Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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would say, ‘embodied’—as the condition of our own freedom. As a result, the end of having ends enjoys a singular status.9
Like all other ends that are taken for granted, the end of having ends is both given and constructed—a synthetic a priori or primordial choice. But unlike our other ends, this end is given not only pre-reflectively but also ineluctably. Whatever humans do, wherever and whenever they exist, the end of having ends is necessarily implicit—which cannot be said of any of our other ends. Nor is this end a construct in quite the same way as the others. For unlike the latter, when this end is brought to the light of consciousness, it is not open to revision. We can do away with it to be sure, but only by ceasing to exist. Which is why, as I argue in this book, acts that run directly contrary to the end of having ends, although they are logically self-inconsistent and continue to entertain that end in all their contrariness, are essentially lethal. Nevertheless, the end of having ends remains synthetic, in that it is not a question of natural law but of human existence. It is made to appear only in virtue of beings whose defining nature it is to transcend or fashion themselves—not to be but to become.
Therefore, the end of having ends may be construed as, rather than a mere good, a hypergood. It is a synthetic a priori, but its syntheticity is more strictly limited and its a prioricity more categorically closed than is the case with the other goods. In the sense that the other goods always presuppose it, the end of having ends may be thought of as a kind of human universal. Its universality, though, has little to do with our received acceptation of this notion, which connotes a positively fixed certitude, a natural law. In contrast, the end of having ends remains an offer, but, to invoke the language of the cinema Wiseguy, “an offer that can't be refused.” That is to say, like all offers it may indeed be refused, but its terms of refusal carry with them the threat of death.
As a hypergood, the end of having ends presents what might be called, oxymoronically, a natural good. What makes this end no less decidedly synthetic than given is that by determining the producing of synthetic ends or goods, it transcends itself. That is to say, it is determining, but what it determines is its own partial negation as a determinant. Uniquely defined by this hypergood, human existence, insofar as it takes itself as its own end, necessarily presents a natural (a priori) but axiological (synthetic) bias toward the end of having ends.
It must follow from the fact of this bias that the asymmetry defined by the difference between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, is a matter of value. It is not merely a question of qualitatively different ways of touching and seeing, but of relative worth. Just as in each and every one of our acts we are condemned to meaning, so we are predestined to differential value. But, one might well ask, which side of the difference—between the sensible and the seen on the one hand, and the sentient and the seer on the other—makes the greater good?
Merleau-Ponty's ontology leaves no room for doubt here. The goodness in question rests with the power not simply to discover or recognize one's own end but to generate the possibility of making and having ends. It would appear, then, that the end of having ends is identifiable with the dynamic of transcendence, the intertwining itself, and not with either of the two sides defined by this dynamic. It is true that if the two sides are taken in themselves, as if they obtained apart from their crossing, then there is no differentiating the one from the other by reference to relative worth. But as soon as they are defined as functions of their crossing, one side appears to enjoy a certain, general primacy over the other. Although both are eminently tied to the intertwining, the one is more so than the other. Indeed, even as they generate and inform each other, one of them—the seer and the sentient—always stands belated relative to the other. This is because, as self-conscious acts, seeing and sentience are logically inclined to exclude—as the outside or the other—the seen and the sensible, whereas the latter, as was noted earlier, include vision and touch as immanent parts or potentialities of their nature.
This differential of generative power is what Merleau-Ponty (1964b: chap. 2) is getting at when he speaks of the “primacy of perception” and pictures perception as most basically a bodily faculty. He is saying that the seen and the sensible, so long as they are understood dynamically by reference to reversibility, constitute the very core of our identity, and that that identity—what we are—must be the starting point of all our perspectives, reflections, and practices, however variable and diverse they may be. It is true that Merleau-Ponty does not speak of the asymmetry between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, as axiological. His later philosophy made it even less likely that he would do so. In The Visible and the Invisible, he attempts to move beyond any cogito whatsoever, even a tacit, experiential one, in order to put behind him once and for all the metaphysics of subject-object dualism. An ontology preoccupied with attenuating the notion of the self or a being equipped to decide merit is not likely to project what there is as innately a matter of value.
If, however, the asymmetry of seer and seen, of sentient and sensible, is aligned with that of self and other, then it at once becomes apparent that human existence is an exercise in value judgment. Deciding on which enjoys primacy of place—self or other—is paradigmatically an ethical question. And since the seer and the sentient always betray selfhood, even if only as a tacit phenomenon, the pertinence of the self-other duality in their case is patent. Merleau-Ponty did indeed come to abandon the tacit cogito, which notion he had originally entertained to capture the self-consciousness implicit in any act of bodily perception. But even his distinction of the visible and the invisible, forged in his effort to do away with any sense of the pure subject, continues to evoke the self-like (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 215): “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar [originary not-present] which is presented to me as such within the world—one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).”
Judging from this quotation, the distinction between the visible and the invisible greatly complicates Merleau-Ponty's earlier organizing distinctions, undercutting their residual dualism. On the one hand, the visible would seem to correspond to the seen and the sensible, but on the other, the invisible paints a much deeper picture than do the sentient and seer. For instead of simply naming an emergent development of the visible (such as vision and touch), the invisible points to the “inner framework” or “secret counterpart” of the visible. In other words, it points directly to the visible's supporting or sustaining framework, that which “renders [the visible] visible, its own and interior possibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 151; my italics).
Thus, the invisible is an aspect of the visible, but, paradoxically, an aspect upon which one can never lay eyes. Merleau-Ponty calls this aspect “meaning,” but one can sense the intonement of spirituality—a philosophical caution against empiricist idolatry—in his usage of the invisible. The point I am making here is that although the invisible is precisely other than the pure subject, it is not intended to do away with subjectivity but rather to conceive of it in irreducibly nondualist terms. The nondualism is focused in the consideration that the irreparable blind spot of the mind's eye, the hole of perceptional invisibility without which perception could not happen, is the body. The body is the unseen standpoint of every perception. But the key thing is that while the notion of the invisible rules out any sense of a pure subject, it nonetheless smacks of inwardness, of “interior possibility.”
Thus, “the invisible” makes a stunning, productive paradox: it identifies self-transcendence or creation with the other rather than the self qua self. The invisible locates “interior possibility” or selfhood primarily in, instead of the seer and the sentient, what is participant of but invisible or other to the seen and the sensible as well as to the seer and the sentient. As a result, the self-other relation is undone as a dualism but not at all erased; it perdures as a primordial and ultimately unfathomable dynamic. If it is the case that the self-other relation obtains thus primordially, what there is is inconceivable, save as a question of differential value. It is a truth to which every religion seems to attest: even when self-consciousness is originarily attributed to the other rather than to the