Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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In light of this dynamic picture of essential ambiguity, ultimately there is no distinguishing between the two kinds of truth, and wherever they can be distinguished, the distinction is relative. This I take it is what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he maintains (ibid.: 393–94) that “there is not one of my actions…which has not been directed toward a value or a truth…Conversely, there is not one truth of reason which does not retain its coefficient of facticity.”
In order to demonstrate that ideas or truths of reason are always tied to being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty takes up Descartes’ example (in his Fifth Meditation, but harking back to Plato and forward to Kant) of the triangle as a pure idea, that is, as an idea in itself, cleanly detached from the empirical world. Merleau-Ponty's discussion is involved (1962: 383ff.; cf. Hall 1979), but the following highly anthropological observation by him—evocative of Wittgenstein's that “norms of description” can grow from hard to soft propositions—suffices here to indicate the spirit of his point (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394): “[T]he alleged transparency of Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as operative for a certain period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that, for a time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional space as the ‘ground’ of their thoughts, and to assume unquestioningly what generalized science will come to consider as a contingent account of space.”
What, then, of the other side of the two-way relationship he called “founding”? If, as against intellectualism, the truths of reason are always derivative, then must we, as dualism bids us, plump for empiricism? But the whole of Merleau-Ponty's great book is geared to show that neither empiricism nor intellectualism can do the ontological trick. For the founding facts in which Merleau-Ponty's “founding” begins are, like Wittgenstein's hard propositions, far from ordinary empirical facts. Instead, they are matters of basic ambiguity. Such ambiguity, which cannot be “resolved” but can be “understood as ultimate” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394), recalls Wittgenstein's thesis of truths that can be shown but, precisely because they are imprisoned in practice and do not stop for logical logic, cannot be said.
Merleau-Ponty, providing a loose and open-ended list of terms, does speak of the “founding term, or originator”: “time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception” (1962: 394). But he uses none of these terms here in an ordinary sense. Let me take up “perception” alone, as this concept forms the axis of his phenomenology and may serve to elucidate the other terms. “[T]he perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence,” he says (1964b: 13). Merleau-Ponty is interested in the presuppositions of our existence, the world as we live it before we reflect on it, which is what he means by “the perceived world.” Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, the perceiving being cannot be in the first place a pure consciousness, as it is for, say, Descartes and Kant. Otherwise it would be, instead of pre-reflective, a disengaged self, like Descartes’ cogito or Kant's transcendental ego. In order to transcend this dualistic conception of the perceiver as that which is wholly set over and against the world, Merleau-Ponty renders the perceiving being as a body-subject. Obviously, by making it out as no less bodily than mindful, Merleau-Ponty construes it, not as detached from but as participating in the world. In which case, unlike Descartes’ ‘I think’, which extends in neither space nor time, it must be a matter of temporality and facticity.
Since the body-subject ‘thinks’, it must enjoy language, in the sense of expression. Language-as-expression reconfigures the world, making the world meaningful, and yet remains inseparable from being-in-the-world, which is to say, from bodily existence or experience. Language in this sense, as for Wittgenstein, is a matter of gesticulation and silence before speech. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that perceives and the body that speaks. And the body can do this because, in the first place, it is not the objective phenomenon that science projects. Purely objective phenomena, in Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's philosophy, are nothing but high abstractions, the production of which depends on the as-if existential detachment afforded by the intellectual or theoretical standpoint. Instead of an objective phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty's ‘body’ goes without organs.8 A body without organs is integrally tied to the world and is therefore less than perfectly separate and discrete; but it is tied in a way so open and dynamic that its movements characteristically reconfigure its relationship to the world, thus always transcending itself in its act.
Even if the perceiving being remains tied to the world, though, perception seems still to presuppose a consciousness of sorts. Hence, Merleau-Ponty posited a cogito or ‘I think’, but, in critical contrast to Descartes’, a tacit one. Such a cogito is the name Merleau-Ponty (1962: 371) gives to the self-consciousness that necessarily accompanies all perception, even if perception is essentially bodily, a movement toward the world in which the perceiving being transcends itself by reconfiguring itself in relation to the world: “All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no object. At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence.” Plainly, as it proceeds in action, that is, “through direct contact with…existence,” the cogito of which Merleau-Ponty speaks must be less than transparent to itself, which is why he calls it “tacit” (ibid.: 402).
But despite its pronounced nature as action rather than thought qua thought, the tacit cogito would not be a cogito at all, an ‘I think, if it eluded itself completely. For this reason, the idea of the tacit cogito might still evoke body-mind dualism, rather than the patent ambiguity of a body that is no less a subject than an object, and thus project perception as an act of consciousness. Seeing this and taking an even more radical ontological turn, one that dovetails with Wittgenstein’s (1972: § 142) notion of a system of “mutual support,” in The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was working on when he died, Merleau-Ponty (1968) reconceived “founding” in terms of “intertwining” or “reversibility.” Instead of a movement in which one thing founds another that in turn reconfigures its source (as culture, our second nature, informs the human practice from which it springs), he conceives of a dynamic crossing arrangement (ibid.: 133):
[B]etween my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are…the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it.
Instead of citing the hands, then, as does Moore, in an exercise of ostension, to prove that we can have certain knowledge of the external world, Merleau-Ponty cites them in their dynamic relationship to each other, in order to describe how perception works and how it solicits faith in its act. That is, he brings our hands to bear, not as objects, but as modes of engaging or perceiving the world. The hand can touch because it too is palpable. It can make sense of (behave sensibly in) the world precisely because it is of the world, a part of the same “universe.” There is a substantive identity between it and the world, such that its touch can be relied upon, not because it provides certain knowledge, but because, as Wittgenstein might say, what it touches resonates with it in practical harmony.
Precisely because there is such identity, however, because the hand's ability to touch depends on its status as itself tangible, its touch can never exhaust in perception what it touches. Its own palpability makes its touch self-referential and thus constitutionally limited (“a veritable touching of the touch, when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things, where the ‘touching subject’ passes over into the rank of the touched”; Merleau-Ponty 1968: 133–34). Only if the hand were itself untouchable, the veritable hand of God, would it be capable of transforming what it touches into an object pure and simple (and even then, judging from the Hebraic creation story, as in Michelangelo's glorious Sistine depiction of it, such sheer objectification