each namable, to each thinkable,—that would not be to
philosophize, but to live”19 (NC 376).
It is true that, anterior to all reflection and conceptual explication,
Schelling wants to reach “ ‘the non-known,’ the Ungewusste, not a science
of Nature, but a phenomenology of prereflexive Being” (N 41/66).20 He also
does not wish to take refuge in some “mystical faculty” because we have
already seen that he wanted to preserve rather than emasculate reason.
He holds that, as Merleau-Ponty phrases it, we “rediscover” Nature in our
18. In The Visible and the Invisible, there is an echo of Schelling’s belief when Merleau-Ponty
states that reflection is no longer perception, but the thought of perception. As noted earlier,
reflection converts our “perceptual faith” that we reach the things themselves into thought
about this connection, thought that eliminates all perceptual incompossibilities, enigmas,
paradoxes, and obscurities (30/51). Nonetheless, for the reasons given above, Merleau-Ponty
takes a more generous view of concepts than Schelling does. His considered view here would
be that Schelling has at least the merit of pointing out the dangers of reflection abstracted
from the constructions of experience.
19. “C’est l’invitation a re-voir le visible, a re-parler la parole, a re-penser le penser”; “simple-
ment à chaque visible, à chaque nommable, à chaque pensable,—ce qui ne serait pas philoso-
pher, mais vivre.”
20. “. . . le ‘non-su,’ l’ ‘Ungewusste,’ non pas une science de la Nature, mais une phénomé-
nologie de l’Etre pré-réflexif.”
pre-reflective perceptual life” (N 39/63). Therefore, we must “retrieve the

prereflexive” (N 51/78).
However, as Merleau-Ponty himself elaborated in great detail, percep-
tion is not an exclusively natural activity. Thus, Schelling’s problem is also
that of Merleau-Ponty: the unreflected immediacy of experience to which
we return is not, and cannot be, an unreflected prior to reflection. Instead,
it is the unreflected as the object of reflection: we have no “pure and abso-
lutely unexpressed life.” On the contrary, “the unreflected only begins to
exist for us through reflection” (Prim. Percp. 30/138). Since coincidence is
only partial, to think that we can reach a pure immediacy of experience is
to succumb to “the myth of original indivision and coincidence as return”
(VI 267/320). Furthermore, philosophy itself requires reflection. Far from
being a “useless repetition of life,” philosophy saves life from sliding into
“ignorance of itself” (Prim. Percp. 19/127).
For Merleau-Ponty, Schelling’s project of rediscovering the imme-
diacy of our contact with Nature is also problematic because he translates
indivisibility as identity: “Because I am identical to Nature, I understand it
just as well as my own life” (N 40/63).21 And since for Schelling percep-
tion reflected upon gives us only the external envelope of things instead
of allowing us to enter into them, recovering that originary meaningfulness
of external Nature requires us to attempt to recover “our own nature” as
undivided when we perceive (Ibid.).22
There is an inherent difficulty in self-understanding that parallels that
of understanding our original unity with Nature. The problem is that, just
as the ceaseless productivity of Nature expresses itself in passively resistant
products that it always transcends, so, too, does our understanding differenti-
ate itself in self-knowledge into subject and object. The original identity has
been lost, and “the history of self-consciousness [is] the attempt of the self to
lay hold of itself again in its unity” (Vallier 2000, 95). Consciousness medi-
ates itself through its own self-objectifications. There is thus a primitive and
necessary unconsciousness in our self-identity, its own “punctum caecum” that
consists of the “originary unity” from which consciousness emerges—“its own
unconscious past” (Ibid., 95–96). In addition, analogous to the way that a
21. “Tant que je suis identique à la Nature, je la comprends aussi bien que ma propre vie.”
Merleau-Ponty cites Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. In the English translation, the
passage is on p. 36.
22. Cf. N 46/72: “The philosophy of Schelling seeks to restore a sort of indivision between us
and Nature considered as an organism, indivision conditioned by [the] indivision of subject-object.
But it admits that this indivision is inevitably broken by reflection, and that it is a question
of ‘re-establishing’ this unity.” “La philosophie de Schelling cherche à restituer une sorte
d’indivision entre nous et la Nature considérée comme un organisme, indivision conditionnée
par indivision subjet-objet. Mais elle [la philosophy de Schelling] admet que cette indivision
est inévitablement rompue par la réflexion, et qu’il s’agit de ‘rétablir’ cette unité.”
product of natural productivity cannot grasp that productive activity, neither

can a product of thought represent fully the self’s activity that produced it.
Merleau-Ponty’s entire ontology is an attempt to recover that primary
indivision in Being and find an adequate philosophy, beyond the limits of
phenomenology, to think that indivision. It is indisputable that reflection
comes after and disrupts the pre-reflective spontaneity of life in which it
intervenes. It disengages us “from the effective unfolding of our perceptions
and from our perception of the world . . . we cease being one with the
concrete flux of our life” (VI 45/70).23 This is a fact that, as Hume liked to
say, is “pretty obvious of itself.” Therefore, either consciousness is blind to
its origins or, if it attempts to recover them, “it can only project itself into
them” (S 153/193). As Toadvine says nicely, reflection does not “break with
nature,” in the sense of being a Kantian antiphysis, but rather is “nature’s
recapitulation at the level of consciousness” (2009, 119). Nonetheless,
reflection is incapable of grasping the “excess of Being” beyond its own
objectifying activity and cannot transcend the subject-object structure of
experience to reach the “excess of Being” (Ibid.).
Merleau-Ponty draws two lessons from this relationship of reflection
to the flux of experience and to Nature. The first one is the necessity
of the “hyper-reflection” (sur-réflexion) described in Chapter II that would
take into account both the immediacy of experience and our reflections on
it. Second, the claim that our indivision from Nature is broken because
reflection disrupts the immediate flux of experience follows only if what
we mean by indivision is identity, which is what Schelling holds, or the
undifferentiated immediacy of experience. What is so important about the
écart in this context is that it demonstrates simultaneously indivision with-
out identity. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it in another context, there is a
“silent knowing” that “obliges [us] to say that man is the becoming con-
scious of natural productivity, and becomes Nature in distancing [himself]
from Nature in order to know it” (RC 76/107; translation altered).24 And
although Merleau-Ponty thinks of the écart in the relationship of the sent-
ant and the sensible, perhaps he would also recognize a similar relationship
between reflection and the sentant itself as it becomes that which is given
in self-awareness. If so, because coincidence would still be only partial, the
immediacy of experience would still be present in a second sense, as an
affective, meaningful component of experience.
23. “. . . du déroulement effectif de nos perceptions et de notre perception du monde . . . que

nous cessions de nous confondre avec le flux concret de notre vie.” (In the ellipsis, the phrase
“que nous nous contentions de leur essence” was left out of the English translation.)
24. “. . . oblige à dire que l’homme est le devenir conscient de la productivité naturelle, et
devient Nature en éloignant la Nature pour connaître.” The English translation runs, “obliging
us to say that man is the conscious development of the natural production, he who becomes
nature is distancing himself from nature in order to learn about it.”
If this is right, the “recovery” of immediacy turns out to be ambiguous.

Immediacy cannot be recovered in the first sense, and it does not need to be
recovered in the second sense by acts of consciousness except, perhaps, in
resurrecting repressed memories in psychiatric contexts.25 For Merleau-Ponty,
the task of reflection is “to revive, possess, internalize, or make immanent”
(S 161/204) the immediacy that remains effective in the experience. As we
shall see, Whitehead provides us with an explanation of how this is possible
and for preserving our unity, but not undifferentiated identity, with Nature.
In Merleau-Pontian terms, this means preserving the “massive adhesion” to,
but not total absorption in, Being.
Likewise, to say that thought is not life, and never will replace it or
express completely what life is, does not imply that thought must necessarily
be cut loose from its moorings in the immediate experience. Correlatively,
even if it were true that concepts were (mere) products that cannot ade-
quately express natural productivity and the sense of life anterior to them,
as Schelling believes, it would still not follow that conceptual knowledge
ruptures our unity with Nature. Such a claim would confuse epistemological
adequacy with ontological connectedness.
Merleau-Ponty states that the idealism that emerged from his prede-
cessor’s search for the immediate, identical relation to Nature positioned
him to repudiate Fichte’s “subjective” idealism in favor of one that is more
“objective.” For Fichte, the I is everything, and all things are constituted by
the I. Schelling criticizes Fichte for seeking in consciousness the only model
of subjectivity and for holding that every manifestation of subjectivity is
derived from consciousness (N 40/64). For Fichte, consciousness is the sole
interiority. In Schelling’s view, by contrast, “everything is I,” and the key
significance of the perceived world is that it is the primary field of “participa-
tion of my own life in everything, and vice-versa” (N 40/64). The unity of
all life drives toward the fulfillment of the I. This is why, as Merleau-Ponty
points out, Schelling does not distinguish organic from inorganic Nature.
The organic and the inorganic are only two different “potencies or powers
of the same Nature” (N 41/65), and the difference between them must
therefore be one of degree rather than kind.26
It is usual, following Hegel, to refer to Schelling’s “objective” ideal-
ism in contrast to Fichte’s “subjective” idealism (N 42/67); we have seen,
25. This is another dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl’s analyses of time conscious-
ness. The “Working Notes” for The Visible and the Invisible state, “The problem of forgetting:
lies essentially in the fact that it is discontinuous” (VI 194/248). “Problème de l’oubli: tient
essentiellement à ce qu’il est discontinu.”
26. Much later, in the Freedom essay of 1809, Schelling will argue that we cannot pass from
the non-living to the living because, as noted above, all of Nature is alive. Both the organic
and the inorganic are dual aspects of the same Konspiration of life.
however, that Schelling’s philosophy seeks a unity of idealism and realism.

Yet, how can we deduce an idealism from a realism? Schelling’s explana-
tion hinges on the image of light, which is much more than a medium of
perception, as it was for Fichte. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty points out, it is
an ancient symbol of primordial knowledge (Urwissen) of the Good, as with
Plato. Air and light for Schelling are “arrangements of materials” of Nature
that sketch a certain meaning, but which cannot be completely itself in
the absence of the consciousness that reaches that meaning (Ibid.). This
arrangement of materials does not itself bear the idea, but rather “prepares
the sense that human beings give it” (Ibid.).27
Along the same lines, in Von der Weltseele, Schelling holds, as J.-F.
Marquet expresses it, that just as “the self is fundamentally liberty, that is
to say infinite auto-affirmation, in the same way there will exist a ‘first force
of nature,’ a naturally expansive and centrifugal fluid, the ether, of which
light will be the phenomenal manifestation (it is this fluid that is properly
the soul of the world)” (1992, 2086b). And it is this “soul” for Schelling
that argues against a model of consciousness as centrifugal meaning-giver
to the world.
As such, there are strong similarities between this view and what
Heidegger refers to as the “the medieval . . . origin” of “the ordinary con-
cept of truth”—that is, adaequatio rei ad intellectum (1977, 118). On this
view there can be a veridical correspondence between the human intellect
and the object of experience (res creata) only because the divine intel-
lect is creating (sustaining in being) and illumining the object on the one
hand, and, on the other hand, the human intellect. As Heidegger puts it,
“Veritas as adaequatio rei (creandae) ad intellectum (divinum) guarantees veritas
as adaequatio intellectus (humani) ad rem (creatam)” (Ibid.).
For Merleau-Ponty, Schelling’s Urwissen symbolized by light also
resembles the Kantian notion of productive imagination (Einbildung), the
faculty that actively organizes our experience in such a way that a meaning
is delineated in outline in the manifold of sensory intuition (N 42/66–67).
Now, it is true that light, for Schelling, as imagination for Kant in the First
Critique, is something “of which we are scarcely ever conscious” (A78/B103).
It may also be true that delineating a meaning “in outline in the manifold
of sensory intuition” means the same thing as the productive imagination as
“transcendental” because, as the necessary mediator between the “extremes”
of sensibility and understanding, it is required for the transcendental unity
of apperception and the unity of (meaningful) experience itself (A124).
27. This statement shows from another angle Schelling’s claim, discussed above, that we can
freely, consciously, realize our purposes in the external world only because “a susceptibility
to such action were already established in the world, even before it becomes an object of a
conscious act” (1978, 214).
However, the analogy between Schelling’s more profound knowledge

symbolized by light and Kant’s productive imagination should not be pressed
too far. For Kant, imagination is a “blind, but indispensable function of the
soul” (A78/B103), not of Nature. Also, delineating a meaning “in outline in
the manifold of sensory intuition” would encompass, rather, the “reproduc-
tive imagination,” which, as the ground for the reproducibility of images,
makes association of particular images possible (and meaningful) (A 102).
As such, the reproductive imagination is “entirely subject to empirical laws,
the laws, namely, of association” and falls under psychology rather than
transcendental philosophy (B152).
Beyond Kant, though, Merleau-Ponty states that light is also the key
for understanding how, for Schelling, living and feeling Nature points toward
a way to think Nature. As Merleau-Ponty phrases it, Schelling sees Nature
as a “primitive unity of conscious and unconscious activities,” and, as in
medieval thought, this primitive unity does not present itself to us in such
a way that we find its “ultimate reason” is located within us (N 42/67).
Contrary to Kant, and especially § 76 of the Third Critique, Schelling speaks
of a knowing that is not separate and distinct from its object because the
former is simultaneously the production of the latter. In turn, this “know-
ing,” or intellectual intuition, requires for its effective functioning that the
I must already be in some sense in this basic unity. There must already be
in things a preparatory outline of what intellectual intuition will set free,
rather in the way that, as described in Chapter I, the finished form of
a photograph is latent in the print being developed. Merleau-Ponty thus
defines Schelling’s intellectual intuition as different from “an occult faculty”
and equivalent to “perception itself before it has been reduced to ideas; it is
perception . . . in which all things are me because I am not yet the subject
of reflection” (RC 75/107).28
Hence the significance of light: it is not only matter, but also enters
the perceptual field and prepares it to be read. Light has an objective reality
in the way that it exercises its penetrating power.29 As such, both light and
air are for Merleau-Ponty symbolic of a knowledge “inscribed in Nature,”
a “natural productivity” (Ibid.). For Schelling, Merleau-Ponty continues,
there are three types of beings: objects such as tables or chairs, light, and
28. “. . . la perception même avant qu’elle ait été réduite en idées; la perception . . . où
toutes choses sont moi parce que je ne suis pas encore le sujet de la réflexion.” The English
translation renders “la perception même” as simply “perception” instead of “perception itself.”
29. Compare Heidegger’s claim that the “essence of truth reveals itself as freedom. The latter is
ek-sistent, disclosive letting beings be” (1977, 128). This disclosure means “to bring the clearing
of the truth of Being before thinking” (1977a, 251). And in turn, the “name of this clearing
[Lichtung] is aletheia” (1977, 138). Merleau-Ponty makes similar comments about “natural Light
and cry of light” in connection with the “Ontology of painting” and “communication with
Being through vision” (NC 180).
the I. Without the light, we would revert to a Kantian arrangement in

which nothing would mediate the unknown being of the thing in itself and
the Kantian subject that provides all the resources necessary for knowing.
For Merleau-Ponty, Schelling knows that, from the perspective of a phi-
losophy of reflection based on concepts, when consciousness asks questions
of Nature we are aware that an answer has already been prepared. Meaning
comes into being through the human subject, but only because, through
light, “the real itself is found integrated in the ideal world” (N 43/68). The
motions at issue are changed into intuitions within us. Everything begins
with us, though we are not its source. In this reversible relationship, “Nature
is borrowed from our perception (cf. pure intuition in Bergson). We are the
parents of a Nature of which we are also the children” (N 43/68).30
For Merleau-Ponty, Schelling’s view traces a middle path between the
subjective interpretation of Nature as only being “through us” (Fichte) and
the objectivistic dogma of holding that “Nature is only outside us” (Ibid.).
Nature is the process of the ego’s becoming itself: “Nature leads by a series of
disequilibria, toward the realization of human being, which in turn becomes
the dialectical term of it” (Ibid.).31
Through this process of realization, human being becomes “co-
knowledge,” what Jaspers called Mitwissenschaft (1955, 82; cited at N 44/68)
of creation. Human being is both its contemporary as well as the ongo-
ing summation of its depths; therefore, the human being “carries traces
of all that Nature has been” (N 44/69), as Whitehead will say of every
actual occasion of experience. For Merleau-Ponty, this makes Schelling’s
philosophy much more like those of Renaissance thinkers such as Bruno
who held that a human being is “a microcosm” rather than, as with Kant,
“an antiphysis” (Ibid.).
For Schelling, all that reflection can reveal of Nature is the relationship
of subject to object and not the fundamental identity of subject and object.
By contrast, intuition properly sees its objects as part of everything “incorpo-
rated into Nature, as incorporated into all that is the Absolute” (N 44/69).
Intuition is a bit like the feeling that we know what we will see behind
us. It is “sleep,” “ek-stasis,” and for Schelling it is difficult to distinguish
intuition from unconscious awareness. In this state, the soul would see “all
things in themselves” anterior to concepts and judgments, “so much so that
the soul and the body seem to be asleep at the same time” (Ibid., 45/70).
30. “la Nature est empruntée à notre perception (cf. l’intuition pure chez Bergson). Nous
sommes les parents d’une Nature dont nous sommes les enfants.”
31. “La Nature chemine, par une série de déséquilibres, vers la réalisation de l’homme qui en
devient le terme dialectique.”
This intuition “is the descent into the dark night of the soul, the abyss
of freedom. . . . Schelling therefore called the intuition ein nicht denkendes
Denken, a thinking that does not think. . . . The intellectual intuition does
not produce a concept although it intuits the dark ground of any possible
concept” (Wirth 2003, 110, 111).
However, Merleau-Ponty states, if intuition is sleep, then it is “reflec-
tion’s appreciation of intuition” (N 45/70) that serves as the organ of phi-
losophy. In that case, intuition would not just be empty but also blind, and
it would be left to reflection to explain this blind contact with Nature.
Reflection would become a “necessary evil” and Schelling’s philosophy would
consist of “reflection on what is not reflection” (Jaspers 1955, 83; cited
at N 45/71). As a result, Schelling, like Merleau-Ponty, needs a language
for the philosophy of Nature that can engage Nature “in its least human
aspects” (N 45/71), and for this, also like Merleau-Ponty, he turns to art.
Just as philosophy finds an arrangement of things with an open meaning,
art is the “objective realization of a contact with the world, which cannot
be objectivated” (Ibid.). Given this fact, Schelling claims that art is the
true “document” and “organ” of philosophy (1978, 219).
For both Merleau-Ponty and Schelling, albeit for different reasons,
neither art and philosophy nor the experiences of philosophers and art-
ists are identical. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy32 begins with what cannot
be known and comes to a conscious conclusion. By contrast, art begins
with conscious thought processes and ends in something that can always
be resumed. Art reaches the Absolute “because at that moment conscious-
ness attains the unconscious” (N 45–46/71). For Schelling, art can assist
the reconciliation of understanding and imagination. The presence of the
Absolute in art is our experience of a “higher Nature,” and thinking appears
to be something “natural.” Art provides the experience of “the identity of
subject and object,” a mélange of idea and fact, and in this experience, as
Merleau-Ponty expresses it in Bergsonian imagery, “things arrange them-
selves as if it were said in advance that the locks should open. Art is this
experience of the identity of subject and object” (N 46/71).33
Nevertheless, Schelling distinguishes between philosophy and art in
that the philosopher wants to express the dark, hidden pre-being of erste
Natur anterior to the intervention of knowing, whereas the artist wants to
re-create the world. Philosophy does not vanish into art. Rather, they are
32. The student notes say “Nature” instead of “philosophy,” but this makes no sense for the
following contrast. Therefore, we have substituted “Philosophy” for “Nature.”
33. “Les choses s’arrangent comme s’il était dit d’avance que les serrures devaient s’ouvrir. L’art
est cette expérience de l’identité du sujet et de l’objet.”
only related in the mutual openness to the world embodied in the experi-
ences of the philosopher and the artist. Both philosophy and art can reach
the Absolute, though in different ways. Philosophy can learn from art with-
out losing its independence. As Patrick Burke indicates for painting, though
Schelling’s preferred artistic medium was poetry, it is a question of “the vis-
ible and the invisible dimensions of presence which the hand of the painter
practices and which the philosopher wants to bring to word” (1999, 187).
For Schelling, poetry is the origin of philosophy. Poetic consciousness
acknowledges that it is not in complete possession of its object, and that the
only way that it can really comprehend it is to create it. Artistic exertion is
the best “document” that testifies to the encounter of “passivity and spon-
taneity” through which Schelling searches for, in Merleau-Ponty’s idiom,
“a Reason that is not prose and a poetry that is not irrational” (N 50/77).
Poets, therefore, just as painters for Merleau-Ponty, are uniquely placed to
understand the creativity of Nature in and through their own creativity that
exemplifies and mirrors it. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty was thinking of this when
writing, “Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it. Make
an analysis of literature in this sense: as inscription of Being” (VI 197/251).34
As part of our life within Nature to which poetry testifies, Schelling
holds that, as Merleau-Ponty observes, with the creation of humanity Nature
becomes re-created as vision. Conversely, human beings become Nature
through their vision (N 47/73). Further, their reversible relationship amounts
to the transcendence of the dichotomy of subject and object. Similarly, just
as the intuition is the medium of our attempts to place ourselves within the
Absolute, the Absolute itself becomes world and a relationship with us. As
Merleau-Ponty expresses Schelling’s view, “God is an empirical fact” and, in
Whitehead’s view as well, “at the base of every experience” (Ibid.). We do
not know God except through experience, and we only grasp God in the
finite: the movement from finite to infinite and vice versa is part of “the
very fabric of things” (Ibid.).
Moreover, for Schelling, as part of this dialectic God’s freedom is made
known in us, and it is in us that God’s powers are exercised. What makes
this reciprocity possible is that Schelling’s philosophy is not a philosophy
of Being that separates the Absolute from the finite, but a “philosophy
of time” according to which “nothing exists merely, but rather everything
becomes” (N 48/74). For Merleau-Ponty, this turning to temporality is, on
the other hand, but another way of reinforcing the notion that “there is
no separated Absolute” (Ibid.).
As Merleau-Ponty sees it, Fichte had a certain “hatred of Nature” (N
48/74), but Schelling, in a way analogous to Husserl’s notion of “affective
34. “Faire analyse de la littérature dans ce sens: comme inscription de l’Être.”

force,” perceives in Nature a weight that conditions and penetrates our

liberty, and yet allows us to fly. It is “contingency” without blocking human
freedom, and it is responsible for the fact that, unlike Sartre, Schelling can-
not construe liberty to be a “negation, pure and simple” (Ibid.). On the
contrary, “Spirit is higher Nature.”35
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Schelling in the Nature lectures concludes
with a reprise of the relationship of intuition and concepts in the light of
Hegel’s well-known criticisms in the “Preface” of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
There, Schelling’s Absolute is said to be one of indeterminate darkness and
obscurity. It is simple and undifferentiated, without a thinkable content. In
the absence of conceptual explication it is the famous “night in which, as we
say, all cows are black—that is the very naïveté of knowledge” (1964, 79). For
Hegel, Schelling, instead of proposing a mediation of conceptual opposites in
order to reach an understanding of the Absolute, substitutes an identity of
subject and object—an identity that reaches to the point of inarticulateness.
The result is a “monochrome formalism,” a “monotonousness and abstract
universality [that] are maintained to be the Absolute” (Ibid., 78). On Hegel’s
view, as Merleau-Ponty expresses it, Schelling does not really understand “the
internal movement of what exists,” but he thinks that he does through his
“analogy of subject-object or of expansion-contraction” (N 48/75).36
Schelling, for his part, makes similar criticisms of Hegel. Hegel’s mistake
is to believe that a concept can be productive and that philosophy can be
reduced to pure logic. As Schelling sees it, an abstract concept is the end result
of Hegel’s philosophy, a philosophy that, as Hegel’s Logic states, gives a motor
power to spirit to enter into Nature, in which movement the Idea, transcend-
ing itself and, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “filled with reality, will lead back to
the Absolute” (N 49/76). Yet how, Schelling asks, can the Idea exhibit any
agency? Only existing beings can exhibit such agency (Ibid.). For Schelling,
Hegel sacrifices Nature to the profit of absolute Spirit, and Merleau-Ponty
strongly contrasts the comparative impotence of Nature in Hegel’s philosophy
with the “stubborn and obstinate character” that it has for Schelling (Ibid.).
On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty holds that Hegel was correct
to criticize Schelling’s “speculative constructions” (N 49/76) that con-
strue Nature to be knowable only by a means different from a science of
Nature—and this without even referring to Schelling’s substantial writings
on the sciences, especially chemistry. However, Merleau-Ponty believes these
“speculative constructions” represent less Schelling’s considered position
than the dangers to which his philosophy is vulnerable. Schelling is still
35. The French editor of La Nature notes (74, n. 3) that this expression is “Without doubt an
allusion to Schelling’s expression, ‘Nature is unconscious Spirit,’ cited by Jaspers’ ” (1955, 297).
36. Schelling, however, did not think of “Konspiration” as an analogy, but as an exact description.
correct, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, to claim that “the rationality of the

Concept, the abstraction of consciousness” (Ibid.), is neither more objective
nor more rational than Nature, and that there is a certain “arbitrariness”
behind the “practice of Reason” (Ibid.) that stems from Hegel’s refusal to
grant Nature any productivity of its own.37
It is clear from Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in the Nature lectures and
his retrospective summaries of them that he is much more sympathetic
to Schelling’s conception of Nature than he is to that of any thinker in
modern philosophy. His debt to Schelling is also evident in Signs where he
writes that “What resists phenomenology within us—natural being, “the
’barbarous’ source Schelling spoke of—cannot remain outside phenomenol-
ogy and should have its place within it” (S 178/225).38 For Merleau-Ponty,
the “barbarous source” is the “il y a,” the stubborn, irreducible fact that
things are, the fundamental element of Being, or flesh. Thus, Paul Ricoeur
was correct to observe that it is more nearly to Schelling “and to the phi-
losophies of an absolute genesis of the finite, that one would have to relate
Merleau-Ponty rather than to Heidegger and Husserl” (Madison 1981, xix).
Moreover, as we have seen, both Schelling and Merleau-Ponty sought a
way to think our fundamental indivision from Nature, the life that is “already
there” before the advent of reflection, and for both philosophers, Being is not
an object. Both thinkers sought to overcome bifurcations of Nature and clas-
sical philosophical antinomies of the one and the many, Nature and freedom,
Nature and consciousness, and the infinite and the finite.
That said, it is also clear that Merleau-Ponty is dissatisfied with
Schelling’s solution for thinking Nature. Although it is difficult to gauge what
he thought of Schelling’s notion of intellectual intuition, Merleau-Ponty
still remained worried about the fate of the concept. As we have seen, the
experience of feeling identical to, or at least unified with, Nature is differ-
ent in kind from philosophical explication that requires concepts. Certainly,
Schelling did not wish to ignore concepts altogether, but it seems clear that
he valued them less than did Merleau-Ponty. For the latter, the starting
point for philosophy is not “a massive and opaque world, or a universe of
adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of
the world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, refers back to it
only its own light” (VI 35/57).39
37. For a spirited defense of Schelling against Hegel, see Wirth (2003, 11–24, 106–107, and
202–206).
38. “Ce qui résiste en nous à la phénoménologie,—l’être naturel, le principe ‘barbare’ dont parlait
Schelling,—ne peut pas demeurer hors de la phénoménologie et doit avoir sa place en elle.”
39. “Ce qui est donné ce n’est pas un monde massif et opaque, ou un univers de pensée
adéquate, c’est une réflexion qui se retourne sur l’épaisseur du monde pour l’éclairer, mais qui
ne lui renvoie après coup que sa propre lumière.”
Finally, there is another reason that Merleau-Ponty could have given,

but did not, in defense of conceptual knowledge, and it is curious that he
did not do so since he was certainly familiar with it. It is that concepts are
necessary to explain contingency—and the possibility that things could not
be or could have been different is something on which he strongly insists.
The argument at issue appears in the much-discussed §76 of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment (as well as in the Critique of Pure Reason [A 218–26/B 265–74]):
“If understanding were intuitive [rather than discursive, i.e., conceptual], it
would have no objects except actual [ones].” But we do understand “merely
possible” objects beyond our experience such as, say, a million-sided figure.
Therefore, our understanding must be more than intuitive. It must involve
concepts because
our entire distinction between the merely possible and the actual
rests on this: in saying that a thing is possible we are positing
only the presentation of it with respect to our concept and to our
thinking ability in general; but in saying that a thing is actual we
are positing the thing itself [an sich selbst] (apart from that concept).
(1987, 284, 285; brackets and parentheses in the original)
On Merleau-Ponty’s view, as noted in Chapter II, contingency is an

essential aspect of Being itself. As Ricoeur says of Merleau-Ponty’s last writ-
ings, “existential contingency is now taken up by a movement of coming to
light of Being itself which is no longer in any way an ‘accident’ ” (Madison
1981, xix). For Schelling, there is contingency in Nature, but there is also,
as we have seen, necessity, and his discussions of both contingency and
necessity range over the order of phenomena, what phenomena there are,
the causal structure of the whole of what appears to us, and the qualities
of what we perceive.
For example, in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, he asserts that we are
justified in demanding that Hume explain the source of what he took to be
the illusion of necessary connections among phenomena: “For that we do
actually think of a sequence of causes and effects as necessary—that thereon
rest all our empirical sciences, theory of Nature and history (in which he
was himself so great a master), he cannot deny” (1988, 26). He also states
that it is necessary that matter have some quality, but what quality it has
is contingent.40 The science that treats of the particular qualities of matter
is chemistry, and so “to general dynamics, as a science that is intrinsically
40. This claim sounds very Whiteheadian. Science and the Modern World employs almost
identical language.
necessary, there stands contrasted, under the name of chemistry, the special
dynamics, which in its principles is utterly contingent” (Ibid., 200, 201).
It is not clear whether, for Schelling, conceptual knowledge is limited
to the contingent or whether, particularly within the natural sciences, it can
also embrace necessity. In any event, for him it cannot substitute for, or
displace, the epistemological and even ontological primacy of intuition. Nor
could it for Bergson, influenced as he was by Schelling through Ravaisson.41
However, for Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen, the knowledge expressed in
the logos proforikos is conceptual in a way that Schelling’s notion of intui-
tive understanding is not.
BERGSON
Intuition and its relation to concepts forms only a small part of Bergson’s
substantial and complex influence on Merleau-Ponty. From his earliest to
his last works, he refers often to his predecessor’s writings, in which he finds
much to praise and also much to criticize.
In “The Philosophy of Existence,”42 written two years before his death,
Merleau-Ponty regrets that his student curriculum had been dominated by
Léon Brunschvicg’s idealism. Had this not been the case, he writes, and if
he and his fellow students had read Bergson carefully during the 1930s, they
would have discovered much that they later learned through philosophies
of existence—i.e., through thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and
Marcel. He then goes on to say that what they could have learned included
the importance of perception, temporality, consciousness, and the reality
of the body as mine as opposed to an object constructed by science. In
short, they had to wait to read those authors to understand the meaning
of the idea of incarnation that they might have obtained from Bergson.
Merleau-Ponty also states in “Bergson in the Making” that his predecessor
was the first to have established the perceptual circuit between the body
and things to which the Phenomenology of Perception gives so much atten-
tion. Not mentioned, however, is Bergson’s reliance on the traditional causal
model of perception and behavior that Merleau-Ponty rejects in the light
of Gestalt psychology.
Merleau-Ponty also states that Bergson was the first to reveal the
“brute being of the perceived world” as “duration a-borning,” and in so
41. However, Bergson himself attempted to downplay Schelling’s influence on Ravaisson,

though not on himself. He attributes what influence there was on Ravaisson to a “natural
affinity, community of inspiration and, if one may say so, pre-established harmony between
two minds” (1999, 228).
42. Dialogue, Vol. V, No. 3, 1966, 307–22. Reproduced and cited at TD 129–39/PC II: 247–66.
doing, he “regains at the heart of man a pre-historic and ‘prehuman’ meaning

of the world” (S 185/223).43 In addition, both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty
interpret Nature as active and dynamic as opposed to a passive Cartesian
substance, and they both conceive of ontology in terms of becoming. Also,
both view subjectivity as interwoven with, and dependent on, a certain set
of biological facts. Therefore, consciousness and life do not stand in oppo-
sition to each other and both reject the ontology of the object. Bergson,
in fact, stated the “J’en suis” before Merleau-Ponty: “ ‘Whatever be the
intimate essence of what is and what creates itself, Bergson said again,
we are of it’ ” (E16/25–26).44 Correlatively, neither philosopher disdained
biological sciences.
Other prominent themes in Merleau-Ponty’s writings on perception
and the body also derive at least in part from Bergson. These include the
body as a “real center of action,” a “center of perspectives” and an orga-
nizational center around which a horizon forms. Because of this, for both
thinkers, to perceive is not merely to inspect things, but rather a bodily
anticipation. Hence, scientific accounts of perception are parasitic upon
and presuppose the world of perception. Thus also, self-contained scientific
knowledge is “mythical” (UAC 79, 80).
Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s various texts,45 all of these Bergsonian
influences can be grouped under four overarching themes: the defense of
intuition as opposed to conceptual thinking in establishing our indivision
from Being, duration in the undifferentiated immediacy of time conscious-
ness and its implications for a philosophy of nature, Bergson’s account of
perception, and his view of life and the body within Nature, as discussed
in Creative Evolution. These large and complex topics can easily enough
fill a separate volume. Therefore, in the limited space available here, we
will confine ourselves to what is most central to Merleau-Ponty’s view of
Nature. Leaving aside the subject of perception, we will take in turn the
topics of intuition and duration in this chapter, and reserve for the following
43. “Bergson retrouve au coeur de l’homme un sens préhistorique et ‘préhumain’ du monde.”

44. “ ‘Quelle que soit l’essence intime de ce qui est et de ce qui se fait, disait encore Bergson,
nous en sommes.’ ” The citation is from Bergson’s address to the First Oxford Conference (E
16/25). Further on, Merleau-Ponty also praises his predecessor for eschewing high-altitude
thinking by thinking within “life, the world, [and] history” (Ibid., 30/44).
45. Merleau-Ponty provides a sustained analysis of Bergson’s philosophy in five places. These
are his lectures collected in UAC, his 1953 inaugural address to the Collège de France (E
9–33/17–47), his first course on “The Concept of Nature” (January-May 1957), in the lectures
dealing with “The Romantic Conception of Nature,” and in his essay, “Bergson se faisant” (May
1959). The second of these sources is currently Chapter IV of La Nature, and there the discus-
sion of Bergson follows that of Schelling, to which it is closely related. The section on Bergson
in the inaugural lecture deals almost exclusively with intuition and duration, whereas the
Nature lectures analyze those themes as well as perception (a running commentary on the first
chapter of Matter and Memory) and life and Nature—focusing exclusively on Creative Evolution.
chapter the theme of life in Nature as discussed in Creative Evolution and

Merleau-Ponty’s own view of life in Nature as a response to both Schelling
and Bergson. In that same context, we will also articulate Whitehead’s
critical response to Bergson.
In “The Romantic Conception of Nature” Merleau-Ponty’s discussion
of Bergson’s view of intuition and concepts continues his reflections on
Schelling. At first sight, he says, their philosophies seem to have little in
common. Bergson, unlike Schelling, is a “positivist” because he wants to
reject all ideas of negativity in the form of “the possible, nothingness, and
disorder” (N 51/78). In particular, he rejects as nonsensical the Leibnizian
question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Yet, while he rejects
as meaningless the question, Why is there anything at all?46 he does want to
know why particular things exist as they do. By contrast, Schelling’s aim is
to discover how the whole activity of Nature comes about, and how Being
is productive enough to produce beings.
In addition, Bergson is not at all concerned with the Schellingian
tension between intuition and dialectic. Given the primacy he accords to
intuition, dialectic on Bergson’s view is only a vacuous conceptual game.
Concepts, he tells us, “ordinarily go by pairs and represent the two opposites.
There is scarcely any concrete reality upon which one cannot take two oppos-
ing views at the same time and which is consequently not subsumed under
the two antagonistic concepts.” Therefore, “never, with concepts or points
of view, will you make a thing.” What is really important for philosophy is
“to know what unity, what multiplicity, [and] what reality” (1999, 176–77).47
In addition, Bergson’s belief that concepts can yield no more than
relative knowledge, never absolute knowledge of the inner being of things,
is why, in Creative Evolution, he uses his analysis of the famous élan vital to
rethink organic nature in terms established by Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As
with both Kant and Schelling, Bergson’s objective is to describe a process of
“natural production” proceeding from “the whole to parts,” but which avoids
“the premeditation of the concept and admits no teleological interpretation”
(RC 78/85). That is, all three philosophers reject finalism.
46. For Bergson, this question rests on the mistake of assuming the priority of non-being
over being and then trying to account for why anything at all came to be (1937, 327). The
problem is thus dissolved rather than solved. Deleuze points out that, for Bergson, assuming
the priority of non-being over being amounts to mistaking “the more for the less,” “as though
being came to fill in a void” (1991, 18). Merleau-Ponty appears to agree: “[T]here is not
something rather than nothing, the nothing could not take the place of something or of being”
(VI 64/92). “[I]l n’y a pas quelque choses plutôt que rien, le rien ne saurait prendre la place du
quelque chose ou de l’être.”
47. Deleuze puts it this way: “The concrete will never be attained by combining the inadequacy
of one concept with the inadequacy of its opposite. The singular will never be attained by
correcting a generality with another generality” (1991, 44).
However, as against Kant, but with Schelling, Bergson holds that

all concepts ultimately falsify reality by breaking up its continuity. So, for
example, he held that Hegel was correct to seek the unity of Being, but
the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis always divides our intuition
instead of unifying it. He expresses this contrast clearly in the opening
paragraphs of An Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he describes “two
profoundly different ways of knowing a thing”:
The first [conceptual knowledge] implies that we move round the

object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the
point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which
we express ourselves. The second [intuition] neither depends on a
point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge
may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where
it is possible, to attain the absolute. (1980, 21)48
Merleau-Ponty does not say so, but he could also have added that Bergson’s
metaphysics, like that of Schelling, is typical of the “Romantic Reaction”
that perhaps finds its best expression in Wordsworth’s famous dictum, “We
murder to dissect.”
For Merleau-Ponty, Bergson’s philosophy is also close to that of
Schelling in terms of negativity. This is a complex topic that we will revis-
it in the following chapter. Here, though, the essential point as regards
Schelling is that, in also rejecting the Spinozistic account of Nature, Bergson
avows its contingency. For Merleau-Ponty, this is enough to show that his
predecessor, despite contradictory claims, incorporates negativity “in the idea
of Being” (N 52/79) after all. This is because what is contingent may have
been different or not have been at all. Moreover, Bergson states that one
question philosophers hardly ever trouble themselves to ask concerns the
idea of nothingness, which is, nonetheless, “the hidden spring, the invisible
motor of philosophical thought” (1937, 275).
Merleau-Ponty would likely agree because of the importance of natural
negativity—from the concealed horizons of sensible things to the negativ-
ity instituted by dehiscence and the écart, to the hidden depths of Being.
Moreover, negativity is his most important vehicle for comparing and con-
trasting Bergson and Sartre and for contrasting his own ontology with both.
48. For Bergson’s rejection of Hegelian dialectic, see 38 ff. Creative Evolution also speaks of
symbolic knowledge as “an artificial imitation of the internal life, a static equivalent which will
lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language, just because we have eliminated
from it the element of real time” (1937, 4). Hegel’s response to this distinction was already
fashioned in his criticisms of Schellingian intuition, namely, that Kant was correct that percepts
without concepts are blind—“the night in which all cows are black.”
His incorporation of negativity within Being is his answer to Bergson’s and

Sartre’s attempted exclusion of it, though they do so in different ways and
for different purposes.49
Despite these differences, however, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say,
Bergson’s entire philosophy, like that of Schelling, is guided by the idea of
a total, self-evident, and primal unity (N 53/80). Both of them believe that
Nature is “a primordial and lost indivision” denied and expressed by “the
developed universe” (RC 78/110). For Bergson, this unity manifests itself
not only through a study of intuition but also, in Creative Evolution, through
an original unity of animal and vegetal life.
Both thinkers also believe that intuition places us in the presence of
an Absolute. Thus, after the passage cited above from An Introduction to
Metaphysics about the two different modes of knowledge, Bergson illustrates
this point with the perception of an external object in motion. My percep-
tion changes with the point of view, whether stationary or in motion, that
I take up on it. How I express the movements “will vary with the system of
axes, or points of reference, to which I relate it; that is, with the symbols
by which I translate it.” Such movement is “relative.” On the other hand,
when I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to the

moving object an interior and, so to speak, states of mind; I also
imply that I am in sympathy with those states, and that I insert
myself in them by an effort of imagination. . . . [I grasp] the move-
ment . . . from within, as it is in itself. I shall possess an absolute.
(1980, 21–22)
This is why Merleau-Ponty says that Bergson often terms this “true
thought” of Being “fusion” or an “inscription” of things in our conscious-
ness: Bergsonian intuition amounts to “a massive grip on being, without
exploration, without interior movement of meaning” (E 12/21).50
These last words conclusively distinguish the “massive grip on being”
that Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Bergsonian intuition from his own “massive
adhesion” to Being as flesh. The latter notion, as we have seen, is anything
but an intuitive grasp “without interior movement of meaning.” As we have
49. Thus The Visible and the Invisible: “All that is partial is to be reintegrated, every negation is
in reality a determination, the being-self and the being-other and the being in itself are frag-
ments of one sole being” (64/92). “Tout ce qui est partiel est a réintégrer, toute négation est en
réalité détermination, et l’être-soi, et l’être-autre, et l’être en soi sont fragments d’un seul être.”
50. “ ‘Acte simple,’ ‘vue sans point de vue,’ accès direct et sans symboles interposés à l’intérieur
des choses, toutes ces formules célèbres de l’intuition en font une prise massive sur l’être, sans
exploration, sans mouvement intérieur du sens.”
seen, his discussion of Schelling demonstrates that he rejects attempts to

recover the pre-linguistic immediacy of experience with which we should
silently coincide (NC 372–75, VI 125–26/166–67), and the same arguments
apply to Bergson. That said, however, Merleau-Ponty does point out that
Creative Evolution speaks positively about the link between language and
intelligence.51 As we have seen of his view of concepts, for Merleau-Ponty
language is not necessarily deceptive, and truth is neither coincidence nor
mute. Once again, to understand means “to translate into available signi-
fications meaning first held captive in the thing and in the world itself”
(VI 36/58).
The intuition through which we belong to Being is therefore not an
eternal, contemplative state. On the contrary, it is temporal through and
through. When we look within ourselves, on Bergson’s view, we perceive
an unbroken flux of duration that simultaneously appears to us as ours, but
also connects us with the passage of Nature. For instance, while we watch
sugar melting in a glass of water, we must wait for the melting to occur.
Our duration and that of the sugar melting are thus one and the same, a
“little fact [that] is highly instructive” (1937, 9; translation altered).52 On
Bergson’s view, one of the lessons that this kind of experience imparts is
that it forms the most convincing reason for believing in the existence
of the external world because we experience ourselves as transcended by
the things themselves.53 Therefore, rather than having to seek beyond our-
selves to reach these things, we are, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “solicited and
haunted by them from within” (E14–15/24). Or, as Matter and Memory puts
it, cited by Merleau-Ponty in the Nature lectures (N 57/85), “we grasp, in
perception, at one and the same time, a state of our consciousness and a
reality independent of ourselves” (1988, 203–204).54
For Bergson, this simultaneity is indicative of the fact that time is
the main vehicle for thinking Being. As Merleau-Ponty notes, duration for
Bergson is much more than “change, becoming, mobility; it is being in the
51. Cf. E 28/41: the internal development of Bergson’s thought proceeds “from a philosophy
of impression to a philosophy of expression. What Bergson said against language has caused
us to forget what he said in its favor.” “d’une philosophie de l’impression à une philosophie
de l’expression. Ce que Bergson a dit contre le langage fait oublier ce qu’il a dit en sa faveur.”
52. The English translation renders “Ce petit fait est gros d’enseignements” as “This little fact
is big with meaning.”
53. Merleau-Ponty expresses this theme nicely when he writes, “When we are at the source of
the durée, we are also at the heart of things” because we do not confront Being as a spectator,
but rather by “a kind of complicity, an oblique and clandestine relationship” (E 15/24–25).
“Quand nous sommes à la source de la durée, nous sommes aussi au cœur des choses . . . c’est
comme une complicité, un rapport oblique et clandestin.”
54. It would be interesting to know to what degree, if any, Bergson influenced Claudel’s for-
mulation of his neologism, “co-naissance.”
vital, active sense of the term” (S 184/232).55 Duration is the way that the
passing moment “maintains itself, conserves itself, undivided in the present,
and grows” (E 10/18); it is “a kind of flowing thing which remains while
it melts away” (Ibid.). Time does not substitute for Being; rather, it is the
coming into being of Being itself, such that all of Being “must be approached
from the side of time” (S 184/232).
Duration is, as Edward S. Casey has noted, a “nonlinear dissolving
time” that stands opposed to Cartesian duration because, as in the above
example, it is neither purely on the “side” of consciousness nor on that
of external things. Rather, “its very existence deconstructs the Cartesian
bifurcation” (1993, 11).56 For Bergson, therefore, on Merleau-Ponty’s view,
“duration is the milieu in which soul and body find their articulation because
the present and the body, the past and the mind, although different in
nature, nevertheless pass into one another” (S 185/232).57 In addition,
Casey’s statement is true as far as it goes, but there is another, equally
important reason why Bergson opposes his notion of duration to that of
Descartes. The Cartesian notion cannot account for evolution, “the very
essence of life” (1937, 22). Since Cartesian duration is about discrete, math-
ematically measured temporal quanta, it is “a world that dies and is reborn at
every instant—the world Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued
creation” (Ibid., italics in the original). Evolution, on the contrary, requires
“a real persistence of the past in the present, a duration which is, as it were,
a hyphen, a connecting link” (Ibid.).
As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty’s own description of duration in per-
ceptual experience rejects the Cartesian analysis of temporal instants, but
it also rebuffs Bergson’s alternative of an unbroken continuity of duration.
The latter, he says, was right to stress temporal continuity, but he was wrong
to employ continuity as the explanation of temporal unity (PhP 420/481).
Unbroken continuity is really inconsistent with time because, if the past
and present already belong to each other, then the difference between past
and present is effaced. An adequate phenomenology of temporality must
account for both continuity and differentiation. Therefore, “if consciousness
55. “La durée n’est pas seulement changement, devenir, mobilité, elle est l’être au sens vif
et actif du mot.”
56. In The Creative Mind, Bergson himself describes the duration that makes up this “non-
linear dissolving time” as a “succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within,
the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the
future” (1999, 35).
57. “. . . la durée est le milieu où l’âme et le corps trouvent leur articulation parce que le
présent et le corps, le passé et l’esprit, différents en nature, passent pourtant l’un dans l’autre.”
snowballs upon itself, it is, like the snowball and everything else, wholly in
the present” (PhP 276n./319n1).58
As noted above, temporal continuity is also important for Bergson in
order to account for the evolution of life. Accordingly, we will continue our
discussion of duration and intuition in the context of Bergson’s influence
on Merleau-Ponty’s view of life in Nature.
58. “. . . si la conscience fait boule de neige avec elle-même, elle est, comme la boule de neige
et comme toutes les choses, tout entière dans le présent.” Merleau-Ponty is referring to the
following passage in Creative Evolution: “My mental state, as it advanced on the road of time,
is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing—rolling
upon itself, as a snowball on the snow” (1937, 2).
VI
NATURE AND LIFE
Merleau-Ponty is attracted to Bergson’s discussions of life in Nature not so

much for the intricate details themselves, but rather because of what they
reveal about various forms of the bifurcation of Nature in modern philoso-
phy. As David Morris has noted, “The Visible and the Invisible . . . is not
just a turn to the philosophy of being of Heidegger, but to the philosophy
of nature of Schelling . . . that Bergson was trying to pursue in Creative
Evolution. One cannot develop a philosophy of perception that overcomes
traditional dualisms without also rethinking life and nature” (2004, 98).
Not surprisingly, therefore, Merleau-Ponty organizes his critique around
the subjects of mechanism and teleology, consciousness and Nature, God and
the world, activity and passivity, and above all, negativity and positivity. It
is this last theme that is most crucial for him because, as noted above, it
serves as the fulcrum for his own view of natural negativity in counterpoise
to both Bergson and Sartre.
MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY

The aim of Creative Evolution, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, is to employ the
intuition “of the duration that we are” (N 58/87) in order to recover the
natural functioning of life as opposed to all distinctly human activities and
all teleology (finalism). He points out how Bergson rejects both mechanism
and finalism as inadequate accounts of natural processes—assemblages of
natural processes for the former and, for the latter, those same assemblages
infused with an external and preestablished end. Life is both above final-
ism—because “life does not create by proposing the idea of an end” (Ibid.)—
and below it, because sometimes there are aberrations and horrible mistakes.
Bergson tells us that in fact mechanism and finalism both make the
same mistake: since everything is already given in both explanations of
Nature, there is no place for unpredictable behavior that evolution displays.
153
For this reason, finalism is “only inverted mechanism” (1937, 39). Bergson
also holds that the principal error of mechanism and finalism is to overex-
tend the use of certain concepts that are “natural to our intellect” (Ibid.,
44). Since our intellect, like perception, is shaped by and for the necessity
for action, it is conceptual thinking that functions by means of instrumen-
tal rationality—forming and testing plans and fitting means to ends. In
such planning, no matter whether we think of Nature as a giant machine
governed by scientific laws or as the unfolding of a preestablished plan,
both ways of conceptualizing Nature have their roots in the same critical
requirements of preparation for action.
Rejecting an externally imposed end to the creative process, Bergson
substitutes “internal finality,” which he thinks recovers Kantian thinking
from the Third Critique. But, Merleau-Ponty holds, he misunderstands Kant,
for whom there is “an immanence between the end and the means”—e.g.,
in the resemblance between a mother and her daughter—but not a finality
“internal to the organism” for which there can be, on Kant’s grounds, no
conceptual knowledge (N 59/87). For Merleau-Ponty, what Bergson adds to
Kant is an understanding of life as history: “the living organism is ‘a unique
series of acts constituting the true history’ ”1 (Ibid., 59/88). In the absence
of such finality, organisms and life itself are to be understood—as in Matter
and Memory—in terms of a temporality in which an organism continues its
past while differentiating itself from it. In other words, its internal unity is
duration. Thus, Bergson says, “every cell, considered separately, evolves in
a specific way. Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in
which time is being inscribed” (1937, 16).2 For Merleau-Ponty, this “register”
is neither human consciousness nor our “notation of time” (N 59/88), but
rather “an institution, a Stiftung,” to use the Husserlian term, an act that
launches “a becoming without being exterior to this becoming” (Ibid.).
This notion of the institution of life draws together several strands of
thought in Creative Evolution, particularly where, as Merleau-Ponty points
out, Bergson supposes an original unity of life at the beginning and then its
differentiation among “animals, vegetables, [and] microbes,” the balancing
functions inherent in life “in the state of reciprocal implication” (N 59/88).
“Complex mechanisms on divergent lines of evolution” (Ibid.) led Bergson
1. This is a misreading of the text. Bergson does not describe the organism this way. Rather,
he says, as against those who want to produce a living organism chemically, “histologists and
embryogenists on the one hand, and naturalists on the other” who are concerned with the
“minute structure of living tissues” see what happens in the chemical retort as a “unique series
of acts that really constitute a history” rather than just a series of physico-chemical reactions
(1937, 36).
2. Bergson italicizes this entire sentence, but neither Merleau-Ponty nor the English transla-
tion of La Nature does so.
NATURE AND LIFE 155
to consider the famous élan vital—the original impulse of life, indetermina-

tion, freedom, creativity—as the generative, unifying force of natural devel-
opment. For example, the same élan that produced sexual reproduction in
animals also produced an analogue in plants, because it would be necessary
later for animals, and the same can be said of “the tendency of the vegetable
toward a growing complexity” (1937, 119). The same force that leads via
one line of evolutionary development to development of some material form,
such as an eye, can lead to the same result realized in a different concrete
realization through an entirely different line of development.
For instance, the “eye of a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as
the common Pecten” possess identical basic parts: “The eye of the Pecten
presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own” (Ibid.,
62). Such phenomena, therefore, produce the impression of perceiving “one
single gesture . . . behind the convergent details,” such that my percep-
tions and what appears through the process of evolutionary development
“intermingle with, transgress upon, or tie up with one another” (S 186/234).
As Merleau-Ponty sees it, the first two chapters of Creative Evolution
carefully describe life as a “blind and finite principle” (N 60/89). As against
finalism, the blindness of life stems from its not having pre-formed ends, as a
result of which present and future states of humanity are neither “pre-figured
in the evolutionary movement” (Bergson 1937, 266) nor purposively pre-
pared. Therefore, the vital impulse can lead to unpredictable divergences
and failure. It cannot overcome all obstacles (Ibid., 254), and what success
it achieves is therefore always contingent (Ibid., 255).
The vital impulse is “finite” because, although the élan “has been
given once for all” (Ibid., 254), it quickly exhausts itself in its work of
producing various natural forms. Life thus exists in tension with matter,
“which is necessity itself” (Ibid., 251), the same view expressed in the last
sentences of Matter and Memory (1991, 249). Life is creative “mobility,” but
it requires effort. Thus, Bergson adds, “the act by which life goes forward
to the creation of a new form, and the act by which this form is shaped,
are two different and often antagonistic movements. The first is continuous
with the second, but cannot continue in it without being drawn aside from
its direction” (Ibid., 129). As a result, Merleau-Ponty concludes, Bergson
views Nature as undividedly “producer and product” (N 60/89), and never
a pure naturans.3
3. Bergson’s interest in evolution was never in Tennyson’s perception of “Nature red in tooth
and claw,” but rather (like Schelling) in the creative productivity of Nature, the profusion of
a stupendous number of different life forms. Duration, he says, “means invention, the creation
of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new” (1937, 11). Feeling a part of this
“single impulsion” of life (Ibid., 271) has the ecologically important consequence that “we feel
ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the Nature
that it dominates” (Ibid., 270).
For Merleau-Ponty, all of the particular data of the evolutionary pro-

cess that Bergson analyzes in the first two chapters of Creative Evolution—
“The Evolution of Life—Mechanism and Teleology” and “The Divergent
Directions of the Evolution of Life—Torpor, Intelligence, Instinct”—
present a concrete picture of life not as “rest” or “coincidence in itself,”
but as “a labor of itself on itself” (N 62/91) through which it achieves
self-actualization. However, in Chapter 3, “On the Meaning of Life—The
Order of Nature and the Form of Intelligence”—Merleau-Ponty states that
Bergson’s “intuition degenerates” (N 60/89). In this “metaphysical elabora-
tion” (Ibid., 62/91), life is now “pure creation, undivided act that does not
leave itself” (Ibid.). It is an “undivided principle . . . and accessible to a
mystical intuition” (Ibid., 60/89). Bergson passes from a conception of life
as “an equivocal and dialectical principle to life as a univocal and intuitive
principle” (Ibid., 62/92).
However, even if life actualizes itself through the development of
particular material forms, the latter delimit and hinder it. For example,
the nervous system serves as a limitation to the complete self-realization
of consciousness, and the eye does not so much make vision possible as it
does pose a necessary material obstacle to the life that courses through it.
On Bergson’s view, “it is a vision that is canalized, and the visual apparatus
simply symbolizes the work of canalizing” (1937, 93). There is a “principle
of unity” by means of which activities of life transcend their “contingent
manifestations” (Ibid., 62/92), and all the forms of natural order are only the
coefficients of adversity of life activities. From this point on, Merleau-Ponty
says, life and its realizations for Bergson are opposed to each other, and
the élan vital turns into a type of “reservoir” instead of an “operation,”
a metamorphosis that Merleau-Ponty attributes to Bergson’s “positivism”
(N 63/93).4 This is puzzling because Bergson does not describe the vital
impetus in this fashion. He always speaks of it in terms of an active force,
a unifying push of Nature—in other words, very much an “operation.”
As Merleau-Ponty sees it, Chapter 3 of Creative Evolution changes the
vital impetus from a principle that is “indissolubly means and end” into one
divided into “two terms: the physical and the psychical” (N 63/93), with the
former derived from the latter. That is, for Bergson, the “relaxation” of life’s
4. It is also a rather mystical “reservoir”—Merleau-Ponty’s word—that raises the specter of

animism. Thus, Merleau-Ponty cites from Creative Evolution the author’s claims that “[w]hile,
in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in itself
it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of
tendencies,” and, “Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain
sense pre-existed” (1937, 258, 269–70). Bergson’s next sentence, not cited by Merleau-Ponty,
explains that souls “are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides
itself, flowing through the body of humanity” (Ibid., 270). Consciousness “is distinct from the
organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes” (Ibid.).
NATURE AND LIFE 157
creative activity generates matter: speaking of “materiality” and “spirituality,”

Bergson writes, “we pass from the first to the second by way of inversion, or
perhaps even by simple interruption” (1937, 201). What he means by this
is one half of a process of contraction and expansion. On the one hand,
each present contracts the past into itself. “What, in fact, is a sensation?”
Deleuze asks. “It is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto
a receptive surface. Quality emerges from this, quality that is nothing other
than contracted quantity” (1991,74).5 Thus also, the notion of contraction
enables us to transcend the dualism of “homogeneous quantity and heteroge-
neous quality, and to pass from one to the other in a continuous movement”
(Ibid.). Yet, if a present instant is “the most contracted degree of our past”
through which we install ourselves in matter, “matter itself will be like an
infinitely dilated or relaxed [détendu] past (so relaxed that the preceding
moment has disappeared when the following appears)” (Ibid.).6 This is also
the way in which this “détente” can transcend the Cartesian dualism of what
is unextended and what is extended. “For perception itself is extensity, sensa-
tion is extensive insofar as what it contracts is precisely the extended, the
expanded (détendu). . . . Movement is no less outside me than in me; and
the Self itself in turn is only one case among others in duration” (Ibid., 75).
Since for Bergson “physics is simply psychics inverted” (1937, 202),
Merleau-Ponty draws the following conclusion. Whereas in the first two
chapters of Creative Evolution Bergson embraced a monism and, as we have
seen, a dialectical view of the relationships between life and matter—life
could not be analyzed into two separate and distinct elements—in Chapter
3, by contrast, Bergson presents “both a dualism and an emanatism, which
is the negation of the dualism: matter is issued from the first element by
the slackening of the latter; it is drawn from it by inversion” (N 63/93).7
Merleau-Ponty next claims that this move from monism to dualism
is unavoidable because, since consciousness is duration of a multiplicity of
mental states, the unity that Bergson’s positivism requires ultimately demands
a unity “beyond duration, a ‘supraconsciousness,’ a maximum of symmet-
rical interiority for the maximum of total exteriority that is matter. The
concept of Nature must burst and yield its place to God” (Ibid.).8 However,
5. Cf. 87–88: “And qualities belong to matter as much as to ourselves: They belong to matter,
they are in matter, by virtue of the vibrations and numbers that punctuated them internally.”
6. Deleuze also notes that, for Bergson, “The present is only the most contracted degree of the
past, matter the most relaxed (détendu) degree of the present (mens momentanea)” (1991, 75).
7. “Maintenant, Bergson admet, à la fois, un dualisme et un émanatisme qui en est la négation:
la matière est issue du premier élément, par détente de celui-ci, elle en est tirée par inversion.”
8. “. . . il faut donc poser une unité au-delà de la durée, une ‘supraconscience,’ un maximum
d’intériorité symétrique au maximum d’exteriorité totale qu’est la matière. Le concept de Nature
doit éclater et céder la place à Dieu.”
Merleau-Ponty continues, Bergson does not identify evolution with God.

The creative energy of life attempts to regain itself after its encounter with
matter, and “God is the same energy but drawn to its source” (N 63/93). For
Merleau-Ponty, Bergson projects his dualism between life and matter into the
very Nature of God when he admits in La Pensée et le mouvant that “God
creates non-Being, the void, at his expense” (N 64/94).9 In addition, although
Bergson is unwilling to make his philosophy into a theology, he occasionally
intuits the union of monism and its manifestations, “the feeling of contact
with an Absolute” residing in us, a caring, “absolute naturans” (N 64/94).10 In
this regard, one of the most curious omissions in Merleau-Ponty’s extremely
sketchy summary11 of Chapter 3 of Creative Evolution is Bergson’s statement,
“In the absolute we live and move and have our being” (1937, 199).
Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Chapter 3 of Creative Evolution is
open to criticism for the way that he interprets the relationship of life and
matter in Creative Evolution. It is not very helpful to say, as he does, that
Bergson’s position on this subject in Chapters 1 and 2 is a monism and his
view in Chapter 3 is a dualism brought about by matter emanating from life.
It is just as accurate to say that Bergson moved from a dualism to a monism,
depending on what one means by these terms. What is the case is that,
in the first two chapters, matter is portrayed as an obstacle against which
the vital impulse must struggle. Matter does not derive from life; rather,
it constitutes its limitation. To take only one of a plethora of examples,
he says of the evolution of life, “Even in its most perfect works, though it
seems to have triumphed over external resistances and also over its own, it
is at the mercy of the materiality which it has had to assume” (1937, 127).
However, in the third chapter, we find the view to which Merleau-Ponty
9. The editor of La Nature notes that this citation is from “a passage dedicated to the Report
on French Philosophy” written by Ravaisson and discussed by Bergson in the last chapter of
La Pensée et le mouvant, “The Life and Work of Ravaisson” (N 94, n. 1). However, the only
sentence in that chapter that even faintly resembles what Merleau-Ponty says is the following
passage in which Bergson quotes Ravaisson: “Infinite thought ‘has annulled something of the
plenitude of its being, in order to draw from it, by a kind of awakening and resurrection, all
that exists’ ” (1999, 239).
10. Cf. E 25–26/38 where Merleau-Ponty discusses Bergson’s God “as the principle of the
good.” “Everything happens, according to Bergson, as if man encountered at the roots of his
constituted being a generosity which is not a compromise with the adversity of the world and
which is on his side against it.” “Tout se passe, à lire Bergson, comme si l’homme rencontrait,
à la racine de son être constitué, une générosité qui n’est pas compromise avec l’adversité du
monde et qui est d’accord avec lui contre elle.” This is as close as Merleau-Ponty comes to
expressing his own sense of God. It is also very close to William James’s view in The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1904a, 517).
11. Nor are Merleau-Ponty’s own retrospective summaries of his courses, Résumés de Cours,
Collège de France 1952–1960, of any help. The total amount of space dedicated to Bergson in
dealing with the Romantic conception of Nature is only three pages (109–11).
NATURE AND LIFE 159
referred: matter is derived by “détente”—“relaxation,” “distension,” “inver-

sion,” or “interruption”—of the action of the vital impulse. The descriptions
of life and matter from the earlier chapters still show up in Chapter 3;
however, the predominant view in this chapter is that matter is “a simple
arrest of the action that generates form [in the creative process]” (1937,
239). Further, “the two opposite directions of the work of consciousness”
(Ibid., 267) are divided between intuition, or instinct, and intellect, also
referred to as “intelligence.”12
Bergson rejects the Kantian alternatives that the “mind is determined
by things,” that “things are determined by the mind,” and that, “between
mind and things we must suppose a mysterious [transcendental] agreement”
(Ibid., 205). Rather, convinced that Kant was correct to assert that “exten-
sion is not a material attribute of the same kind as others” (Ibid., 204), but
without accepting Kant’s reasons for this assertion, Bergson defends a fourth
alternative that Kant could not consider because “he did not think that the
mind overflowed the intellect” (Ibid., 206). It is that “intellect and matter
have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain
at last a common form” (Ibid.). This happens “naturally” because in this
double creation, “the same movement by which the mind is brought to form
itself into intellect, that is to say, into distinct concepts, brings matter to
break itself up into objects excluding one another. The more consciousness
is intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized” (Ibid., 189), and the more
matter is spatialized, the more time is spatialized.13
To explain how this natural inversion or relaxation takes place, Bergson
appeals to the following analogy. Suppose I am listening to a poetry reading.
I follow the reading with an undivided consciousness. I “interest myself”
in the poet, place myself in his or her feelings, relive “the simple state”
that has been “broken into phrases and words,” and “sympathize” with the
poet’s “inspiration” (1937, 209). “Now,” says Bergson, “I need only relax my
attention, let go the tension that there is in me, for the sounds, hitherto
swallowed up in the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by one, in their
materiality” (Ibid.). This is not something that I do; it adds no content
to the experience, but rather subtracts something. Hence, it is “negative,”
12. In Creative Evolution, intuition is a type of instinct, and instinct is “sympathy.” Intuition
is “instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object
and of enlarging it indefinitely” (1937, 176).
13. Merleau-Ponty holds that criticism of the conceptual spatialization of time is neither neces-
sary nor sufficient for recovering “authentic time” (PhP 415n./474–75 n. 1). It is not necessary
because time is disengaged from space only on condition that space is something “objectified
in advance,” and if we disregard “primordial [bodily] spatiality” (Ibid.). And protests against
spatialization are insufficient because, when the conceptually static terms used to describe time
have been fully criticized, it is still possible to misdescribe “an authentic intuition of time” (Ibid.).
and the more I “pursue this quite negative direction of relaxation, the more
extension and complexity I shall create” (Ibid.). Bergson then states that
this comparison will at least help us to comprehend “how the same sup-
pression of positive reality, the same inversion of a certain original move-
ment, can create at once extension in space and the admirable order which
mathematics finds there” (1937, 210). This is to say that the flux of life,
for Bergson, is purely positive, while Negativity is the product of intellect.
There is no natural negativity, except in the weak sense of contingency.
The same reasoning also applies to space, which “arises automatically,
as the remainder of a subtraction arises once the two numbers are posited”
(Ibid.).14 Thus, as the sounds of the poet’s voice materialize for me when I
“relax my attention” to its meaning, in a comparable fashion spatial exten-
sion materializes when the efforts of the vital impulse are interrupted. As
noted above, matter and spatial extension simply are that interruption to
which intellect corresponds. Intellect and matter are both cut out of the flux
of life in the same movement, just as intellect cuts out bodies from matter.
“Yet,” Bergson he still maintains, “it is undeniable that matter lends itself
to this sub-division” (Ibid., 203).
It is very difficult to make Bergson’s two views of the relationship of
life/consciousness and matter consistent with each other, a conclusion that
Merleau-Ponty reaches at the end of his analysis of Creative Evolution in the
Nature lectures. What intervenes is his all-important critique of negativity
and positivity in that work.
NEGATIVITY AND POSITIVITY
Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s entire discussion of Bergson in La Nature and

elsewhere, he portrays his predecessor as engaging in a sort of running and
ultimately losing battle with negativity and the idea of nothingness. Since
Bergson could not totally exorcize nothingness from Being, he writes, philo-
sophical anguish was more nearly repressed than eliminated (N 52/79). As
a case in point, he states that the shift from Chapter 2 to Chapter 3 of
Creative Evolution exhibits the author’s habitual movement to a “defined
14. Another reason that Merleau-Ponty might have described Bergson’s view in Chapter III of
Creative Evolution as “emanatism” is a note appended to this statement about space. Bergson
writes, “Our comparison does no more than develop the content of the term logos, as Plotinus
understands it. . . . More generally, the relation that we establish in the present chapter between
‘extension’ and ‘detension’ resembles in some aspects that which Plotinus supposes . . . when he
makes extension not indeed an inversion of original Being, but an enfeeblement of its essence,
one of the last states of the procession” (1937, 210, n. 1). In terms of Bergson’s conception of
space, Deleuze notes helpfully, “Space, in effect, is not matter or extension, but the ‘schema’
of matter, that is, the representation of the limit where the movement of expansion (détente)
would come to an end as the external envelope of all possible extensions” (1991, 87).
NATURE AND LIFE 161
positive reality,” to “perceive a negation in this positive reality,” and there-

fore to translate “this negation into positive terms (here the physical and
the psychic).” The final result, he goes on to say, is to preserve “despite
everything the positive unity, the incorporation of this new negation in
the concepts of being and of the positive” (N 64/94).15 In this way, as
Merleau-Ponty sees it, Bergson can preserve his positivism only at the price
of repressing the negative. However, this criticism is unconvincing because
the only sense of negativity present here is the inaction of life or conscious-
ness—its “relaxation” or “detension.”
Second, Merleau-Ponty observes that when we focus on the process
of natural production, we find that Bergson’s desire to banish negativity
commits him to the view that there can be no pure disorder. There can
be relative disorder, but the “idea of [total] chaos is contradictory” (N
65/95).16 This conclusion follows from Bergson’s discussion of two forms
of order: the “vital” (1937, 224), and the “geometrical” or, more generally,
“the mathematical order” (1937, 219), which La Nature terms “the physico-
mathematical order” (N 65/95). The latter, for Bergson, is negative, but only
in the sense of not being “a positive thing” (1937, 219). Its negativity stems
from the fact that “the particular laws of the physical world” that express
this form of order are “the work of an investigator who has regarded things
from a certain bias, isolated certain variables, [and] applied certain conven-
tional units of measurement” (Ibid., 218), and because the mathematical
order, like matter, “produces itself automatically by the interruption of the
inverse order . . . it is this very interruption” (Ibid., 220).
On the other hand, it is no less true that Bergson states, in language
that closely resembles Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, that matter
“already possess[es] everything necessary to adapt itself to our [mathematical]
formulae” (Ibid., 219).17 Further, the physico-mathematical order expresses
15. “. . . de s’apercevoir que, dans cette réalité, il y a une négation, d’où la traduction de
cette négation en termes positifs (ici le physique et le psychique) et d’où, finalement, afin
de conserver malgré tout l’unité positive, l’incorporation de cette nouvelle négation dans les
concepts d’être et de positif.”
16. Merleau-Ponty does not say so, but this argument derives from Kant. A phenomenal ap-
pearance of total chaos would be self-contradictory because of the implicit ordering activities
of consciousness through which the manifold of sensory intuition would achieve intelligibility
as chaos.
17. On its face, this sentence appears to contradict Bergson’s rejection of one of the Kantian
alternatives mentioned earlier, that “between mind and things we must suppose a mysterious
agreement.” Bergson does not seem to recognize a tension between the two sentences, and
perhaps he would reply that the key difference is the word mysterious. Kant was referring to
the problem of how the categories of the understanding can “connect” with those data—in
his technical language, be “schematized.” Bergson’s second sentence is about the intellectual
measurement of matter, not how mind and matter come together in the first place.
and presupposes the regularities of cause and effect: given the same condi-
tions, the same results will obtain. The vital order, however, yields the same
results under different circumstances, as we have seen with the example of
the same structures of matter appearing in diverging lines of evolution. The
two forms of order also differ in terms of temporal emphasis. Permanence in
the vital order comes from the success of future results, whereas permanence
for nonliving entities is explained by past-looking considerations.
Merleau-Ponty claims that, for Bergson, these two forms of order are
“not only contrary, but contradictory” (N 65/95). Bergson clearly sees them
as contrary in that the first type of order, “the vital,” is that in which cre-
ativity is unforeseeable (Ibid., 224), while the second type of order, “the
mathematical,” is “automatic and . . . foreseeable” (Ibid.). Yet, Bergson
never claims that these two types of order are contradictory, and for him
both are in fact true. This is because the mathematical order of Nature is
simply the way that intellect conceptualizes matter.
Merleau-Ponty also finds it difficult to believe in the positivity of
the “physico-mathematical order” in Bergson’s philosophy, particularly in
light of the latter’s claim that the capacity to disintegrate is an essential
characteristic of matter. Yet, even though Bergson does not hold that the
“physico-mathematical order” is positive, this is still an odd claim to make.
For, the disintegration of material configurations would ipso facto amount
to the disintegration of the “physico-mathematical order” as concerns the
matter affected.
However, Merleau-Ponty does not consider that objection. Instead, he
pursues the subject of negativity in terms of the conflicting views of mat-
ter in Creative Evolution. He concludes that Bergson’s positivism makes the
double demand on us that we believe that “life is a positive reality from
which matter derives, by a simple arrest [par simple arrêt]” (N 66/96) of the
vital impulse and that, given the supposed contradictions sketched above,
life and matter are “two positive orders” (Ibid.). The first belief stresses
continuity from one order to another. The second, he says, if taken literally,
would destroy Bergson’s idea of Nature, which teaches us that life amounts
to “the resumption of the arrested creative movement, and from which the
arrest produces matter, the latter being a reality that makes itself in a world
which undoes itself” (N 66/96, 97).18 This “bipolar” movement “interior to
Nature” must be presupposed: the “negation operating in Nature” (Ibid.) in
the continual interplay of life and matter is essential to prevent Bergson’s
concept of Nature from breaking up.
18. “. . . la vie est la reprise du mouvement créateur arrêté, et dont l’arrêt donne la matière,
celle-ci étant une réalité qui se fait dans un monde que se défait.” There is no explanation
of “un monde que se défait,” without which it is difficult to determine what Merleau-Ponty
means here.
NATURE AND LIFE 163
Thus, Merleau-Ponty concludes yet again—in this case, because he

conflates the concepts of negation and nothingness—that “the true mean-
ing of Bergson’s philosophy” is that, despite his protests to the contrary, it
“incorporates” the idea of nothingness in Being rather than abolishing the
idea (N 67/97). Yet, he says, returning to negation, given Bergson’s posi-
tivism, “it is the same thing to say that something is not and to say that
something is. All negation is only denegation, Verneinung, as Freud would
say” (N 67/97),19 and it was left to Freud to sound the “psychological depth”
of negation insofar as it has no direct connection with things, but rather
“to the repression of erroneous judgments” (Ibid.). In this way, for Bergson,
“negation is only an affirmation of an affirmation” (Ibid.).20
From this claim Merleau-Ponty argues that Bergson defends the total
positivity of mind, illustrated with the following example. Suppose that there
were no functioning languages or societies, and that every human “intellec-
tual initiative, every faculty of self-reflection and of self-judgment atrophied”
(1937, 292). Even so, there would remain “the dampness of the ground” that
would be taken up in sensations and that would be capable of transmitting
“a vague idea to the deadened intellect. The intellect would still affirm, in
implicit terms” the presence of the humid soil independently of higher cog-
nitive functioning, and so the latter is not necessary for affirmation (Ibid.).
It is clear, Bergson tells us, that “this passive intelligence, mechanically
keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor following the course
of the real” (Ibid.), would feel no need for any negative judgment.
Merleau-Ponty claims that this is a weak argument for an “esprit positif”
(N 67/98). On his view, its most obvious deficiency is to leave out history.
19. “Pour lui [Bergson], c’est la même chose de dire que quelque chose n’est pas et de dire que
quelque chose est. Toute négation est dénégation, Verneinung, comme dirait Freud.” It would
be an accurate portrayal of Bergson’s view if the end of the first sentence were “que quelque
chose d’autre est” (“that something else is”).
20. Bergson’s own explanation is much clearer than Merleau-Ponty’s commentary. Negation is
“affirmation of the second degree” (1937, 288) because it affirms something of an affirmation
that itself affirms something of an object. For example (Bergson’s), I say that a table is black.
This is an affirmative proposition about something that I’ve seen. But “The table is not white”
is not an affirmation of what I have seen, so it is not a judgment about the table. Rather, it
is a judgment about the (implied) “judgment that would declare the table white. I judge a
judgment and not the table” (Ibid., 287–88). Whenever we say, “This is not X,” it expresses
the perceptual appearance “in the language of my expectation and attention” (Ibid.). This,
therefore, is another case of relative disorder, “the disappointment of a mind that finds before
it an order different from what it wants” (Ibid., 222). Bergson could well have responded to
Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of implied negativity as he did in terms of negative judgments di-
rected at unexpected (positive) forms of order. Deleuze is right to say that the core of Bergson’s
philosophy is “to think differences in kind independently of all forms of negation: There are
differences in being and yet nothing negative” (1991, 46). These dualisms include those of dura-
tion and space, memory and matter, perception and recollection, and perception and affectivity.
Thus, in “Bergson in the Making” Merleau-Ponty writes, “It is hard to

understand why Bergson did not think about history from within as he had
thought about life from within. Why did he not also set about investigating
in history the simple and undivided acts which arrange fragmentary facts for
each period or event” (S 187/235–36)?21 Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, this
primitive and passive affirmative mind seems ill suited for Bergson’s own
“ontology of the past, the present, and the future” (N 67/98).
Moreover, Merleau-Ponty asserts, in Creative Evolution, there is “a
movement between the positive and the negative” (Ibid., 52/79) because
we need intelligence to ask questions that instinct alone would not pose (see
Bergson 1937, 151), and the former works on the latter (N 52/79). This cre-
ates, for Merleau-Ponty, “a ‘tension’ between the question and the answer”
(Ibid., 52/79–80) within intuition itself and, he goes on to say, Creative
Evolution maintains the “positive value” (Ibid., 1937, 52/80) of intelligence
because it is the source of the mobility of consciousness. “Consciousness,”
Bergson tells us, “is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions
or potential activity which surrounds the action really performed by the liv-
ing being” (Ibid., 144), and it is this active function of consciousness that,
as Merleau-Ponty sees it, leads Bergson to say that coincidence with Being
is, as we have seen above, “only partial” (Ibid., 52/80).
Nevertheless, for Bergson, there is no evidence that this relation-
ship between consciousness and intuition introduces any “tension” between
them, and still less any negativity beyond the absence of total coincidence.
In addition, Merleau-Ponty’s argument for the weakness of Bergson’s argu-
ment for the positivity of mind is itself weak. The first problem is that it
tries to make the argument prove something that its author did not intend.
Bergson never claimed that the primitive mind in his thought-experiment
could encompass all our reflections on Being or that it was adequate to
express his “ontology of the past, the present, and the future.” Rather, he
was concerned to show that, well beneath conceptual thinking, for a mind
that followed “purely and simply the thread of experience, there would be
no void, no nothingness, even relative or partial, no possible negation.
Such a mind would see facts succeed facts, states succeed states, things
succeed things” (1937, 294). That is because, at that very primitive level,
“the intellect will still affirm, in implicit terms” (Ibid., 292). Yet, it cannot
“receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, that which exists may come
21. “C’est vraiment une question de savoir pourquoi il n’a pas pensé l’histoire du dedans
comme il avait pensé la vie du dedans, pourquoi il ne s’est pas mis, là aussi, à la recherche
des actes simples et indivis qui, pour chaque période ou chaque événement, font l’agencement
des faits parcellaires.” The answer to Merleau-Ponty’s question is that Bergson, at least in
Creative Evolution, considered history in terms of the evolutionary development of life. See,
for example, 65–66 and 264–69.
NATURE AND LIFE 165
to be recorded, but the non-existence of the non-existing cannot” (Ibid.).

Consequently, the second problem with Merleau-Ponty’s response is that
he does not acknowledge that what is at issue here for Bergson is simply a
variant of his previous point that negative judgments do not literally report
perceptual impressions, but rather constitute meta-judgments, that is, judg-
ments about judgments.
Bergson states that confusion about affirmation and negation stems
from the fact that such judgments are expressed in propositions and, from the
perspective of formal logic, both affirmation and negation consist of “mutu-
ally symmetrical acts” (1937, 292). However, this “symmetry is altogether
external and the likeness superficial” (Ibid.) because the two types of judg-
ments function very differently. Affirmative judgments simply state that X is
Y, whereas negative judgments, although they have the deceptively simple
form of X is not Y, really conceal an implicit contrast between what is the
case and what is not. As a result, the proposition, “The ground is not damp”
means both “(1) that one might believe that the ground is damp, [and]
(2) that the dampness is replaced in fact by a certain quality x” (Ibid., 293).
At this basic pre-reflective level, for Bergson, the present looks for-
ward to future possibilities not consciously foreseen, but in some ways
sensed through instinct. Now, at the end of “Bergson in the Making,”
Merleau-Ponty criticized his predecessor for not believing in “interrogative
thought” (S 191/240), though for Bergson, interrogative activity is anterior
to thought and is present even in the most elemental forms of awareness
of the environment. As he pointed out in Matter and Memory, because
of the way that the nervous system is constructed, it is perceptions that
pose questions to our motor responses. This is only one example of the
fact that Merleau-Ponty could have found even more support in Bergson’s
“phenomenology of perception” for his ontology of flesh. For both thinkers,
our perceptual and bodily links to nature repudiate completely a Cartesian
dualism and a bifurcation between appearance and reality.
A WHITEHEADIAN RESPONSE
Whitehead’s assessment of Bergson is very much in keeping with that of

Merleau-Ponty, but also much more concise. He likewise cites Bergson often
and was substantially influenced by his thought, even while finding many
shortcomings in it. For example, Whitehead uses the expression, “the pas-
sage of nature,” for what Bergson calls “time,” and he agrees with Bergson
about its being the fundamental character of reality (CN 54). On the other
hand, Whitehead does not agree with Bergson’s repudiation of teleology
and suspicion of concepts, and he is willing to accommodate disorder and
negativity in nature in a way that Bergson would not.
Whitehead also makes appreciative use of some of Bergson’s terminol-

ogy. For instance, he explicitly uses Bergson’s word canalization to express the
presence of “mental originality” in an animal’s body. “It expresses the con-
trol and intensification of mental life, without which limits, disaster would
befall the body” (PR 107). Also, in developing his own account of feelings,
Whitehead appropriates Bergson’s notion of intuition, but “with some sig-
nificant changes” (PR 280). In addition, Whitehead, like Merleau-Ponty,
was deeply influenced by Bergson’s view of the penetration of the past in
the present: we “trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our
memory pours into the present only the odd recollection or two that in
some way complete our present situation” (Bergson 1937, 284).
Too, Whitehead likewise holds that Bergson was partially correct in
his protest against the intellectual spatialization of things through which
process is ignored and the world interpreted “in terms of static categories”
(PR 209). He was correct insofar as such spatialization abstracts from the flu-
ency of process. “The difficulties of Cartesianism with its three clear-cut sub-
stances, and with its ‘duration’ and ‘measured time’ well in the background,
illustrate the result of the subordination of fluency” (Ibid.). However, for
Whitehead, Bergson was wrong to rule out spatialization completely as a valid
descriptive device: “The more primitive types of experience are concerned
with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception . . . sense-reception is
‘unspatialized,’ and sense-perception is ‘spatialized.’ In sense-reception the
sensa are the definiteness of emotion: they are emotional forms transmitted
from occasion to occasion” (PR 113, 114).
Moreover, although Whitehead thinks that the history of philoso-
phy generally supports Bergson’s contention that the intellect does tend
to spatialize nature, Whitehead rejects Bergson’s more sweeping conclusion
that this tendency is “an inherent necessity of the intellect” (PR 209).
He criticizes the “anti-intellectualism” of both Bergson and Nietzsche who
hold, he believes, that all intellectual analysis is based on some “discarded
dogmatic method, and thence . . . deduce that intellect is intrinsically tied
to erroneous fictions” (AI 223). As Victor Lowe points out, Whitehead’s
explanation of nature as composed of “existences as teleological processes”
supports Bergson’s rejection of materialism, but at the same time teaches
“by example that it is possible for theoretical concepts to express the inner
growth of things” (1966, 50). Whitehead was not unaware of the difficulties
of using concepts (universals) to express the particularity of things, but he
also understood that dependence on traditional Aristotelian logic was an
insuperable obstacle. “Here again,” Lowe says correctly, “Whitehead is the
innovator, Bergson the conservative to whom logic is forever Aristotelian
and the intellect forever excluded from metaphysical penetration” (Ibid.,
259). Whitehead’s conceptual innovations in his mature process metaphysics
NATURE AND LIFE 167
are also something that Merleau-Ponty would have appreciated as he himself

struggled to find new ways to formulate his ontology of flesh.
Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” found other shortcomings as well
in Bergson’s process philosophy. For reasons that we will investigate later,
Whitehead’s work, unlike that of Bergson, distinguishes becoming from change
and is based on the former. Like Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead also rejects a con-
ception of process as unbroken continuity and a conception of discontinuities
as mere static states created by our intellectual intervention. For Whitehead,
on the contrary, as we shall see in the following chapter, process is discontinu-
ous because it is made up of individual acts of concrescence. Also, whereas
Whitehead’s notion of creativity applies to all existents, Bergson’s “creative
evolution” is only concerned with living beings. Therefore, despite multiple
claims to the contrary, creativity for Whitehead is not the same as Bergson’s
élan vital because it has a much wider scope. Whitehead’s notion of creativity
in fact is a descriptive generalization of organic life, and this is the reason
why he calls his metaphysics “the philosophy of organism.”
THE LIFE OF FLESH
We have seen that Schelling holds that, in some way, all of Nature is alive,
and Bergson explains the presence of life in Nature through his famous
élan vital. Merleau-Ponty offers a different explanation through his stud-
ies of biology. The last “Working Note” for the completion of his “new”
ontology, written two months before his death, specifies that Part I of the
entire project would deal with “The visible,” and what came to be The
Visible and the Invisible formed an unfinished beginning of it. Part II, which
included Eye and Mind, would treat the subject of Nature, and Part III,
unwritten, would deal with the Logos (VI 274/328). About “Nature,” the
philosopher writes that he does not intend to interpret it as “Nature in
itself” as Scholastics might have conceived it, but rather as the “intertwining”
of animality and human beings. It would be “Nature as the other side of
man (as flesh—nowise as ‘matter’)” (Ibid.). There is an Ineinander between
human beings and “animality and Nature,” just as there is “an Ineinander
of life and physicochemistry” (N 208/269).
Merleau-Ponty’s three Nature courses articulate this “intertwining” in
great detail in order to argue against Cartesian dualism and other forms
of the bifurcation of Nature. The first course focuses on the phusis, the
second on animality, and the third on the human body and the Logos. We
have also seen that, for Merleau-Ponty, our flesh explains the flesh of the
world and vice versa, and we have followed his generalization of the body’s
reversible, chiasmatic structure to all flesh. In the three Nature lectures, he
wants to show through the evolutionary process, embryology, phylogenesis,
an analysis of animal behavior, and the relationships of human beings and

(other) animals, that life, the subject, or consciousness, does not descend
into matter, but rather emerges from it. Correlatively, he also tries to steer
a middle path between vitalism and mechanism while rejecting finalism, but
allowing for purposeful behavior.
Rather than delving into all of Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the
complex details of animal behavior and their implications for understanding
human behavior and the body, we will restrict ourselves to the philosophi-
cal relevance of some of the biologists studied in his courses. For example,
typical of the kinds of discussions that reject finalism in these chapters is
that which focuses on George E. Coghill’s study of the axolotl lizard (1929).
Beginning as a tadpole, the lizard eventually develops four legs and then
emerges on land. Coghill studied its development as an embryo and then
its motility, especially its learning to swim. He identified five phases in
this learning process (N 140–41/189), which are not important here, but
what is significant is Merleau-Ponty’s non-finalist interpretation of Coghill’s
research. Writing in a Bergsonian vein, he says that if we see the achieve-
ment of swimming in the tadpole’s first movements, we would then be
guilty of the finalistic, “retrospective illusion” of projecting the future into
the past, or else copying the “sensible world” with an intellectual double
without understanding the former (Ibid., 152/203).
Along the same lines, Merleau-Ponty rejects preformation as an expla-
nation of embryology—the notion that an embryo develops from an already
complete miniature—and notes that “modern embryology defends the the-
sis of epigenesis”—the theory that embryonic development begins with an
undifferentiated egg cell (N 152/203). He repeats this claim later in the
context of rejecting Hans Driesch’s vitalistic analysis (1929) of ontogen-
esis (Ibid., 230/239).22 And for organisms generally, he rejects the finalistic
notion that they already have their futures “folded back in potential in
the beginning of its organic life, as in a nutshell in its beginning” (Ibid.,
155/206).23 There is, however, clearly present a sketch of its future, in the
sense that development is not random, but this sketch is more nearly in
the sense of an outline than something predetermined. The sketch guides
development, but does not guarantee it. Thus, Merleau-Ponty states, there
22. But see RC 126/173: “Embryology since Driesch seems to us to have been moving in this
direction in refusing to opt either for preformation or epigenesis, rather taking both notions
as ‘complementary’ and describing embryogenesis as a ‘flux of determination.” “l’embryologie
depuis Driesch, quand elle refuse d’opter entre préformation et épigenèse, prend ces notions
comme ‘complémentaires’ et décrit l’embryogenèse comme un ‘flux de détermination.’ ” What-
ever the evidence for this statement in the spring of 1960, biologists now generally accept that
epigenesis is the correct theory.
23. “L’avenir de l’organisme n’est pas replié en puissance dans le début de sa vie organique,
comme en raccourci dans son début.”
NATURE AND LIFE 169
is another instance of natural negativity in the organism, an absence of

something “difficult to know” that the future will fill (Ibid.). “Life,” he
writes, “is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is . . . the reality of a process,
as Whitehead would say, unobservable up close, which assuredly is made,
and which is a reality” (Ibid., 156/208).24
A more important influence on Merleau-Ponty’s views of life and
Nature was the German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll. In his 1958 course on
“Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture,” the philosopher
appropriates Uexküll’s descriptions of the Umwelten of both lower and higher
animals (1909, 1932). For Uexküll, an Umwelt is a subjectivized world—for
example, a field that would be experienced very differently by a cow, a tick,
or a human being. On his view, a given organism and its world are related
internally such that, as Tristan Moyle puts it, there is “an adaptation of the
environment into the organism” (2007, 168).
Uexküll’s studies of the “ways” or “manners” in which animals behave
reveal that those “manners” can be “read as the meaning of behavior.” Since
this behavior directed toward an Umwelt “begins well before the inven-
tion of consciousness” (N 167/220)—it “includes elementary organization
(embryology), and physiological, instinctive organization, or behavior prop-
erly called”25 (Ibid., 167/220)—Uexküll strongly rejects the Cartesian notion
that consciousness is a subject joined to a machine. For Merleau-Ponty,
similarly, animality becomes an incarnate “logos of the sensible world” (Ibid.,
166/219).
Uexküll holds that both lower and higher animals have Umwelten.
However, some lower animals, such as a certain species of medusa, the
marine worm, the urchin, and the starfish, approach the condition of being
mere machines. They have no proper unity that opens up to the outside
and no motor projects—“no unity of the living being which unfurls itself
toward the outside” (N 169/222)—because their entire existence amounts
to reflex responses to their environments. The urchin, for example, is a
“reflex republic” (1932, 47; cited at N 169/222). For much the same rea-
son, Whitehead says that “a tree is a democracy” (AI 206). By contrast,
Merleau-Ponty will add in his third Nature course that higher animals have
a “regulation,” that is, a behavioral circuit between the outside and world
and the animal’s central nervous system. As a result, “they are their Bauplan,
they recreate it” (N 221/283). A Bauplan, or a building plan, amounts to
“a kind of a priori spatial and temporal field unique to each animal species”
24. “La vie n’est pas une sorte de quasi-intériorité . . . la réalité d’un passage, comme dirait
Whitehead, inobservable de près mais qui assurément se fait, et qui est une réalité.”
25. “Le comportement embrasse l’organisation élémentaire (embryologie), l’organisation physi-
ologique, instinctive ou de comportement proprement dit.”
(Moyle 2007, 168). The plan has a dimensionality according to which the
various stages of the organism’s temporal and spatial growth get organized.
In addition, our bodies, unlike those of lower and most higher animals, can
actually project a world (Ibid., 222/284).
Even lower animals, then, have a Bauplan, but only in a “descrip-
tive sense” (Ibid.)—that is, as a heuristic device to conceptualize a unity.
Uexküll considers them “incomplete organisms” (N 222/284). On the other
hand, as Whitehead also held, there are degrees of organization and life in
nature, and thus there are other lower animals that are more complex and
are fully organisms. For example, the sea anemone has “three separate neural
networks, but . . . only one behavior” (Ibid., 170/224).
The Umwelt of a higher animal is marked by another novelty: the
construction of “a Gegenwelt” (“monde opposé”) (N 170/224).26 Lower life
forms have unified functioning, but no ability to reply to their world. The
Umwelt has them closed off and insulated from most external influences.
Such animals “constitute a sort of cohesion with their world, a closed unity”
(Ibid, 170–71/224). For example, the urchin, Uexküll tells us, adapts itself
so thoroughly to its world that is full of dangers, but with which it does not
have to struggle for existence, that it lives as though it were alone in the
world (Ibid., 171/224). Therefore, Uexküll rejects, as will Merleau-Ponty,
the Darwinian explanation of natural selection based on life “endlessly men-
aced by death.” The urchin, for instance, lives in tolerance of other animals
and shows that, pace Darwin, not all animals exhibit “more and more perfect
solutions to the same problem” (Ibid.). Uexküll substitutes for Darwin’s
threatened-by-death explanation the view that the external world has the
ability to determine a unique solution in any given situation (N 178/233).
This is a recurring theme throughout Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures, and
it is central to his alternative to the bifurcation of Nature in terms of
bodies and the emergence of mentality. This theme is particularly visible
in his third Nature course when he discusses the problems of phylogenesis
that “put the very fabric of being in question” (N 243/309). Merleau-Ponty
points out that morphology was Darwin’s chief concern, and the “theory
of descendance” from an identified origin became key to understanding the
exceptional “identity . . . between the hand, the clawed animal foot, the
horse’s hoof, the turtle’s flipper, [and] the bat’s wing” (Ibid.). For Darwin,
26. Uexküll adds further specifics to his concept of a Gegenwelt. “He distinguishes the Welt
(the objective world), the Umwelt (the milieu tailored to the animal), and the Gegenwelt,
which is the Umwelt of higher animals; the interiorized Umwelt is in its turn made up of two
systems: the Merkwelt and the Wirkwelt”—the worlds of perception and action, respectively (N
172/226). “Il distingue le Welt: c’est le monde objectif, l’Umwelt: c’est le milieu que se taille
l’animal, et le Gegenwelt, qui est l’Umwelt des animaux supérieurs, l’Umwelt intériorisé est, à
son tour, fait de deux systèmes: le Merkwelt et le Wirkwelt.”
NATURE AND LIFE 171
organisms get modified by the combination of chance and “the pressure of

selection,” and something exists because something else did not survive—“a
factor of life replaced by a factor of death. Elimination of the inept” (Ibid.,
244/309).
For Merleau-Ponty, Darwin is correct that the problem of evolution
does not consist in explaining why some organism exists, as Leibniz would,
and that what has to be shown is that all competitors in a particular situation
have been got rid of (N 251/317). Yet, like Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty does
not think that the eliminative solution is empirically adequate. Animals,
particularly higher animals, have other possible survival strategies beyond
what the theory of descendance would predict. Therefore, for Merleau-Ponty,
evolution, which is history, must be distinguished “absolutely” from filiation
(Ibid., 258/325).
For Uexküll, these strategies require what Merleau-Ponty, following
Husserl, has referred to as Offenheit to an Umwelt—something that begins
with higher animals because their nervous systems function as a reply to
the exterior world [Gegenwelt] to which, therefore, they must already have
been open (N 171/225). For lower animals, such replies are determined in
advance by their structure. For higher organisms with a greater degree of
life, stimuli are elaborated by the nervous system and the latter functions
as “a mirror of the world” (Ibid.). For example, in higher organisms, the
organization of sense organs permits an animal to acquire environmental
information, especially “if the sense organs are mobile, like an antenna,
which is a sort of exploratory vision” (Ibid., 178/233).
Higher organisms develop themselves in and through building up cre-
ative ways of dealing with the challenges of their Gegenwelten to which they
are open. Hence, the organism cannot be an effect of its external world
or cause of it. For the lower animal, by contrast, there is only a “ ‘wave
of excitation’ ” (Ibid., 171/225). The organization is complete only if the
animal is aware of “the position of its body and its members, only if it pos-
sesses a proprioceptivity”—something that invertebrates, such the octopus,
lack (Ibid., 172/226).
Merleau-Ponty also follows Uexküll in rejecting both the Kantian
perception of unknowable life in the organism and the Schellingian iden-
tification with Nature because neither can produce an Umwelt (N177/232).
The “open field” of the human Umwelt cannot be the correlate of a Kantian
freedom—that is, manifested only in an internal decision. Rather, it is “a
structural freedom” (Ibid., 178/233). It is not that of a “suprasensible thing,”
but equally not that of a Schellingian “nature-subject” (Ibid.).
Finally, Merleau-Ponty states, Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt teach-
es us the continuity of life that links the behaviors of lower and higher
animals and therefore the impossibility of drawing a sharp line between
“where behavior begins and where mind ends” (N 178/234). Therefore,

Merleau-Ponty finds in Uexküll’s work support for his oft-repeated rejec-
tion of a hierarchy of species and the related claim that ours differs from
all others in kind instead of by degrees—“qualitatively” (Ibid., 214/276; cf.
RC 96/135). Our relations with other species are “lateral,” not hierarchical,
“an overcoming that does not abolish kinship (Ibid. 268/335). This is why
he says, toward the end of the Nature lectures, that the rationale for his
long, complex treatment of evolution is “to give this depth to the human
body, this archeology, this natal past, this phylogenetic reference, to restore
it in a fabric of preobjective, enveloping being, from which it emerges and
which recalls to us its identity as sensing and sensible at every moment”
(N 273/341).27
For additional evidence for this archeology, Merleau-Ponty turns to
Edward S. Russell’s discussion (1946) of “the ‘oriented character’ of organic
activities” (N 178/234). Russell uses behavior as a model for understanding
relationships between cells and, in return, he views behavior as an extension
of the animal’s motions outside its body. For Russell, behavior and physi-
ological activity are reciprocally involved with each other, as in the case
of “the physiological activity of tissue repair and the behavioral activity of
an animal that repairs its dwelling” (Ibid., 179/234).
In addition, Russell, analyzing such diverse creatures as hydras, dogs,
lizards, insects, and crustaceans, compares “the activity of behavior and regu-
lation within an organism” (Ibid., 180/235–36). In the adult state, behav-
ioral activity is already marked in “morphogenesis,” as is clear in the case of
insect metamorphosis, “in which behavioral processes and organic processes
are linked in the same chain” (Ibid., 181/237). Likewise, sometimes crus-
taceans secrete their shells and at other times build them out of materials
in their environments. In these activities, “the organism and the exterior
milieu are substituted for one another” (Ibid.).
However, it is Russell’s observations of flatworms that bring to light
what Merleau-Ponty takes to be the two most important results of his
research. The first is goal-oriented behavior in those creatures, “even for
the most elementary activity, as for example the regeneration of tissue”
(N 181/237). This capacity means that it can produce possible structural
forms “beyond its actual structure. It is a sort of experimental verification
of Aristotelianism: there is a formal cause beyond mechanism, a victorious
27. “C’est pour donner cette profondeur au corps humain, cette archéologie, ce passé natal, cette
référence phylogénétique, c’est pour le restituer dans un tissu d’être pré-objectif, enveloppant,
d’où il émerge et que nous rappelle à chaque instant son identité comme sentant et sensible,
que nous avons donné une si grande place à la théorie de l’évolution.”
NATURE AND LIFE 173
planification in each morsel of the flatworm” (Ibid., 181/238).28 Russell also

points out that if the opening of a cut flatworm faces toward the head of the
animal, the opening will grow one or multiple heads, and if the opening faces
toward the rear, it will grow a tail (Ibid., 182/238). Therefore, the flatworm
exhibits “a limited and specialized teleology” that functions in tandem with
local conditions—in accord with what Uexküll says about the organism’s
Umwelt—and “within the limits imposed by physicochemical conditions”
(Ibid.). Human teleology, Merleau-Ponty writes, “constructs by assembly of
machines, whereas the organism does it by auto-differentiation” (Ibid.), a
process of tissue regeneration in which the animal evades the Parmenidean
disjuncts of Being and non-Being (Ibid., 183/240).
Merleau-Ponty extends his reflections on the Umwelt and connec-
tions between animal behavior and the developmental process to the subject
of mimicry as studied by Adolf Portmann (1960). Merleau-Ponty has in
mind both animals that take on the appearance of their environment and
those that imitate other animals, even of other species. For example, there
are butterflies that mimic the color of wasps as well as their “rapid, low,
irregular flying” (N 185/242). This fact gives him another reason to ques-
tion “Darwinian ideology” (Ibid., 186/243), even though there are cases of
adaptation to environments that are not true mimicry. As Merleau-Ponty
sees it, life is richer than a mere “organization for survival” because the life
of an organism can manifest an extraordinary profusion of forms, the useful-
ness of most of which is untried and are “occasionally even dangerous for
the animal” (Ibid.). On the one hand, there is a push for freedom, and on
the other, “an economy of life” (Ibid., 186/244).
Portmann’s studies of animal appearances and mimicry (1960) lead
Merleau-Ponty to the emergence of the expressive body in higher animals.29
Their bodily appearances are “more sober” than those of some lower animals,
yet there is a larger potentiality for expression. Their bodies are “entirely a
manner of expression” (N 187/244).
For example, the ornamentation of animals such as frogs present “a
‘semantic ensemble’ . . . a ‘critical ensemble’ that allows the animal to be
28. “C’est une sorte de vérification expérimentale de l’aristotélisme: il y a une cause formelle
par-delà le mécanisme, une planification victorieuse dans chaque morceau de planaire.”
29. For example, with regard to human beings, Merleau-Ponty writes that the fact that the
libidinal body illustrates a “natural rooting of the for-other” can be compared to Portmann’s
demonstration that “mimicry is understood as identification, and that the species is already
inscribed in generativity and is also inscribed in this intercorporeity” (N 210/272). “il faudrait
une étude du corps libidinal, et montrer qu’il y a un enracinement naturel du pour autrui (nous
avons vu Portmann: le corps animal comme organe du pour autrui, le mimétisme comme iden-
tification, l’espèce, déjà inscrite dans la générativité, inscrite aussi dans cette intercorporéité).”
recognized by its fellow creatures” (Ibid., 187/245).30 For Merleau-Ponty,

there are two ways to consider the markings on animals, just as we might
consider writing on “an old stone”: we can speculate about how the inscrip-
tion came to be there, but we can also try to understand its meaning (Ibid.).
A mollusk’s shell, he continues, does not mean much because the shell does
not express the animal within it. By contrast, “the pattern on the skin of
a zebra has a meaning because it resulted from an “ensemble of convergent
processes” (N 187–88/245). We should be interested in these animal appear-
ances, on his view, because they consist of a language, and one of the most
significant domains of experience in which this is the case is sexuality. In
higher animals, there is a transformation of sexuality in that it “takes on
an expressive value, a ‘value of form’ ” (Ibid., 188/246). For example, lower
vertebrates might have muscles to close the eye to protect it, but the same
muscular movement in a higher animal can play an expressive role in sexual
presentations.
For Merleau-Ponty, the existence of mimicry and his reading of what
Portmann shows about the expressive function of animal appearances imply
that an organism’s milieu and morphology are related internally via resem-
blance. Their interaction happens “as if there were an indivision, a perceptu-
al relation between the two” (N 188/247). Mimicry appears to establish that
we can define behavior “only by a perceptual relation,” and consequently,
Being cannot be defined outside of perceived being” (Ibid., 189/247).
To say that animal behavior is expressive, and proportionally more so
the higher the order of organism involved, is to say that at a certain level
behavior becomes symbolic. That is why Merleau-Ponty takes up studies of
instinct and then symbolism by one of Uexküll’s students, Konrad Lorenz.31
Lorenz considers that instinctive behaviors are not goal-oriented because
instinct “is a primordial activity ‘without an object,’ objektlos” (N 190/249).
Mechanistic explanations are not applicable to instinct because they can
only be linked to a certain object without being oriented toward it (Ibid.,
191/249).
Lorenz offers an example of a heron that had not yet engaged in nest
building and will only do so the next year. “The heron one day perceives
30. “. . . un ‘ensemble sémantique’ . . . un ‘ensemble critique qui permet à l’animal d’être

reconnu par son congénère.” The editor of Le Visible et l’invisible, Claude Lefort, points out
that Merleau-Ponty relies on texts from Portmann’s Tiergestalt such as the following about
“the body patterns of certain animals.” Such patterns “must be appraised as a special organ of
reference in relationship to a beholding eye and to the central nervous systems. The eye and
what is to be looked at form together a functional unit which is fitted together according to
rules as strict as those obtaining between food and digestive organs” (1960, 113; cited at VI
244, n. 78/298, n. **).
31. Merleau-Ponty remarks that Lorenz’s works are “very difficult to find,” and he relied mostly
on his articles in the Journal für Örnithologie and Die Zeitung für Tierpsychologie.
NATURE AND LIFE 175
leaves, falls in front of them in a sort of ecstasy, then executes the behavioral
stratagem of accumulation of leaves for the nest, and then falls back into
calm” (Ibid., 191/250).32 The instinct is not yet fully realized, but is only
there as sketched in outline. “Then it is as if this behavior is erased” (Ibid.).
In the pre-nest-building activities, the heron also uses non-instinctive bodily
abilities such as motility and perception. Unlike objektlos instinct, these
activities are “oriented toward ends, which Lorenz calls ‘taxes’ ” (Ibid.). “A
taxis is an oriented and finalized movement of the body” (Ibid.).33 Instinct,
therefore, manifests another kind of natural negativity because it contains
“a sort of reference to the non-actual, an oneiric life” (Ibid., 192/251).
One interesting example of this natural negativity in instinctive behav-
ior is how it gets filled with what Lorenz terms a “Prägung,” an “imprinting”
that targets the animal’s “innate stimulus triggers” (N 193/252) and “fills it
with a being not foreseen by Nature” (Ibid., 194/253–54). There are many
examples of such imprinting, as when the young of one species take as
their mother an adult of another species that they first see, even of species
normally hostile to it. Instinct is therefore not purely internal, but rather
incarnates an intertwining of the internal and the external (Ibid., 195/254).
When there are weak external stimuli, the organism’s activity can
seem to be empty. In that case, instinct can be disrupted or become “sym-
bolic activity” that functions for animals as a way to communicate with
each other, and the behavior traced in outline “easily becomes significa-
tion” (N 195/254, 255). Instinct and symbolism are closely linked, for
Merleau-Ponty—for example, by the transformation of instinctive behavior
into mimicry. Symbolic behavior, on his view, emerges whenever “behav-
ior establishes a resonance” (Ibid., 195/255). Furthermore, when symbolism
develops and institutes certain behaviors, those behaviors take on “a new
value as social evocation” (Ibid., 197/256–57). For example, sexuality is
not about mere acts of copulation, but also a ceremony of “monstration”
(Ibid., 196/256) in which instincts can assume the form of rituals. For this
reason, Merleau-Ponty holds that “we can speak in a valid way of an animal
culture” (Ibid., 198/259).
Merleau-Ponty’s second Nature course ends with his dissatisfaction
with all of the biologists mentioned above on the relationship of body and
consciousness. He says of Lorenz, for example, that he declines to express
any opinion about whether animals have a consciousness, though he vir-
tually states that no one with any experience with animals “would deny
32. “Le héron aperçoit un jour des feuilles, tombe devant elles en une sorte d’exstase, puis
exécute le manège comportemental d’accumulation des feuilles pour le nid, et, retombe ensuite
dans le calme.”
33. “Ce qui est taxie c’est un mouvement du corps, orienté et finalisé.”
them consciousness” (N 199/259). The third Nature course—“Nature and

Logos: The Human Body” (January–May 1960)—addresses that question and
examines “the human body as the root of symbolism,34 as the junction of
phusis and logos, because our goal is the series phusis—logos—History” (Ibid.).
In that third course, Merleau-Ponty answers the question of the rela-
tion of consciousness and animality, including humanity, in his habitual
terms of sensuous reflection, the reversibility of the sentant with the sen-
sible. Therefore, he does not seek to gain a scientific knowledge of Nature
alone, though scientific investigations of Nature “have their truth and their
place” (Ibid.). In other words, they are not false, but abstract—an instance
of Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” as noted in Chapter I.
Scientific operations treat Nature as a problem, as in Bridgman’s operation-
alism (1927).35
Biology construed in this manner as a “technical science” considers
a “living being as an artifact, as physiochemical composite” (NC 90), and
Merleau-Ponty contrasts this view of an organism as a “bloße Sache” with
that of a living being that exists in Einfühlung relationships with others
(Ibid.). These relations are not a “residue of pre-science in science” (Ibid.).
Rather, they reveal “a reference to the Umwelt and to the world that cannot
be reconstituted starting from bloße Sachen: it is the universe of physics that
is enveloped in that of life and not the inverse” (Ibid., 90–91).36 As the first
sentence of Eye and Mind puts it succinctly, “Science manipulates things
and gives up living in them” (OE 159/9).37 This envelopment is also why
Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, states that “all of zoology supposes on our
34. The sense of “root” (la racine) here is unclear. It cannot mean “source” or “first appear-
ance.” It would also be too finalist and conflict with Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of a hierarchy
of species to say that “root” means that toward which other animal symbolisms aim for their
fulfillment. It might also designate the first fully explicit, elaborated symbolism, or the primary
means of knowing about symbolic behavior in (other) animals.
35. “ ‘Operationalism’ of Bridgman: ‘The true definition of a concept is not made in terms
of properties, but in terms of effective operations’ ” (N 203/263). “ ‘Opérationalisme’ de Bridg-
man: ‘La vraie définition d’un concept ne se fait pas en termes de propriétés, mais en termes
d’opérations effectives.’ ” Merleau-Ponty cites here Percy W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern
Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 6.
36. “. . . une référence à l’Umwelt et au Welt qui ne peut être reconstitué à partir des bloße
Sachen: c’est l’univers de la physique qui est enveloppé dans celui de la vie et non l’inverse.”
37. “La science manipule les choses et renonce à les habiter.” Eye and Mind, which Merleau-Ponty
wrote in the summer of 1960, begins by continuing the third Nature course that he had just
completed. The influence of the latter on the former is considerable and explains references
in the first few pages of Eye and Mind to embryology, biological gradients (measures of the
speed with which an organism or cell changes in its physiological activity, metabolism, and
growth), operational thinking, and cybernetics. This is why his organizational scheme for
completing what came to be The Visible and the Invisible specifies that Part II, which includes
Eye and Mind, will deal with Nature.
NATURE AND LIFE 177
part a methodical Einfühlung with animal behavior, with participation by

the animal in our perceptual life and participation of our perceptual life in
animality” (RC 97/136).38
At the same time, far from denying the truth of biological expla-
nations, Merleau-Ponty adds that an organism is, in a sense, only physi-
co-chemistry (N 206/267), and no non-natural causality or “entelechy”
could intervene in natural processes. The organism cannot be reduced to
“a sum of instantaneous and punctual microscopic events; it is an enveloping
phenomenon, with the macroscopic style of an ensemble in movement. In
between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark”
(Ibid., 207/268).39
In Merleau-Ponty’s third series of Nature lectures, he takes up the
subjects of “genesis, embryology, and the theory of evolution” (N 207/269).
He is particularly interested in the subjects of ontogenesis and embryology
because he wants “to make contact with indubitably organic facts” (RC
97–98/137). He also wants to argue against Driesch’s vitalism.
For example, in the process of genesis, we can analyze organic func-
tioning in “microscopic terms,” but only when we already have the envel-
oping structures of the organism (N 207/268). Yet, those structures are not
determined by causal relations at a microscopic level. Embryonic devel-
opment is through and through physico-chemical, but physico-chemistry
does not necessitate “an organism of a typical form when the plan of the
whole is restored from a part (regeneration of flatworms)” (Ibid.).40 For
38. “Il est apparu que toute zoölogie suppose de notre part une Einfühlung méthodique du
comportement animal, avec participation de l’animal à notre vie perceptive et participation de
notre vie perceptive à l’animalité.” Merleau-Ponty translates and comments on Husserl’s Beilage
XXIII of the Krisis, which concerns biology (NC 383–92). He agrees with Husserl that biology
is just as universally true as is physics (NC 386), and that “the Ineinander of intersubjectivity
extends to our relationship with our body, with animals, [and] plants—[a] universal Ontology”
(Ibid., 89). “L’Ineinander de l’intersubjectivité s’étend à notre rapport avec notre corps, avec
animaux, plantes—[une] Ontologie universelle.” Biology approximates philosophy because the
“animal variant of Einfühlung opens up an ontology to us” (NC 387).
39. “. . . une somme d’événements microscopiques instantanés et ponctuels; il est phénomène-en-
veloppe, il a une allure d’ensemble, macroscopique. Entre les faits microscopiques se dessine
la réalité globale en filigrane.”
40. This sentence as well as the one immediately preceding it display clearly Merleau-Ponty’s
habitual equation of causation and mechanistic determinism. Similarly, he writes, “In ontogenesis,
in evolution, everything is physicochemistry in conformity with thermodynamics, but it is neither
physicochemistry nor thermodynamics that demands the constitution of these ‘singular points’
that are organisms, these structures, this architectonic in which physicochemical events will
play” (N 213/276). “Dans l’ontogenèse, dans l’évolution, tout est physicochimie en conformité
à la thermodynamique, mais ce n’est pas la physicochimie ou le thermodynamique qui exige
la constitution de ces ‘points singuliers’ qui sont les organismes, de ces structures, de cette
architectonique où joueront les événements physicochimiques.” For the same conception of
causality in the very different context of the relationship of puberty and adult life, see RC 41/61.
Merleau-Ponty, the physico-chemical differs from life as “the event-based”

differs from “the structural,” “the ontic” from “the ontological,” and a “series
of individual spatiotemporal facts at a unique locale” does from “the archi-
tectonic” structure (Ibid.).
The main focus of the third Nature course is the human body rather
than animality. “Evolution,” he says, “marks the transition since the human
issues from it” (N 208/269), and he wants to consider human beings where
they emerge in Nature. Parallel to the “Ineinander of life and physicochem-
istry,” so also is the human “to be taken in the Ineinander with animality
and Nature” (N 208/269). Correlatively, as Uexküll saw, human beings are
not animals in a Cartesian sense—that is, as machines—into which reason
gets inserted. Because it is the human body with which “evolution makes
the transition to human being,” “the human cannot appear in its qualita-
tive difference by the mere addition of reason to the animal (body)” (Ibid.,
214/276).41 Humans comprise “another corporeity” (Ibid.) shared with ani-
mals with various degrees of mental creativity, and humans “co-exist with
animality instead of rashly refusing it any kind of interiority” (C 39)—addi-
tional evidence for which he finds in Wolfgang Köhler’s attempts to “retrace
the structure of the universe of chimpanzees” (Ibid.; cf. SNS 84–85/147).42
For Merleau-Ponty, our Ineinander with animals is further attested in
ethnology and animal psychology, which reveal that animality does not
constitute “the origin of humanity, but rough sketches, partial prefigura-
tions, and something like anticipatory caricatures of it” (S 124–25/157; cf.
N 214/277).43 To show that is, in effect, the aim of the entire second set
of the Nature lectures. Humanity emerges not through the imposition of
a for-itself on a bodily in-itself, and not as “another substance,” but rather
“as interbeing” (N 208/269–70). In other words, the interworld (l’entremonde)
extends beyond human intercorporeity to include that of animals as well.
For, among other things, the human body, just as those of other higher ani-
41. “. . . l’homme ne peut apparaître dans sa différence par l’addition de la raison à l’animal
(corps).” The aim of the last part of the third Nature course is “to describe the animation of
the human body, not as descent into it of a pure consciousness or pure reflection, but as meta-
morphosis of life, and the body as ‘body of mind’ (Valéry)” (RC 128/177). “Décrire l’animation
du corps humain, non comme descente en lui d’une conscience ou d’une réflexion pures, mais
comme métamorphose de la vie, et le corps comme ‘corps de l’esprit’ (Valéry).” See also the
same discussion at VI 233–34/287.
42. Wolfgang Köhler, Intelligenzprüfungen An Menschenaffen (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1921);
L’Intelligence des singes supérieurs (Paris: Alcan, 1927).
43. The interweaving of humanity and animality, which evidences “a strange kinship” be-
tween them, is also attested in mythic presentations such as Eskimo masks studied by Evelyne
Lot-Falck. Both the animal and its “human double . . . are inscribed on the same face”
(N 214/277). For Merleau-Ponty, the lesson for human corporeity of “our ‘strange kinship’ with
the animals (and thus the theory of evolution)” is “our projection-introjection, our Ineinander
with Sensible Being and with other corporeities” (Ibid., 271/339).
NATURE AND LIFE 179
mals, exhibits a “ready-made or natural symbolism” (Ibid., 211/274) because

it is “interrogation (movement) and a response (perception as Erfüllung) of
a project, speaking and understanding” (Ibid., 211/273).44
As regards the evolutionary process that leads to this entremonde,
Merleau-Ponty endorses Teilhard de Chardin’s description of the emergence
of humanity in Nature when the latter says that “Man came silently into
the world,”45 and he interprets this statement to mean four things. In the
context of the “preliminary types” of animals that led up to us, we do not
see where the fully conscious human being emerges. “We do not see him
any more than we see the moment when consciousness appears in onto-
genesis” (N 267/334).46 Second, “like all transitional forms, the human is
offered at first in few exemplary forms” (Ibid.). Third, this silent entry is
due to the fact that individual bodily organization is less conspicuous “than
that of the species—the morphological variety is miniscule” (Ibid.). And
fourth, there is “no rupture” with the rest of animality (Ibid., 267/335).
“There is,” Merleau-Ponty concludes, “a ‘metamorphosis,’ not a beginning
from zero” (Ibid.).
The theme of life in Nature and our place within it brings to a close
the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s early and late conceptions of ontology and
of Nature. It also concludes our reflections on the ways in which he sought
to position his views against the heritage of modern philosophy that still
prevailed at mid-twentieth-century. However, in the end, how philosophi-
cally adequate is his late, unfinished ontology of flesh? It has not escaped
serious criticism, and to one of the most recent examples we now turn.
44. “. . . interrogation (mouvement) et une réponse (perception comme Erfüllung d’un projet),
parler et comprendre.”
45. Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain in Oeuvres (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1955), I:
203. “L’homme est entré sans bruit.” Translated into English as The Phenomenon of Man (New
York: Harper and Row, 1965), 184.
46. “On ne le voit pas plus qu’on ne voit le moment où elle [la conscience] apparaît dans
l’ontogenèse.”
VII
BEYOND THE LIMITS

OF PHENOMENOLOGY
The Fate of the Subject
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh has not gone without criticism as well

as creative elaboration, both in print and in papers read each year at
meetings of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle and the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, in addition to other venues
throughout the world. In a recent paper in the principal journal dedicat-
ed to studies of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, Chiasmi International, Renaud
Barbaras has advanced a significant critique of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology
of flesh as internally inconsistent. That is to say, the very conditions that
make it possible, on Barbaras’s view, make it impossible. His main concern,
as we shall see, is the fate of the subject from which the ontology develops.
Barbaras’s criticisms are not unobjectionable, and there are cogent
responses that Merleau-Ponty himself can offer. However, beyond that fact,
for the present work his arguments are not only timely but also oppor-
tune because, in showing how Whitehead’s process philosophy can help
Merleau-Ponty answer them, we can demonstrate by the same stroke how
Whitehead’s work might provide Merleau-Ponty a firm metaphysical founda-
tion for overcoming various forms of the bifurcation of Nature, the ontology
of the object, and its accompanying pensée de survol.
THE IMPASSE IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S ONTOLOGY
Barbaras first summarizes some central themes from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology

of flesh, beginning with Merleau-Ponty’s own point of departure, as discussed
earlier, Husserl’s discussion of touching-touched, reversible relationships in
181
§36 of Ideas II. When things are given to us leibhaft, “in the flesh” (en chair),
the sensibility required for this reversibility is not added to the body con-
ceived as a physical object. Rather, it is “constitutive of corporeity” (Barbaras
2008, 20). As Husserl himself pointed out, we reach the conception of the
body as physical object only through abstraction (Ibid., 21). Therefore, the
meaning of “ontic” flesh, revealed in phenomenology, is reversibility.
Husserl, though, is concerned only with the ontic sense of flesh rather
than a Merleau-Pontian ontological generalization about “the flesh,” and
Barbaras argues that Merleau-Ponty’s “passage” or “transcendence” (dépasse-
ment) from my own ontic flesh to flesh as its ontological “foundation” cannot
be as simple or direct as he thinks it is.
As we have seen, the ontological generalization begins with the fact
that the subject-object distinction is “blurred” (brouillée) both in the lived
body as well as in the perceptual object that, for Husserl as well as for
Merleau-Ponty, forms “the pole of my body’s operations . . . the terminus in
which its exploration ends” (S 167/211). Sensibility, as in the preeminent
touching-touched relationship, is thus characterized by “a sort of fundamen-
tal iteration: sensibility only makes the world appear because it is already on
the side of the world” (Barbaras 2008, 21). As a result, it only seems to be
a paradox to say that “sensibility already belongs to that which it nonethe-
less constitutes” (Ibid.). As a result, the lived body cannot be solely a body
in the sense of a material object (the touched), nor can any experience of
touching be conceived apart from a philosophy of incarnation (Ibid.).
In arriving at this conclusion, Barbaras interprets Merleau-Ponty as
holding that “we have to renounce the very usage of the categories of subject
and object” (2008, 21). It is true, as we have seen in Chapter III, that the
latter’s ontology of flesh seeks a “brute Being” anterior to the subject-object
distinction. However, Barbaras’s claim does not follow from the fact that
the subject-object distinction is “blurred” in my flesh. All that follows is
that certain conceptions of the subject—e.g., that of Descartes—must be
given up. What really follows is that the problem of the subject must be
reconfigured to arrive at a non-Cartesian concept because “we must admit
that what appears appears to . . . [the subject, which] is, so to say, engaged
in what it sees” (Ibid.). Further, we should remember Merleau-Ponty’s com-
ment that we cannot go back before subjectivity even in moving beyond it
(S 154/194) and that he gives us a great many descriptions of the subjective
and objective aspects of flesh that are, after all, presupposed in the notion
of co-naissance.
Barbaras then notes, correctly, that, on the traditional—that is,
Cartesian—view, reversibility is only a “psychological curiosity” (Ibid., 22),
and therefore we must choose between taking reversibility seriously or not.
If we do, we must follow Merleau-Ponty in concluding that, if the sub-
BEYOND THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY 183
ject-object distinction is “blurred” in my body, it must be “blurred” beyond

it as well. My flesh is an “ontological witness,” and “the ontic meaning of
flesh is thus destined to be transcended towards a more originary meaning”
(Ibid.). As we have seen in Chapter III, this “passage” from the ontic to the
ontological, by way of ontological generalization, is based on the fact that,
through the structures of visi-bility, my flesh belongs to the world and vice
versa. This fundamental belongingness extends our mode of incarnation, the
reversibility of sensing and sensed, to the world as such. Therefore, just as my
flesh can be awakened and become a sensing and a sensible, so also “being
is always already on the side of phenomenality and a being that would rest
silently in itself is emptied of meaning” (Ibid.). It is in this manner that
Visi-bility takes on an ontological meaning (Ibid.).
Barbaras then points out that, contrary to transcendental philosophies
that accord a primacy to a constituting subject and derive the meaning of
the world from it, for Merleau-Ponty it is the other way around. Visibility
is such that the subject itself derives from the reversible structure of onto-
logical flesh—that is, the flesh whose being is defined by the reversibility of
sentant and sensible. It is this structure of visibility that accounts for vision,
and not the reverse: there is “a relation that the visible has with itself that
traverses and constitutes me as a seer” (VI 140/185).1 There is a “funda-
mental passivity” in this relationship because “sense experience discovers
itself as dependent on a phenomenality, of a Perceptible in itself, that is
the real actor of appearing and of which sense experience is only a mode
of crystallization or of achievement” (Barbaras 2008, 23).
Further, as Barbaras notes, to grasp correctly the way that le sentant
and le sensible are “blurred” in my own flesh implies understanding how the
trajectory from the former to the latter “inverts itself in my body,” and how
it is the path from the sensed to the sensing that creates the truth of the
opposite path (Ibid., 23). In other words, as we have seen in Chapters II
and III, although Merleau-Ponty begins with a description of our own flesh
and then generalizes to the flesh of the world, in reality what is discovered
is that it is actually because of the nature of the flesh to which I belong
that there can be a duet of sensing and sensed to correspond to it. Once
again, “[H]e who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by
it, unless he is of it” (VI 134–35/177–78).
However appealing this ontology might seem, Barbaras notes, he is left
with a sense of “malaise” because of a lack of certainty about whether “this
inversion of the circuit of phenomenality gives us a point of arrival that
coincides with the point of departure” (2008, 23). That is, if we make the
subject to whom appearances occur one that is flesh, which belongs to and
1. “. . . un rapport à lui-même du visible qui me traverse et me constitue en voyant.”

is dependent on visibility, do we retain the means to acknowledge properly

the subject that forms our starting point? On the one hand, for Barbaras,
“the subject is dissolved2 in a world that becomes thus Visible and it is in
this sense that one can speak of the flesh of the world” (Ibid.). Yet, on the
other hand, if inversely we begin with the Visible, the flesh of the world,
and seek to understand seeing according to it, can we reach “the flesh as
mine,” myself as a seer (Ibid.)? Or, more simply, does my ontic flesh follow
from the flesh? If we accept the ontological generalization and characterize
not only appearances in the flesh (leibhaft) in terms of reversibility, but also
extend reversibility to all of flesh, can we maintain our original point of
departure in the inverse direction?
Barbaras thinks not. He notes that the ontological generalization and
the resulting belief that the lived body belongs to the flesh of the world are
underwritten by “a presupposition as massive as it is unquestioned, according
to which the body forms part of the world, is situated at its heart and in
continuity with it—in brief, is a particle or fragment of the world” (2008,
23). Actually, there are two presuppositions here, as Barbaras goes on to
state, namely, that “the world is an objective reality, extended in space and
[that] the body is a fragment of this reality, a bit of extension, extract of
the latter because it [the body] is completely a part of it” (Ibid., 24). This
second presupposition is necessary because [even] spatial extension has to be
assumed to speak of the continuity of body and world and the “indiscern-
ible . . . frontier” between them (Ibid.).
For Barbaras, the problem that these presuppositions pose is that the
continuity of body and world directly clashes with the subject that provides
its phenomenological description. Everything occurs “as if Merleau-Ponty
had forgotten phenomenology for a moment in order to make possible its
ontological radicalization” (2008, 24). In actual fact, for Barbaras, there is a
double forgetting. In the first instance, the reversibility of sensing and sensed
and the “blurring” of subject and object in my flesh demonstrate that my
flesh “could not in any way be conceived as . . . [a purely] objective body”
(Ibid.). Therefore, valorizing the continuity of my flesh with that of the
world so as to transmit to it the body’s own sensibility leads to a “contradic-
tion” with what reversibility teaches us: my own flesh while touching shares
no properties with the world of material things, and in such experiences
my flesh “possesses no spatial continuity with it” (Ibid.).
2. “Dissolved” (dissous) is either an infelicitous word choice or supported by the suppressed

premise that “subject” means something like the Cartesian version. Merleau-Ponty never
argues that the incarnate subject should be “dissolved.” That is why he says repeatedly that
there is a unity of body and soul and it requires that we find a (non-Cartesian) way to think
that unity—something that, among other things, Whitehead’s process philosophy will provide.
Barbaras then concludes, “The conditions of extension [the ontologi-

cal generalization, not spatial extension] thus destroy the very possibility
of it: if my flesh is a [purely objective] body, sense experience [le sentir]
is exterior to it anew, as a soul is to a body, and it cannot in any case
be attributed to the world, which remains an extension without soul and
without flesh” (2008, 24). On the other hand, reversibility and the fact
that our flesh belongs to the world do show us that our own flesh is not
“foreign to the world, as a consciousness would be” (Ibid.). We must find a
way to think this belongingness beyond the usual categories of “spatial or
material inclusion” (Ibid.), and thus the central and “most difficult” ques-
tion is how, exactly, our flesh can be “situated in the world,” and he thinks
that Merleau-Ponty’s ontological generalization begs the question instead of
answering it (Ibid.).
We have no need of thinking the world as pure extension, Barbaras
states, except to justify “passing directly from the body to the world” (Ibid.,
25). In rethinking the way that we belong to the world, the fact that the
subject-object distinction is blurred in our flesh invites us also to question
“the meaning of being of that to which it belongs, in brief, of this world
which it [our flesh] engages in order to make it appear” (Ibid.). For Barbaras,
the way that our flesh is related to the flesh of the world is reducible neither
to “simple continuity nor, to be sure, of belonging in the sense of a spatial
inclusion—another figure of this continuity” (Ibid.).
He also offers an explanation for Merleau-Ponty’s continuity hypoth-
esis, namely that the latter “remained dependent on that objectivist philoso-
phy that he did not cease to contest” because the continuity hypothesis was
the only way that he could defend the “incarnation of consciousness” against
both “reflexive philosophy, by understanding it first as immersion in an
objective world,” and transcendental philosophy by decentering the “power
of sensing” from a constituting consciousness to the world itself (Ibid., 25).
Merleau-Ponty’s solution, as Barbaras sees it, is “a simple monism in which
the very frontier of my flesh and that of the world is erased” (Ibid.).
Barbaras then states that Merleau-Ponty himself was aware of the dif-
ficulties that he has raised, for which he offers as evidence the continuation
of Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the subject-object distinction is “blurred”
in my flesh. He notes that the latter extends the same assertion to the
perceptual object as well, “the pole of my body’s operations” (S 167/211).
In that passage from “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” the author goes
on to say that we must take literally statements that a perceptual object
“is grasped ‘in person’ or ‘in the flesh’ (leibhaft)” (Ibid.). For Barbaras, this
passage shows that for Merleau-Ponty, “the carnal extension” is founded
“no longer on an objective continuity but on that of the intentional tissue”
(Ibid., 25). The reference to both the ontic and ontological senses of flesh,
as Barbaras sees it, attempts to replace, within the intentional distance of

incarnate consciousness and things, “a continuity permitting the ontological
extension of the flesh” (Ibid.).
However, he continues, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt reveals both “a
naïveté and a forcing” (Ibid., 26). This is because, he says quite surpris-
ingly, the latter’s gambit depends on ignoring the fact that, “in the expres-
sion leibhaft, the flesh has a metaphorical significance: it signifies the most
intimate, that is to say, what is most one’s own [le plus propre], and that is
why the term is used profitably in order to state a givenness of the thing
itself, in person, in order to describe its live presence” (Ibid.).
Barbaras goes on to claim that Merleau-Ponty proceeds as though the
only meaning of the flesh is one’s own, “as if, consequently, leibhaft referred
back to the mode of being of the body” (2008, 26), and as though “presence
in the flesh signified the presence of a flesh”—in other words, the ontological
generalization (Ibid.). As a result, it is simple for Merleau-Ponty to ascribe
to material things “the sense of being of one’s own flesh,” the reversibility
of sensing and sensed (Ibid.).
But this easy transition returns Barbaras to his malaise, which he
says is due principally to the fact that Merleau-Ponty proposes a “univocal
concept of flesh, to which the very distinction of perceiving and perceived
[sentant et senti], that is to say finally the intentional distance, must be able
to be brought back” (Ibid.). And in this process, “the ontological transpo-
sition” from the ontic to the ontological submerges the “subject of sense
experience or of the appearing” (Ibid.). In other words, to the movement
of the subjective experience of the lived body toward the flesh of the world
corresponds the inverse movement of the world “towards phenomenality,”
“but never towards subjectivity” (Ibid.). These two opposite developments of
meaning never reach coincidence because the starting point of the first one,
“the subject of sense experience,” cannot be terminus ad quem of the other
“because we simply cannot understand how an appearing immanent in the
world can give rise to its own subject, how visibility can give [27] birth to
vision” (Ibid., 26–27).3 Barbaras states that he “absolutely cannot see” how
Merleau-Ponty can arrive at a subject out of this Visibility because what
most opposes the notion that a subject could emerge from an appearing “is
the evidence from which philosophies of consciousness nourish themselves,
evidence according to which the appearing only has meaning as appearing
to a subject” (Ibid., 27). The subject, he continues, “is not a moment or a
degree of concentration of visibility but very simply its condition” (Ibid.).
3. What is left out here is the whole problem of emergence. Merleau-Ponty points to the mo-
ment that an organism starts to see—“un organisme se met à voir.” When language occurs, the
Spirit moves to a more subtle body—“une nouvelle forme de réversibilité.”
In addition, after citing the passage from The Visible and the Invisible
about the flesh of the world not being self-sensing (VI /304), Barbaras states
that it seems that Merleau-Ponty is giving up at one fell swoop his “univocal
sense of flesh” all that he had tried to acquire thereby. His concept of flesh
becomes “inconsistent” because “The flesh is suddenly doubled—there is the
flesh of the world and there is the sensing flesh” (Ibid., 27).
Barbaras concludes that it seems as though Merleau-Ponty is “trapped
by what he wanted to flee and that because he wanted to flee it too fast”
(Ibid.). He thinks that the latter is too hasty in ascribing to the flesh of
the world the reversibility of touching-touched relationships in order to
escape from “the philosophy of consciousness” (Ibid.). However, in that
way, Barbaras argues, Merleau-Ponty prevents himself from acknowledging
“the sensing, active pole in its difference, and ends by affirming anew the
specificity of my flesh in relation to that of the world,” and once again,
“Merleau-Ponty oscillates between a certain form of realism and a certain
form of idealism” (Ibid.).
For Barbaras, rather than follow Merleau-Ponty’s “confused phenom-
enological monism” that flows from the attempt to “ontologize one’s own
flesh” (Ibid., 27), the most helpful way to appreciate the nature of flesh and
“to transcend the philosophy of consciousness” is, first, to distinguish what
is basic about consciousness, “in what ultimate phenomenological truth it
is rooted” (Ibid.). Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras thinks, expresses that clearly—
namely, that we cannot completely eliminate “the distinction between sens-
ing and sensed in my flesh and, in a more general way, the distinction of
subject and world . . . without resolutely ignoring that there is only appear-
ing as appear to” (Ibid.). Hence, we do not have to transcend “the polarity
of sensing and sensed for the sake of a third genus of being,” but rather
question “the meaning of being of sense experience and the sensed world
(of which my body forms a part) in the light of their original intertwining,
such as it attests itself in the experience of one’s own flesh” (Ibid., 27–28).
A MERLEAU-PONTIAN REPLY
Barbaras essentially challenges Merleau-Ponty with two closely related criti-

cisms. The first one is methodological and consists of the dilemma sketched
earlier: if the (ontological) flesh of the world possesses the same capacity
for the reversibility of sensing and sensed as my own (ontic) flesh, then it
makes no sense to speak as Merleau-Ponty does of extending to ontologi-
cal flesh the originary structure of ontic flesh and to say that the former is
continuous with the latter. And if extension and continuity do make sense,
since the flesh of the world is not sensing, but only spatially extended, the
only continuity possible is effected by the objective, spatially extended body.
The second criticism is substantive and follows immediately. Given

the continuity hypothesis, beginning inversely with ontological flesh can
never allow us to arrive at the sense of subjectivity required for the sens-
ing—touching correlated with the touched, seeing with the seen, and so on.
Therefore, Merleau-Ponty is said to have “forgotten phenomenology for a
moment in order to make possible its ontological radicalization” (Barbaras
2008, 24).
One way in which Merleau-Ponty might reply to the methodological
criticism consists of questioning the meaning Barbaras attributes to “exten-
sion.” The “extension” involved in Merleau-Ponty’s ascription of the revers-
ibility of one’s own flesh to the flesh of the world is not something that
he does in the sense of, say, a logical inference or by making some type of
discovery. Instead, as described in Chapter III, he finds himself in the pres-
ence of others, material things, and the world around us that present this
fundamental structure of reversibility. It is not that this pen in my hand
senses me in the way that I sense it, just as it is not the case that the tree
“looks at” the painter as the painter looks at it. Rather, as discussed in
Chapter III, the reversibility at issue in our mutual belonging to the world
is one of a mutual “fit.” I can grasp the pen because, from my side of the
experience, my hand can easily and comfortably hold the pen. From the side
of the pen, its shape and balance easily unite with the curve of my hand
to enable me to write: in this sense, it is itself graspable. It “senses” me
in joining the intentional texture of my motor-project of writing. (See the
discussion in Chapter III about “demythologizing” the language of sentient
things.) In other words, the ontological generalization is made possible and
intelligible through this fundamental belongingness.
Does such a reply yield a “confused phenomenological monism”
(Barbaras 2008, 27)? And would it not actually produce a dualism of sens-
ing and non-sensing flesh? Certainly Merleau-Ponty intends a monism; the
late ontology seamlessly continues the rest of his œuvre in militating against
dualisms of all kinds. As for the confusion, it is itself misleading to say that
“Merleau-Ponty acts as if there were no other sense of the flesh except one’s
own, as if, consequently, leibhaft referred back to the mode of being of the
body” (Ibid., 28). If “sense of the flesh” and “mode of being” refer simply
to reversibility, it is not confusing and, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty
does in fact hold that to be true. On the other hand, if these phrases refer
to our own capacity for sentience, that would be both confusing and in
some cases false. The example of the pen, the experiences of painters, and
Merleau-Ponty’s own statement, cited by Barbaras, that the flesh of the world
is not, like our own, self-sensing (VI 250/304), all support Merleau-Ponty’s
contention that there are differences of degree in the reversibility through
which belonging to the structures of visibility is enacted.
It is true that Barbaras points out Merleau-Ponty’s differences of

degree “at the very heart of the flesh” (Ibid., 27) and, as noted earlier, he
concludes that this distinction compels Merleau-Ponty to abandon his “uni-
vocal sense of flesh” in favor of “the flesh of the world” and “sensing flesh”
(Ibid.). Yet, if we maintain belonging to the world of flesh through chias-
matic reversibility as the prime interpretive principle, then it is not incon-
sistent to hold that there are various degrees and modalities of reversibility
depending on the degree of sentience possible. A “univocal sense of flesh”
would mean one kind of flesh with many modalities. Furthermore, monisms
as different as those of Spinoza and Leibniz—and that of Whitehead, as
we shall see—show that this claim is not at all self-contradictory. Hence,
with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s monism, some entities, such as the pen, are
clearly not sentient in the ways that we are. Others—such as the experi-
ences of higher life forms—are very like our fleshly reversibilities. And
there is a vast array of lower life forms with various degrees of sentience
and, therefore, reversibilities.
In this context, it is unfortunate that Barbaras does not refer to any of
Merleau-Ponty’s biological studies in the Nature lectures. Since those studies
focus on the emergence of subjectivity from Nature, they are highly perti-
nent to the former’s criticisms of the fate of the subject in Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology. Barbaras himself does not want to endorse a “philosophy of con-
sciousness” (2008, 27) any more than Merleau-Ponty does, but insists that
“an appearing only has meaning as appearing to a subject” (Ibid.), and that
therefore the subject is not the product of visibility, but “its condition”
(Ibid.). That said, however, it is not clear how Barbaras positively char-
acterizes the subject and why Merleau-Ponty’s account of it, as described
in Chapter III, is unsatisfactory. That is, if we conceive of the subject as
expressive processes of thought, perception, behavior such as painting, and
language—in general, the mental “side” of our flesh, the spiritual “side” in
the widest possible sense, that is inextricably “confused” with the body—why
is such a conception not enough to provide that to which an appearing
could occur?
Barbaras could reply that such a conception cannot suffice to give us a
subject that serves as a “condition” of the appearing. Without any specificity
about what kind of condition he has in mind, no subject for Merleau-Ponty
can function as a constituting consciousness. The subject can in no way be
conceived as the antecedent condition producing either the appearing or its
meaning. This is one lesson of Claudel’s notion of “co-naissance” according
to which the sentant does not precede the sensible or vice versa. If we think
of the “subjective” side of our flesh as the sentant in conjunction with the
sensible, then we fail to see why this understanding of the sentant could not
satisfy Barbaras’s two criteria for being a subject.
On the other hand, Barbaras is quite right to say that “the subject
of sense experience or of the appearing . . . disappears” (2008, 26), if by
“subject” we are to understand a reference to Kantian, Husserlian or other
similar conceptions of it, or even Merleau-Ponty’s earlier defense of the
“tacit cogito.” However, it does not follow that Merleau-Ponty “forgets phe-
nomenology” (Ibid., 24, 25). We think that it is more accurate to say that, as
discussed in Chapter II, his method of descriptive generalization takes up his
earlier phenomenology and drives it beyond its limits. This transcendence is
why, as we pointed out there, Merleau-Ponty sought a way to escape from
a philosophy of consciousness and why he jettisoned all the bric-à-brac of
modern philosophy and its heritage.
Barbaras is also indisputably correct to say that the “blurring of the
dualities in the flesh invites [us] also to interrogate the meaning of being
of that to which it belongs” (2008, 25). And it is precisely in responding to
this invitation that Whitehead’s process philosophy provides both another
way of responding to Barbaras’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty as well as a firm
metaphysical foundation for the latter’s late ontology.
A WHITEHEADIAN RESPONSE
There is much that is central to Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology that

Whitehead had attempted to fathom, and he provides deeper explanations
for the cohesion and differentiation (the one and the many) of the flesh
and how we are situated within it. Conversely, we have already seen how
Merleau-Ponty found certain concepts and discussions behind them in
Whitehead’s rejection of the bifurcation of Nature to be consonant with
his own ontology. In rapid summary, they include the view that Nature is
process (passage) made up of “brute facts,” the insistence on thinking within
Nature as against the ontology of the object, the body as a “system of systems
dedicated to the inspection of a world” (S 67/83), internal versus external
relations, the emergence of life and spirit from Nature, the “fallacy of simple
location,” the emotional causal influence of the past in the present, and the
rejection of dualisms, scientific materialism, process as unbroken continu-
ity, the bifurcation of primary and secondary qualities, the subjectivist and
sensationalist principles, and representational thinking.
Merleau-Ponty would also have agreed with Whitehead’s statement,
had he known it, that “philosophy is limited in its sources to the world as
disclosed in human experience” (MT 97), or l’être perçu. He likewise appreci-
ates Whitehead’s view of Nature as an “operative presence” (N 163, citing
CN 73) precisely because of the inseparability of creator and creature—that
is, Nature is not created, directed, and/or created by a conscious spectator
disengaged from it. By the same token, he adds that Whitehead is correct
that the course of Nature cannot be “ ‘the history of matter’ . . . like ‘the
fortunes of matter in the adventure of nature’ ” (N 116/157, citing CN 16).4
Parallel to the way that Chapter II explicated Merleau-Ponty’s concep-
tions of ontology and philosophical method before turning to the discussion
of flesh, here we must also discuss briefly Whitehead’s view of philosophical
method. This is necessary because any claim that his process metaphysics
could have furnished additional insight and precision for Merleau-Ponty’s
last ontology will inevitably meet with a certain amount of scepticism.
Indeed, readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s writings who come to Process
and Reality for the first time can easily believe that these claims are highly
implausible.
Doubts begin to emerge in the very first two paragraphs of the book
insofar as they describe the “essay” to follow as one of “speculative philoso-
phy” that aims “to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general
ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be inter-
preted” (PR 3). Seemingly worse, two pages later Whitehead claims that
“true method of [philosophical] discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane.
It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the
thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed obser-
vation rendered acute by rational interpretation” (Ibid., 5). Systems and a
pensée de survol after all?
Despite the fact that all of Whitehead’s other texts are much less sys-
tematic than Process and Reality—including those that follow it, Adventures
of Ideas and Modes of Thought—it is true that these two thinkers had very dif-
ferent conceptions of philosophy. As a result, as noted in the Introduction,
it would be simply wrong to claim that Merleau-Ponty is a speculative
metaphysician malgré lui or that Whitehead is a phenomenological ontolo-
gist manqué.
However, despite these differences, or even because of them, Franck
Robert is correct to say that Merleau-Ponty would have found Process and
Reality valuable because Whitehead’s “thought leads us to the very limits of
phenomenology, and perhaps beyond its limits, there where phenomenology
stands while it seeks to think radically the things themselves, the concrete-
ness of experience, appearing” (2007, 342). And Robert is also correct that
the “very possibility of phenomenology within its limits is . . . the major
stake in the dialogue between Whitehead and phenomenology” (Ibid., 343).
On the other hand, the search for an adequate philosophical method
aside, comparing and contrasting Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty is some-
4. The editor of La Nature notes here that this quotation is “doubtless a paraphrase of [CN]
p. 20: [In scientific materialism,] ‘The course of nature is conceived as being merely the fortunes
of matter in its adventure through space’ ” (N 157, n. 5).
times needlessly complicated by misleading linguistic differences that gener-

ate only surface contradictions. Consider first the meaning of a system in the
previous discussion. Whitehead’s concept is very different from that which
Merleau-Ponty rejected. It is not an attempt to eliminate contingency and
all of the ambiguities, paradoxes, tragedies, and aporias of life, still less to
explain away the sources of moral anguish. In this regard, Whitehead agrees
perfectly with Bergson, Maritain, and Merleau-Ponty in rejecting traditional
theodicies that attempt to justify evil as a partial good. As Religion in the
Making expresses it, “No religion which faces facts can minimize the evil in
the world, not merely the moral evil, but the pain and the suffering. The
book of Job is the revolt against the facile solution, so esteemed by fortunate
people, that the sufferer is the evil person” (49).5
Rather than trying to explain away any of this, Whitehead only wishes
to understand it. His concept of a system answers to Wilfred Sellars’s later
statement, cited in the Introduction, that “The aim of philosophy, abstract-
ly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest sense of the
term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1963, 1).
Therefore, Whitehead’s system is also designed to avoid “the fallacy of simple
location” embedded in scientific materialism, as discussed in Chapter II, as
well as in a doctrine diametrically opposed to it, Leibniz’s monadology. In
addition, “things in the broadest sense” implies, as both Merleau-Ponty and
Whitehead would insist, all the evidence. “The chief danger to philosophy,”
the first sentence of Part V of Process and Reality tells us, “is narrowness in
the selection of evidence” (337). Nothing can be excluded because of bias,
special pleading, idiosyncrasy, diffidence, or arbitrariness.
Whitehead’s concept of a system also differs from those that
Merleau-Ponty criticizes in terms of the claims it makes. It is an exceptional-
ly humble rationalism. Three times in the first twenty pages alone of Process
and Reality he warns his readers about expecting too much from speculative
philosophy. For example, the penultimate paragraph of his “Preface” tells us
that there “remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect
are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical
discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement
is an exhibition of folly” (xiv). To this caution he adds, “Philosophers can
never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles” (PR 4)
and that, in point of fact, “there are no precisely stated axiomatic certain-
ties from which to start. There is not even the language in which to frame
them” (PR 13).
5. Cf. SMW 179: “He [God] has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation
with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except
to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author
of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its successes.”
However, although Merleau-Ponty would have agreed with these pas-

sages, is it plausible that he would have endorsed any type of rationalism?
True, the only models familiar to him exhibited the dogmatic certainty that
he associated with high-altitude thinking, and it was perfectly consistent for
him to reject them while pointing out in his early work that he did not
reject the absolute or rationality per se, but only “the absolute and ratio-
nality separated from experience” (Prim.Percp. 27/135). Yet, if we think of
rationalism as holding minimally that Nature has an inherently intelligible
structure, at least part of which can be disclosed to human reason, could
Merleau-Ponty accept such a view of Nature?
There is not much in his early work to support such a belief, but his
fascination with the Stoics’ concept of the logos endiathetos make his final
view less clear. Insofar as that logos holds the universe together, and that
order is substantially coherent, it follows that the logos is not only a prin-
ciple of order but also one of intelligibility to which our reasoning powers
are open. More than this bare logical possibility, however, for Merleau-Ponty
all cultural life, qua the logos proforikos, comprises an expression of the logos
endiathetos. Since science is one form of that cultural life, science constitutes
a form of practical reasoning about Nature considered as at least generally
rational, puzzles about “black holes” and quantum theory paradoxes aside.
That is why Merleau-Ponty accepts and defends it, but critically. Therefore,
it appears to follow that Merleau-Ponty could endorse at least a minimal
rationalism or, in Whitehead’s words, a “humble” one.
What, then, might Merleau-Ponty say about Whitehead’s flight of
the aeroplane into “the thin air of imaginative generalization?” As regards
Whitehead’s concept of philosophical method, the metaphor of the airplane,
if taken by itself, is also misleading. This image of speculative thought has
to be balanced by Whitehead’s previously noted claim that thinking always
takes place within the process of Nature that necessarily remains attached
to intellectual activity. In Merleau-Ponty’s language, the best way to think
of the “flight of the aeroplane” is to consider it an instance of reflective
thought that intervenes in the flux of existence without breaking our indi-
vision from it. The aeroplane, after all, must maintain contact with the
ground and return to earth one way or another.
In Whitehead’s system, what results from such descriptive generaliza-
tion is an attempt to express how everything “hangs together” in such a
way that both unity and difference, sameness and distinctness, the one and
the many, are preserved and explained, and yet with a type of explana-
tion that differs considerably from those that Merleau-Ponty rejects. Just as
Merleau-Ponty generalized the structure of chiasmatic reversibility resident
in our own flesh to the flesh of the world, Whitehead likewise takes our
bodily experience to be a model of being and extends its structure univer-
sally. Therefore, his system attempts to explain what makes “the givenness
in the flesh” intelligible in a way that does not depend on the lived body,
and which, on the contrary, provides “the meaning of its [the lived body’s]
belonging” to the flesh of the world (Barbaras 2008, 28). In this context,
Whitehead would certainly have appreciated Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in the
last paragraph of his essay, “The Idea of Nature for Whitehead”:
The task of a philosophy of Nature would be to describe all the

modes of process, without grouping them under certain titles bor-
rowed from substantialist thought. Man is a mode just as much as
are animal cells. There is no limit to the proliferation of categories,
but there are types of “concrescence” that pass by shading off from
one to the other. (N 121–22/165)6
In addition, both philosophers would certainly advance such thinking in

support of the point raised earlier that monism is consistent with different
modes of being.
For Whitehead, the modes of process are modes of becoming, and
what becomes are termed “actual entities.” More specifically, “actual enti-
ty”—used synonymously with “actual occasion of experience,” except in the
case of God—is more or less confined to Process and Reality. Before that
work, chiefly in Science and the Modern World and afterward in Adventures of
Ideas and Modes of Thought, Whitehead usually speaks of “actual occasion,”
“actual occasion of experience,” and “unit of process.” For the most part,
in what follows we will use either “actual occasion” or “actual occasion of
experience.”
Actual occasions are “the final real things of which the world is made
up” (PR 18). They consist of Whitehead’s version of Leibniz’s monads, but
they are open rather than closed, interdependent rather than independent,
and are acts of becoming rather than substances that endure through change.
Because actual occasions are acts of process, it is they that are instances
of the “internal activity” (CN 54) in Nature cited by Merleau-Ponty, to
which Whitehead also refers as “substantial activity” (SMW 177). Moreover,
because an actual occasion is an act of becoming, the completion of its
becoming is also its transition to the past—that is, its perishing. Therefore,
“its birth is its end” (PR 80), and that is why Whitehead likes to appeal
to Locke’s notion of time as “perpetual perishing” (Ibid., 29). (There is a
paper to be written on the relationship of Locke and Proust on this subject.)
6. “La tâche d’une philosophie de la Nature serait de décrire tous les modes de passage, sans
les grouper sous certains titres empruntés à la pensée substantialiste. L’homme est mode aussi
bien que les cellules animales. Il n’y a pas de limite au foisonnement des catégories, mais il y
a des types de ‘concrescence’ qui passent par dégradation de l’un à l’autre.”
The becoming of an actual occasion is an act of “concrescence” (Ibid.,

21), a process of “growing together,” which is made up of “prehensions”
(SMW 69). Prehensions are “Concrete Facts of Relatedness” (PR 22), and
“the theory of ‘prehensions’ embodies a protest against the ‘bifurcation’ of
nature. It embodies even more than that: its protest is against the bifurcation
of actualities” (PR 289). It is through its prehensions that every occasion
of experience emerges from its past actual world, reaches satisfaction, and
passes away. In this sense, it is incorporated into the disjunctive diversity of
actual occasions that make up that past actual world. All that we as subjects
experience must be in our past, even if it is in our immediate past, exactly
for the reasons that Merleau-Ponty saw in describing the écart. There is
always a temporal slippage, a lack of coincidence between the sentant and the
sensible, the subject and that which is subjected to it—what George Kline
aptly calls the “concretum,” that which has been growing together (1983,
104).
Of particular relevance to Barbaras’s objections to Merleau-Ponty is
the fact that, on Whitehead’s view, every occasion of experience, not only
those that are human, is both sentant and sensible, and therefore a subject.
Each prehends in some way all of its past actual world, though some occa-
sions and sets of occasions are grasped as more relevant than others to its
own becoming. Through this process of “prehensive unification” (SMW 69),
“the [past] many become one and are increased by one” (PR 21). Therefore,
a “concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe” (Ibid., 165),
a relationship that Religion in the Making expresses nicely as follows: “The
whole world conspires to produce a new creation. It presents to the creative
process its opportunities and its limitations” (112–13).
For Whitehead, this “ ‘production of novel togetherness’ is embodied
in the term ‘concrescence’ ” (PR 21). It is “ultimate” because the concres-
cence instantiates creativity, which is the “universal of universals, character-
izing ultimate matter of fact” (Ibid.). Creativity is a general activity, “the
principle of novelty.” The basis of the “ ‘creative advance’ [of Nature] is the
application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation
which it originates” (Ibid.). In other words, creativity is implicated in both
the novel “ongoingness” and “solidarity”—a term borrowed from Wildon
Carr—of the universe (Ibid., 40).
Merleau-Ponty, of course, has an equal interest in the solidarity of
Nature, which he found expressed in the Stoics’ notion of the logos endi-
athetos. For Whitehead, every instance of process consists of “the whole
universe in the process of attainment of a particular satisfaction” (Ibid.,
200) in the new concrescence, and it is creativity that drives this process.
In effect, then, his account of prehensive unification constitutes an explana-
tion of the “workings” of the logos endiathetos.
It follows from the fact that every actual occasion begins by taking up
all past occasions, that their successors will also incorporate them into their
own concrescences. Since, as we saw in Chapter I, the “historic character
of the universe” belongs to the essence of every actual occasion (MT 123),
the “completed fact is only to be understood as taking its place among the
active data [present concrescences] forming the future” (Ibid.). More techni-
cally, the “principle of relativity” states that “the potentiality for being an
element in a real concrescence of many entities into one actuality is the
one general metaphysical character attaching to all entities. . . . In other
words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every
‘becoming’ ” (PR 22).
Further, since actual occasions are intertwined rather than indepen-
dent, they overlap each other in internal rather than external relationships.
Whitehead, influenced here by William James, describes them as “drops of
experience, complex and interdependent” (Ibid., 18). Therefore, in its con-
crescence, any given actual entity implicates others “among its components”
(Ibid., 7). That is to say, the initial phase of an actual occasion incorporates
its past actual world into its own becoming in a chiasmatic relation of
sentant and sensible. The sensible is integral to the sentant and vice versa. As
a result, there are “no brute, self-contained matters of fact” (Ibid., 14). As
opposed to scientific materialism, “the notion of a mere fact is the triumph
of the abstractive intellect” (MT 12). Instead of “simple location,” there is
a chiasmatic empiétement in which the solidarity and coherence of Nature
are preserved. Our entire existence, Whitehead holds, is made up of both
past relationships and “the formation of new relationships constitutive of
things to come” (Ibid., 43). Interdependent actual occasions thus provide a
metaphysical foundation for what Merleau-Ponty means by the structure of
visibility and tangibility through which we belong to the flesh of the world,
and therefore the “perceptual faith” “in a system of natural facts rigorously
bound together and continuous” (VI 26/46–47).7
Whitehead, like Merleau-Ponty, rejects representative theories of per-
ception. Past actual occasions really are present to the presently concrescing
occasion by forming the content of its own birth. Correlatively, Whitehead
also rejects Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. There are
no actual entities behind those that appear to us, and our appearances are
not re-presentations of “brute facts” standing somehow behind them. Rather,
they are the brute facts themselves.
In addition, because an occasion ends by transmitting itself as a datum
to future occasions, the concrescence must involve a decision about how
to relate both to its past and future. These decisions are guided by the
7. “en un système de faits naturels rigoureusement lié et continu.”

occasion’s “subjective aim” (PR 224), and when the decisions are made,
the occasion reaches satisfaction and perishes. Whitehead’s view is that
each actual occasion is self-determining, for which reason he ascribes to
it the Spinozistic definition of substance, “causa sui” (PR 7). However,
not too much should be read into this attribution. For it is obvious that
Whitehead does not use the phrase in Spinoza’s sense.8 No actual entity can
be self-sufficient—even God, as we shall see in the following chapter—and
actual occasions come into being and perish. Therefore, no actual entity is
the analogue of Spinoza’s Substance. Yet, the very expressive phrase, “sub-
stantial activity,” clearly points to such a Substance, conceived dynamically.
Further, unlike Spinoza, Whitehead defends indeterminism. On his
view, the “subjective aim” embodies purpose, or final causation, and “one
task of a sound metaphysics is to exhibit final and efficient causes in their
proper relation to each other” (Ibid., 84). The “proper relation” is that, in
whatever way an actual occasion responds to its past, all that is necessary is
that it react in some fashion or other. The “brute facts” of the past actual
world entail that, as Merleau-Ponty and Schelling both held, “the weight
of the natural world is already a weight of the past” (VI 123/164),9 but it
is a weight that conditions rather than determines the occasion’s becoming.
The “proper relation” of efficient and final causes also leads Whitehead
to distinguish their respective processes as “two species” (PR 214). There is
only one process, but there is a rhythmic, overlapping reversibility between
them. One species, also termed a “kind of fluency” (Ibid., 210), is “concres-
cence,” which is internal to the act of becoming (Ibid.). The other aspect
of process is “transition,” that whereby a past actual occasion is an element
of the conformal phase of a new concrescence (Ibid.). Transition is “the
vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past” (Ibid).
Prehensions that have as their objects past actual occasions are termed
“physical prehensions” (PR 23), which is what is most prominent in the
first phase of the becoming occasion. Yet, not the whole past is positively
prehended by the new occasion. Whitehead’s commitment to indeterminism
leads him to describe these prehensions as both negative as well as positive.
Negative prehensions are those that exclude data, and positive prehensions,
termed “feelings,” are those that include data. Because of the necessity to
respond to the past actual world, Whitehead also calls these physical pre-
hensions “conformal feelings” (Ibid., 165). These feelings also imply that
the “initial situation with its creativity can be termed the initial phase of
the new occasion. It can equally well be termed the actual world relative
8. For further discussion of this point see Cloots (2001, 37f.).

9. “. . . le poids du monde naturel est déjà un poids du passé.” See also Merleau-Ponty’s state-
ment that a human being “carries traces of all that Nature has been” (N 44/69).
to that occasion” (AI 230). Therefore, at the initiation of an occasion of

experience, the new concrescence is constrained to conform to the past
that is given to it, but it does so selectively. Negative prehensions allow
for indeterminism in the sense that the consequent occasion is not merely
the result of the preceding occasion.
The prevalence of physical feelings at the origin of an actual occasion,
also termed “feelings of causal efficacy” (PR 58), means that, as noted in
Chapter II, “the basis of experience is emotional.” The “creativity of the
world,” on Whitehead’s view, “is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling
itself into a new transcendent fact” (AI 177; cf. PR 116).10 And it is this
foundation of experience that provides the explanation for the weakness of
modern epistemology. For its exclusive focus on sense data fails to account
for “the mass of our moral, emotional, and purposive experience [that] is
rendered trivial and accidental” (MT 148), and it is in and through that
“emotional, and purposive experience” that we are rooted in Nature.
The essence of this purposiveness consists of “the rise of an affec-
tive tone originating from things whose relevance is given” (AI 176). In
particular, he finds in the Quaker word concern, when disassociated from
any cognitive content, an apt description of the “fundamental structure”
of subject and object (Ibid.). This “concern” is doubled and mirrored by
the aim of past actual occasions to transmit themselves into future acts of
becoming. In this chiasmatic reversibility, “the creativity of the world from
both “directions,” so to speak, “concernedness is of the essence of percep-
tion” (Ibid., 180).
In arguing against scientific abstraction from “the throbbing emotion
of the past,” Whitehead was decisively influenced by Wordsworth. In the
latter’s “full concrete experience,” what he found in Nature that science
could not express was “the “brooding” and “mysterious” presence of the
hills that surrounded and haunted him (SMW 83). His poetry expresses the
natural Gestalt of “surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate
element that we set up as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps
the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance”
(Ibid.). In Whitehead’s technical language, Wordsworth’s feeling for nature
exhibits “entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences
of others” (Ibid., 84).
10. With regard to Merleau-Ponty, it is worth noting that Whitehead also takes science to
be an abstraction from experience. A case in point for the discussion above is his statement,
“The notion of physical energy, which is at the base of physics, must then be conceived as
an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective
form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself” (AI 186). He then goes
on to say that philosophy should “describe the more concrete fact from which that abstraction
[“physical science”] is derivable” (Ibid.).
This line of thought is most congenial to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of

flesh, yet at first glance the reference to the “fundamental structure” of subject
and object may sound like the very philosophy of consciousness and constitu-
tion of meaning that Merleau-Ponty rejects. Whitehead states explicitly that
“the subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of experi-
ence” (AI 175), and he advances a much bolder descriptive generalization
than did Merleau-Ponty when he imputes subjectivity and agency to every
occasion—an invisible in every visible. In the section of Process and Reality
titled “Organisms and Environment,” he writes that we should apply to living
bodies what we know of “other sections of the physical universe,” but the
converse is also true: “[O]ther sections of the universe are to be interpreted
in accordance with what we know of the human body” (119).
This is not to say that Whitehead advocates some type of pan-psy-
chism, as he has sometimes been accused of doing. This is because he does
not believe that the subjectivity inherent in each actual occasion is capable
of high-grade mental activity. It is more accurate, therefore, to think of
his generalization as expressing a pan-experientialism in contrast to the
inert matter of scientific materialism. Every actual occasion, no matter how
rudimentary its organization, has the capacity to respond in some way to
its environment.
Therefore, when Whitehead writes that he takes, “with Locke . . .
human experience as an example upon which to found the generalized
description required for metaphysics” (PR 112), this does not mean that he
takes all actual entities to incarnate the same high-gain intensity of mental
experience of which human beings are capable. With the more extended
sense of “subject,” what is essential is that, according to “the reformed sub-
jectivist principle,” “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing,
nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (Ibid., 167). This is the exact inverse
of Sartre who holds that apart from nothingness, there are no experiences
of a subject. How, then, is Whitehead’s view consistent with an ontology
that seeks “l’Être sauvage” anterior to distinctions of subject and object?
Here again, when we clear away linguistic confusion, we find a con-
tradiction that is more apparent than real. For there are at least two reasons
why Whitehead’s sense of subjects and objects has no connection with what
Merleau-Ponty objected to or tried to undermine. In the first place, the
Whiteheadian subject-object relation is not identical to that of the knower
and the known. In fact, he states that he chose the word prehension precisely
to indicate “uncognitive apprehension” as opposed to the cognition that we
usually associate with “perceive” and “apprehension,” and he substitutes for
the notion of “mind” that of “prehensive unification” (SMW 69). He also
maintains that “the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and
that conscious discrimination itself is a variable factor only present in the
more elaborate examples of occasions of experience” (AI 175–76). As a

result, the “subject” in the subject-object relationship cannot be a constitut-
ing consciousness or Cartesian res cogitans, any more than can the object be
a mental construction or cogitatum. The subject is, rather, much more like
what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “sentant” that corresponds to the sensible
that, because of the écart, must lie in the immediate past of the “sentant.”
And for Whitehead also, there can be no sentant without a sensible, and vice
versa. They are two “sides,” or “leaves,” of the same concrete act of process.
Therefore, it follows that Whitehead cannot hold a view of the subject that
is located outside of Nature, imposing meaning on it via “psychic additions.”
Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen, progressively de-emphasizes the
notion of a constituting consciousness in favor of institution and, because
of the prominence of synthesis in constitution—say, in the cases of Kant
and Husserl—abandoned synthesis for metamorphosis. As The Visible and the
Invisible puts it, beginning with “the visible and vision, from the sensible and
feeling,” yields a radically new conception of “subjectivity”: syntheses are
replaced by “a contact with being across its modulations or its reliefs” (VI
269/322). What Whitehead’s concept of concrescence offers Merleau-Ponty
is a way to disentangle the concept of synthesis from that of constitution,
and to keep the idea of synthesis at the same time as the reversibility
of the flesh. This is possible because the synthesis of an actual occasion,
the formation of its prehensive unity, is the sentant-half of the reversibil-
ity relationship, but which already includes the sensible within it (“activity
= passivity”). And it is not just a question of philosophical explanations,
either. Concrescence is an accurate description of ordinary experiences in
which we feel a number of previously disparate strands of influences come
together at nodal points of our lives and coalesce in a decisional unity, of
which Merleau-Ponty himself provided an excellent example (see Chapter
IV) when he described the “experience of an event” that “loses its opacity,
reveals a transparency and makes itself meaning forever” (PM 121/170).
The second reason for distinguishing Whitehead’s concept of subjects
and objects is that an actual occasion of experience is not one of a persisting
subject directing or constituting its own concrescence. From this point of
view, the becoming of an actual occasion resembles closely Merleau-Ponty’s
description of dehiscence between the feeling and the felt. It is the process
that is primary, and in the novel concrescence the structure of both subject
and object emerges. This natural production of subjectivity (and objectivity)
is what Merleau-Ponty was looking for in his constant dialogue with his
Cartesian and Sartrean sparring partners.
Therefore, Whitehead would agree with Merleau-Ponty that the
subject, consciousness, and life emerge from Nature rather than being
inserted into it or being a transcendental condition of it. In this respect,
both Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures as well as Whitehead’s diverse works

effectively agree with Nietzsche that “[c]onsciousness is the last and latest
development of the organic” (1974, I: §11, 84). In the same vein, Whitehead
says of Kant that “the process whereby there is experience is a process from
subjectivity to apparent objectivity,” whereas on his own view, it is just the
opposite: the process proceeds “from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from
the objectivity whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity,
whereby there is one individual experience” (PR 156).
Whitehead’s insistence on the complete distribution of subjectivity
throughout Nature is also consonant with Merleau-Ponty’s perception of
the universe as overflowing with meaning and his subsequent reliance on
the Stoics. “Value,” Whitehead states plainly, “is inherent in actuality itself”
(RM 100; cf. SMW 93–94). Therefore, as Chapter II pointed out, he rejects
the meaninglessness of Nature, or “vacuous actuality,” characteristic of sci-
entific materialism. “The term ‘vacuous actuality,’ ” he writes in Process and
Reality, “here means the notion of a res vera devoid of subjective immediacy”
(29). There is value in everything and no actual occasion is valueless.
In connection with this subjective immediacy, there is another impor-
tant fact to note about positive and negative physical prehensions. It is that
they are intentional, without the consciousness usually presupposed for such
a relationship with the world. Whitehead expresses the intentional character
of feelings (positive physical prehensions) as “vectors” because “they feel
what is there and transform it into what is here” (PR 87).
In Merleau-Ponty’s writings, as de Saint Aubert notes, “progressively
and ineluctably, the notion of intentionality disappears” the more they
emphasize the flesh (ESA II: 148; italics in the original text), and he asks,
“What then could remain of intentionality without consciousness, and what
could ‘corporal intentionality’ . . . or again an ‘intentionality interior to
being’ [VI 244/ 298] mean” (Ibid., 148–49)? Whitehead’s answer consists of
the prehensive facts of relatedness that hold together the structure of vis-
ibility and tangibility in which we are inextricably intertwined. For Nature
is “a complex of prehensive unifications,” and space and time “exhibit the
general scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions” (SMW 72).
None can be shorn of its context and yet, because of the Gestalt structure of
Nature, “each one of them within its context has all the reality that attaches
to the whole complex” (SMW 72) (perhaps thinking again of Wordsworth).
Space and time, on Whitehead’s view, are not external things in themselves
any more than they are for Merleau-Ponty. It is not, therefore, that actual
occasions are located in space and time in a container-contained relation-
ship. Rather, it is the other way around: space and time themselves emerge
from the interaction of occasions of experience. In other words, the latter
are spatializing, temporalizing entities.
In the following chapter, we shall articulate the details of prehen-

sions and their unity in experience, and we shall see more clearly how, for
Whitehead, every actual occasion is indissolubly subject and object. Yet by
this time, we have sketched enough of Whitehead’s view of Nature to begin
to speak to Barbaras’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty.
Whitehead’s concept of interdependent actual entities that overlap
through feelings of causal efficacy clearly underwrites Merleau-Ponty’s belief
that “sensibility only makes the world appear because it is already on the
side of the world” (Barbaras 2008, 21). Every actual occasion becomes on
the basis of its sensibility to its past actual world that it incorporates within
it. Therefore, in the reversibility of sensing and sensed from one occasion of
experience to another, the subject that emerges in a new concrescence does
derive “from the reversible structure of ontological flesh . . . [the] structure
that accounts for vision, and not the reverse” (Ibid., 22). In turn, that occa-
sion becomes a datum in future concrescences. The way that the “relation
that the visible has with itself that traverses and constitutes me as a seer”
(VI 140/185) is qua past actual world that pours its inheritance into each
present actual occasion and makes its creative response possible. In other
words, there is a fundamental belongingness of each actual occasion to the
world from which it springs and which it continues to create: “[T]he many
become one and are increased by one.” Every occasion of experience pos-
sesses the visible because it is possessed by it—each one “is of it,” to use
Merleau-Ponty’s expression.
For the same reason, Whitehead’s metaphysics supports what we
have seen Barbaras term Merleau-Ponty’s “presupposition as massive as it is
unquestioned, according to which the body forms part of the world, is situ-
ated at its heart and in continuity with it—in brief, is a particle or fragment
of the world” (2008, 23). Whitehead’s work also underwrites the accom-
panying presupposition that “the world is an objective reality, extended in
space and the body is a fragment of this reality, a bit of extension, extract of
the latter because it [the body] is completely a part of it” (Ibid., 24). Since
actual occasions arise from their past actual worlds and creatively continue
it through their own concrescences, the body must form part of the world
and effect a continuity with it. Were this not the case, the solidarity of
Nature would break down.
Furthermore, the body is a fragment of spatial extension, but it can-
not be that only. This is partly because actual occasions that compose it
are spatializing existences as are all others, and partly because, as a result,
“a fragment of spatial extension” cannot mean the container-contained
relationship devoid of value and self-determination characteristic of mod-
ern philosophy and science. The continuity of spatial extension does not
imply the absence of subjectivity and value in any actual entities throughout
Nature. Therefore, for Whitehead, it cannot be that the continuity of body

and world directly clashes with the subject that provides its “phenomeno-
logical description” (Barbaras 2008, 24).
Because of Whitehead’s conception of subject and object, he would
also argue against Barbaras’s claim that “the descent of subjectivity in the
world through the body corresponds to a rising up of the world towards
phenomenality, but never towards subjectivity” (2008, 26). For Whitehead,
since every actual occasion is indissolubly subject and object, it is the world’s
“rising up . . . towards phenomenality,” and any actual occasion is new
prehensive unification, or concrescence. In this sense, Whitehead’s under-
standing of human subjectivity arises out of a broader context in which
subjectivity and objectivity are always intertwined.
Whitehead is also just as much concerned as is Barbaras with the
necessity to find a way to think our belongingness to the world beyond the
usual categories of “spatial or material inclusion” (Barbaras 2008, 24). Yet,
whereas the latter believes that Merleau-Ponty’s ontological generalization
begs the “most difficult” question of how, exactly, our flesh can be “situated
in the world” (Ibid.), Whitehead offers a detailed, systematic answer. As
we shall see in more detail in the following chapter, his monism not only
explains in effect how reversibility is possible, but likewise allows for various
degrees of subjectivity. It is an answer also to the question of “the mean-
ing of being to which it [our flesh] belongs, in brief, of this world which it
engages in order to make it appear” (Ibid., 25). Lastly, it is a response that
fulfills Barbaras’s desire for “an ontological sense of the flesh that would
owe nothing to the lived body, of which the latter would, on the contrary,
depend, in the sense where this ontological flesh would deliver the meaning
of its belonging” (Ibid., 28). To that answer we now proceed.
VIII
COM-PREHENDING THE FLESH
In speaking to Barbaras’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh, the

previous chapter introduced a Whiteheadian reading of the great themes of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Nature: the openness of our flesh to flesh in
general, our reversibility with it, the inherent intelligibility of Nature, the
emergence of the subject in the process of concrescence, and a justification
for perceptual faith. Correlatively, as we have also seen, Whitehead likewise
rejects dualisms of mind and body, the ontology of the object, its accom-
panying pensée de survol, and the primacy of consciousness that constitutes
the meaning of Nature. Yet, the previous chapter sketched Whitehead’s
explanation in broad strokes without stopping to fill in the concrete details
of how the actual functioning of Nature takes place. That is the task of
the present chapter, and for Whitehead, the operative concept to analyze
is that of prehensions.
What Merleau-Ponty says about perception in Phenomenology of
Perception and afterward has a strong parallel with the prehensive structure
of actual entities. In both cases, givenness in experience is to be given to
a subject and givenness occurs through intentional perceptions and feelings.
Both take up concrete situations and respond creatively to them. Both are
instances of expression in which meaning is not imposed on the world, but
rather is found somehow already prefigured in it. In both cases, therefore, a
theory of meaning emerges between extreme realism and idealism: we find
the world as “already there” conditioning our perceptions of it, but the only
world of which it is meaningful to speak is the world that we perceive.1
THE DATA OF PHYSICAL PREHENSIONS AND SENSORY LIFE
The discussion of prehensions thus far has focused on physical feelings in

the first phase of concrescence—“feelings of causal efficacy”—through which
1. For a more extensive discussion of these parallels, see Van der Veken (2000).
205
the occasion takes up its past actual world into its own becoming. The first
matter to clarify consists of what it is, exactly, that gets taken up. That is,
in the process of transition from a past occasion to a present concrescence,
what is inherited from the past and, in turn, transmitted to the future? It
cannot be the active processes themselves of concrescence because those
processes have perished. This means that “the throbbing emotion of the
past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact” refers both to past actual
occasions when they were in the act of concrescing and to the transition
to new occurrences.
It cannot be objective form alone that is transmitted because that
would entail a representative theory of perception and render Whitehead’s
account of experience vulnerable to all of Hume’s sceptical arguments.
Rather, what is transmitted is form as embedded in past actual occasions that
are no longer active. It is this complex relational role of form that creates
and maintains the solidarity of Nature and accounts for the structure of vis-
ibility and tangibility (PR 62). Each presently concrescing actual occasion
becomes both a “subject” of the active concrescence and a “superject” (Ibid.,
29)—the objective form that remains when the concrescence is complete,
and in turn, that actual occasion in its superjective aspect becomes a real
part of a new concrescence. The objective record of past processes, their
remaining form, is what Whitehead calls the actual occasion’s “objective
immortality” (Ibid., 347).
The unity of “subject” and “superject” in a single concrescence is also
how Whitehead would interpret Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the unity of the
inside and the outside, activity and passivity, but in a double sense. The
first sense is the unity of the nascent subject and the superjective aspects
of past actual occasions that comprise the data of its own first phase of
concrescence. And the second sense is the subject’s own superjective record
of what it became. In both cases, the superjective aspect of the concres-
cence is not something added from the outside to the subject that emerges
from prehensive unification. Rather, it is an “outside” that is already the
“envelope,” so to speak, of the inside, and cannot be defined apart from it.
The initial phase of concrescence, insofar as it is receptive to its past,
suggests passivity, but “the word ‘recipient’ suggests a passivity that is erro-
neous” (AI 176). Since the prehensions that make up the first phase are
both positive (feelings) and negative (those that exclude data), a natural
negativity exists that puts some rudimentary interpretation in play. To some
degree, it is not unlike the Gestalt-structuring of perceptual fields. Therefore,
“active receptivity” or, more simply, what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl,
terms “Offenheit,” is a better description.
The next subject that requires clarification is the nature of the objective
forms embedded in past actual occasions that are transmitted over a historic
COM-PREHENDING THE FLESH 207
route of future concrescences. Whitehead calls the possible forms of order

in Nature “eternal objects” (PR 23; cf. SMW, Chapter 10, “Abstraction”).
Eternal objects form a complex topic to which we will return. Here, though,
it suffices to say that Whitehead defines them as “pure potentials for the
specific determination of fact, or forms of definiteness” (PR 22), and their
importance in the present discussion is their role in understanding occasions
of experience. In feelings of causal efficacy, for Whitehead, the most basic
and primitive mode of experience, although there is form embedded in such
feelings because of their real connection with the past actual world, such
form is latent, vague, and inchoate. However, in higher organisms, there
is also what Whitehead calls perception in the “mode of presentational
immediacy” (Ibid., 169). In this mode, clear, sharp sensa corresponding to
eternal objects are pried out of feelings of causal efficacy and become objects
in their own right.
Human experience is a mixture of the two modes, which Whitehead
terms “symbolic reference” (PR 168). Both modes are by themselves abstrac-
tions. Feelings of causal efficacy alone would provide us only William James’s
“great blooming, buzzing confusion,” and no one has better expressed the
abstractness of the data of presentational immediacy than did Heidegger
with reference to the audial sensations discussed in Chapter I. That is why
he writes, “It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to
‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’ ” (1967, 207).2
It is precisely these sense data, divested of their source in feelings of
causal efficacy, that constitute the “impoverished” notion of experience that
Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead both criticize in modern philosophy. It is
impoverished precisely for the reason that Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead
would both give: in Whitehead’s language, the data of presentational imme-
diacy, notwithstanding their “prominence in consciousness,” are part of the
“superficialities of experience” (AI 280). Sense data present no depth of
the past; they are like the sparkling colors and patterns of lights playing
on the surface of water on a sunlit morning, but which reveal nothing
of the hidden depths below. Or, as Whitehead phrases it, they conceal
the “real facts of the past” that are the foundation for the immediacy of
experience, “the reality from which the occasion springs, the reality from
which it derives its source of emotion, from which it inherits its purposes,
to which it directs its passions” (Ibid.). This is why the empiricists in the
2. Whitehead describes phenomena such as these as follows: “[T]he evidence on which

these interpretations are based is entirely drawn from the vast background and foreground of
non-sensuous perception [the mode of causal efficacy] with which sense-perception is fused,
and without which it can never be. We can discern no clean-cut sense-perception wholly
concerned with present fact” (AI 181).
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the absence of any other support,

always had to rely on the vivacity and force of impressions to ground their
arguments for the existence of the external world—proofs that were always
vulnerable to counterexamples of equally vivacious dreams, hallucinations,
illusions, and the like.
The superficiality of the data of presentational immediacy is also the
reason that Merleau-Ponty grounds our perceptual faith in a deeper structure
of tangibility and visibility, and stresses our belonging to the flesh of the
world. This is to say that his manner of describing, say, color and its onto-
logical import in Cézanne’s paintings, differs fundamentally from clear aware-
ness, or from what Whitehead would term presentational immediacy. What
Merleau-Ponty is describing is the intertwining of both Whiteheadian modes
of perception, and there is one passage in the Phenomenology that could have
been written by Whitehead himself. The author is walking across the Place
de la Concorde, completely absorbed in the city of Paris, even though he
knows that he never lives entirely “in varieties of human space,” but instead
is “always rooted in a natural and non-human space.” He then states,
I can rest my eyes on one stone of the Tuileries wall, the Square
disappears and there is then nothing but this stone entirely without
history: I can, furthermore, allow my gaze to be absorbed by this
yellowish, gritty surface, and then there is no longer even a stone
there, but merely the play of light upon an indefinite substance.
(293/339)
The interconnectedness of occasions of experience through feelings

of causal efficacy provides a conceptual foundation for perceptual faith and
its anchorage in the structure of visibility and tangibility, and Whitehead
is surely correct that our “sense of reality can never be adequately sustained
amidst mere sensa, either of sound or sight” (MT 45–46). This is not just
because of the superficiality of “mere sensa,” but also because of perceptual
errors and other types of inconsistencies to which Merleau-Ponty devotes
considerable attention. The feelings of causal efficacy provide our ground
in Nature in a way that sense data cannot.
On the other hand, and even Whitehead insists on it, the clear, sharp
data of presentational immediacy are compelling enough to convince us
that at least most of our perceptual experiences are veridical. More than
that, their interaction leads Whitehead to say something that sounds very
like what Merleau-Ponty describes as the reversibility of our flesh and
that of things: “There is a certain correlation between the ingressions of
sense-objects of touch and sense-objects of sight into nature.” In this way,
there is a “ ‘conveyance’ of one sense-object by another. When you see the
blue flannel coat you subconsciously feel yourself wearing it or otherwise

touching it” (CN 154). As a result, the empiricists’ reliance on the force
and vivacity of sensory impressions was not entirely misguided. It is possible
for perceptual faith to live successfully but naively on the surface of life, but
only until it is called upon to justify itself. In other words, naive realism
lasts only as long as the naïveté.
Feelings of causal efficacy are also central to the experience of the
logos endiathetos. There is at least a rough parallel between the way that the
data of presentational immediacy bring clarity and sharpness to the inchoate
data of primary causal feelings and the way in which the logos proforikos
brings clarity to the silent logos of the perceptual world. As we have seen,
any expression or articulation of the latter is already an instance of the
logos proforikos, just as the extraction of clarity from powerful, emotional
feelings of causal inheritance involves different types of feelings than those
of causal efficacy. Their relationship consists of another case of the double
relation of le fondant and le fondé in Fundierung.
CONCEPTUAL FEELINGS, ETERNAL OBJECTS,

AND THE QUESTION OF GOD
Different types of prehensions also form the basis for the way that Whitehead
shapes his views of life, consciousness, and mind, and how they emerge from
Nature instead of being inserted into it. Life, like feelings of causal efficacy,
has something to do with form taken up from previous acts of concrescence,
but at the same time it is also about novelty. “Life,” for Whitehead, “is
a bid for freedom. The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent
characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life
presents, [which is] How can there be originality” (PR 104)? Subsequent
to the phase of conformal feelings, in which eternal objects are immanent
but vague and inchoate, other (positive) prehensions, called “conceptual
feelings,” pry out the forms (eternal objects) of conformal feelings and refer
to the previous occasions in which they were ingredient, or had achieved
“ingression” (Ibid., 243). These conceptual feelings merely reiterate the pat-
tern of eternal objects immanent in the data of conformal feelings, and such
“conceptual reproduction” (Ibid., 249) occurs in all acts of concrescence.
Such conceptual feelings are “hybrid” prehensions because their data consist
of both past actual occasions and eternal objects, and for Whitehead, most
conceptual prehensions are “hybrid.” “Hybrid” prehensions combine in a way
le sensible and le sentant. By contrast, “pure” conceptual feelings are those
whose objects are eternal objects alone.
However, there are other conceptual feelings in some occasions of
experience among higher organisms that introduce novelty into the occa-
sion. (Occasions that cannot achieve any type of novelty belong to inor-
ganic entities.) One type of such feelings is called “feelings of conceptual
reversion” (Ibid., 249). These feelings consist of “the positive conceptual
prehension of relevant alternatives” (Ibid.). This is to say that the eternal
objects that are prehended in such feelings are relevant to the set of actual
entities prehended in conformal feelings. Hume’s famous example of the
missing shade of blue3 is a classic case.
More advanced novelties emerge in more complex feelings among
higher organisms, which increases the richness and depth of their mentality.
Whitehead calls these “propositional feelings” (PR 214). Their objects are
“propositions,” which is to say a “contrast” (by which Whitehead means a
comparison) between the physical feeling of the set of actual entities that
are the source of the occasion’s conformal feelings—the “logical subjects” of
the proposition (Ibid., 257)—and a “predicative pattern” (Ibid.) of eternal
objects that could apply to the logical subjects.
For example, hundreds of people daily may pass an abandoned building
on a certain street and think nothing of it (literally). However, one day
an entrepreneur might get the idea of converting the space to lofts. In this
case, the proposition would be “apartments in that building,” and the “logi-
cal subjects” would be all of the actual occasions that make up the complex
network of the structure and its spatiotemporal location. Whitehead insists
that “the primary function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure for
feeling” (PR 25) and that its truth value is secondary. (Before the apart-
ments are built, the proposition “These are lofts” is false, and if they are
built, it will be true.)
However, it should be pointed out that propositional feelings may or
may not rise to the level of consciousness. In the above instance, perhaps
because of sleepiness, jet lag, or too much drink, the entrepreneur will
only half-recognize the lure. In this case, the idea does not rise above a
vague recognition. “Consciousness,” on the other hand, “is how we feel
the affirmation-negation contrast” (PR 241), which Whitehead explains
as follows. The object of feelings always possesses “a unity as felt.” When
the datum at issue is complex, “this unity is a ‘contrast’ of entities.” The
“affirmation-negation” contrast, the most significant of such contrasts, is that
in which “a proposition and a nexus [of actual occasions] obtain synthesis
in one datum, the members of the nexus being the ‘logical subjects’ of the
proposition” (Ibid.).
A number of important consequences follow. As with Merleau-Ponty,
mentality and ideation emerge from a natural process rather than being
imposed on it. Further, the ideas here, conceptual feelings, are likewise
3. David Hume (1967) [1739], Book I, Part I, Section I, 6.

“the lining and depth” of the visible (VI 149/195), the in-visible of the
visible. In addition, the formation of feelings of conceptual reversion and
propositional feelings also institute potentiality and a natural negativity in
the process of Nature, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as a latency of meaning
in the flesh. As noted in the previous chapter, consciousness is the highest
development of mentality, and hence comes last in experience rather than
first. It emerges from the awareness of contrasts of contrasts. In human expe-
rience, consciousness often involves multiple levels of contrasts. Therefore,
it is “the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary
base” (PR 267).
Recurring to what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the depth and latency
of meaning, Whitehead goes on to say that this view of consciousness is
underwritten by “the plain facts of our conscious experience” (Ibid.). The
transient flickering of consciousness at best reveals in Gestalt-like fashion
something that Merleau-Ponty appreciated in Freud’s work, namely “a small
focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experi-
ence which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension” (Ibid.; cf. IP
214–23 and 279–94). And finally, this process of originating mentality shows
why, on Whitehead’s view, reflective acts can interfere with the flux of our
experience, but they cannot threaten our indivisibility from it.
However, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, the latency or pregnancy of mean-
ing in the flesh is always a matter of ideation as the “lining and depth” of that
flesh, and this raises serious questions about the nature of the eternal objects
that are the data for conceptual feelings—either by themselves or as held in
a contrast (comparison) with a set of past actual entities that most relevantly
fund the new concrescence. So far, we have stated merely that eternal
objects are possible forms of order and definiteness in Nature, but much
more clarity is needed to see whether a consonance with Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of ideation is possible. What, then, are eternal objects?
Whitehead chooses the phrase as a substitute for “universals” that, on
his view, is burdened with too many interpretations and distortions in the
history of philosophy (SMW 159). The ideal aspect of reality needs to be
completely reinterpreted. That is because each eternal object is only real
when ingressed as a particular of some sort: only in this way does it become
universally available to all its successors (PR 48). This is why he holds that,
as noted in Chapter II, it is problematic to use the concepts of “particular
and universal,” along with those of “subject and predicate” and “substance
and quality,” to describe the world and our experience of it (Ibid., 49).
Whitehead’s view that the concepts of universal and particular need
to be revised coheres well with Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of how the uni-
versal can only be known through the particular and how, reciprocally, a
particular color can take on universal significance. Chapter III discussed this
relationship in the example of yellow in Freud’s case of the Wolf Man in

which yellow became a dimension of Being, or “universal dimensionality”
(VI 236/289). More generally, as we saw in Chapter IV, Merleau-Ponty
adds that “each thing exists beyond itself, when each fact can be a dimen-
sion. . . . Colors, sounds, and things—like Van Gogh’s stars—are the focal
points and radiance of being” (S 15/22).
Whitehead also offers a negative definition of “eternal object” as
“abstract,” which means that “what an eternal object is in itself—that is to
say, its essence—is comprehensible without reference to some one particular
occasion of experience” (SMW 159). An eternal object transcends all occa-
sions, but achieves a connection with them through “ingression.” In short,
an eternal object is anything that can be subject to “conceptual recognition”
without also referring to “any definite actual entities of the temporal world”
(PR 44). Even so, Whitehead goes on to say, the operation of “conceptual
recognition” takes place in connection with some actual occasions in the past
actual world of our experience, as in the case of Hume’s missing shade of blue.
As possible “forms of definiteness,” eternal objects fall into either an
objective or a subjective species. The former include mathematical forms,
but also any other way of describing reality without reference to activities of
feeling. A member of the “subjective species” is “an element in the definite-
ness of the subjective form of a feeling. It is a determinate way in which
a feeling can feel. It is an emotion, or an intensity, or an adversion, or an
aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain” (Ibid.). An eternal object is, therefore,
any potential way in which something can be described.
For Whitehead, eternal objects are inextricably intertwined with the
agency of God in two fundamental ways. First, the “ontological principle”
states, “actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is
to search for one or more actual entities” (PR 24). Consequently, “every-
thing must be somewhere; and here ‘somewhere means ‘some actual entity’ ”
(Ibid., 46). Whitehead’s view is that God is an actual entity, and eternal
objects are the objects of God’s (eternal) conceptual vision. This eternal
process of envisagement constitutes God’s “primordial nature” (Ibid., 87).
Within that “primordial nature,” the “metaphysical status” of an eternal
object “is that of a possibility for an actuality” (SMW 159), yet in itself
as the datum of a conceptual prehension—whether by us or by God—it is
self-contained and carries within it no reference to the possibility of “physi-
cal ingression in any particular entity of the temporal world” (PR 44).
The absence of physical references in an eternal object, maintaining
its “metaphysical status” as a possibility, also preserves the contingency of
Nature, and Whitehead’s argument to that effect is remarkably like that of
Kant, recounted in Chapter V, for claiming that our knowledge is concep-
tual rather than intuitive. According to Process and Reality, “ ‘Potentiality’
is the correlative of ‘givenness.’ The meaning of ‘givenness’ is that what is

‘given’ might not have been ‘given’; and that what is not ‘given’ might have
been ‘given’ ” (44).
The second way that Whitehead links eternal objects to the necessity
of divine agency concerns the relation of God and the world. Despite what
the above description of God’s primordial nature may suggest, Whitehead
does not construe God as a penseur absolu cut off from the world. On the
contrary, he (for so Whitehead designates the deity) exercises care for
nascent occasions of experience by suggesting a relevant array of eternal
objects to include in the concrescence to express the occasion’s “subjective
aim” (PR 88).
One could well argue that even Leibniz’s God does that much through
the establishment and maintenance of the universe’s preestablished har-
mony. However, Whitehead criticizes Leibniz’s conception of God for its
metaphysical inconsistency. For example, while created monads have no
windows toward each other, God, as the supreme monad, has windows
toward them and vice versa. For Leibniz, God is an exception to the meta-
physical system, whereas for Whitehead, the “ideal of cosmological theory
to which the philosophy of organism endeavours to conform” is that “there
is only one genus of actual entities” (PR 110).
On Whitehead’s view, the actual entity that is God is the necessary
complement to actual entities that make up the temporal universe. God’s
primordial nature is eternal, but temporal actual entities are acts of becom-
ing and perishing. His vision of eternal objects is complete—he knows all
possibilities—whereas the vision of any temporal actual occasion is neces-
sarily perspectival and limited by its concrete historical situation. Further,
whereas other actual occasions begin with physical, conformal feelings that
root them in spatiotemporal existence and then advance to some degree of
conceptual feelings, for God it is the exact opposite. His conceptual vision
and valuation come first, but they must be followed by physical prehensions
of the universe constituting his “consequent nature” (PR 345). For, as in
the case of Schelling’s God that needs the world, as noted in Chapter V,
for Whitehead God’s primordial nature by itself would leave him lacking in
reality both because no actuality has yet entered his experience and because,
without some contact with physical reality, God would have no conscious-
ness as the subjective form of his propositional feelings. And nothing is more
Whiteheadian than Merleau-Ponty’s claim, cited in Chapter IV, about “the
existence of this world as an unsurpassable fact which from the first solicits
creative actualization and therefore . . . [disallows] the point of view of a
worldless God” (SNS 96/168).
Through the physical prehensions that make up God’s consequent
nature, he gathers up and preserves past actual occasions as superjects, which
then become objectively immortal in him.4 They constitute “the ‘many’

absorbed everlastingly in the final unity” (PR 347). This means that, with
respect to both his primordial and consequent natures, God for Whitehead
is intimately involved with the world—both guiding it through suggested
subjective aims and saving it as the ultimate depository of history. In this
sense, perishing, or death in general, is the ultimate chiasm—passing out
of and into history simultaneously. Moreover, God’s consequent nature is
dynamic rather than static. The lengthier the duration of the universe, the
greater the growth of his consequent nature, and God’s concrescence is
never-ending because it consists of a ceaseless integration of the conceptual
prehensions of eternal objects with the physical prehensions of the universe.
God’s relation to the world, therefore, is one of intertwining and encroach-
ment. There is a mutual enhancement as the flesh of the world becomes
God’s flesh and God, through his primordial nature, prompts and motivates
the becomings of other actual entities. As a result, contrary to Bergson’s
claim in Creative Evolution that God “has nothing of the already made; he
is unceasing life, action, freedom” (248), for Whitehead God is both.
The primordial nature of God is compatible with any universe what-
soever, and in this sense transcends this concrete universe. The consequent
nature of God means that God in his connectedness is somehow qualified by
this universe, so that we can say that this universe is somehow within him.
Therefore, God’s processive being would in Merleau-Ponty’s terms institute
an écart and dehiscence with this universe. On the other hand, he would
accept a “massive adhesion” of the universe to the driven force of Creativity.
The subjective forms (originating in God’s conceptual feelings—they
are “lures for feeling” in Whitehead, or a logos endiathetos in Merleau-Ponty)
can only be suggestions because each actual entity remains causa sui. For
Merleau-Ponty, expression is always creative, and that which is expressed can
never be severed from it. This movement of expression cannot have a fixed
end as long as there is a being whose essence is to be open to Being and
to show what is there to be seen. Therefore, Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty
both reject finalism and the external imposition of a telos on Nature.
Whitehead phrases this suggestion as follows: “The wisdom of subjec-
tive aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected
system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies
of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal
feeling” (PR 346). As this list shows, the best options available are not
always good ones, either for the occasions of experience at issue or for God,
and Whitehead would certainly agree with Merleau-Ponty that goodness is
4. Toward the end of his life, Paul Ricoeur (2007) endorsed just such a view of human
immortality—i.e., preservation in the divine memory.
contingent. The best possible aim can be bad, yet, “if the best be bad, then
the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Atè, the goddess of mischief.
The chaff is burnt” (PR 244).
As a result, two important implications follow. First, “the best pos-
sible world” for Whitehead does not mean a perfect world, but only that
all others are worse. And second, the possibility of a less than perfect
world affecting God’s consequent nature is a dark consequence first noted
by Schelling, and also accepted by Whitehead: “He does not create the
world, he saves it: or more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with
tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness”
(PR 346). Or, as he had expressed it in Religion in the Making, “He is the
ideal companion who transmutes what has been lost into a living fact
within his own nature. He is the mirror which discloses to every creature
its own greatness” (154–55). This description makes one think of Bergson’s
conception of God, “hidden in the sufferings of the persecuted” (E 31/45)
and Merleau-Ponty’s description of Bergson’s view, cited in Chapter VI, of
“a generosity which is not a compromise with the adversity of the world
and which is on his side against it” (E 25–26/38).5
In addition, although Merleau-Ponty thinks that pure ideality presup-
poses a pensée de survol, as we have seen, Whitehead’s conception of God
offers an alternative view. God’s conceptual vision of eternal possibilities is
always and necessarily tied to his physical relationship with the universe. To
adapt Merleau-Ponty’s statement cited earlier from “Faith and Good Faith,”
incarnation “changes everything.”
In the reversible mirror relation that God has with the world, it would
also follow that “the sufferings of the persecuted” would be hidden in God.
That is, since God does not control the physical universe, the latter can
and does contain evil. And since evil is embedded within it, not only can
God not escape it, but rather he must bear it. This makes God “the great
companion—the fellow sufferer who understands” (PR 351), as the penul-
timate paragraph of Process and Reality phrases it.
Whitehead has three additional arguments for the metaphysical neces-
sity of God that concern his primordial rather than consequent nature.
George Allan nicely summarizes them as follows: “(1) God as a receptacle
for the ordered system of all possibilities, on which cosmic order depends;
5. Merleau-Ponty joins Bergson in rejecting classical theodicies that make evil into partial
good. Even if the philosopher can believe this “in the silence of his office,” Bergson holds,
how could he maintain such a belief “before a mother who has just seen her child die?” (E
25/38). In Whitehead’s elaboration of the relation of such a God who is “on our side” and
the world with its “adversité” and evil, we see in which direction Merleau-Ponty could have
developed his own view about God, humanity, and the world. It certainly would be a theology
that would have taken an impressive step “after Leibniz.”
(2) God as the source of novelty in the initial aims of actual occasions;
and (3) God as a constraint on that novelty needed for the stability that
undergirds the creative advance” (2008, 329). It is worth noting in passing
that (3) does have an unexplored relevance to Merleau-Ponty. As Allan
points out, the order and stability of nature previously construed in the rig-
orous determinism of Newtonian theory “is loosened in a quantum universe
to statistical probabilities” (Ibid., 329), something that Merleau-Ponty also
discusses in the Nature lectures. For Whitehead, the range of possibilities in
quantum theory is too vast to explain the actual stability of the universe.
Therefore, such order requires an orderer (Ibid., 330, 332–33).
On the other hand, as Allan immediately adds, Whitehead does not
argue for the existence of an orderer merely on statistical grounds. We
have, Process and Reality states, “an intuition of an intrinsic suitability of
some definite outcome from a presupposed situation” (207), a result beyond
the explanatory power of statistical explanations (Allan, 2008, 330). This
suitability, which Merleau-Ponty would interpret in terms of the ontologi-
cal structures of visibility and tangibility, transcends statistics. As Allan
notes (Ibid.), Process and Reality claims that the suitability “depends upon
the fundamental graduation of appetitions which lies at the base of things,
and which solves all indeterminations of transition” (207). And it is God’s
conceptual vision and valuation of eternal objects provided partially and
according to relevance to temporal acts of concrescence that makes up the
necessary source of these “appetitions.”
God is the necessary source because of Whitehead’s commitment to
both the “ontological principle” and his insistence that an eternal object is a
self-contained, timeless, “unchanging relationless entity” (Allan 2008, 332),
unlike temporal actual occasions that are composed entirely of relationships.
Therefore, for an eternal object to serve as “a possibility for an actuality,”
God as mediator between the eternal and the temporal is necessary in order
to propose it as relevant to a presently concrescing actual occasion.
Whitehead scholars are divided among themselves about whether his
notion of God as a nontemporal actual entity makes sense. Whitehead’s
aim, as noted above, is to understand God in terms of the same metaphysi-
cal categories applicable to all actual entities in order to achieve a coher-
ent system with greater explanatory power. And yet, the effect has been a
substantial amount of confusion for his commentators. As Allan phrases it,
“Actual entities are events, but God in its primordial nature does not come
to be and in its consequent nature does not perish—God is an event, but
one that does not actually occur” (2008, 334).
Whitehead scholars also disagree whether God is really necessary for
emergence of the subjective aim of an actual occasion, or whether the latter
possesses within itself the capacity to envisage its own possibilities in such
a way that the creative advance of the universe is maintained. In other

words, why must possibilities be eternal, abstract, self-contained, in them-
selves related to nothing but the divine vision that conceptually prehends
them? This question is central to the current work because it goes to the
heart of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of the invisible in the flesh as its Proustian
“lining and depth” and, as we have seen in Chapter III, what he terms the
“most difficult” question of all, the relationship of the idea and the flesh.
And this question returns us to the nature of eternal objects.
Whitehead’s concept of eternal objects has attracted criticism for a
considerable period of time.6 Here, we will consider two of the most recent
ones that are pertinent to Merleau-Ponty’s concerns for ideas in the flesh.
The first one is advanced by Allan himself, re-arguing John Dewey’s criti-
cisms. The second one consists of Franck Robert’s attempts to argue that
Merleau-Ponty’s view is inconsistent with that of Whitehead. Although
these two critiques stem from very different contexts, we shall see that
they converge and that this is no accident. Many commentators, including
us, have remarked on the close similarity of Dewey’s and Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophies.7
In the course of a 1936 American Philosophical Association sympo-
sium on Whitehead’s philosophy, Dewey attempted to persuade Whitehead
to give up the notion of eternal objects in favor of a “genetic-functional”
interpretation (Allan 2008, 327). Whitehead’s metaphysics was, he argued,
an incoherent combination of the “morphological” and “genetic-functional”
(Ibid.). The former amounts to eternal objects, and even the word ingres-
sion, he thought, implies some form of prior existence before becoming
actualized in occasions of experience, and that actualization requires God as
intermediary. Hence, as Dewey saw it, Whitehead in effect faced the same
metaphysical difficulty as did Descartes: the necessity of relating two radi-
cally different types of existence to each other by appealing to the divine
as a third term (Ibid.).
Dewey argued that “eternal” objects, no longer timeless, but rather
bound to history, would emerge within the flux of experience in response
to the resourcefulness of occasions of experience. “Experimental intelligence
would replace God as the agency needed to relate actual existences and
eternal objects” (Allan 2008, 328). In Merleau-Pontian terms, “eternal”
objects would amount to the complex existence of the twofold logos: the
6. See, for example, in PANW, the essays by Victor Lowe, Charles Hartshorne, Bertram Mor-
ris, and Wilbur Marshall Urban.
7. During a 1953 interview with Merleau-Ponty, one of these commentators, Herbert Spie-
gelberg, asked whether he had read Dewey. Merleau-Ponty replied that he had not (personal
communication, to Hamrick).
logos endiathetos that accounts for the hidden intelligibility of the universe
and the logos proforikos that brings it to the fore. This expressive activity
requires no external, divine agent.
Whitehead declined Dewey’s invitation because he considered that the
“genetic-functional” interpretation was incapable of expressing “insight into
those ultimate principles of existence which express the necessary connec-
tions within the flux” (Ibid.).8 Nonetheless, Allan—correctly, in our view—
declines to follow Whitehead’s insistence on possibilities being timeless. He
states that “the past that determines the fundamental conditions, the shape
and content, of the world we inhabit, is also a source of possibilities that
allow us to alter these conditions in novel and incrementally fundamental
ways” (2008, 346). And if this is true, qualified creativity embodied in pres-
ent acts of concrescence that exist in internal relations with both past and
future actual occasions of experience suffices “for articulating a coherent and
adequate philosophy of organism” (Ibid.).
Therefore, there is no “ontological need” for God’s primordial nature to
serve as the “eternal repository” of such possibilities (Ibid.). In this respect,
it is significant that, as Victor Lowe points out, the chapter of Adventures of
Ideas titled “Objects and Subjects,” Whitehead’s 1931 Presidential Address
to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and
which forms “the locus classicus for Whitehead’s conception of experi-
ence . . . manages to summarize Whitehead’s metaphysical position quite
well, without once mentioning either these entities [eternal objects] or God”
(“Whitehead’s Philosophical Development,” in PANW 119).
Whitehead would have done better to accept Dewey’s invitation. In
actual fact, it is difficult to see how eternal objects can be eternal or objects.
They are not eternal because, even if resident in the divine vision in some
fashion or other, they are not objects or entities of any kind. The reason
that they are not objects is not because they are abstract—numbers form
the classic example of why “abstract entities” is not self-contradictory—but
because they are “pure potentials.” Therefore, eternal objects are at most
potential objects with a potential existence. Hence, it is also difficult to see
why Whitehead lists eternal objects as one of “The Categories of Existence”
(PR 22). If this interpretation is adopted,9 it is clear that it would move
Merleau-Ponty’s position on the logos endiathetos very much in the direction
of that of Whitehead, understood in this way.
8. Whitehead’s reply appeared originally as “Remarks,” Philosophical Review 46, no. 2 (March
1937): 179; reprinted as “Analysis of Meaning” in ESP 94 (cited by Allan 2008, 328, n. 6).
9. Even Allan states without comment, “Eternal objects are existences” (2008, 332). It is not
clear whether he is simply repeating Whitehead’s interpretation of them or is himself untroubled
by ascribing existence to pure potentialities.
Robert takes his stand within Merleau-Ponty’s last ontology to argue

that Whitehead’s eternal objects are intellectual abstractions from the more
fundamental sense embedded in our experience and the world around us
(2007, 359). He begins by acknowledging that eternal objects are “pure
potentials that can achieve ingression in actual entities in the process of
concrescence so as to structure the meaning of it” (Ibid., 356). Robert then
correctly calls our attention to Merleau-Ponty’s desire to express the mean-
ing of Being before the reflective split between fact and essence (Ibid., 358),
and that, for the latter, an essence is not a static, self-contained eternal
object of reflection, but rather Wesen in the verbal sense—the concrete
style, or manner of being, of someone or something. As we have seen in
Chapter II in regard to Heidegger’s experience of his high school building,
essences are “the Sosein and not the Sein” (VI 109/148). The essence is
the in-visible, the “lining and depth” of the visible. It involves both the
visible and the invisible, the flesh of Nature as well as the idea. It is “the
sensible Proustian idea, that which gives the narrator access to the essence
of Combray when he eats a madeleine soaked in tea” (Robert 2007, 359).
“In short,” Merleau-Ponty states, “there is no essence, no idea, that does not
adhere to a domain of history and of geography” (VI 115/154).
Robert goes on to say that, for Merleau-Ponty, the more profound
intelligibility of Being conveyed through such styles, or sensible ideas, under-
writes the possibility of what Whitehead calls eternal objects and conceptual
prehensions of them. More precisely, he states:
The essentiality of the essence is thus to never be pure, that is to say,

fully positive. . . . One must therefore renounce the non-temporal
essence, the very idea of [the] eternal object, even if this object
cannot be thought beyond its ingressions in actual entities. The
failure of a thought of the non-temporal essence points out for
Merleau-Ponty the permanent flaw in a reflexive thought, of which
the speculative philosophy of Whitehead could indeed be a form.
(Ibid., 360)
On Robert’s view, Whitehead’s metaphysics amounts to a “new dualism”

(Ibid., 360), a renewed separation of “fact and essence, existence and
essence, which an attention to the concrete world would demand be aban-
doned” (Ibid., 367).
Robert’s text clearly gives the appearance that Whitehead’s view of
eternal objects is diametrically opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s account of sen-
sible ideas, the relationship of the idea to the flesh. However, it is not that
simple. First, thinking of pure potentials that are forever intelligible but never
incarnated in the world does not create a dualism of existential fact versus
essence. For example, there is no reason why Merleau-Ponty or anyone else

who understands the words could not think of and about a million-sided
figure, even if none ever existed and we stipulate that none ever will exist.
Such thoughts are not in the least inconsistent with seeing ideas as the “lin-
ing and depth” of the flesh. All that such hypotheticals show us is that much
more precision is required to understand Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “there
is no essence, no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of
geography.” The key word is “adhere.” Not only would it would be a very
cramped reading of this sentence to insist that it means “actually instanti-
ated,” but it would also fail to cohere with the ontological importance that
Merleau-Ponty ascribes to the imagination. Rather, it would mean that we
can think of nonexistent million-sided figures on the basis of our experience
of different figures and shapes of various numbers of sides and that we could
not think of a million-sided figure if we had had no experience of any figure
or object that had sides. Or, as Whitehead might put it, the case of God apart,
all conceptual prehensions take place in a perceptual, historical context.
Second, it is clear that what Merleau-Ponty means by the verbal sense
of Wesen is very close to what Whitehead means by creativity, qualified by
eternal objects ingressing in actual occasions of experience. For, in both
their objective and subjective species, pure potentialities amount simply to
the way that anything can be characterized. Both thinkers are describing
the process of actualizing potentialities in the phenomenon of expression.
Finally, Whitehead’s notion of the prehension of new possibilities, such
as Hume’s missing shade of blue, coheres well with certain of Merleau-Ponty’s
images of sense making, especially coherent deformation and decentering
and recentering, which are prominent in the logic of discovery. In other
words, feelings of unrealized possibilities make up an important factor in the
development of the logos proforikos.10
Therefore, we believe that it is more coherent to adopt Dewey’s inter-
pretation of eternal objects and think of them as emergent from the process
of Nature and as all the ways that reality can be characterized in both its
particularity and generality. This is to say that, as Allan has argued, the past
has the capacity to provide us with potentialities, and a rich enough array
of possibilities to underwrite the Kantian and Whiteheadian argument that
potentiality is necessary for contingency. This way of conceiving form in
Nature is clearly consonant with Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of “universals”
and “particulars” and our cognizance of them. Ideas would remain the “lin-
ing and depth” of the flesh.
Hence, Merleau-Ponty could agree with Whitehead that a quality
“varies from one occasion to another in respect to the differences of its
10. For copious examples, we recommend highly Richard Holmes (2008).

modes of ingression” (SMW 159). This conception of possibilities strongly

resembles the view of the Phenomenology of Perception when the author
writes, borrowing an example from Sartre’s L’Imaginaire: “this red would
literally not be the same if it were not the ‘woolly red’ of a carpet” (PhP
4–5/10).11 There is only the concrete universal for Merleau-Ponty—or, in
Whitehead’s language, a structure of ingredient eternal objects. Conceiving
the intelligibility (or logos-character of Nature) as the ingression of eternal
objects in the creative advance of novelty is consonant with Merleau-Ponty’s
conception of ideas in the flesh as the invisible of the visible.
FORMS OF NATURAL ORDER;

MIND AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
Further consonances with Merleau-Ponty’s ontology appear when we con-
sider the forms of order in Nature that eternal objects make possible.
Whitehead calls the most general form of natural order a “nexus” (plu-
ral: “nexūs”). A nexus is “any particular fact of togetherness among actual
entities. . . . The ultimate facts of immediate actual experience are actual
entities, prehensions, and nexūs” (PR 20). A nexus signifies the togetherness
of actual occasions that create the solidarity of the universe—the ultimate
structure of visibility and tangibility. Accordingly, nexūs generally have both
spatial width and temporal depth and are capable of achieving very complex
forms of togetherness.
For example, some nexūs are what Whitehead calls “societies,” and a
society is “a nexus with social order” (Ibid. 34). That is,
(i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definite-

ness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common
element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of
the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other
members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that
condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive
feelings of that common form. (Ibid.)
Further, “the common form is the ‘defining characteristic’ of the society”

(Ibid.). In other words, there is both common form and a genetic inheri-
tance of that form among all the actual occasions making up the nexus
(Ibid.). A purely non-social nexus, Whitehead states, “is what answers to
the notion of ‘chaos’ ” (Ibid., 72).
11. “Enfin, ce rouge ne serait à la lettre pas le même s’il n’était le ‘rouge laineux’ d’un tapis.”
In addition, some nexūs have a “personal order,” which comes about

when a nexus “is a ‘society’ ’’ and “when the genetic relatedness of its mem-
bers orders these members ‘serially’ ” (PR 34). When this “serial ordering”
derives from the “genetic relatedness,” the nexus is termed “an ‘enduring
object’ ” (Ibid.). Whitehead indicates that “person” could be an appropriate
synonym except that it suggests consciousness, which is not necessarily the
case. Enduring objects “sustain a character,” and “most ordinary physical
objects,” which are enduring objects, can be further analyzed into “strands
of enduring objects” (Ibid., 35). These are “the permanent entities which
enjoy adventures of change throughout time and space.” These entities,
which have social order and “strands of enduring objects,” are called “cor-
puscular” societies (Ibid.).
However, much greater complexity than this exists in Nature. Some
societies are called “structured” because they contain “subordinate societies
and nexūs” (PR 99). In turn, these subordinate societies and nexūs develop
and function according to the demands of the context provided by the
structured society. Just as every particular occasion takes on the character
of the society of which it is a member, so, too, do subordinate societies
and nexūs with regard to their structured environment. In other words,
the structured society functions as a Gestalt whole that conditions and is
internally present to all of its parts.
Finally, there are structured societies of structured societies that, as
the name suggests, are composed of subordinate structured societies (and
nexūs). The human body is an enormously complex structured society of
structured societies and nexūs—as Merleau-Ponty phrased it, “a system of
systems dedicated to the inspection of a world.” These complex forms of
social order are part of Whitehead’s explanation of the bodily unity for
which, as recounted in Chapter III, Monsieur d’Alembert was searching.
Given this framework of structured societies of structured societies, mind
or soul becomes a temporally thick route of dominant occasions rather than
a transitory act of becoming, for such an act by itself could not account for
anything like personal identity. How, then, can we explain the existence of
mind or logos in nature so that we avoid a Cartesian bifurcation of mind
and body?
Whitehead provides a helpful hint in Science and the Modern World
when he states that his analysis of “the concept of the order of nature” is
“more concrete than that of the scientific scheme of thought” because he
begins with “our own psychological field,” which is the “the self-knowledge
of our bodily event. I mean the total event, and not the inspection of the
details of the body” (73). He generalizes from the “principle” that his “bodily
event” is the same as “all other events, except for an unusual complexity
and stability of inherent pattern” (Ibid.). He then proceeds to say that, if
you start from “the immediate facts of our psychological experience, as surely
an empiricist should begin, you are at once led to the organic conception
of nature” (Ibid.). How we conceive of the order of nature is tied to a view
of nature as the “the locus of organisms in process of development.” (Ibid).
Earlier on, Whitehead titled this conception “organic mechanism”
(SMW 80) and in Process and Reality, he terms it “the philosophy of
organism” (18). Regardless of the label, what Whitehead recognizes here
is Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasmatic reversibility between body and
soul, and between the body and the world. This comes out very clearly in
Modes of Thought when he states that “the world is in the soul” and “the
soul itself . . . [is] one of the components within the world” (224). Thus,
our conception of the world has to be framed with reference to “the bodily
society,” and, conversely, we must construe the “bodily society” in the same
way that we do the “general functionings of the world” (225). By contrast,
the essential flaw in dualisms of mind and body is that, as we saw in Chapter
II, “in between there lie the concepts of life, organism . . . interaction, [and]
order of nature” (SMW 57). There is a “bodily life of the incarnate mind”
(CN 107), as Descartes’s “confusions” in the Sixth Meditation demonstrate.
Whitehead perceives that any adequate account of mind or soul must
explain personal identity over time and the pervasive feelings of personal
unity that we have at any moment of self-awareness. Personal identity
amounts to a continuity of an identifiable pattern in “a genetic relation
between occasions of human experience” (AI 186). Our awareness of “the
self-identity pervading our life-thread of occasions, is nothing other than
knowledge of a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature”
(Ibid., 187), and the “general principle” that guides it is the same causal
efficacy that binds together all of Nature. It is “the doctrine of the imma-
nence of the past energizing in the present” (Ibid.). The “vector relation of
particular to particular” creates “an analogy” between the way that energy
is transferred from one occasion to another throughout Nature and “the
transference of affective tone, with its emotional energy, from one occasion
to another in any human personality” (Ibid.). As Merleau-Ponty notes in a
different language, the flesh of the body coheres with the flesh of the world
and vice versa.
However, the enormously complex structure and functioning of the
human body prevent personal identity from being a temporally thin, direct
line of inherited patterns. Whitehead takes note of this fact in language
highly congenial to Merleau-Ponty’s pensée fondamentale:
The peculiar status of the human body at once presents itself as

negating this notion of strict personal order for human inheritance.
Our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion is
broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues.

Sensitive nerves, the functionings of our viscera, disturbances in
the composition of our blood, break in upon the dominant line
of inheritance. In this way, emotions, hopes, fears, inhibitions,
sense-perceptions arise, which physiologists confidently ascribe to the
bodily functionings. So intimately obvious is this bodily inheritance
that common speech does not discriminate the human body from
the human person. Soul and body are fused together. (AI 189)
All of this shows, as Whitehead points out, that no society of occasions

exists isolated from all others (PR 90). All societies and nexūs in the body
have to be thought of within the wider background of structured societies
that include them. In this Gestalt structure, any given society has a back-
ground social context and forms a part of it (Ibid.). Also, the above pas-
sage testifies to the fact that “the Human Body is that region of the world
which is the primary field of human expression” (MT 30), and because any
“region of nature” that happens to be the principal “field of expression”
that is produced by its parts, “that region is alive” (Ibid., 31). And not
only the human body: other organisms “beyond human beings, and beyond
the higher animals,” are capable of achieving this unity of expression and
life (Ibid., 31).12 Moreover, as we have seen clearly with Merleau-Ponty
and Schelling, thought is carnal: “The notion of pure thought in abstrac-
tion from all expression is a figment of the learned world. A thought is a
tremendous mode of excitement” (MT 50).13
All of this bodily complexity achieves a unified “field of expression”
because the body is a “miraculously coördinated” (AI 189) ensemble of
occasions of experience that pours its inheritance via many indirect paths
into diverse parts of the brain, which, by a reverse influence, provides unity
and direction. However, personal order (identity, the soul), is not a matter
12.
In Modes of Thought, Whitehead refers to different modes of being that we discussed in con-
nection with Barbaras’s arguments, and to which Merleau-Ponty refers at the end of his essay
on Whitehead: “There is, however, every gradation of transition between animals and men.
In animals we can see emotional feeling, dominantly derived from bodily functions, and yet
tinged with purposes, hopes, and expression derived from conceptual functioning. . . . And yet
the life of a human being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which unrealized
ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The distinction between men and animals is in
one sense only a difference in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference.
The Rubicon has been crossed” (37–38).
13. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead connects this thought with what became the later
notion of propositions being lures for feeling. He writes, “It is not true, however, that we ob-
serve best when we are entirely devoid of emotion. Unless there is a direction of interest, we
do not observe at all” (124). One important moral and legal implication of this claim is that
the ideal of the objective observer is at least sometimes wrongly cast in terms of disinterest
and disengagement.
of all or nothing. It can exist by degrees, such that it is not a matter of

whether an organism has a soul or does not have one. “The question is, How
much, if any” (Ibid., 208)? For example, multiple personalities and other
pathological conditions indicate the breakdown of personal order despite
the continuity of subordinate nexūs and societies that make up the rest of
bodily parts, organs, and systems.
Process and Reality ventures a more detailed explanation of how per-
sonal identity and unity come about. The author calls it “psychological
physiology,” which is a “conjectural theory” (103) consistent with his ontol-
ogy. First, he reminds us that life is characterized by novelty via concep-
tual reversion; a society can be called “living” only derivatively. A “living
society” is that which contains at least some “living occasions,” and such a
society may be “living” by degrees, more or less depending on the number
of its member living occasions (102).
This living nexus—that is, the connection of all the occasions of
experiences that keep us alive, is capable of supporting “a thread of personal
order along some historical route of its members. Such an enduring entity
is a ‘living person’ ” (PR 107). Through the transmission of feelings from
the regnant nexus to the rest of the body, “the mental originality of the
living occasions receives a character and a depth. In this way originality
is both ‘canalized’—to use Bergson’s word—and intensified. . . . Thus life
turns back into society: it binds originality within bounds, and gains the
massiveness due to reiterated character” (Ibid.).
The regnant nexus is also the second half of Whitehead’s explanation
of bodily unity. It answers to the intrapersonal coherence that Merleau-Ponty
sought in regard to the relationship of thought to oneself. As we saw in
Chapter III, Merleau-Ponty describes it as a “central vision” that gathers
all feelings “dispersed in my body,” the fleshly “I think that must be able to
accompany all our experiences” (VI 145/191). The result is the “synergic
body” that organizes these dispersed feelings to create “the experience of
one sole body before one sole world” (Ibid., 142/186). In Merleau-Pontian
terms, Whitehead’s notion of the regnant society and subordinate structured
societies throughout the body provide an explanation for the fleshly “I think”
and bodily unity.
To sum up, personal identity, or soul, can be explained in Whiteheadian
terms as a route of occasions or a nexus in the brain, which inherits data
indirectly from the whole body and generates the body’s main source of
originality and creativity. This entirely living nexus supports the regnant
society that, through its “presiding occasion” (PR 109) at any given moment
provides bodily unity for all of the subservient bodily nexūs and societies.
And it is unity that must be explained because “the life in the body is
the life of the individual cells. There are thus millions upon millions of
centres of life in each animal body” (Ibid.). Therefore, we need to reach

an explanation of both “unified behaviour, which can be observed by oth-
ers, but also consciousness of a unified experience” (Ibid.). The “defining
characteristic” of this “regnant society” is “that complex character in virtue
of which a man is considered to be the same enduring person from birth
to death” (Ibid., 90). It is the “enduring object formed by the inheritance
from presiding occasion to presiding occasion. This endurance of the mind
is only one more example of the general principle on which the body is
constructed” (Ibid., 109).
How, then, could Whitehead’s metaphysics explain the reversible
structure of flesh? Whether it is a question of the sentant-sensible relation-
ship in my own flesh or in that between my flesh and the flesh of the world,
there is first the original pre-reflective unity of, say, touching and touched,
activity and passivity. As we have seen, the passivity of the touched is not
added to the activity of touching, but rather is part of, so to say, its interior
horizon. Therefore, to touch is already to be touched, and every concres-
cence enacts this chiasmatic structure.
In the case of this reversible relationship in my own flesh—when, for
example, my left hand touches my right—the actual occasions of experience
that make up the societies and structured societies that comprise the affected
areas of flesh on my left hand take up in their initial phases of concrescence
the objectified data of the actual occasions of the area of the right hand
that is touched. This appropriation is possible because of the vector quality
of the conformal feelings in their initial phases that take what is “there” in
the right hand and integrate the objectified data of the touched hand into
the processes of the left hand.
This incorporation of the touched in the touching requires a tempo-
rally thick process of transition in addition to the processes of concrescence
themselves for the reasons given by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the écart. The
actual occasions of the right hand as thus objectified are not contemporane-
ous with those that are actively prehending, but must instead lie in their
pasts—here, in their immediate pasts. As already noted, there is always a
temporal slippage between touching and touched, seeing and seen, and so
on, however minute.
This reversibility of touching and touched need not involve any reflec-
tive acts, but it can, as when we try to prehend the touching hand as touch-
ing. In the above case, we would then discover the impossibility of the right
hand feeling the left as touching, just as the effort to see our eyes seeing
in a mirror always aborts at the last instant. However, that experience is a
more complicated bodily phenomenon, and hence requires a more complex
explanation. For it involves much more of the body than does the simple
touching-touched relationship. It entails a bodily self-reflection—as noted
above, what Merleau-Ponty describes as a “central vision” that gathers all

feelings “dispersed in my body,” the fleshly “I think that must be able to
accompany all our experiences” (VI 145/191).
This reflective intervention involves the complicity of the whole body
in the act of attention. In Whiteheadian language, actual occasions in the
regnant society receive disparate data from the immediately antecedent
states of the body in their own concrescences and pass them along to sub-
sequent dominant occasions of the society. The pattern of data received from
subordinate societies of actual occasions, principally in the hands, presents a
problem to be solved such that the subjective aims of each dominant occa-
sion in the regnant society would consist of combining into one coherent
datum the experiences of touching and touched. However, because of the
natural negativity of the écart, the dominant occasion cannot combine in
itself, and transmit to its successors, a coherent unity of feelings. That is,
the dominant occasion can not “canalize” the objective data received in
such a way that the attempt to grasp the sensing as sensing is successful.
Furthermore, this reflective intervention in the flux of experience rises
to the level of consciousness—as we have seen, “how we feel the affirma-
tion-negation contrast” (PR 241)—in which a proposition, the possibility of
unifying feeling and felt, and the societies of actual occasions involved in the
feeling and felt hands—“obtain synthesis in one datum” (Ibid.). However, in
this case it turns out that the data cannot be successfully synthesized because
of the self-contradiction of preserving the process of subjective concrescence
while objectifying it as the superjective data of physical feelings.
As regards the explanation of reversibility with non-self-sensing flesh,
on the pre-reflective level the same analysis applies. The pre-reflective unity
of the active sentant and the passive sensible obtains through feelings of
causal efficacy regardless of whether it is my own flesh or that of a wider
Nature. On the other hand, since, as Eye and Mind points out, our bodies
are made of “the same stuff” as physical things, and since, for Whitehead
there is only one genus of actual entities, the reciprocal sensing on the part
of the flesh of the world is more complicated and more profound than in
Merleau-Ponty’s writings. There really is a reciprocal sensing but, because
of the écart, always subsequent to the original human sensing. Following
the enormously complex concrescences throughout the human body that
are involved in the perception of, say, a tree, there is a returned influence
via the powerful feelings of causal efficacy from the occasions of the tree to
subsequent actual occasions in the body. On the “side” of the tree, as on
that of the body, actual occasions are instances of process that become and
then perish, and in perishing, transmit their objective record to subsequent
occasions. The actual occasions in the tree differ from those that make up
the human body only in terms of degree of mental originality.
Finally, this fundamental unity with and belongingness to Nature as

a whole has an important ecological consequence. It is that, even if we are
unaware of that unity and belongingness, the connection with the deeper
currents of Nature underlying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts
of experience is still open. Even if we are inclined to dualistic thinking
and mentally separate our being and our welfare from that of the envi-
ronment, we rest on an illusion. Through our Offenheit, as Merleau-Ponty
has articulated it, we still belong to the flesh of the world through its
structures of visibility and tangibility, our fate is inseparable from it, and
for this essential fact about our being, Whitehead provides a metaphysical
foundation and therefore deeper understanding. In this instance it is clear
how Whitehead’s conceptuality can clarify the suggestive, yet rather vague,
nontechnical vocabulary of the later Merleau-Ponty
SCHELLING AS COMMON ANCESTOR

OF WHITEHEAD AND MERLEAU-PONTY
Whitehead’s thinking about our fundamental unity with Nature is as much

influenced by Schelling as is Merleau-Ponty’s, although the historical path
of that influence is much more indirect. It also reveals both remarkable
similarities as well as critical differences between Whitehead’s “philosophy of
organism” and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, although, unlike Merleau-Ponty,
Whitehead does not explicitly discuss Schelling. On the other hand, again
unlike Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead incorporated important Schellingian
insights into a fully developed metaphysics and philosophy of Nature.
Antoon Braeckman (1985, 265) has shown how the historical route
of occasions of experience from Whitehead to Schelling passed first through
Wordsworth—for Whitehead, the most influential figure in the “Romantic
Reaction” (SMW, 75ff.)—to the eighteenth-century mechanistic view of
nature, and back to Coleridge. Wordsworth’s poetry, which was very sig-
nificant in Whitehead’s philosophical development, was heavily influenced
by Coleridge and embodied perfectly the spirit of German Idealism via
Coleridge’s appropriation of Kant and Schelling—as well as, to some degree,
Fichte.14
Although Coleridge correctly understood and substantially agreed with
Kant’s aesthetics, Coleridge almost completely misunderstood transcendental
philosophy, and ended by transmuting it into psychological description.15
14. Coleridge considered that Fichte’s philosophy of the act instead of Substance undermined
Spinoza, but apart from this “dynamic philosophy,” Coleridge rejected all other aspects of
Fichte’s thinking (Braeckman 1985, 267).
15. See Gabriel Marcel (1971, 39), for the discussion of Kant’s and Schelling’s aesthetics, and
p. 70 for the misunderstanding of transcendental philosophy. Cited in Braeckman (1985, 267).
He took it as a description of what actually exists rather than one about

the necessary conditions for the possibility of knowing what there is. The
same is true of Coleridge’s reading of Schelling. He did not understand
that the key intuitions of Schelling’s philosophy of Nature and aesthetics
derived from the latter’s own transcendental philosophy, which Coleridge
mistook for a description of what actually exists as opposed to propositions
about the necessary conditions for the possibility of natural productivity,
including that of human existence itself. Thus, it was much more a real-
ist than an idealist interpretation of Schelling (and Kant) that Coleridge
bequeathed to Wordsworth and, through him, to Whitehead. This realism
found expression in Coleridge’s appreciation of Schelling’s “completion of
the Kantian philosophy in respect to the philosophy of nature,” as well as
his writings on aesthetics, on the relationship of art and nature, and on the
reformulated relationship of subject and object that transcended dualism
(Braeckman, 269, 271).
Through Coleridge, Wordsworth took from Kant the seminal impor-
tance of life and the organism, the prominence of free will and the imagi-
nation—but also cross-fertilized by Coleridge’s study of Schelling’s view of
the imagination as the basis of the autonomy of the subject and of nature.
As we have seen previously, the creative activity of the artist for Schelling
is the paradigm case of overcoming the subject-object dualisms in modern
philosophy and of imitating as closely as possible Nature as Natura naturans.
The concept of the imagination also permitted Wordsworth to con-
ceive of nature as organic—“to think of the one as many and the many
as one” (Ibid., 271)—which made its obvious mark on Whitehead. Also
crucially influential in the latter’s metaphysics, Coleridge and Wordsworth
both derived from Schelling the views that God is immanent in the world
and that, as described above, Nature is a fundamentally creative process
that develops toward the human mind.
Schelling’s view of Nature as creative process closely resembles
Whitehead’s “Category of the Ultimate,” Creativity, which was likewise
developed from Schelling and Wordsworth’s organic conception of nature
as an “ever-acting ground which is involved in and finds expression through
all particular instances of nature” (Ibid., 275), as well as the inseparability
of fact and value in experience. As Whitehead phases it in “Immortality,”
“Value refers to Fact, and Fact refers to Value” (PANW, 684). A reference
to either one necessarily implicates the other because they are both “abstrac-
tions from the Universe,” and any abstraction implies a reference to the
whole from which it is an abstraction (Ibid., 685).
Since for Schelling and Wordsworth, our experience of nature is
one of value, especially aesthetic value, there is a tight link between that
experience and Whitehead’s rejection of “vacuous actuality” and his radi-
cal descriptive generalization that subjectivity is distributed throughout
all of Nature.16 Moreover, as we have seen in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of

Schelling, the latter, in contrast to Kant, did not conceive of art or the
imagination generally as just the end result of consciousness. More funda-
mentally, consciousness is the result of the creative power of Nature.
However, of all the aspects of what was supposedly Schelling’s concep-
tion of Nature in Wordsworth’s poetry, it was the creative dimension of the
imagination that made the greatest impact on Whitehead. Both Whitehead
and Schelling thought of the visible as an abstraction from its dynamic foun-
dation, explained in terms of “atomic processes of becoming”—actual entities
and Aktionen, respectively, and Schelling thought of Nature as a “dynamic
atomism” (Braeckman, 1985, 276). Moreover, both held that any given act
of becoming has both a foundation in and is simultaneously an expression of
a more basic activity of Nature. For Whitehead, this is Creativity; Schelling
writes in terms of “ ‘Absolute Nature,’ ‘Natura Naturans,’ ‘The Bond,’ ‘The
Copula,’ ‘The Soul (of the World),’ etc.” (Ibid., 278).
Following this interpretation, what Whitehead says about Creativity is
quite close in terms of imagination to what Schelling means by Nature. For
Whitehead, following Locke and Hume, imagination is epistemologically a
model of Creativity, which serves as an analogue for the ontological role of
creativity in Nature. However, the point of departure for Schelling’s view
of the imaginative character of creativity begins with Kant. According to
the first Critique, there must be a pure, that is, transcendental, imagination
(“productive imagination”) that synthesizes the manifold of sensory data,
and thereby mediates the sensory manifold and the pure categories of the
understanding (A 118-A 123). “Otherwise,” says Kant, sensibility would
yield only “appearances, would supply no objects of empirical knowledge,
and consequently no experience” (A 124). Schelling, by contrast, goes far
beyond the unification of objective sensory data and the subjective catego-
ries of the understanding directed toward knowledge of the phenomena.
He maintains that, since these objective and subjective factors are really
“functions of what should be defined as (subjective) activities in themselves,
(productive) imagination can generally be described as the active unifica-
tion of two different activities issuing in a finite product” (Braeckman 1985,
278). Further, because Nature is inseparably material and spiritual, the “two
different activities” are both mutually opposed and inherently intertwined.
In this way the unifying activity of (productive) imagination is best seen
as a process in and through which, in Whiteheadian language, the many
16. See Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude, for its emphasis on creativity in
nature and the poetic process through which the poet’s mind grows. “This growth of the
poet’s mind ends with the ‘Imagination’ as its last and most fundamental creative power”
(Braeckman 1985, 276).
become one, a synthesis from which “finite products” emerge, and every
finite product is a “concretum.”17
Since the active process of creative imagination is the most basic
activity of Nature, it grounds all physical/mental activity, even to its highest
levels in artistic production. Furthermore, since this basic creative activity
does not exist in abstraction from its concrete instantiations, Nature can be
conceived as a “relational whole.” It is a synthesis from which finite products
emerge because it unites “subject and object, the mental and the physical,
the organic and the inorganic. This is the ultimate reason why Schelling
defines this activity as the ‘Copula,’ ‘the Bond’ ” (Braeckman 1985, 278).
For the most part, Schelling’s view of the productive power of Nature
is very close to Whitehead’s notion of Creativity. Both are principles of
individuation, processes that do not exist apart from the concrete instances
that incarnate it, and that guarantee the solidarity of Nature through an
organic synthesis in every concretum of physical and mental feelings, those
of the actual world and of conceptual possibilities. However, there is one
significant difference in the way that these two thinkers conceive of the
active unity of the mental and the physical as the fundamental essence of
Nature. For Schelling, the most basic example of this unity is to be found
in “the self-conscious Ego, whereas Whitehead’s paradigm is an unconscious
experience” (Ibid.)—although for Whitehead, unconscious experience does
not mean without subjectivity. Schelling’s view is that, when we understand
ourselves as self-conscious examples of creative imagination, then we achieve
an awareness of “the (dynamic) unity of subjectivity and objectivity that can
generally be ascribed to reality as a whole and to its constituent parts” (Ibid.).18
On this basis, Braeckman concludes insightfully that Schelling and
Whitehead share three concepts implied in the general nature of imagina-
tion. In Whitehead’s language they are the “Reformed Subjectivist Principle,”
the “creative advance” of Nature, and a “philosophy of organism.” Because
of their allegiance to the first of these concepts, both thinkers take Nature
to be “the visible Mind and Mind, the invisible Nature,” and, as we have
seen, both reject a mechanistic worldview (Ibid., 280).19
Whitehead’s notion of “the creative advance” of Nature, as described
above, concerns a natural progression toward the production of actual occa-
sions of experience that are increasingly complex unities of physical and
17. For the notion of “concretum,” see George L. Kline (1983, 104–46) and (1986, 144ff.).
18. Ibid. Much of Native American thought exemplifies the same view of Nature. See, for
example, John G. Neihardt (1961, 20–48).
19. Interestingly, Braeckman states that both Schelling and Whitehead advance the “Revised
Subjectivist Principle” as an alternative to the “so-called ‘bifurcation of nature,’ ” a qualifier that
he does not explain. Perhaps, however, he means to express only the fact that, for Schelling,
Nature never really is bifurcated.
conceptual feelings, at the apex of which we find consciousness. Schelling

holds the same view: he describes “the history of consciousness, which can
either be described as regressive, starting with the Ego (this is the aim of
his [Schelling’s] transcendental philosophy), or as progressive, starting with
the ultimate natural processes (this is the aim of the philosophy of nature)”
(Ibid.).
As regards the final common concept, “the philosophy of organism,”
we have seen that on Whitehead’s view, the “ontological principle” requires
that creativity does not exist outside of actual entities. Yet it is equally true
that no actual entity or set of actual entities could exhaust the creativity of
Nature. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie has already shown us how the inexhaust-
ible productivity of Nature gets expressed in finite products that it inevitably
transcends, and he also holds the same view of the internal causation of
organisms as does Whitehead. In terms of the organicity of Nature, therefore,
each organism is equally its own cause and effect, is self-productive and
self-constitutive. Kant and Schelling rightly saw that mechanical causation
cannot explain living organisms. Since Schelling holds that mechanism is
derivative from organism, rather than the other way around, this logical and
ontological priority implies that, for him as for Whitehead, Nature is an
organic unity. Correlatively, Schelling describes imagination, and Whitehead
depicts concrescence and transition, as organic processes.
Although Schelling repeatedly stresses the significance of the notion of
organism for understanding Nature and clearly joined together the organic
view of Nature with the creative, productive imagination, Braeckman argues
that there are two basic differences between Schelling and Whitehead that
demonstrate that Whitehead is not the transcendental philosopher that
Schelling is. One of these differences, not germane to the present discus-
sion, concerns their different conceptions of God. The second difference is
that Schelling
understands the Imagination primarily as a necessary condition

of the possibility of the actual world which has to be thought of
in order to understand Nature as a whole. It is the same line of
thought in Schelling which is responsible for his analysis of nature
in ultimate processes of becoming (“Aktionen”), on the one hand,
and his explicit remark in a footnote that those “Aktionen” should
not be interpreted as existing but only as ideal grounds (categories)
of explanation. (Braeckman 1985, 282)
However, even if “Aktionen” were only ideal while Nature as Organism

is real, the previously noted parallels with Whitehead and with his view of
creativity as the “Category of the Ultimate” and “universal of universals”
would hold. For Creativity is also a metaphysical category, and only achieves
realization through its instantiations in actual entities.
Perhaps because Whitehead was mostly unknowingly influenced by
Schelling, unlike Merleau-Ponty, he never offers direct criticisms of his
“ancestor,” again unlike Merleau-Ponty. Nonetheless, despite common con-
cerns and congruent views of the organicity of Nature, the unity of the
mental and the physical, and imaginative creativity, Whitehead almost cer-
tainly would have advanced the same criticisms as did Merleau-Ponty in
regard to conceptual understanding. Furthermore, Whitehead clearly agreed
with Kant, although he does not cite him in doing so, that concepts are
just as necessary for understanding what is given in intuition. Whitehead
and Merleau-Ponty in their own ways had the merit of demonstrating the
necessity of broader yet empirically adequate concepts for the enterprise of
overcoming the various forms of the bifurcation of Nature embedded in
modern philosophy, for escaping its heritage of dualisms, deterministic cau-
sality, the valueless matter of scientific materialism, and superficial accounts
of experience, and for disclosing our inextricable involvement with Nature
and our deepest connections with Being.
CONCLUSION
The preceding chapters have attempted to articulate at least an outline of

an ontology of nature by means of the deep and mutually enlightening rela-
tionship between Whitehead’s process philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s final
ontology. We have seen that Merleau-Ponty found in the few Whiteheadian
texts that he knew a number of concepts that were consonant with his own
intuitions guiding the emergence of that ontology. These concepts consist
of the view that Nature is process (passage) made up of “brute facts,” the
insistence on thinking within Nature as against the ontology of the object,
the body as a “system of systems dedicated to the inspection of a world” (S
67/83), internal versus external relations, the emergence of life and spirit
from Nature rather than being imposed on it from outside, and the rejection
of an externally imposed teleology in favor of finding purposive, symboli-
cally rich behavior within Nature itself. There are also the “fallacy of simple
location,” the emotional causal influence of the past in the present, and the
rejection of dualisms, scientific materialism, process as unbroken continuity,
what Whitehead calls the “subjectivist” and “sensationalist” principles, and
representational thinking.
Because Merleau-Ponty reacted strongly against much of modern
philosophy for the same reasons as did Whitehead, he also endorsed the
repudiation of various forms of the bifurcation of Nature in modern phi-
losophy. The first version, originating with Galileo, is that between Nature
as apparent and Nature as it really exists. In that form, what exists in the
external world is not what we see, and what we see is not there. What we
perceive according to that view would be, rather, what Whitehead terms a
“psychic addition” to Nature (CN 29). This form of the bifurcation persisted
with Descartes and Malebranche, and to which both added a bifurcation
between minds/souls and bodies. Other forms of the bifurcation persisted
throughout modern philosophy and well into the twentieth century, namely
that between the self (mens sive anima) and others, reason and feeling, facts
and values, the realm of (mechanistic) efficient causes (Nature) and that of
final causes (the mind and, in some versions, God).
We began with Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenological ontology in
order to show both how it was meant to overcome these bifurcations and
how its phenomenological descriptions prepared for the eventual ontology
235
of Nature. Those descriptions focused on the lived body and its incarnate
freedom, expression and language, the body’s relationship with nature and
culture, and the body’s perceptual/behavioral circuit with things, other peo-
ple, the circumambient world (Umwelt), and Earth as our primordial Boden.
We also explicated the ways in which Merleau-Ponty mobilized his phenom-
enology of the lived body to continue his long struggle against Cartesianism
that, for him, also included Sartre’s early writings.
This struggle persisted throughout Merleau-Ponty’s life and informed
a substantial part of his late writings, both published and unpublished.
Accordingly, we have followed his criticisms of his estranged friend in the
course of gaining some understanding of the objectives and principal con-
cepts of his final ontology of Nature. We have shown why Merleau-Ponty
thought it necessary to develop a “new” ontology, and why he thought that
it would eventually have more explanatory power than the earlier phe-
nomenology. This led in turn to detailed consideration of the chiasmatic
reversibility of the to-feel and to-be-felt, which is realized in “the flesh,” his
primordial ontological concept.
Neither Merleau-Ponty nor Whitehead formulated their criticisms of
the bifurcations of Nature out of a whole cloth. Both were significantly
influenced by the thought of Schelling and Bergson, though not uncritically.
As a result, we have given a great deal of attention to that influence. In the
case of Schelling, this is particularly important because this relationship is
hardly mentioned by other commentators, such as Dillon (1997) and Hass
(2008); others—for example, Toadvine (2009)—do discuss it briefly, but
without making contact with Schelling’s texts. The reference to Schelling’s
work is important because it forms a bridge between Merleau-Ponty and
Whitehead since both of their reactions against the bifurcation of Nature
were influenced by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. As regards Bergson, we have
also shown that both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty took seriously his views
of duration, temporality, the process of Nature, its intellectual spatialization,
evolution, and perception. On the other hand, they rejected his conten-
tions that concepts were necessarily inadequate to express the interior life
of organisms and that the intellect must always in some sense falsify the
life of Nature.
Merleau-Ponty’s and Whitehead’s views of life in Nature contrast with
both those of Schelling and Bergson, and this in turn opened the way to
considering some criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, how Merleau-Ponty
might have responded to them, and finally how Whitehead’s process philoso-
phy—even with just the few texts that Merleau-Ponty knew—could have
supported and supplemented his likely response. That discussion in turn
led to an articulation of the major concepts of Whitehead’s mature process
metaphysics in order to demonstrate how the texts that Merleau-Ponty did
CONCLUSION 237
not know—especially Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas—could have

provided the latter with a firm metaphysical foundation for his last ontology
as well as much needed conceptual precision.
Seeking a metaphysical foundation required for an adequate ontology
of “l’Être brut” anterior to reflexive consciousness coincides in some ways
with Whitehead’s project of recurring to pre-Kantian modes of thought. In
effect, both thinkers were open to what Merleau-Ponty praises about the
seventeenth century, namely that it was
that privileged moment when natural science and metaphysics

believed they had discovered a common foundation. . . . In differ-
ent ways Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche recognize,
beneath the chain of causal relations, another type of being which
sustains that chain without breaking it. Being is not completely
reduced to or flattened out upon the level of external Being. There
is also the being of the subject or the soul, the being of its ideas,
and the interrelations of these ideas, the inner relation of truth.
(S 148/186, 187)1
As we have shown, both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty recognize

that the universe overflows with meaning, an intelligibility that is neither
fully formed waiting to be represented in consciousness nor a product of
consciousness to be imposed on senseless matter. Between these extremes of
realism and idealism, meaning is sketched in outline in Nature with which
the percipient, speaker, and thinker are complicit in expressing it fully.
Yet, as regards the source of this meaningfulness (l’origine de la vérité),
Merleau-Ponty’s view changed significantly from his earlier to his later writ-
ings. It is still true that he adhered to a middle path between realism and
idealism, such that the only Being of which it makes sense to speak is “l’Être-
pour-nous” that is, however, somehow “already there (in outline)” before our
experience of it. As we have seen, the earlier writings approached intelligi-
bility in terms of the twofold, Husserlian structure of meaning of the found-
ing and founded (le fondant and le fondé). In this relationship of Fundierung, le
fondant includes perception and facts, and the perceptual-behavioral circuit
between them. Le fondé comprises language, expression, rationality, and in
general, all cultural phenomena, including the sciences and mathematics.
1. “. . . ce moment privilégié où la connaissance de la nature et la métaphysique ont cru trouver

un fondement commun. . . . De différentes façons, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche,
sous la chaîne des relations causales, reconnaissent un autre type d’être, qui la sous-tend sans
la rompre. L’Être n’est pas rabattu en entier ou aplati sur le plan de l’Être extérieur. Il y a
aussi l’être du sujet ou de l’âme, et l’être de ses idées, et les relations des idées entre elles, le
rapport interne de vérité.”
Yet, in the later work, as Nature became increasingly important onto-

logically, Merleau-Ponty broadened the structure of le fondant and le fondé.
Human perception itself, as we have shown, became rooted in something
deeper: the reversibility of feeling and being felt, which belongs to the
flesh of the world and which makes perception possible to begin with. Le
fondé became the whole sphere of ideality, language, painting—in general,
all cultural forms of expression. Meaning—as, for example, in geome-
try—became more than cultural. It was prefigured in Nature itself, which
Merleau-Ponty expressed through the Stoics’ notion of the logos endiath-
etos—the logos in-built in creation, which permeates Nature, through which
the universe “holds together,” and which achieves expression through the
logos proforikos.
Whitehead’s process metaphysics accounts for this twofold logos in
terms of creativity (“the universal of universals”) qualified by forms (eternal
objects and values). Through the method of descriptive generalization he is
able to understand how all actual occasions of experience throughout Nature
incarnate some value because each is a unity of subject and object. We have
demonstrated that his more daring descriptive generalization makes sense of
Merleau-Ponty’s descriptive generalization of the flesh. Whitehead’s account
of occasions of experience as instances of prehensive unification also replaces
the conceptuality of reflective consciousness in which subjects stand over
against objects, and Whitehead would agree completely with Merleau-Ponty
that Being always exceeds the grasp of reflective consciousness. In other
words, the relationship of le sentant and le sensible exists at all levels of
Nature, albeit with various degrees of mental originality.
Therefore, for Whitehead as well, all cultural expressions have a com-
mon ground of possibility in Nature, and the closest that Merleau-Ponty
comes to expressing Whitehead’s all-encompassing creativity qualified by the
forms at all levels of existence is when he refers to “a total movement of
Speech, which goes unto Being as a whole [un mouvement total de Parole qui
va vers l’Être entier]” (VI 211/265). It could be considered as Merleau-Ponty’s
category of the ultimate: Being in its entirety—inherently permeated by the
silent logos of perception that is dynamically expressed by the logos proforikos.
Each actual entity is Janus-faced. It looks backward to the “the throb-
bing emotion of the past hurling itself” into its own becoming and it looks
forward to the future that its own becoming prepares. Unhappily enough,
we do not know where Merleau-Ponty’s turn to “fundamental thought”
would have led him. It is tempting to ask whether, had Merleau-Ponty
lived to complete his ontology of Nature, he would have incorporated more
of Whitehead’s thought into his ontology. There are at least two reasons
why this question is not purely speculative. The first one is that there are
several passages in The Visible and the Invisible that remain obscure if not
CONCLUSION 239
read from a dynamic, process perspective. This is particularly true of the

verbal conception of Wesen, the reversibility of the chiasm, dehiscence, and
the écart. The second reason is that Merleau-Ponty had already discarded
conceiving Nature in terms of substances and attributes, as the object of
a constituting consciousness, whether in Cartesian, Marxist, or Sartrean
modes. Moreover, despite his criticisms of Schelling and Bergson, they still
exercised a substantial influence on his ontology. Process thought would
have presented itself to Merleau-Ponty as a viable source of thinking about
Nature that solicited and nourished his intuitions.
In this work, by conjoining Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead in an
enriching concrescence, we have in effect shown how Merleau-Ponty
might have advanced toward the completion of his ontology of Nature.
The final synthesis of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought and Whitehead’s con-
ceptuality would be a logically consistent, empirically adequate metaphysics,
sufficiently enriched by phenomenological evidences and Merleau-Ponty’s
ontological account of the ultimate unity of mind and body, spirit and
Nature. It would be a philosophically adequate way to think the fundamental
unity (wholeness, integrity) of Nature and ourselves within it. Yet, even
short of that goal, the interfusion of Whitehead’s process metaphysics and
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh would make a significant advance toward
the way that Merleau-Ponty conceived “the future of philosophy.” He really
saw before him the task of taking up again the whole of philosophy in
“fundamental thought” (“reprendre toute la démarche philosophique en pensée
fondamentale”) (VI 183/237). He puts it as follows: although philosophy
“will never regain the conviction of holding the keys to nature or history
in its concepts,” it cannot “renounce its radicalism, that search for presup-
positions and foundations which has produced the great philosophies” (S
157/198). Searching for those “presuppositions and foundations” in order
to ontologically rehabilitate the sensible (S 166–67/210) and its manifold
cultural expressions would entail a much fuller articulation of the logos pro-
forikos than what we have begun here. That would be another chapter in
the quest for “L’origine de la vérité.”
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INDEX
Abram, David: 34 logos endiathetos, 105, 106; meanings

activity and passivity: 4, 92, 98, 99, of, 58; as polymorphic, 95
100, 101, 106, 109, 125, 153, 200, Bergson, Henri: 8, 38, 39, 40, 144–151;
206, 226; and Leibnizian monads, on affirmation and negation, 163,
192, 194; and subjective aim, 197, n. 20; 165; and the bifurcation of
214. See also chiasm Nature, 153; and consciousness as
actual entities: 194, 233; as actual duration, 157; and duration, 38, 144,
occasions of experience, 194, 195, 145, 150; on élan vital and Kant,
199, 200, 202 146; and God, 121, 122, 157–158;
Allan, George: 215–217, 220 and Hegel, 147; on instinct and
animality: 167ff.; and Bauplans, intelligence, 164; on intellectualized
169–170; and embryology, 167; and consciousness and spatialization,
Ineinander relationships, 178; and 159; and intuition, 65, 164; on
intertwining with humanity, 167, intuition and the Absolute, 148; on
178; as logos of the sensible world, intuition and concepts, 144, 145,
168; and phylogenesis, 167, 170–171; 146, 147; on intuition and duration,
as reinforced in mythic presentations, 149; on intuition and intellect, 159;
178; and Umwelts, 169–170 and life and matter, 155, 156, 157,
Anaxagoras: 73, 78 158; and mechanism and finalism,
Arnheim, Rudolf: 81, n. 14; 88, n. 26; 153–160; and monism and dualism,
99, n. 40 157; on negativity and forms of
Aristotle: 50, 120, 172 order, 161–163; on nothingness,
art: and the Absolute, 138–140; and 147, 160; and positivity, 160–165;
the identity of subject and object, and as product of intellect, 160;
139; and philosophy, 139–140 on organisms and Kant, 154; and
partial coincidence with Being, 85,
Bachelard, Gaston: 42, 76, n. 8; 82, 97, 130, n. 16, 164; and perception
n. 15 and conceptual thought, 154; and
Barbaras, Renaud: 99, 181–190, rejection of theodicies, 192, 215,
202–203, 205, 224, n. 12; and the n.5; Sartre’s criticism of, 38; and
dissolution of the subject, 184, 186; sensations, 157; and spatialization
and phenomenology and ontology, of nature, 53; on time and thinking
184; and reversibility of human and Being, 149–150; and Whitehead’s
worldly flesh, 182–184, 185 criticisms of, 165–167
Being: as “brute,” “wild,” 57, 77, 81, Berkeley, George: 3, 33, n. 41
93, 144; and erste Natur, 127; and Bernet, Rudolf: 12, 13, 28, n. 34; 29
the il y a, 57, 71, 91, 142; and the biology: 58, 145, 167 ff.
253
254 INDEX
Blondel, Maurice: 69, 75; and indirect 81, 88, 89, 93, 95, 101, 130; and
ontology, 69–70 metamorphosis, 88; as pre-established
bodily esthesiology: 78, 79, 84, 110 harmony, 119; as process, 87; and
body: as bearer of symbolic systems, reversibility, 88, 90, 93, 98, 99, 102,
28, 107, 114, 176, 179; and bodily 182, 193, 223, 236
symbolism in higher animals, 174, Claudel, Paul: 26, 84; and
175; and the corporeal schema, 19– “co-naissance,” 26, 61, 87, 92; 94,
21, 75, n.5; 78, 88, 92, 108; and 97, 102, 149, n. 54; 182, 189
fungierende intentionality, 64; human Cloots, André: 9, 197, n. 8
body as emergent from evolution, Coghill, George E.: and studies of the
178; as “lexicon of corporeity,” 26, axolotl lizard, 168
78; as libidinal, 75, n. 5; 88, 92, cogito: 12, 23, 32, 35, 56, 61, 73, 79, n.
173, n. 29; as lived, 12–29, 203, 12; as silent, 14, 190
224, 236; and motor-intentionality, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 228; and
17–29, 103; and pathological appropriation of Kant and Schelling,
motility, 21–24; as phenomenal and 228–229
objective, 90. See also space and time Compton, John: 5
Braeckman, Antoon: 124, n. 2; 228, concepts: 7, 8, 20, n. 16; 26, 27, 46,
229, 230, 231, 232 47, 48, 52, 108, 109, 129, 132, 142,
Bridgman, Percy W: 176; contrasted 176, 182; and Husserlian Offenheit,
with Einfühlung, 176–177 68; as necessary for contingency,
Brunschvicg, Léon: 26, n. 28; 30, n. 143; in the “new” ontology, 56,
35; 54, 57, n. 13; 67, 144 61, 67–69, 92, 100, 115, 119; and
brute facts: 4, 53, 102, 190, 196, 235; the ontology of the object, 68; as
and Schelling, 197 required for understanding data of
Burtt, E.A.: 34 intuition, 234. See also Bergson and
Schelling
Cassirer, Paul: and symbolic pregnance, concrescence: 8, 194, 167, 195–199,
27–28, 80 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 211,
causality: 3, 17, 21, 22, 26, 34, 36, 37, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 226, 227,
42, 48, 49, 56, 71, 116, 143, 144, 232, 239
162, 171; and efficient and final consciousness: 13, 16, 23, 31, n. 37;
causes, 3, 33, 197–198, 223, 235; 66, 79, 104, 117, 131, 136, 200;
and embryonic development, 177 and the affirmation-negation
Cézanne, Paul: 80, 93; and the depths contrast, 210; as the highest
of inhuman nature, 58, 59, n. 15; development of mentality, 211;
76, 81; and topological space, 96 the history of, 232; and life, 132,
Chardin, Teilhard de: 179 145, 200–201; and motility, 17ff.;
chiasm: 86–94; and dehiscence, 88, as perceptual, 7, 12, 14; and the
98; and the écart, 89, 97, 98, philosophy of, 2, 117, 156, 187, 189;
107, 134, 147, 195, 214, 226, and presentational immediacy, 207;
227, 239; as the fold, 88, 95; and and its punctum caecum, 55, n. 9;
Ineinander relationships, 87; and 133; as result of the creative power
intercorporeity, 90–91, 173, n. 29; as of nature, 61, 73, 230; and Sartre,
intertwining, 88, 95; and Offenheit, 36–46, 65, 91, 101. See also body
87, and overlapping, envelopment, and constitution
INDEX 255
constitution: 17, 25, 38, 43, 51, 57, 79, descriptive generalization: 2, 4, 66, 99,
82, 93, 109, 111, n. 15; 177, n. 40; 108, 167, 182, 185, 190, 193, 199,
189, 199, 200 203, 229, 238
contingency: 40, 67, 71, 101, 119, De Waelhens, Alphonse: 45, 46
120, 141, 143, 147, 160, 192, 212, Dewey, John: 217–218, 220
220; and goodness, 214–215. See also Diderot, Denis: 90, n. 28
concepts Driesch, Hans: 168, 177
creativity: 49, 60 106, 220; and the Dunphy-Blomfield, Jocelyn: 9, 74, n. 3
advance of nature, 49, 231; as
Category of the Ultimate, 232; and écart: See chiasm
expression in animal life, 168–179; Einfühlung: 75, n. 5, 76, 92, 107
and freedom in Bergson’s élan vital, emotions: 24–25, 224; and form/matter
155; and human cultural expression, analysis of experience, 25–26
14, 24, 26, 27, 50, n. 4, 56, 57, eternal objects: 207, 209, 220; and
66, 69, 76, 90, 103, 104, 105, 109, divine agency, 212, 216; and feelings
110, 112, 115, 116, 193, 205, 209, of conceptual reversion, 210; and
214, 224, 239; and imagination, ingression, 209, 212, 217, 221; as
230–231; as inexhaustible in nature, necessary for contingency, 212; and
232; as metaphysical category, 233; universals and particulars, 211
and propositional feelings, 210, 224; Euclid: 94–95, 112
and Schelling’s “barbaric principle,” evolution: 150, 153, 154, 155, n.
127; and Schelling’s influence on 3; 156; and Darwin’s eliminative
Whitehead, 229–230; and sense explanation of, 170–171
making, 220; as Universal of
Universals, 195, 198, 238. See also finalism: 118, 129–130, 146
meaning flesh: 2, 4, 7; as carnality, 74–76;
chiasmatic unity with, 68, 86–94; as
Deleuze, Gilles: 146, nn. 46, 47; 157, element of Being, 76–79; and depth,
160, n. 14; 163, n. 20 79–84; as human and worldly, 187;
depth: 79–84, 211; and art, 80, 81; as the new irrelative, 78, 99; as
and dimensionality, 80; and ontic and ontological, 187–188, 203;
geometrical perspectives, 80, 95, and reversibility, 28–29, 187–188;
n. 33; and imagination and desire, and topological space and time,
82–88; and the ontology of the 94–100; and verticality, 84–86. See
object, 80; as temporal and spatial, also chiasm
84 freedom: 20, 37, 38, 39, 42–43,
Descartes, René: 3, 7, 29–36, 46, 49, 56, 111, 127, 130, 131, 136; and
50, 51, 52, 53, n. 6; 61, 67, 217; expressive animal behavior, 173; and
and activity and passivity, 100; and intuition in Schelling, 138. See also
Cartesian mind-body “confusions,” creativity, Kant, and Sartre
31–32, 41, 45, 50, n. 5; 54, 60, Freud, Sigmund: 82, 87, 211; and case
61, 66, 67, 87, 90, 92, 182, 223; of the Wolfman, 82–83, 109; 163,
and horizontal being, 85; and 212
idea of God, 118; and mind/body
interaction, 34–36, 49, 157; and the Galilei, Galileo: 3, 29, 33, 34, 49, n. 3;
Dioptrics, 80 52, 102, 235
256 INDEX
Gestalt psychology: 14–17, 27, 51, 144; Hume, David: 24, 48, n. 2; 51, 52, 53,
and Gestalt structures, 15, 16, 18, 101, 143, 206, 210, 212, 220, 230
24, 82, 111, 198, 201, 206, 211, 222, Husserl, Edmund: 12, 20, n. 16; 28, 38,
224 42, 43, 54, 60, 62, 65, 66, 74; and
God: 3, 52, 57, 58, 60–61, 104, 117, aesthetic logos, 28, 106, n. 7; and
118, 119; as abyss, 124–125; as affective force, 28, 39, 140–141; and
actual entity, 212; as empirical fact, consciousness, 66, 78, 87, 140; and
140; and erste Natur, 128; and evil, the Earth, 62–63, 70; and Einfühlung
119–121, 122, 192, n. 5; 215; as as underlying zoology, 176–177; and
fellow sufferer, 215; as Kosmotheoros, intentionality, 17, 42; and Offenheit,
4, 6, 94; as metaphysically necessary, 62, 64; and time-consciousness, 85,
215–217; as origin of subjective aims, 135, n. 25; and touching-touched
216–217; primordial and consequent relationships, 27, 43, 87, 89, 97,
nature of, 212–213; and processive 181–182; and transcendental
nature as écart and dehiscence of subjectivity, 2, 12, 39, 43. See also
universe, 214; as source of novelty, Ineinander
216
ideas: and bond with flesh, 8, 90, 103;
Hass, Lawrence: 12, 14, n. 8; 18, n. 12; and conceptual feelings, 210–211;
24, n. 22; 29, 33, n. 42; 53, n. 6; 75, as lining and depth of the visible,
n. 4; 105, n. 4; 110 103, 210–211, 217; as musical and
Hegel, G.W.F.: 22, 25, 26, n. 26; 67, literary, 109; and no pure ideality,
78, 123, 128, n. 11; 135, 147; and 109, 111
Schelling on intuition and concepts, Ineinander: 62, 74, 76, 78, 87, 88, 97,
141–142 107, 118, 167, 177, n. 38. See also
Heidegger, Martin: 14, 15, n. 11; animality and body
19, n. 14; 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, inspiration and expiration of Being:
54, 60, 70, 92, 107, 142, 207; and 94, 126
Being speaking in us, 105; and institution: 20, 43, 106, 110–111, 154,
direct ontology and Merleau-Ponty’s 200
critique of, 69–72; and medieval intentionality: 42, 46, 201; and without
concept of truth, 136; on Nature consciousness, 201. See also body and
as Bestand, 127; and Offenheit, 62, consciousness
71; on pure sensations, 15, n. 11; intersubjectivity: 121, 122, 177, n.
207; on truth and freedom, 137, 38; and contrast of Heidegger and
n. 29; and verbal meaning of Wesen, Sartre, 43–44
72; 88, n. 25; 219
Herr, Lucien: 78, 81 James, William: 22, 40, 68, n. 31; 158,
history: 13, 36, 44, 45, 48, 54, 56, 58, n. 10; 196, 207
59, n. 16; 66, 68, 87, 97, 108, 109,
110, 111–112, 113, 114, 117, 145, Kant, Immanuel: 29, 61, 63, 201;
191, 214, 239; of consciousness, 232; and bifurcation of nature, 3, 102;
and eternal objects, 217; and ideas, and Bergson’s critique of, 146–147,
219–220; and life, 154, 163–164, 154, 159; and concepts, 67–68;
171, 176 and consciousness, 38, 78; and
INDEX 257
constitution, 79, 200; and eternal 27, 45, 59, 80; and mechanism
objects as possibilities, 212–213, and organisms, 130, 229, 236; and
220; and the form/matter analysis mechanism and vitalism, 168; and
of experience, 29; and freedom as metamorphosis, 78; and the natural
antiphysis, 20, 42, 134, 138, 171; world, 6, n. 6; 13, 56, 125, 140,
and God, 124–125; and knowledge 145–146; and openness to the world,
as conceptual, 143, 154, 273; and 18, 64; as perceptual, 18, 26, 64, 66,
imagination, 136–137, 230, 233; 69, 86, 88, 99, 132, 177; as personal,
and knowledge of organisms, 232; 11, n. 1; 14; and the physico-
and no pure disorder, 161, n. 16; chemical, 130, 167, 177, 178; as pre-
and phenomena and noumena, 33, personal, 14; as pre-reflective, 142.
n. 40; 59, 99, 102, 196; and the See also evolution and nature
sensationalist principle, 51, 101; and Locke, John: 33, 48, n. 2; 51, 52, 199, 230;
Schelling’s critique of, 124, 125, 128, and time as perpetual perishing, 194
129, 131, 137; and the Stoics, 106; Lorenz, Konrad: 174–176; and animal
and transcendental subjectivity, 12, consciousness, 175–176; and instinct
34, 190 and mechanistic explanations,
Kierkegaard, Søren: 54 174–175
Klee, Paul: 81, 84, 85, n. 21; 94, 98;
and topological space, 96 Malebranche, Nicolas: 3, 100, 235
Köhler, Wolfgang: 178 Marcel, Gabriel: 57, n. 13; 88, 96, 144,
228, n. 15
Lefort, Claude: 30, 84, 174, n. 30 Maritain, Jacques: 119, 192
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 3, 27, 67, Marx, Karl: 13, 44, 54, 59, 112, 239
73, 127, 146, 171, 189, 192, 194, mathematics: 3, 33, 34, 36, 47, 94,
213, 215, n. 5; 237; and activity 112, 116, 150, 237; and natural
and passivity, 101; and explicative order, 160–162; and topology, 96
theology, 119, 120, 121; and pre- Matisse, Henri: 96, 110
established harmony, 57, 101, 119; meaning: 16, 13, 15–16, 66; and
and the nature of God, 213; and the ambiguity, 16; as anterior to
ontology of the object, 58, 118 consciousness, 103; and bodily
life: 151, 153–179; and animals, 13, motility, 23–26; and essences, 104;
28, n. 32; 167–179; and Bergson’s and the form/matter analysis of,
account of, 148, 153–162; as 23–24, 29; and geometry, 104–105,
cognitive, 21, 24, 25, 33, n. 40; 118, 107, 115, 116; as ideals expressed in
133, 135; and conceptual feelings, language, 45; as the in-[the]visible,
209; as emergent from nature, 54, 7, 79, 109, 219, 220; and nature,
117, 119, 126, 168, 200, 235; of 58–59, 105; and openness, 45; and
flesh, 167ff.; as freedom and mental sedimentation, 20, 57, 110, 111,
originality, 166, 209, 214, 225; and 112; and sense making, 110–113; as
God as ground of, 127; and ideas, sketched in outline, 23, 103, 116;
103; and immediate flux of, 134–135, and the verbal meaning of Wesen,
160; and Ineinander relationships 72, 83, 87, 107, 219, 220. See also
with physico-chemistry, 167, 177; creativity, ideas, institution, and the
as institution, 154; and meaning, logos endiathetos and logos proforikos
258 INDEX
mechanism: 5, 15, 22, 26, 29, 30, 33, 47–54; as process, 48, 53, 59, n. 17;
n. 40; 48, 49–50, 52, 53, 129, 130; 60, 61, 77, 87, 98, 107, 146, 153,
and organism, 231–232. See also 161, 190, 193, 194, 210, 229, 231,
Bergson and Schelling 232; solidarity of, 49, 51, 195, 196,
metamorphosis: 41, 78, 88, 93, 94, 97, 202, 206, 221, 231. See also Bergson
98, 100, 101, 156, 172, 179, 200 and Schelling
metaphysics: 4, 54, 73; and Bergson, negativity: in instinctive behavior, 175;
147; as generalization from human as instituted by dehiscence and the
experience, 199; and rapprochement écart, 98, 147; and Bergson, 147–148,
with science, 237; and Sartre, 45; 153, 160–165; in nature, 79, 98, 147,
and systems, 67, 191, 192, 193–194; 206, 211; in organisms, 169; and
and theories of causation, 197; Sartre, 30, 39, 44, 46, 147, 148, 153
and theories of painting, 93; and Nietzsche, Friedrich: 40, 54, 82, 123,
Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, 127, 166, 201
167, 191, 226, 228, 229. See also
descriptive generalization objects and subjects: 3, 5, 18, 27, 38,
mind-body relationships: 49–50, 54, 69, 46, 56, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 73,
90, 91, 235; and Whitehead’s theory 76, 77, 81, 92, 102, 182, 184, 185,
of mind, 222–226; and personal 198–203, 218; and concern, 198; and
identity, 225–226 Schelling, 126, n. 6; 131, 133, 134,
misplaced concreteness, fallacy of: 48, 138, 139, 140, 141
52, 53, 176 Offenheit: 44, 62–64, 67, 71, 87, 121,
Moyle, Tristan: 169, 170 171, 206, 228
ontology: 54, 58; and Bergson, 145,
natural order, forms of: 194, 221–224; 164, 165; and biology, 176–177;
as enduring objects, 222; as nexūs, and indivision from nature, 133; of
221; as persons, 222; as societies, meaning, 54; and Merleau-Ponty’s
221–222; as structured societies, “new,” 1, 2, 7, 11, 47, 53, 54–56,
222 58, 60, 67, 77; of the object, 3, 29,
nature: 1–9; as autoproduction of 30, 49, 50, n. 4; 53, 67, 68, 69, 71,
meaning, 59, 60; as basis for 73, 79, 85, 93, 94, 126, 132; and
Merleau-Ponty’s “new” ontology, ontological rehabilitation, 2; and
54–72; bifurcation of, 2–3, 29, 31, relativity and quantum theories,
40, 43, 47–54, 58, 73, 74, 100, 104, 68; and Sartre, 37; of substances
142, 165, 167, 170; and Galilean- and attributes, 51; and Whitehead’s
Cartesian concept and Merleau- conceptual innovations, 167. See also
Ponty’s criticisms, 2, 29–36, 47–54, flesh and nature
102; indivision from, 39, 74, n. 3; organisms: 2, 17, 19, 50, 129, 130, 131,
80, 90, 133, 134, 142, 148; and 133, n. 22; 154, 156, n. 4; 168–177,
Marx, 13, 59; meanings of, 58–60; 186, n. 3; 223, 224, 225, 229, 232,
and Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental 236; and higher, 207, 209, 210
thought, 2, 239; and Natura naturans organism, philosophy of: 51, 167, 213,
and Natura naturata, 60, 101, 106, 218, 228, 231, 232
116, 124, 125, 126, 229, 230; as
phenomenon, 11–29; as privileged Pascal, Blaise: 40, 118, 121
access to Being, 70; and Sartre, pensée de survol: 50, n. 4; 53, 58, 63,
36–45, 59; and scientific materialism, 80, 96, 109, 126, 181, 191, 205, 215
INDEX 259
perception: 14–17; as nascent logos, 27, 179; and finalism and mechanism,
108; and modes of causal efficacy 129–130, 153–154; and genesis of
and presentational immediacy, mentality, 210–211; and imagination,
207, 208; realist theory of, 50; 230–231; and intellectual
representational theory of, 22, 29, spatialization, 166; and prehensive
36, 50, 51, 79, 93, 101, 196; as unification, 205–206; and transition,
symbolic reference, 207. See also 206; and temporalization, 38, 110;
Gestalts and Gestalt psychology and two species, 197. See also chiasm
perceptual faith: 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, and concrescence
78, 115, 205; and actual entities, Proust, Marcel: 20, 63, n. 25; 82, 85,
196; and Husserl, 65; and the logos 103, 109, 217, 219; and Locke, 194
endiathetos, 106; and presentational psychoanalysis: 82, 87, 92; and
immediacy, 208–209; and Sartre, 65; Bachelard, 76, n. 8; ontological vs.
and tangibility and visibility, 208 existential, 83
phenomenology: 2, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13,
15, 16, 23, 24, n. 22; 27, 29, 31, n. rationalism: 67, 192–193
37; 45, 67, 105, 117, 132, 165, and rationality: 4, n. 3; 23, 111–112, 142,
Bachelard, 42; and Barbaras’s critique 154, 193, 237
of Merleau-Ponty, 182, 184, 188, realism and idealism: 64, 117, 127,
190, 191; and Bergson, 50, 165; and 135–136; 187, 205, 229, 237
flesh, 74, 77; and ontology, 35, 54, reformed subjectivist principle: 231
64, 134; and Sartre, 36, 37, 45–46; Ricoeur, Paul: 142, 143, 214, n. 4
and Schelling’s “barbaric” Nature, Robert, Franck: 4, n. 4; 72, n. 44; 100,
127, 142; and the twofold logoi, 105, 191, 217, 219
115, 117 Russell, Edward S.: and purposive
Piaget, Jean: 99–100; and reversibility, behavior in flatworms, 172–173
100
Plato: 27, n. 30; 108, 136 Santayana, George: 52, 64, n. 27
Portmann, Adolf: and studies of Sartre, Jean-Paul: 7, 13, 32, 50, n.
mimicry and expressive animal 4; 58, n. 14; 59, 61, 65, 71, 79,
behavior, 173–174 84, n. 18; 91, 122; and concrete
prehensions: 195, 205ff.; and conformal universals, 221; and consciousness
feelings, 197; and feelings of causal as source of meaning, 101; and
efficacy, 205–206; as hybrid, 209; dehiscence, 90; and Kant, 38;
as negative and positive, 197, 198, and logos endiathetos, 106; and
206; and past emotions, 206; as metamorphosis, 93, 101; and natural
unconscious, 199 production of subjectivity, 200; and
primary and secondary qualities: 2, 3, nausea, 40–43, 127; nothingness,
6, n. 8; 33, 34, 49, n. 3; 50, 52, 54, 82, 199; and Offenheit, 62; and the
56, 190 painter, 94. See also negativity and
process: 4, 6, 15, 17, 18, 40, 66; and phenomenology
actual occasions of experience, Scheler, Max: 57, n. 13
194–195, 200, 201; and animal Schelling, F.W.J.: 8, 13, n. 6; 22, 43,
development and genesis, 173, 58, 91, 117, 123–144; and concepts
177–178; continuity/discontinuity of, and explanations, 131–132, 135, 141;
167, 190, 230, 235; and dehiscence, and concepts and intuition, 138,
89–91, 200; and evolution, 155, 167, 139, 144; and concepts and
260 INDEX
Schelling, F.W.J. (continued) Spinoza, Benedict de: 3, 51, 91, 125,

perceptual faith, 132, n. 18; and 126, 127, 189, 197, 228, n.14; 237;
Descartes, 127; and l’être brut, 127; and Natura naturans and Natura
and God’s consequent nature, 215; naturata, 101, 126
and ideas as carnal, 224; and identity Stoics’ logos endiathetos and logos
with Nature, 133; and imagination, proforikos: 8, 67, 103–122, 144, 193,
232; and; influence on Whitehead, 195, 217–218, 220, 238; and feelings
228–233; and intellectual intuition, of causal efficacy, 209
131, 137, 142; and Kant’s subjectivist principle: 50, 51, 52, 101,
critical philosophy, 128–129; and 190, 235
Konspiration, 126, 135, n. 26; 141, n. subjectivity: 54, 55; and descriptive
36; and Leibniz, 126; and mechanism generalization, 201–202, 229; and
derivative from organism, 232; and emergence from nature, 168–179,
Merleau-Ponty’s critical analysis, 189; as fundamental structure
123–144; and nature as active unity of experience, 199, 203; and
of the mental and the physical, metamorphosis, 200; and philosophy
231; and Sartrean view of freedom, of, 28, 29; and primordial Being,
141; and Spinoza, 125–127; and 56, 64, 68, n. 34; as sedimented
Whiteheadian criticisms, 233. See meaning, 56–57, 182; and
also Bergson and Nature subjects and superjects, 206; as
scientific materialism: 47–54, 190, 192, transcendental, 2, 12, 39, 43; and
196, 199, 201, 233, 235 unconscious experience, 231
sensationalist principle: 51, 76, 101, substance: 6, n. 7, 77, 178, 208, 211,
191, 235 228, n. 14; 239; and actual entities,
sentant and sensible: 28, 62, 78, 86, 87, 194; and Aristotle, 50; as causa sui,
88, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 100, 101, 125, 197; and Leibnizian monads,
102, 134, 176, 183, 186, 189; and 57; in modern philosophy, 3, 31, 34,
ecological consequences, 228; and 35, n. 43; 48, 49, 50, n. 5; 51, 52,
prehensions, 195, 196, 200, 209; and 56, 66, 145; and Schelling, 126; and
a Whiteheadian explanation of, 226, Spinozistic attributes and modes, 91,
227, 228, 238 126
Silesius, Angelus: 71, 107 systems: See metaphysics
simple location, fallacy of: 4, 48, 49,
51, 54, 77, 84, 96, 190, 192, 196, time: 61, 66, 87; and actual occasions
235 of experience as temporalizing
space: 16, 202; and depth in modern processes, 201; as basic nature of
painting, 80–81; and enduring reality, 165; and Bergsonian time
objects, 222; and the flat projection consciousness, 145; and Claudel, 84,
of perspectives, 80, 81; as inhabited 97; and dehiscence, 97; and depth,
spatiality, 18–19, 20, 208; and Kant, 84, 85–86; and duration, 150; and
101; and Pascal, 40; as objective, the écart, 97; and enduring objects,
17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 34, 80, 184, 202; 222; and Fundierung, 115; and
and prehensive unification, 201; and Husserlian time consciousness, 85,
simple location, 48–49; and time 135 n. 25; as inhabited temporality,
for Bergson, 159–160, 163, n. 20; 18–19, 140; and institution, 111; and
topological, 94–100 intellectual spatialization, 159, 166;
INDEX 261
and Kant, 101; and life, 154; and universals and particulars: 50, 52, 110,
Locke and Proust, 194; as objective, 166, 195, 211, 220, 232, 238; and
18–19, 30, 201; and personal concrete universals, 107, 108–109,
identity, 223; and prehensive 220, 221; universals as dimensions,
unification, 201; as sedimented 83, 212
in the corporeal schema, 20; and
thinking Being, 149–150
vacuous actuality, fallacy of: 4, 52, 201,
Toadvine, Ted: 12, n. 3; 55, n. 7; 104,
229
n. 2; 134, 236
Valéry, Paul: 78, 86, 91, 93, 178, n. 4
Van Zago, Luca: 68, n. 34
Uexküll, Jakob von: 169–170; and
animals’ Umwelt, 173; as critic of
Descartes, 178; and criticisms of Wahl, Jean: 3, 4, 30, n. 35
Kant and Schelling, 171–172; and Wordsworth, William: vi, 147, 198,
Husserlian Offenheit, 171 201, 228, 229, 230
nature
PHILOSOPHY
Hamrick / Van der Veken

nature and logos
This is the first book-length account of how Maurice Merleau-
and A Whiteheadian Key
logos
to Merleau-Pont y ’s
Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop
an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Fundamental Thought
Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last
ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty’s
unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the
first detailed treatment of certain works by F. W. J. Schelling in
the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence
William S. Hamrick
nature and logos

on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive
Jan Van der Veken
discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the Stoics’s notion of the
twofold logos—the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This
book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between
these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various
bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that haunted
philosophy and science since the seventeenth century.
William S. Hamrick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and has written and edited
several books, including (with coeditor Suzanne L. Cataldi) Merleau-
Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of
Thought, also published by SUNY Press. Jan Van der Veken
is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Catholic University of
Leuven and has written and edited several books, including (with
coeditor Patrick Burke) Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives.
S tat e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Y o r k P r e ss
w w w. s u n y p r e s s . e d u

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Hamrick / Van der Veken

nature and logos

William S. Hamrick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at

State University of New York Press

© 2011 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Production, Eileen Meehan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

for Professor Albert Dondeyne and Professor Alphonse

—William Wordsworth, Lines,

Chapter I: Nature as a Phenomenon 11

Chapter II: From Dualism to a Twofold Ontology 47

Chapter III: The Way of All Flesh 73

Chapter IV: Logos Endiathetos and Logos Proforikos 103

Chapter V: The Schellingian and Bergsonian Heritage 123

Chapter VI: Nature and Life 153

Chapter VII: Beyond the Limits of Phenomenology:

Chapter VIII: Com-prehending the Flesh 205

AD Les Aventures de la dialectique. Translated into English as

PrP The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

AI Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1933].

ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library,

What is it to perceive and to be perceived, to experience and to be expe-

and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty no longer refers to this absolute spectator

was not a phenomenologist manqué, nor Merleau-Ponty a speculative meta-

an ecological consciousness, to bring people to an awareness that they are

Quantum field theory shows the world as a plenum of events at

Merleau-Ponty adds in the 1957 course on “The Concept of Nature”

a demonstration of their consonance. However, our aim is to transcend the

Nature appears in Merleau-Ponty’s early texts more as a context for a phe-

albeit a body-consciousness that he distinguished from a Cartesian cogito

PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE

In these earlier writings, Merleau-Ponty portrays nature from the perspective

fundamental, inextricable involvement, Bernet states that Merleau-Ponty’s

4. Cf. VI 253–54/306–307, and for additional discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of clas-

in films the perception of any given shot is contextualized by what precedes

a synergy in virtue of which they interpenetrate in corporeal synesthesias,

As a result, our knowledge of our body image as it gets expressed in

Merleau-Ponty seeks to illumine motor intentionality and the habitual

However, as de Saint Aubert points out, despite the apparent importance

“verifies mediately and clarifies his hypothesis by cross-checking facts, and

451–52).26 For Merleau-Ponty, it is through styles of behavior that the body

concept that derives from Husserl’s descriptions of touching-touched rela-

Merleau-Ponty notes approvingly that this sense of pregnancy, overlooked by

For Merleau-Ponty, things have an expressive power, an ability to “display

MERLEAU-PONTY’S SPARRING PARTNER: DESCARTES

there is no question that Descartes is Merleau-Ponty’s nemesis. Few

dialectic between appearance and reality36 (Ibid.). And it is precisely this

36. “positivisme ontologique ou ontologie de l’objet, négativisme ontologique ou ontologie du

a Cartesian understanding could possibly conceive of a mélange of mind and

However, Descartes’ argument from permanence suffers from the fatal

Unfortunately, Descartes does not venture an explanation for the pos-

There is, therefore, a double problem of unverifiable reference: the sensa-

A LATTER-DAY CARTESIAN: JEAN-PAUL SARTRE