Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety.[1]
I am thrown into nature, and that nature appears not only outside me, in objects devoid of history, but it is also discernible at the centre of subjectivity.[2]
In my attempt to link up the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech,” and “Other Selves and the Human World,” I am struck by this use of ‘natural,’ which seems to be both an absolute outside and absolute inside.[3] What is ‘nature’ for Merleau-Ponty? How does he intend it? Indeed, can he intend it? I am increasingly attentive to the possibility that this use of nature, the natural, is somehow the ground of my body’s ambiguity, yet at the same time that which allows for provisional determinations to be made.
Because I am born into personal existence by a time which I do not constitute, all my perceptions stand out against a background of nature.[4]
Nature, therefore, is the background from which my determinations stem, the natural time from which my existence borrows, and the perceptual ground from which my objectivities emerge. I act in accordance with them and according to these given modes of apprehending. The body takes up these ways of coping, identifying and modulating the world, appropriating it into sedimented modes of behavior. This way of encountering is such that Merleau-Ponty can state: “Perception is always in the mode of the impersonal ‘One.’”[5] It is, therefore, the case that these ways of being, this way of navigating, of having one’s bearings in a kind of ontic space, is sedimented in our cultural traditions. The lived body, is therefore, highly anonymous in its habitual ways of coping with the world which is both within and outside of it. The body is always already a culturally determined entity; as such it lives in view of others, according to others and in terms of others. The fact that I have understood myself to be an individual, perhaps, “unique like a snowflake,” seems to be an understanding I have appropriated despite never having explicitly taken up the thought of Descartes. “The cultural world is then ambiguous, but is already present.”[6]
Could Descartes ever have known what would be made of his thought? There were no Cartesians before Descartes, only in the wake of his thought, as instituting, could Cartesianism emerge as a tradition. For the Cartesians we are not, as it were, bound to the contingent fact that we are embodied. Rather, as mind, guaranteed by the rational creator, we are beyond, outside, we have a “view from above.”[7] The mind and the guarantee of the transcendent God are somehow outside the natural, thus the body is reduced to the idea the mind has of it. The body, as it is posited by Merleau-Ponty, is a kind of reaction to the institution begun by Descartes, to the Cartesians and the western tradition that followed in its wake. The body is not a contingent fact of existence, my body is not an idea which I might have of it, my body can never be an object in this way, it reveals itself as a certain opacity, as an ambiguous mode of existence.
I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it.[8]
The body affords, or allows for this kind view removed from itself, this view at a distance, however, this mode of encountering is not primordial;[9] neither is it grounded in a transcendental guarantee, as Descartes had supposed; rather, the transcendence which enables it, at the same, time re-opens it, making it nothing more than a point of view, a perspective of a moment in the flow of ‘natural time.’[10]
This nature, which is somehow at the centre of the body, is that which appropriates at a pre-reflective level; the cultural world is the sedimented behavioral patterns and constituted objectivities, which allow me to engage with the world. As such, I am never quite at one with myself, as I am always already engaged in a kind of along sidedness with myself, others and the world. The body, therefore, exists in a highly anonymous way, such that I do what one does, perhaps commonsensically, I understand others through an appeal to this general way of being which is my own. As such, in reflection, the un-relfected must always already be present, that is present in a kind of absence, perhaps an absolute absence. There is always already a background, a nature from which my determinations must borrow, I am open to this field of nature, which transcends me, while at the same time allows me to transcend myself. The natural is that infinity in the face of which I am but a finite opening. There is, therefore, nothing to be understood by an examination of nature, rather this nothing is precisely what makes everything possible. This nothing, therefore, is that which gives me to myself as something to be understood.
I have been given to myself as something to be understood. My understanding will already have to remake itself in the wake of the thoughts encountered here. I have, as it were, become aware of the risks involved in working in this way. I am aware that countless ‘I’s’ will no doubt come across the present textual offering, and offer interpretations of what I might have been attempting to express at this time. Perhaps, they might characterize this offering as a stage, a phase, or a particular period in the development or trajectory of my thought. Perhaps, this offering might be viewed as naïve, as youthful, messy, the initial steps of something larger, or perhaps surprisingly sophisticated for the particular phase within which it was written. I am already aware of feeling a certain uneasiness in the face of the above statements; however, I have become quite skilled at ignoring myself in the wake of my own thought.[11] The present encounter with Merleau-Ponty has led me into a reflection on the process of the unfolding of my thought. When is a work complete? Not complete in the sense of being sufficient in and of itself, but rather, how do I finally come to leave a work as it is when I can always go further, I can always view it differently, when there is always a surplus of the unsaid over the said?[12] These are the kind of thoughts which seem to be necessary in the face of ambiguous embodiment.
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge Classics: New York, 2002. p 232.
[2] Ibid., p. 403.
[3] If it is indeed appropriate to speak of something like an inside and an outside?
[4]Ibid., p. 404.
[5] Ibid., p. 279.
[6] Ibid., p 405.
[7] If we are attentive to the footnotes on p. 231, are they not presented as a kind of indictment? Are they not gesturing toward a trajectory which was recognized, yet not followed? Were the Meditations guided in advance by a kind of ‘pragmatic motive,’ by a desire to lay down the epistemological foundations for absolute subjectivity, for a substance complete in itself, which might, in turn, render the apparent world determinate, or at least determinable?
[8] Ibid., p 231.
[9] That is to say, once this reflection has ceased, it remains necessary for me to act in the world.
[10] As such I must reckon with my situation, a finite province borrowing from the infinite, not as an intersecting but as an intending.
[11] I have come to the conclusion that I will no doubt disagree with myself moments from now, as such I have acquired the habit of saving everything that I write, rather than accept my initial reflections, the coming to expression of thought being far more complex than a reflexive glance might consider.
[12] It would seem that the formal requirement involved in these reflections, namely that I must submit something in order to be properly assessed, is perhaps that which informs my ability to make a statement final.
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