Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense
By Shea Stevens
[An abstract of this paper was submitted to Chiasmi in 2025 but the abstract was not accepted for a full peer review nor was the author given feedback. The author chose to publish their work here instead.]
Introduction
The Visible and the Invisible and its working notes represent a culmination of themes seen in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier works: dialectical gestalt ontology, sensation, and stimulus-response. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh reaches for a unifying language to describe the field of the world, of all being. This unifying language is that of sense. (See Ted Toadvine’s article, “Singing the World in a New Key,” which mentions this ontology of sense.) But sense does not stand alone; it is a dialectic of sense/non-sense. The language of “sense” highlights the relational and reactive nature of a given phenomenon. I will touch on a number of his works that offer an illuminative background for his ontology of sense/non-sense before looking at The Visible and the Invisible.
In section one, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s earlier works. I look at the emergentist/mutualist ontology of his concept of gestalt, with its dialectical relations as described in The Structure of Behavior, which he offers in response to behaviorism’s notion of the localized stimulus and reflex. Then, I look at the continuation of Hegelian and gestalt ideas in Sense and Non-Sense. After that, I explore Phenomenology of Perception’s treatment of sensation. In section two, I explore the interconnection of these common threads of the stimulus, sensation, and dialectical relations in The Visible and The Invisible’s ontology. Merleau-Ponty states that “the stimuli of perception are not the causes of the perceived world… they are rather its developers (revelateur) or its releasers” (VI, 27/39). The unified dialectical ontology of sense and non-sense is concerned not with primal oppositional forces, but rather it retains unity among “depth” and “development.”
Earlier Works
Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior explores an emergentist or mutualist ontology. Some have suggested the word “mutualism” best retains the idea of mutual or dialectical influences (Carl Gallet).
The concept of a gestalt, going back to its roots in Goethe, lives within the tension between dynamism and structure; it is a natural, structured form. Goethe says these two terms “form” and “structure” are not mutually exclusive; organic nature exists through its structure, and it is structured because it has a living form (Observation on Morphology in General, 950). But he also acknowledges that the perceived gestalt isolates and freezes something which in the universe is actually more dynamistic than its perceived structure suggests, and which is connected to the infinite (On Morphology, 979; A Study Based on Spinoza, 916). Goethe’s scientific-philosophical writings reflect an appreciation of intelligible structures and also the transcendent dynamism of the universe. Goethe recognized the non-linear causality of the universe, describing a “web of creation” exploding outward “from an unknown center to an unknowable periphery.”[1] He posited that “what is inside is also outside.”[2]
1.a Gestalt, Goethe, and Hegel
Merleau-Ponty connects the concept of gestalt and its dynamics of figure/ground with his notion of Hegelian dialectic in The Structure of Behavior: “the notion of Gestalt led us back to its Hegelian meaning” (210). But the gestalt’s Hegelian nature is not demonstrated or explained in great detail by Merleau-Ponty in SB, aside from that passage and his usage of “dialectic” in that work. It will be developed further in The Visible and the Invisible. In SB, Merleau-Ponty defines a phenomenon as having qualities both “for me” and “in itself,” (186, 199). In order to hold this balance in his theory of the phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty uses the concept of the gestalt which appears in one’s perception while retaining an inner rhythm of its own. He says, “[p]erceptual behavior… [can be understood] only as a dialectic, the moments of which are not stimuli and movements but phenomenal objects and actions” (205). Phenomena do not come into being through sheerly isolable, objective stimuli and a corresponding separate movement in response from an observer, rather he speaks of “perceptual behavior.” A dialectic exists between perception and activity. A perceived object and the perceiver’s action are mutually intertwined. In The Visible and the Invisible, dialectic is still at the forefront of Merleau-Ponty’s mind, and this passage from VI helps us understand what Hegel’s dialectic meant to him:
“dialectical thought is that which admits that each term is itself only by proceeding toward the opposed term, becomes what it is through the movement, that it is one and the same thing for each to pass into the other or to become itself, to leave itself and to retire into itself, that the centripetal movement and the centrifugal movement are one sole movement” (90-91)
If I had the space, I would have liked in this section to go deeper into Hegel, dialectics, and how Goethe influenced Hegel in general, and Hegel’s usage of the gestalt term. I think there is an important article to be written about these links. Dialectic, as a concept used by Merleau-Ponty which he received through Hegel, was a concept explicated by Engels and others such as Lukacs whose work was shown to be important to Merleau-Ponty, according to his work, Adventures of the Dialectic.
Hegelian dialectic also includes negation. A negation in Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic is like a figure and ground, or a film’s negatives, a metaphor I will explore later in this paper. The Aristotelian idea of form was conceptualized in relationship to a substrate. Similarly, every whole is in relation to parts, and as Merleau-Ponty explores in The Visible and the Invisible, a ‘no’ is always in relation to a ‘yes.’ In SB, Merleau-Ponty connects his notion of form to the figural structure of a figure/ground: “A ‘form,’ such as the structure of ‘figure and ground,’ for example, is a whole which has a meaning… The alleged bodily, social and psychological ‘causalities’ are reducible to this contingency of lived perspectives which limit our access to eternal significations” (224). The greater whole is the condition for the localized phenomenon. So, rather than simplified and overly localized, objective notions of causality, Merleau-Ponty highlights in this work that ‘causalities’ are actually lived phenomenal perspectives which are fundamentally connected to “eternal significations,” a greater universal field which does not have entirely isolable causal parts. These eternal, ultimate meanings do not appear naked before us, they are hidden. In “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “There is no being without nothingness, but nothingness can exist only in the hollow of being” (67-68). This quote offers a neat precursor to the writings on the “hollow” seen in VI, where Merleau-Ponty more fully articulates a dialectic of the yes and no; being and negation. In “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Hegel is credited with the noble “attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century” (63-64). He also sees in Hegel an attempt “to reveal the immanent logic of human experience in all its sectors” (65). This integration of the irrational with the existence of immanent logic is Merleau-Ponty’s endeavor to address the polarity of sense and non-sense, of being and non-being.
Merleau-Ponty’s collected essays in Sense and Non-Sense include thoughts on Hegel, and they also contain explorations on gestalt and metaphysics, revealing a deeper understanding of themes that came up in The Structure of Behavior and which returned to the forefront in The Visible and the Invisible. One quote summarizes the dialectical significance of the gestalt described in SB: “…by revealing ‘structure’ or ‘form’ as irreducible elements of being, [gestalt psychology] has again put into question the classical alternative between ‘existence as thing’ and ‘existence as consciousness,’ has established a communication between a mixture of objective and subjective” (86). In the same essay, Merleau-Ponty describes metaphysics as “the experience we have of… paradoxes in all situations of personal and collective history and the actions which, by assuming them, transform them into reason” (95-96). Merleau-Ponty’s musings on gestalt, metaphysics/ontology, and the Hegelian endeavor to address the paradoxical coexistence of reason and irrationality were all intertwoven in his philosophical framework. These themes gave direction to his entire life’s work.
1.b Phenomenology of Perception
Around the same time Sense and Non-Sense was published, Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception, which features the most systematic exploration of sensation in his oeuvre. In SB Merleau-Ponty was focused on responding to behaviorist notions of the stimulus and reflex. This topic is carried over in the early parts of Phenomenology of Perception, where he lays out what he calls the “classical prejudice:” an oversimplified, objectivistic and mechanistic view of sensation as reducible to localized stimulus-responses. Merleau-Ponty had countered this in SB with the Goldsteinian perspective that a gestalt arises just as much actively-- through the structure of the subject-- as it does passively-- through the structure of the external field. Sensation is as much a holistic reaction pattern and a moment of co-creation as it is the delivery of a perceived form. This co-creation is emphasized again in PP, where he goes into greater detail on sensation.
He describes in PP a circularity to the experience of sense, which is a major theme in The Visible and the Invisible. He states that he is “defining sensation as coexistence or as communion” (220). Describing this communion as a dialectic, he says “[t]he sensing being [le sentant] and the sensible are not opposite each other like two external terms, and sensation does not consist of the sensible invading the sensing being… In this exchange between the subject of sensation and the sensible, it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers the action, nor that one gives sense to the other” (221). In describing sensation as a dialectic, Merleau-Ponty is exploring questions of metaphysical dynamics and causality. In more ancient concepts of matter and form, these terms were defined according to act and potency; actualizing form and the potential of substrate. Ontology is always connected, explicitly or implicitly, to theories of motion. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty connects the field of the senses to the same field as movement and perception. He says the structure of perception is not a mechanistic structure of objective physical parts; the functioning of the body “is not a sum of juxtaposed organs,” but rather its functions are incorporated within the “general movement of being in the world” (242). He states that “Movement… is the foundation of the unity of the senses” (243). In that passage, he says this movement is not to be understood in an objectivistic or merely material way. Movement is intertwined with these questions of causality and intelligibility of the world. Does an effect result from a localized cause, an object distinguishable in time and space? The dynamics are more complex; objects are dynamistic down to their atomic core, they stay in motion unless they are acted on, and motion is relative to space and time. The third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, which is inseparable from its partner. My car pushes on the road, but the road also pushes on my car. Ontological concepts of the potential of substrate and the actualizing power of a form not only relate to motion, but they also have implications for any kind of activity or power, such as sensing, thinking, caring, or living. We will continue to explore the circularity of the sensitive/sensible and of activity/passivity seen in VI in the next section.
Sensation is connected to motion, and it is also connected to the higher-order experiences of perception and intentionality. He says, “[w]hat we call ‘sensation’ is merely the most basic of all perceptions” (251). Sensing is not merely physical but also phenomenological and intentional; not merely a heteronomous reaction but a co-created one. Sense, at least in humans and animals, is not localized within a given part, but is a whole action of an organism with intentionality. The subject is a whole not reducible to their parts. There is a tension in how to pin down a dynamistic universe which has been increasingly seen as interconnected and holistic across enormous physical fields. Organisms are wholes, and they exist within greater whole-systems and cultures. There is no absolute matter, no purely material body separable from some kind of pure spiritual form, and there is no separating the small-scale from the influence of distant fields. In VI, Merleau-Ponty grapples with the ontological implications of universal holism. I am thinking in particular of his conception of “latent intentionality” (Apostolopoulos, 2016). Latent intentionality conceptualizes a truly universal ontology; it describes the intentionality, the relations, between all the structures and formulas of the universe. Looking for now at Phenomenology of Perception, we see quotes that indicate the seeds of the ontology of sense and latent intentionality seen in VI. He says, “[e]mpty and determinate intentions emerge from each point of the primordial field;” sensation finds “in the sensible” its own rhythm, proposing a “form of existence” which is its own, and which the sensitive adapts, it “makes them its own” (221). All kinds of forms in the universe operate according to their own relatively immanent logos-formula, exert their limited causal influence, and attract or ‘hold onto’ other forms in mutual relationship.
“Sensation is intentional because I find in the sensible the proposition of a certain existential rhythm… taking up this proposition, and slipping into the form of existence that is thus suggested to me, I relate myself to an external being… If qualities radiate a certain mode of existence around themselves… this is because the sensing subject does not posit them as objects, but sympathizes with them, makes them its own, and finds in them his momentary law.” (221)
Sense is found within the world. It is not exclusive to a human or animal subject. In an experience of sense, there is a dialectic between the mutual action/reaction of the sensible and the sensing. The sensible has its own sense, a rhythm, a form of existence without the subject bestowing sense upon it. Elsewhere in PP he foreshadows other ideas seen in The Visible and the Invisible. We see the “hollow” and the “fold” in being: “I am not, to recall Hegel’s phrase, a ‘hole in being,’ but rather a hollow, or a fold” (222). He also mentions the dialectical, figure-ground transcendence of any ‘thing’ we perceive: “What makes up the ‘reality’ of the thing is thus precisely what steals it from our possession. The aseity of the thing—its irrecusable presence and the perpetual absence into which it withdraws—are two inseparable aspects of transcendence” (242). These quotes relate to the transcendence of non-sense; a kind of transcendence belonging to a figure/ground. This will be a theme explored in The Visible and the Invisible.
2. The Visible and the Invisible’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense
Merleau-Ponty’s overarching themes of dialectical gestalt ontology and sense are continued in The Visible and the Invisible as seen in earlier works, and he also has some interesting passages on the concept of stimuli. I will show how all of these themes connect in that work, in order to provide a deeper understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of sense/non-sense and propose why it may be considered a unified ontology. I will explore these themes in VI by dividing them into the following subsections: i) different meanings of “sense,” ii) the universality of “sense,” iii) horizonal transcendence as non-sense, and iv) causality and stimuli.
2.a Different meanings of “sense”
Merleau-Ponty suggests in The Visible and The Invisible that sense can be defined in different ways. The word “sense” can be used to indicate the presence of a meaning; something “makes sense,” or something can be true “in a sense.” Merleau-Ponty uses the latter phrase many times in VI. The sense/meaning of a “visible” is not found to be “a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null” (132). It is up for interpretation, it is determined by the reception of the being responding to it, as well as its own inner structure. He writes about pregnancy of sense, the inner meaning or formula which subtly proposes a certain way for the relator to engage with it: “The pregnancy is what, in the visible, requires of me a correct focusing, defines its correctness. My body obeys the pregnancy, it ‘responds’ to it” (208). A phenomenon or a form is not an objective “thing,” rather he suggests that it might be best conceptualized as a relief, a “differentiation” (132). As Aristotle said, substance consists in a thing’s differentia (see Aristotle’s Metaphysics). This description of a “relief” calls to mind again the structure of the figure laid against its contrasting ground. Anything that can be observed, experienced, any logical law or formula, or whole system is thus something that we make “sense” of. It is necessary that, in addition to the logos of the ‘thing’ itself, there is another entity or field co-creating or co-determining the logos-formula found ‘in the thing.’
Put very succinctly, one might say that a thing’s sense, its meaning, is the formula-logos by which it will react to something, or the way it relates to one’s observation of it. Relationship is crucial to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and his concept of logos. My senses are the avenue through which I react or relate to my environment, and the co-determined relationship arises similarly through the sense, the formula-logos, of the thing I encounter. The “sense” of that which I perceive is a formula which co-determines my reaction-perception to it. He speaks of the observer’s “participation” in a thing’s sense: “that [logos] that pronounces itself silently in each sensible thing… which we can have an idea of only through our carnal participation in its sense,” the logos of its “internal structure” (208). Impossible as it is for language to adequately express this reciprocity, I want to say that a sense prompts a “response.” As I quoted a few lines above, the body “obeys” the pregnancy, or “responds” to it. There may be times when it is meaningful to describe a dialectic between action and reaction, or a catalyst and a predictable, logical “effect.” These words do not intend to capture absolute objects or absolute separation of cause and effect. Rather, these words are grasping at the relationship and the extent to which a phenomenon stands out as distinct in its inner logic from the external environment of its surroundings. The meaning according to which cause is distinguished from effect in our mind is also the bridge between them, the way for us to understand the relationship of the universe. A relatively isolatable logos, the contrasting differentia which is the formulaic meaning of a phenomenon, is the only way we can understand the relationship among phenomena in the world, figures against the ground of a greater logos, a greater field of Being with its folds and hollows, which transcends our compulsion to separate things. Merleau-Ponty in VI again describes sense in connection with logos: “the sensible world is this perceptual logic, this system of equivalencies... This logic is... [l]ifted from a world whose inner framework… [we] render explicit” (246-248). The sensible logos, the inner formula, is not an absolute. It is emergent from the depth of the flesh in which it is embedded.
2.b Universality of “sense”
The network of sense is, in a way, universal. Merleau-Ponty speaks of “an anonymous visibility” belonging to the flesh of the world, “radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and a universal” (142). Latent intentionality is this primordial, universal relationship. What is individual does not exist on its own separate flat plane, it is something with a depth, it is an entry point into the dimensionality of the “flesh” of the world, the field of being. Likewise, “the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things” (134). There is a notion that senses are emerging from the depths of the world around us, not just arising through the subjective activity of human or animal bodies. The depth of an emergent flesh as contrasted with a reductionistic, flattened physical plane is an idea that will come up again in this paper.
What is the cutoff of sensation? I think of a plant drawn to the sun like my eye is pulled toward a flash of light. Even without consciousness or a nervous system, it can respond, or be in an action-reaction dialectic, with a stimulus. In what way is it descriptively useful to talk of sense as embedded throughout the universe? Ted Toadvine explored this point in his own article about the ontology of sense (Toadvine, 2004). When I ask these questions and bring up the gray area concerning plants and latent intentionality, I do not intend to dismiss the important differences between animal sensation, plant behavior, and the laws or logos of the physical world. Instead, this is equal parts an exploration of the ontological continuity of the “flesh of the world” and an exploration of the usage of the word “sense.” In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the limits of language and, embracing this limitation, he claims the freedom to use words descriptively and not objectively (102?). In the same way, I do not intend to propose here a kind of panpsychism. This is rather an exploration of the application of the word sense, in the interest of a universal ontological field which makes “sense,” which has lawful regularities according to which there is contact, relationship, and reactions in the universe rather than a ‘blind’ sum of juxtaposed coincidences or absolutely separable phenomena.[3] An ontology of sense is not a way to talk about universal consciousness, it is rather an ontology of universal relationship, a universe of fields of figure and ground which open upon one another, as Merleau-Ponty suggests:
“we no longer make belongingness to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility, and… rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient.” “An anonymous visibility inhabits both of us... being an individual, of being also a dimension and a universal” (VI, 142)
Merleau-Ponty’s ontology describes not just a continuity of material flesh but a continuity of logos, an inner framework, the thickness of the flesh between the “things.” The world, he says, is “a field of Being” (240). This continuity of being is not on one flat plane, it is a continuity among folds and hollows; it has dimensions. He speaks of “an ontological relief which [cannot be effaced] by incorporating it into one unique plane of physical causality” (256). Among the contrasts or “reliefs” of these folds and hollows, there is connection through a “circuit” (269). There is a kind of electric dynamism, activity and not just potential down in the depths of the world which is what upholds and informs my own living flesh. If the world is one field, then “to touch is to touch oneself…the things are the prolongation of my body and my body is the prolongation of the world... the flesh of the world (the quale) is indivision of this sensible being that I am and all the rest which feels itself (se sent) in me” (255-256). As a dialectic of sensitive/sensible, there is a reciprocity of both activity and passivity, not just a one-sided activity, between seer and the visible: “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” (139). I will explore further the dialectic of activity/passivity in subsection iv.
Merleau-Ponty defines the continuity of sense, the ontological continuity of the world, in terms of openness: “it is through openness that we will be able to understand being and nothingness” (99). He says to be of one flesh is “to be open to oneself” (248). The openness of gestalts, of figures that open upon a ground, is the openness of Being in an ontological way, not connection through consciousness: “what is primary is not the diffuse ‘consciousness’ of the ‘images’... it is Being” (251). This is a new understanding of intentionality: latent intentionality. If this is to be a unifying ontological and phenomenological system, sense is not limited to the human subject. What we usually consider non-sensitive must have a sense of its own, a logos, a form which must be in relation and dialectic with other phenomena, or there can be no truly universal continuity.
Sense is also not limited to what is observable by the human subject. Merleau-Ponty says the domain of the sensible “extends further than the things I touch and see at present” (143). The world is eternally interconnected, through folds and hollows in the entangled web of creation, there is “non-sense” which plays a negating role, but in principle this non-sense also has an invisible, pregnant sense, unbeknownst to me.
2.c Horizonal transcendence as “non-sense”
I referred in the previous paragraphs to the “pregnancy” of sense within the flesh, the hidden logos, the potential with which the seer collaborates to make its logos “explicit.” Some kind of continuity is needed here among the polarity of sense and non-sense. If the sensible ends with what we currently see or can measure, we have a phenomenological-ontological system of an incomplete world. There is a universal dialectical relationship between sense and non-sense. Sense may be universal, but so is non-sense. The form or logos of sense stands out from its ground, which represents non-sense. The potentiality of non-sense is crucial. It is the yet unconquered, it is invisible, yet it is out there. It is also at the same time deep within, interior and hidden. Merleau-Ponty says this transcendent depth is the necessary “divergence” and the “never-finished differentiation,” folding, of the dialectical world-system.
The existence of the transcendent non-sense as “identity within difference” is necessary to unify the world, to bring everything into continuity (225). Merleau-Ponty summarizes this kind of dialectic: “it is necessary to incorporate into being a whole quantity of negative attributes, the transitions, and the becoming, and the possible…the inherence of being in nothingness and of nothingness in being” (73). Merleau-Ponty proposes in VI that the relationship of being and nothingness is best articulated as a dialectical relationship. The dialectic of being/nothingness is in many ways just another way of describing sense/non-sense. A form, a gestalt, a being, a phenomenon is a kind of formula-logos, one sense among a greater field of sense. Merleau-Ponty describes all of these concepts as “fields” in his writings. Figure and ground represent a field and its horizon. A field transitions into a transcendent ground.
In the above quote from 73, I particularly want to notice the use of the word “transition.” Apostolopoulos (2016) says that Merleau-Ponty “holds that intentionality must be a latent transition because ‘the sensible order is being at a distance’… it is distance from and passivity in relation to an object that brings it to us, a ‘distance [that] is not the contrary of… proximity’… ‘[w]hat it does not see is what makes it see’”. One might think about such “transition” or development in the metaphorical terms of the negative film of a developing photograph, inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s own usage of the word “revelateur,” which is a word for developer fluid. It is only through the negative, the non-sense, that we can perceive the photograph’s contrasting shades and figures. Merleau-Ponty states, “when we see being, nothingness is immediately there, and not in the margin like the zone of non-vision around our field of vision, but over the whole expanse of what we see, as what installs it and disposes it before us as a spectacle” (66). He suggests that the reciprocity of being and nothingness, of light and dark, is present all throughout our field of vision, it is not just tucked away in the shadowy perimeters of a vision. The field of vision is a field of reliefs: “there is a contact with being through its modulations or its reliefs… the other is a relief, as I am” (269). Using language of a contrast or “relief” is another way of referring to a thing’s depth. In VI’s working notes Merleau-Ponty makes this connection: “What is a Gestalt?... [What is] an organization in depth, a relief?” (205). For there to be a contrast, there must be dimensionality, not just a flat plane. There must also be some distance in order to see, this distance is also part of the process of negation, of a contrast.
Like the developing of a negative in film, the dialectical relation that flows from no into yes is the characteristic process of the world. This word “development” is used by Merleau-Ponty to describe stimuli and causality. Development represents an emergence of a phenomenon, rather than suggesting a thing or a cause as an absolute object. The dynamism of transition, difference, depth, and development coexist in a polarity with concepts that are relatively stable; structure, coherence of the flesh conforming to itself, a logos-formula, or a phenomenon which is “fixed.” We will now look at this polarity.
2.d Causal tension between universal dynamism and partial structures
The dialectical nature of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology incorporates a polarity of dynamism and structure. It is a polarity of, on one hand, an always dynamic process slipping out of our fingers, and on the other hand, a manifold of meaningful structures which can be observed when “fixed” by our focused lens (131). It is only by freezing and localizing time and space that we can perceive this structure which is, in another sense, a dynamism which transcends the sense I make of its snapshot. (References to the metaphor of a ‘developed’ photograph are found in Visible and Invisible and the Nature lecture notes. In the Nature lecture notes-- when Merleau-Ponty is commenting on Bergson—he states, “Nothingness has a positive role. Without this virtual, the thing itself would be without content, without contour, indefinable, as an untaken or undeveloped photograph” (57). He says shortly before that in the text that “if the photo is already taken within things, it is not yet developed” (56). He explains this development from darkness to light, from negative to positive, from ground to figure: “We pass from one to the other by diminution, by obscuration, contrary to the philosophical tradition that wants knowledge to be light” (55).)
Merleau-Ponty describes “[t]he fixity of the fixed point and the mobility of what is this side of it” as “one sole transcendence,” contrasting a fixed structure and its dynamic ground while also uniting them (231). In another passage, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the ocean. Depending on one’s perspective, the ocean might appear as either “shimmering and living” or as “immobile” (64). How are we to distinguish what is active and what is passive?
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of circular reciprocity between sensible and sensitive represents the ontological connection between act and potency, touching on questions of motion and causality. Merleau-Ponty writes about the ‘passivity of our acting,’ the ‘mutual liability’ in which we are all held. Passivity goes both ways. He says, “it is a question of reconsidering the interdependent notions of the active and the passive” (43). Attempts to describe causality and make formulaic distinctions between act and potential have historically been central to the work of ontology and metaphysics. In VI, Merleau-Ponty disregards a linear causal chain: “for me it is no longer a question of origins nor limits nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of being” (265). Elsewhere he states, “[w]hat replaces causal thought is the idea of transcendence... dimensionality” (227).
Merleau-Ponty’s views on causality directly relate to his idea of a stimulus/response. Kurt Goldstein was critical of localized reflex theory in order to say ‘yes’ to a whole-organism gestalt, while still acknowledging that a reflex is a meaningful concept. This attitude was shared by Merleau-Ponty and informed his concept of the stimulus and the great constellation of stimuli. In VI’s first chapter, Merleau-Ponty says “the stimuli of perception are not the causes of the perceived world, that they are rather its developers (revelateur) or its releasers” (27). If sensation is a whole-gestalt activity which does incorporate physical stimuli as substrate in some way, then it becomes easier to see sensation as existing on something like a spectrum in connection with other stimulus-response relationships in the universe. A sensitive/sensible relationship might be said to exist in continuity with all other kinds of reactions or relations in the universe. I want to pay attention to the notions of stimulus and sense in a universal way because, if a dialectical ontology of sense encapsulates all of the universe, then there must be gestalts not only at the scale of beings who exhibit sensation in their nervous system, but also gestalts which are held together in mutual relationship with their environment without a nervous system causing this relationship. Holding a more open concept of stimulus is a useful bridge to conceptualize the ontological continuity between the senses of living beings and the sense exhibited among other relations and reactions in the universe.
The stimulus is like a developing of reflected light, a frame frozen in time in a snapshot and translated in some way, by its recipient.[4] A stimulus is a structure that develops, or is a developing of, the world. It is not an absolute cause. Its causal power is limited and qualified, because it is determined by the greater field. There are many kinds of stimuli, and he includes “other men, a social and historical constellation;” culture as stimuli. What is important to him is to acknowledge this “constellation” of stimuli. It goes back to his gestalt ontology, an emergent web of latent relationship. Yes, you might say there are figural stimuli, which act on other bodies, but they themselves are also acted upon, and it is impossible to be utterly “objective” in how we separate a stimulus from its wider field.[5] The constellation of stimuli, of gestalts, is an entangled web. It is the network of the flesh of the world. He says we must “recognize the efficacity” of “stimuli” which “have no physical existence,” and here is where he mentions the constellation of society and history (23). Elsewhere he uses the word “occultation” when talking about the notion of removing “efficacious stimuli” (194). He also clarifies that he does not disagree with those who want to talk about “the presence of such receptors with such thresholds, etc.” (256). What he wants to emphasize is that these physical facts do not have complete “explicative power…they express differently an ontological relief which they cannot efface by incorporating it into one unique plane of physical causality.”
Hands, he says, do not suffice as agents of touch in themselves, but we must not “decide for this reason alone that our hands do not touch” (137). He says we should instead consider “that our body is a being of two leaves: from one side, a thing among things and otherwise, what seizes them and touches them.” Agency and passivity, stimulus and response, figure and ground melt into one another and reciprocate one another. A hand might be a stimulus and an agent in one sense, and in another sense, it is passive. It is one ‘part’ within a greater field which upholds it and whose living motion surges through it, as a unified field of “one sole movement,” “one sole explosion of being” (91, 265).
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that structures have depth. They exist within a greater depth and a horizon, rather than belonging to “one unique plane of physical causality” (256). This is the depth, the contrasting relief, of his dialectical ontology of sense and non-sense.
3. Conclusion
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical system stands on perceptual faith, on implicit trust in the intelligibility of the world. Yet it highlights the transcendence of the world beyond localizations of time and space. The human subject is thrown into the world, but the world transcends that localization. Merleau-Ponty’s core philosophical stance is the balancing of the dynamic whole and the particular phenomenon, which are always in tension. Non-sense, in Merleau-Ponty’s system, represents that which eludes observation and the limitations of a defined logic. It may seem like non-sense, but it can also be considered the transcendent logos of nature in continuity with all else that is. There may be impossibly complex folds, but these are features of a universe characterized ultimately by a logical continuity. He says, “[b]etween the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.” He has confidence in the universe’s continuity just as much as he is convinced of its complexity and dialectical nature.
Merleau-Ponty highlights that we, in our perceptual faith, at least presume adequacy to exist. The goal is always there; adequacy to truth, a coming to terms with the world. As he says, “we believe in it tirelessly” (42). But no one reaches adequacy; sense is always met with non-sense. In VI, he writes that “Being… is abyss and not plenitude” with a depth that never ceases (77). There may be sense, but it has a depth into which we sink if we ever try to wrap our heads around the truth. What then can we say about the endeavor of philosophy? He says, “philosophy interrogates the perceptual faith but neither expects nor receives an answer …we have with our body, our senses, our look, our power to understand speech and to speak, measurements for Being, dimensions to which we can refer it, but not a relation of adequation or of immanence” (103-4). We have “the watch and the map” that “indicate to us how what we are living is situated in relation to the course of the stars or to the course of a human day... But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves?” (103-4). Every answer, every affirmation we land on is followed by more questions and we feel our solid ground start to fold.
Endnotes:
[1] Goethe, On Morphology, 981, Problems, 987
[2] This latter quote was used to conclude one of Merleau-Ponty’s essays in Sense and Non-Sense, “Film and the New Psychology.” The idea is also mentioned in SB, 210: “the Gestalt still had to be conceptualized as unity of the interior and exterior.” These quotes by Goethe are also relevant to points made by Merleau-Ponty seen throughout this paper.
[3] This idea is conveyed in SB 202 “…the relations of the physical system and the forces which act upon it and those of the living being and its milieu are not the external and blind relations of juxtaposed realities, but dialectical relations in which the effect of each partial action is determined by its signification for the whole”
[4] The snapshot is also used as a metaphor for interpreting or abstracting a structure in SB 205: “…we actualize separately the physical body, the body of the anatomists or even the organism of the physiologists, all of which are abstractions, snapshots taken from the functional body.”
[5] This idea is conveyed in SB 206-207, on stimuli and the nervous system’s “dialectic” of “function and substrate”