IMAGINING BODIES WITH MERLEAU-PONTY

IMAGINING BODIES WITH MERLEAU-PONTY

By

JAMES B. STEEVES

A Thesis

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University

September 2000
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2000) McMASTER UNIVERSITY
(Philosophy) Hamilton, Ontario

TITLE: IMAGINING BODIES WITH MERLEAU-PONTY

AUTHOR: JAMES B. STEEVES I B.A. (University of New Brunswick)

M.A. (University of New Brunswick)

SUPERVISOR: Professor Jeff Mitscherling

NUMBER OF PAGES: xi I 227.

11
 ABSTRACT

The imagination plays a central role in Merleau-Ponty's

philosophy. In his earlier works, the imagination is shown to

be the creative ability of the body to have a sense of space

and motility in terms of which we are able to make sense of

the world. In his later works, the view that the human body
is a dynamic and creative process of realizing possibilities

is extended to ontology; Being is shown to be a continual

dissemination of meaning through the medium of 'flesh'. Thus

Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from start to finish, is a

philosophy of the imagining body.

This thesis begins with a discussion of imagination

theory in order to show that there are four kinds of

imagining: (i) perceptual imagining, (ii) aesthetic
imagining, (iii) fanciful imagining, and (iv) elemental
imagining. It is shown how Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the
imagination covers each kind, and how his analysis is

superior to those of many other philosophers. Merleau-Ponty's

theory of the body is then examined in the light of

contemporary research, with an emphasis on the nature of the

body schema. The body is shown to be a creative medium for

engaging with the world, and to be the basis for the four
kinds of imagining. Thus the imagination theory of Merleau-

ill
ponty is a theory of the imagining body. Finally, the role of

the imagining body in ontology is explored. It is shown that

Being is itself dynamic and creative, and expresses itself

through the medium of 'flesh'. The imagining of Being,

however, finds its ultimate expression in the imagining body

as it imagines itself in perception, aesthetic production,

fanciful thinking and the interpretation of elemental images.

IV
 ACKNOWLEOOMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the

encouragement and support of many people. I would like to

thank my supervisor, Dr. Jeffrey A. Mitscherling, for

encouraging me throughout the course of my study at McMaster

University and for the many helpful comments and suggestions

that he provided during this time. I would also like to thank

Dr. Gary B. Madison who was always willing to open his horne

to philosophical and political discussion. Dr. Jay Lampert

deserves thanks for his many comments and suggestions, and

for always expecting only the best from his students.

Research for this thesis was generously supported by an

Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.

I wish to acknowledge the many discussions and
friendships that have shaped my research. A few people who
deserve special attention are Rodney Cooper, Darcy Otto,

Peter Widdicombe and Daniel So. I am also grateful for the

continual support of my parents, Peter and Linda Steeves, and

David and Cheryl Loaring.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Elizabeth

Loaring, who has not only exhibited encouragement and

support, but who continues to show me how the philosophy of

imagination applies to everyday life.

v
 DEDICATION

To Elizabeth,
whose love and imagination
know no bounds.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iii
Acknowledgments v
Table of Contents vii
Abbreviations ix

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

A. Imaginative Embodiment 1

B. Overview 4

CHAPTER TWO: GENEALOGY OF IMAGINING

A. Introduction 12

B. Modern Philosophy and Romanticism 15

c. Psychoanalysis 20

D. Phenomenology 23

E. Hermeneutics and Postmodernism 29

CHAPTER THREE: IMAGINING

A. Introduction 39

B. Perceptual Imagining 41

C. Aesthetic Imagining 62

D. Fanciful Imagining 67

E. Elemental Imagining 80

vii
CHAPTER FOUR: BODIES

A. Introduction 99

B. Traditional Theories 102

C. Body Schema and Body Image III

CHAPTER FIVE: IMAGINING BODIES

A. Introduction 127

B. perceptual Embodiment 139

C. Aesthetic Embodiment 154

D. Fanciful Embodiment 162

E. Elemental Embodiment 166

CHAPTER SIX: IMAGINING BEING

A. Introduction 178

B. Flesh and Reversibility 179

C. Imagining Flesh 199

D. Conclusion 212

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED 218

Vlll
 ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used to refer to

Merleau-Ponty's texts. Wherever possible, I have used the

same abbreviations for both the original French texts and the

standard English translations. References to Merleau-Ponty's

French texts always end with an 'F'. All italics and

quotation marks found in quotes throughout the thesis are

from the original source unless otherwise indicated.

Works by Merleau-Ponty in English

AD Adventures of the Dialectic. Tr. Joseph Bien. Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1973.

CAL Consciousness and the Acquisi tion of Language. Tr. Hugh

Silverman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973.

HT Humanism and Terror. Tr. John O'Neill. Boston: Beacon

press, 1969.

1M .. On Sartre' s Imagina tion." In Texts and Dialogues:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Hugh Silverman and James
Barry. Tr. Michael B. Smith. Humanities Press: New
Jersey, 1992.

1PP In Praise of Philosophy. Tr. John Wild and James M.

Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963.

PP Phenomenology of perception. Tr. Colin Smith. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.

PrP The Primacy of Perception. Tr. James M. Edie.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

POW The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude Lefort. Tr. John
O'Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University press, 1973.

ix
SNS Sense and Non-Sense. Tr. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia
Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern university Press,
1964.

S Signs. Tr. Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1964.

SB The Structure of Behavior. Tr. Alden L. Fisher. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1963.

TFL Themes From the Lectures at the College de France 1952-

1960. Tr. John O'Neill. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1970.

VI The visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Tr.

Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968.

Works by Merleau-Ponty in French

ADF Les aventures de La dialectique. Paris: Gallimard,

1955.

RCF Maurice MerLeau-Ponty a La Sorbonne: Resume de ses

cours etabli par les etudiants et approuve par Lui-meme.
Bulletin de Psychologie no. 236, vol. 18, no. 3-6
(November 1964); notes on courses delivered between
1949 - 51.

HTF Humanisme et Terreure. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

IMF ilL I Imagination," Journal de Psychologie Normale et
Pathologique 33 nos. 9-10 (1936), pp. 756-61.
INF "Un inedit de Merleau - Ponty," Revue de Metaphysique et
de Morale no. 4 (1962), pp. 401-9.

IPPF Eloge de La philosophie et autres essais. Collection

Idees. Paris: Gallimard, 1960 (first edition 1953) .

EMF L'Oeil et l'esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

PPF Phenomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
PrPF Le Primat de perception et ses consequences
philosophiques. Grenoble: Cynara, 1989.

x
POWF La Prose du monde. Ed. Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard,
1969.

ROF Les relations avec autrui chez l'enfant. Paris: Centre

de Documentation Universitaire, 1967 (first edition
1951) .

TFLF Resumes de cours, College de France 1952-1960. Paris:

Gallimard, 1968.

SNSF Sens et non-senSe Paris: Nagel, 1966 (first edition

1948) .

SF signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

SBF La structure du comportement. 2nd. ed. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France (first edition 1942) .

VIF Le visible et l'invisible: suivi de notes de travail.

Ed. Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

Xl
 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

A. Imaginatiye Embodiment

Every year on one of the hottest weekends of the surnmer l

the small and quiet town of Dundas, Ontario, is transformed

into a festival of sound and light. The usually quiet main

street of shops and cafes becomes a stage for buskers who

sing and dance, juggle balls, swallow knives, and perform

various tricks with playing cards, bicycles, chains and

torches. During these festivals, off in a quieter corner of

the street, one can find a mime silently displaying her art.

She is dressed in a simple black shirt and black leotards,

her face is painted white with exaggerated make-up on her

lips and around her eyes, and her hair is tied back into a

pony-tail. As if enthralled by her own embodiment, she moves

in sweeping gestures, creating the illusion of a wall or a

tiger, magically changing her immediate surroundings into a

palace with kings and queens, romantic encounters and

executions, or into a jungle fraught with vicious animals and

dense foliage. With Simple gestures/ as if by a secret inner-

comrrnmication, the mime entrances the onlookers and brings

them all into her world, leaving the sounds of the street

behind.

How is it that the mime, so simple in dress and

appearance, can communicate so clearly and 'audibly' to her

 2

audience? The observer can tell instantly what the mime is

experiencing- -he feels her fear and senses the approaching

tiger, he shares her lust for power or her disdain for the

criminal. There seems to be, in each of us, a unique language

of the body on which the mime skillfully plays like the keys

of a piano. By stretching her body as she pulls down on the

imagined rope, she makes us feel as if we are climbing the

rope towards the sky. By moving her hands to the left while

her abdomen moves to the right, she causes us to f eel her

imaginary movement along a wall. The mime is aware of a

number of gestures that bear an immediate sense for us, and

by using these gestures she is able to tell a story without

making a sound. 1

The mime is perhaps the most skilled at the art of

creative gesture and embodiment. But the art of embodiment

can be found in every person. There is not a single word

spoken without a background of embodiment. Every statement

occurs on the backdrop of a blush, a flush of anger or

jealousy, or a relentless look of disinterest and formality.2

1 For a good introduction to mime, see Maravene Sheppard Loeschke,

All About Mime (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982).
2 We notice the importance of gesture for ordinary discourse in
situations where this level of communication is no longer possible, such
as when we talk on the phone. unable to reinforce our statements with
gesture, we distort and exaggerate our voice, tone, and even the content
of our statements in order to ensure that communication is achieved. The
telephone reduces the communicative experience to sound, causing us to
draw from this medium much more than usual. A similar 'hypersensibility'
is developed by people lacking one of the main senses, such as a blind
person with an acute sense of smell or sound, or a deaf person with an
acute sense of sight in lipreading.
 3

Many philosophers have called attention to the role of

embodiment in establishing perlocutionary meaning that can

often contradict the literal meaning of a statement. It seems

that from birth we are submerged in an ocean of silent

meanings that we use to relate to others and to the world.

Children seem to be especially attuned to the silent

mediation of the body. As children, we experience the world

as a mixture of magic and reality, of work and play. This is

no doubt due to the fact that children are in the process of

learning a number of bodily habits that adults have already

learned and use without explicit thought or effort. The child

lives in a world that is new at every turn, and she learns

quickly to adjust her body in response to her environment.

The mature adult, by contrast, often leaves behind her

childhood 'wonder' concerning the body to focus on more

irranediate concerns: school, work, relationships, et cetera.

The body's magic falls into the background, operating at a

tacit level that is more or less ignored and forgotten.

We are surprised, then, when we see the mime turning our

mundane embodiment into a work of art. We are led into the

mime's story by the way that the she makes us feel our bodies

in relation to gravity and the spatial and temporal

environment. Not only does the mime make use of bodily

language in order to convey a story or an image, but she also

invites us to re-explore our own bodies and the limits of
embodied experience.
 4

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a philosophy

of embodiment. At a time when consciousness was being lauded

as the source for all meaning, Merleau-Ponty explored the
possibility that consciousness is itself informed by the

body. At the root of conscious experience is an embodied life

that consciousness does not create. Not only does the body

impose certain limits on our projects, but the body already

influences how consciousness is able to perceive and think

about reality in such a way as to create these projects. From

his earlier writing on perceptual experience to the later

ontology of flesh and vision, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a

celebration of the body.

By imagining bodies with Merleau-Ponty, we are invited

to consider the art of mime as a general art that we all

perform, whether explicitly or tacitly, well or badly, and as

a basic structure of every manner of human existence. Through

the movements and gestures of the mime, we begin to see the

truth and the beauty of our own embodiment. The body is the
basis for philosophy and it grounds the possibility of
thinking, speaking, and freedom. Philosophy begins in wonder,

and it takes root in mime.

B. OVerview

There are numerous essays and texts describing Merleau-

Ponty's theory of the body. Many of these texts were

published in the 1960s following Merleau-Ponty's untimely
 5

death in 1961. Around this time, Merleau-Ponty was of

interest to scholars primarily as a phenomenologist following

in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl or as a proponent of the

existentialism that he developed with Jean-Paul Sartre. Most

of the secondary literature from this period tends to

interpret Merleau-Ponty in tenns of his existentialism and

phenomenology.3

In the wane of a philosophy of consciousness and the

rise of postmodern philosophy, many contemporary philosophers

have found a new significance in Merleau-Ponty's writings. It

has been discovered that Merleau-ponty's philosophy contains

ideas that parallel or surpass many of the prophets of

postmoderni ty: the need to decenter the thinking subj ect as

the source of truth, the essential mediation of the world by

means of symbolic structures, the need to consider underlying

forces that influence our understanding of reality, and the

need to reconsider the nature of the body and its relation to

thought and human freedom.4

It is in the wake of this interest in Merleau-Ponty's

philosophy that I propose to reconsider his philosophy of the

3 See, for instance, John Bannan, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967); Mary Rose Barral, Merleau-
ponty: The Role of the Body-Subject in Interpersonal Relations
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965) ; Remi Kwant, The
Phenomenological Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University press, 1963): Richard Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
4 Some good examples are Gary Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-
Ponty (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981): Martin Dillon, Merleau-
ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) i and
Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de 1 'experience (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998).
 6

body. In particular, I wish to disclose the body as a

creative medium for engaging with the world. This requires

not only an examination of his philosophy of embodiment, but

a study of his theory of imagination. Since Merleau - Ponty
wrote very little about the imagination,S this task is made

doubly hermeneutical, as the theory of imagination to be

found in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy must be assembled out of

the many references to the imagination scattered throughout

his works. It is my intention to show that within his theory
of embodiment and his later ontology of the flesh there is a

unique theory of the imagination in terms of creative

embodiment and the flesh of the world.

There is surprisingly little written about Merleau-

Ponty's theory of the imagination. Though he is mentioned in

many general studies (such as Richard Kearney's Poetics of

Imagining: Modern to Postmodern.6), there are very few books or

articles devoted exclusively to him. Two exceptions are

Richard McCleary's Imagination's Body 7 and Glen Mazis's "La
Chair et L'imaginaire: The Developing Role of Imagination in

5 The only study by Merleau-ponty devoted exclusively to the

imagination is a rather favorable review of Sartre's earliest work on
the imagination (called simply L'imagination) which appeared as
"L' imagination," Journal de Psychologie nonnale et Pathologique 33
(1936), pp. 756-61; it is translated into English by Michael B. Smith as
"On Sartre's Imagination" in Texts and Dialogues: Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
ed. Hugh Silverman and James Barry (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992).
6 Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Postmodern (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998), Chapter Five.
7 Richard McCleary, Imagination's Body (Washington: University
Press of America, 1986).
 7

Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy. ,,8 But both of these works are

limited in a number of ways. McCleary focuses on the role of

the imagination in education, and provides little discussion

of the details of Merleau-Ponty's theory. Mazis's article is

based on what I shall be arguing is a misreading of Merleau-

Ponty. He claims that Merleau-Ponty'S Phenomenology of

Perception contains an imagination theory similar to that of

Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the imagination is radically

separate from perception. It is only in Merleau-Ponty's later

works, especially in The Visible and the Invisible, that

Mazis finds a unique theory of imagination that is at the

heart of perception. 9
My thesis suggests an alternative reading of Merleau-

Ponty. I argue that there is a consistent philosophy of the

imagination to be found throughout Merleau-Ponty's entire

career. This theory of the imagination begins in The

Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, with

the description of the body as a creative medium for

existence. Rather than separating the imagination from

perception, as Mazis interprets him, Merleau-Ponty places the

imagination at the heart of perception and all other modes of

human existence. The imagination appears in Merleau - Ponty' s

8 Glen Mazis, "La Cbair et L'imaginaire: The Developing Role of

Imagination in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy," Philosophy Today 32 (1988) I
pp. 30-42; see also Francoise Dastur, "perceptual Faith and the
Invisible," Journal of the Bri tisb Society for Pbenomenology 25 (1994),
p. 47.
9 This point and my rebuttal are discussed at length in Chapter
Three, Section D.
 8

earlier works as the creati ve aspect of the body. Merleau-

Ponty focuses on the body schema as a sense of unity for the

body and its active engagements with the world. The

development of the body schema is shown to involve a

dialectic between the use of acquired habits and abilities

and the creative renewal of those habits in the light of

novel scenarios. The imagination is the creative pole of this

dialectic, allowing the body to transcend its physiological

drives and to turn its environment (Umwelt) into a world for

human action (Wei t) .10

Throughout much of his career, Merleau - Ponty explores

the role of creative embodiment in the acquisition of

language, in social and political engagements, and in the

creation of works of art. Whether one is creating a sculpture

or attempting to affect the course of history, one is

surrounded by a world that cannot be completely understood or

controlled. In all of these encounters, one is limited by the

body which always conceals a part of the environment. But the

body is also one's access to these spheres of human life,

providing a background and a means for engaging with reality.
Thus throughout these works, Merleau-Ponty remembers the role

of the imagining body.

Most significant to our study of the imagining body is

Merleau-ponty's latest work, The Visible and the Invisible.

10 John Russon, "Embodiment and Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and the

Ontology of Nature," Man and world 27 (1994), p. 298.
 9

This project was cut short by his death in 1961, but thanks

to the editorial work of Claude Lefort we have today the

working draft and additional notes to this work in progress.

Within these pages can be found a novel ontology based on

what Merleau-Ponty calls "flesh" (la chair, VI 133/VIF 175).

Rather than separating subjectivity fram objectivity,

Merleau-Ponty claims that everything is made of the same

flesh, and that subjectivity is only a fold or a tuft in this

elemental substance. Flesh is not a kind of atom or Ursto££i
rather, it establishes the various differentiations of Being
and the reversibilities that make up our experience of the

world. By means of his ontology of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty

further decenters the philosophy of consciousness from the

philosophy of the imagining body to the imaginative

differentiation of Being in the form of flesh. The imagining

body is grounded in a deeper sense of imagining, the

imagining of Being as it creatively divides itself,
constituting the world with all of its levels of meaning.

I have attempted to capture the imagining body and its

relation to flesh in the pages that follow. The second

chapter involves a brief discussion of imagination theory in

the writings of selected philosophers. I argue that the

imagination cannot be reduced to any particular function or

aspect of existence, and that it is better to approach the

imagination by means of a genealogy. I proceed to provide a

brief genealogy of the imagination by focusing on its role in

 10

Modern philosophy and Romanticism, psychoanalysis,

phenomenology, hermeneutics and postmodernism.
The third chapter provides an analysis of Merleau-

Ponty's own theory of imagination, and demonstrates how it

accounts for many different kinds of imagining. Perception,

for instance, is shown to involve not absolute shades of

colour or clearly def ined obj ects , but a number of sensuous

dimensions that open and close upon one another and that are
discerned with the help of the imagination. As a product of
the imagination, the aesthetic object is a "sensible par
excellence," displaying the dimensional character of
sensation in exemplars that are carved out of marble or
traced upon a canvas. Fanciful thinking is shown to be

interrelated with perception, acting as an extreme case of

free thought while remaining bound in some ways to
perception. Finally, the imagination is explored in its
relation to elemental images, such as the profound images of
poetry and dreams, in order to illustrate the manner in which
these images, far from being mere subjective creations,
ground us within a world that already imagines itself into
being.
The fourth explores in detail Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
of embodiment, beginning with the traditional theories to
which Merleau-Ponty was responding. The phenomenal body is

described in terms of a body schema that is neither a

psychological construct nor an instinctual mechanism, but an
 11

open medium for engaging with the world. I relate Merleau-

ponty I s analysis of the body schema to current studies in

cognitive science and psychology.

In chapter five, I apply my findings concerning the body

schema in chapter four to the question of the imagination. I

begin by showing how the body can be conceived as an

imaginative medium, and then apply the imagining body to the

various forms of imagining developed in Chapter Three. The

imagining body is shown to be essential for each of the areas

discussed in chapter three: perception, aesthetic production,

fanciful thinking and the interpretation of elemental images.

Finally, in Chapter Six, the concept of flesh is shown

to contain an additional form of imagining on the part of

Being itself as it differentiates itself into the world of

sense. We will discover in what ways it makes sense to talk

about an imagination of Being, and how this imagining grounds

the imagining of the human body. It is not only the body, but

Being itself, which opens itself onto a future of perpetual

renewal and creative development. To imagine bodies with

Merleau-Ponty, we inevitably find ourselves imagining Being.

 CHAPTER TWO: GENEALOGY OF IMAGINING

A. Introduction

In order to develop a philosophy on the basis of the

imagining body, it is imperative that we first understand

what is to be meant by the term 'imagination'. It is

difficult to determine what exactly is meant by the

imagination. In ordinary language, it is used to refer to

many different things. The most obvious use of the word is to

refer to mental imaging, such as is found in daydreams and

fanciful thinking. It applies not only to those dreams and

images that we create VOluntarily, but to the experience of

many elemental images that seem to bear a meaning of their

own, conditioning the affective response of the dreamer. Thus

the imagination is often attributed not only to fanciful

thinking, but also to the profound images that are

experienced in dreams and expressed in poetry.

But the list does not stop there. We often attribute the
imagination to acts of artistic creation. Artists, at times,

have been seen as creative geniuses who present novel ideas

in a variety of media, including paint, sound, and the built

environment. And at times it is even attributed to ordinary

experiences, such as when a person performs a particular

action in a unique way. It has even been argued (as we will

see shortly) that the imagination is essential to every act

12
 13

of perception, however ordinary and simple. The imagination

suggests a number of different phenomena that the philosopher

is at pains to enumerate and describe.

Peter Strawson describes the imagination as having three

functions: mental imaging, invention and false belief. He

claims that any theory that focuses on only one of these

functions is too narrow. l l But it is not sufficient simply to

enumerate these functions; one must also consider whether

these functions contradict each other. Mary Warnock shows

that there is a tension, for example, between the imagination

as an aid to perception and as an aid to the creation of

novel meaning. She writes:

We use imagination in our ordinary perception of

the world ... So imagination is necessary ... to
enable us to recognize things in the world as
familiar, to take for granted features of the world
which we need to take for granted and rely on, if
we are to go about our ordinary business; but it is
also necessary if we are to see the world as
significant of something unfamiliar, if we are ever
to treat the objects of perception as symbolizing
or suggesting things other than themselves. u

How is it, asks Warnock, that the same imagination which

facilitates mundane perception can also be the source for

novel forms? Thus we have the problem not only of containing

a variety of senses in the same definition, but of

reconciling what seem to be incompatible meanings.

11 Peter Strawson, "Imagination and Perception, " Freedom and

Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 45 and 64.
12 Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 10.
 14

Along with Richard Kearney, I rej ect the search f or a

complete definition of the imagination. There is no single

function of the imagination that can be used to make sense of

its other meanings and functions. But this does not mean that

we are left with no meaning at all. To refuse to admit that

there is a definitive ground for truth need not suggest that

we are left with a total flux or a groundless concept.

Kearney's suggestion is that the different meanings of the

imagination can be understood to bear what Wittgenstein

described as "family resemblances" in which there is no

single meaning connecting the members of the group though

there are many similarities that overlap one another. 13 My

brother might have my mother's chin, and I my father's, yet

we might both have the eyes of a distant grandparent. Taken

as a whole, a stranger is quick to recognize the family

resemblance I bear to my brother even though he may be at a
loss to point out specific family characteristics. In a

similar way, we can find family resemblances among the

different functions of the imagination. By searching for

similarities and sifting through contradictions, we can start

to develop a general theory of the imagination.
The following sections involve a brief genealogy of the

imagination. I have decided to limit my study to only a few

key figures in order to focus on some of the common themes

13 Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, p. 15; Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), Para. 67. See also VI 110-11/VIF 149.
 15

that keep reappearing in the philosophy of the imagination. 14

These themes are that the imagination plays an essential role

(i) in perception, (ii) in the production and appreciation of

aesthetic objects, (iii) in fanciful thinking, and (iv) in

the interpretation of elemental images.

The genealogy sketched out here will begin with the

Modern era of Western philosophy and its culmination in

Romanticism. Next will come psychoanalysis and phenomenology,

both of which played an essential role in the formation of

Merleau-Ponty's ideas. Finally, the imagination found in

philosophical hermeneutics and postmodern thought will be

considered.

B. Modern Philosqcby and Romanticism

Modern philosophy is generally understood to involve

European philosophy from the seventeenth to the beginning of

the twentieth century. During this time, many philosophers
sought an apodeictic ground for knowledge that would find in

philosophy the firm foundation that would subsequently be

attributed to the physical sciences.

Within this tradition, the imagination was seen
primarily as an aid to epistemology, especially in the area

14 Two important influences on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the

imagination that are not covered, for instance, are G. W. F. Hegel and
Henri Bergson. Both were essential in the development from Modern
philosophy to phenomenology. I have decided, for the sake of brevity, to
focus merely on Modern philosophy and phenomenology, and not the period
of transition between them.
 16

of perception. It is the imagination that allegedly allows

for the synthesis of sensible experience into a unified and

meaningful whole. Only after sense experience is prepared or

shaped by the imagination can the sensible world be

experienced in a meaningful way.

David Hume, for example, saw the imagination as an

important aid to perception. He claimed that the impressions

of sensation are copied in the mind to form images of memory

or imagination, so that an image is essentially a faint
version of an impression. He writes: " [T] hose perceptions,

which enter with most force and violence, we may name

impressions .... By ideas I mean the faint images of these in

thinking and reasoning Impressions and ideas differ only
in their strength and vivacity."lS For Hume, the lack of an

essential difference between images and impressions meant

that there is no apodeictic knowledge concerning reality. All

knowledge, he claimed, is based on associations made between

impressions and ideas by means of the imagination. It is the

imagination, and not a predetennined order of reality, that
makes possible the illusion of a unified world of experience

(80) •

Despite the fact that it frequently "changes its ideas"

(10), the imagination is also capable of establishing

meaningful (albeit fictional) associations among impressions

15 David Hurne, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), pp. 1 and 19; see also p. 8.
 17

on the basis of which the individual subject can live 'as if'

in a world of certainty. This functioning of the imagination,

however, follows a logic that is hidden from clear

reflection, which itself emerges from "unknown causes" (7).

The imagination is ultimately a mystery of human psychology

that acts as an "associating quality" and a "gentle force"

(10) on the mind. In spite of the absence of absolute truths

the thinking subject is able to turn these associations into

a coherent picture of reality and a sense of community.

Immanuel Kant's reading of Hurne led him to turn Hurne' s

defeat into a triumph. Rather than leaving the project of

Modernity ship-wrecked on a psychological mystery, Kant

changed it into the very ground of apodeictic knowledge.

Transcendental subjectivity, as opposed to empirical

subjectivity, became the focus of Kant 1 s inquiry as the

contributor of the objectivity of objects. Thus his claim to

having inaugurated a Copernican revolution by basing the

objectivity of reality on the subjectivity of the

transcendental subject. 16

Central to Kant's transcendental philosophy is the

transcendental imagination. Unlike the empirical imagination,

which combines known perceptions under empirical concepts,

the transcendental imagination is the source of obj ecti ve

16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. J.M.D. Meiklejohn

(Rutland, Vermont: Everyman's Library, 1991), p. 14. For a good
discussion concerning Kant's theory of imagination, see Rudolf Makkreel,
Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: university of Chicago
Press, 1990).
 18

knowledge. He explains that while the faculty of sensation

provides the content for knowledge and the faculty of

understanding provides the concepts, it is the imagination

(Einbildungskraft) that forges the form for each. The

imagination provides an a priori fonn for experience by

producing schemata that prepare the sensible manifold for

cognition. A transcendental schema is not a 'weak impression'

but "a rule for the detennination of our intuition" (119) and

thus is not subj ect to the uncertainties of psychological

powers. Though the actual workings of the imagination remain,

for Kant, an utter mystery, the fonn for experience and

cognition that it produces is apodeictic.

The transcendental imagination obtains a unique role in

the contemplation of aesthetic objects. Kant claimed that the

imagination finds, within a hannonious fonn, an opportunity

to work freely over the sensible manifold without the

restriction of concepts. The imagination discovers in the

aesthetic object a "purposiveness without purpose"17 which
allows it to engage in a free-play that is not bound by

concepts.

Romanticism involved the demise of the Modern subject

with the influences of history, emotion and art on the

thinking subject. This demise, however, was not the result of

Skepticism but of having overinflated the power of

17 Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. J.M. Bernard (New York: Hafner,

1951), Book 1, Section 10.
 19

transcendental subjectivity. In particular, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge emulated the transcendental imagination as the

imitation of God's act of creation, an expression of our free

control over nature and of the artist's unlimited power to

express. The imagination at work in perception, for instance,

is considered to be "a repetition in the finite mind of the

eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. ,,19 Rather than

having the imagination mimic a static order of reality pre-

ordained by God, Coleridge identified the imagination with

God's creativity. The individual Kantian subject who fonned

the possibility for objective knowledge is inflated into a

creative genius who mimics the acts of the Divine Creator.

From Hurne to Coleridge the imagination had emerged from

the depths of empirical psychology and risen to the heights

of divine creation. For all three philosophers, the

imagination played a central role in perception as well as in

the production and appreciation of aesthetic forms. There was

also, in Hurne's theory, a concern for the image's ability to

deviate from ordinary logic and create illusions. It is this

concern that became prominent in the next stage of the

genealogy when the powers of transcendental subjectivity came

to be plagued by the powers of the unconscious.

18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Vol. I, ed. J.

Shaw-cross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), p. 202.
 20

C. Psychoanalysis

Around the tUnl of the twentieth century, the Modenl

confidence in the individual subject and the Romantic praise

for the creative genius began to wane. No longer content to

rely on the auspices of waking consciousness, intellectuals

began to take heed of the hidden sources of the unconscious

that foil the quest for apodeictic knowledge. They started to

think of the imagination not merely as a psychological

mystery, but as an epistemological menace. The ability of the

imagination to present reality as other than it is, rather

than enriching perception, became seen as a potential mask

for unconscious desires that threatened the unity and harmony

sought by Modern philosophers. 19

Amongst the obvious examples of psychoanalysts and

critics of reason- -Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl

Jung20- - is Jacques Lacan, whose seminal essay, liThe Mirror

Stage as Formati ve of the Function of the I as Revealed in

Psychoanalytic Experience,"21 proved to be of great interest

to Merleau - Ponty . Lacan argued that the development of the

19 See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its

Discontents, ed. J. Strachey, tr. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press,
1963), p. 17.
20 J .M. Cocking provides a brief history of the imagination which
gives special attention to the stage of psychoanalysis. He concludes,
however, that the imagination must not be seen as essentially concealing
but as a neutral faculty that is capable of disclosure as well as
concealment. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p. 281.
21 Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in psychoanalytic ExperienceD in Ecrits, ed. and tr. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
 21

ego is based on the illusory functioning of the imagination.

This is seen especially in the case of the mirror image. At

the age of six months, a child ceases being merely amused by

his mirror image and comes to identify with it. "We have only

to understand the mirror stage as an identification," says

Lacan, "in the full sense that analysis gives to the tenn:

namely, the transfonnation that takes place in the subj ect

when he assumes an image" (ibid., p. 2). By identifying with

the image, the child is enabled to become aware of himself as

seen by others, and ultimately to prepare himself for social

existence. But the externalization of self characteristic of

the mirror stage also establishes a division within the self

that the child never manages to overcome. Lacan writes:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust

is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation
--and which manufactures for the subject, caught up
in the lure of spatial identification, the
succession of phantasies that extends from a
fragmented body-image to a fonn of its totality
that I shall call orthopaedic--and, lastly, to the
assumption of the annour of an alienating identity,
which will mark with its rigid structure the
subject's entire mental development. (Ibid., p. 4)
By identifying with the image in the mirror, the subj ect

comes to witness his subjectivity in external fonn. But in

the process of this identification there is a split between

the new spectral identity and the immediacy of the will--a

split that the subj ect will never overcome. It is on the

basis of this split, and the subject's living by virtue of

 22

such fantasies, that neurosis is made possible (ibid., p. 6-

7) •

Psychoanalysis, however, need not be so pessimistic

about the human condition, nor need it be restricted to an

analysis of the various ways that the unconscious masks the

underlying drives of the human soul. A more positive

diagnosis was provided by Gaston Bachelard. He claimed that

along with the possibility of concealment, the images

emerging from the unconscious can also provide the source for
novel meanings. 22 He argued that there are essentially two

sides to an encounter with an image fram the unconscious. On

the side of the image, there is not an absolute sense content

or mental picture, but a salient quality that strikes the

soul and causes it to reverberate--what Jocelyn Lebrun

describes as "the inverse of a concept. ,,23 Bachelard explains

that the poetic image "is the dynamism of the sonorous life
itself which by engulfing and appropriating everything it

finds in its path, fills the slice of space, or better, the

slice of the world that it assigns itself by its movement,

making it reverberate, breathing into it its own life." 24 On

the side of the subj ect, the reverberations of the image

motivate the subject to respond to the image in an affective

22 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston:

Beacon, 1969), p. xi.
23 Jocelyn Lebrun, "Pour une phenomenologie de l' imagination
poetique," Archives de Philosophie 51 (1988), p. 199; Bachelard, The
poetics of Space, p. xv.
24 Bachelard, ibid., p. xiii.
 23

way, so that the archetypal image establishes a particular

meaning that the subject articulates and expresses in works

of art. Bachelard writes: "After the original reverberation,

we are able to experience resonances, sentimental

repercussions, reminders of our past. But the image has

touched the depths before it stirs the surface" (ibid., p.

xix). The imagination, then, assumes a psychological or

'material' function as a response to archetypal images (such

as the image of water, earth, air and fire). These images

bear a psychological significance that can be articulated in

art and poetry. The philosophy of the imagination, according

to Bache lard , must appeal to this material basis if it is not

to become a mere imagination of the surface (what he calls

the formal imagination) .25

With the rise of psychoanalysis came a rise in interest

in the effects of the unconscious on human existence. While

Freud and Lacan stressed the ability of the imagination to

conceal the truth about the unconscious and to create a

schism in self - identity, Bachelard focused on the role that

unconscious images can play in artistic creation and poetry.

D. Phenomenology

Another direction of philosophy that began with the

demise of the Modern subject is phenomenology. This movement

25 Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, edt and tr. Colette

Gaudin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. 37.
 24

has precedents in Medieval philosophy and the philosophy of

Franz Brentano, but was especially developed by Edmund
Husserl. While traditional philosophy has tended to base
knowledge on the relation between ideas in the mind and an
assumed order of reality, phenomenology focuses attention on
the relationship between consciousness and 'phenomena' (or
the way that things appear). To understand how we know about
objects, we must focus on how we intend their meaning. 26
An important step in a phenomenological study is what
Husserl called the reduction of practical concerns and
metaphysical assumptions (the 'natural attitude') to the way
that things appear to consciousness. The reduction implies
not a doubt concerning the existence of the world, but an
emphasis on its meaning for consciousness. By discarding a

concern for the 'existence' of the thing I phenomenology is

able to concentrate on how things appear as meaningful.
Husserl explains: "We do not abandon the natural thesis we
have adopted, we make no change in our conviction, ... we set
it as it were 'out of action', we 'disconnect it', 'bracket
it'" (98). The goal of phenomenology is to achieve a "pure
description" (160) of phenomena, untainted by theories and
unwarranted assumptions about reality.
Husserl found a prominent role for the imagination in
phenomenological analysis. The imagination can be used to

26 Husserl, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr.

W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 134-5 and 152-3.
 25

explore all of the possible meanings of an object and

synthesize them into a single essence. The imagination is

particularly helpful because it does not concern itself with

the question of the thing's 'existence' (for example, whether

the thing is 'real' or 'irreal'), but neutralizes such

concerns so that one can focus on the phenomenon itself. The

various "perspective variations" of a given perceptual

object, for instance, can be synthesized into an "intentional
unity.1I27 Thus the imagination resumes a prominent role in

phenomenological analysis, but rather than dealing with

actual mental images or representations of reality, it is

concerned with modes of consciousness and intended meanings.

Edward Casey's voluminous study on the imagination
departs from Husserl's analysis. 28 He adopts Husserl's claim

that the imagination must not be thought of exclusi vely in

tenns of the type of image or object involved but with

respect to the entire structure of consciousness and the

meaning of phenomena. 29 But Casey focuses less on the role of

27 Ibid., pp. 118 and 119. Thi s does not mean, however, tha t the
imagination synthesizes distinct images or that every aspect of an
object must be included in order to arrive at an intuition of the
essence. See p. 181.
28 Edward casey, Imagining; A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976).
29 In this way, Casey's work could be seen as similar to that of
Gilbert Ryle who claims that the imagination must be understood in terms
of the activity of the imaginer and not in terms of the object involved.
But while Ryle focuses on the activity of the mind involved in
imaglnlng, Casey and Husserl consider the entire structure of
consciousness and intended meaning. See Chapter Eight in The Concept of
Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949).
 26

the imagination in neutralizing the natural attitude and more

on its role as a form of fanciful thinking.

Casey lists a number of essential characteristics of the

imagination. First, imagination is completely spontaneous.

The imaginer can imagine freely without any restrictions and

is unable to fail in her activity. Thus the imagination is

claimed to be unlike perceptual experience, in which the

objects are opaque and appear with hidden sides and aspects.

The imaginer is limited only by logical impossibilities, and

by the need to develop the imagination by means of
education. 3D Second, imagination is self-contained. Imagined

images and situations are discontinuous with each other and

with perceptual experience, and appear upon a flat background

that conceals nothing about them. Unlike perceptual objects,

the image is given completely and cannot be explored or made

more determinate by further inquiry (like a perceptual

object). Casey argues that "being strictly depthless, an

imagined obj ect possesses no sides or surfaces other than

those which it expressly proffers within a given imaginative

presentation" (ibid., 92). Third, imagination is self-

evident, as there is no way to 'perfect' an image in the way

that one improves one's understanding of a perceptual object

(94-97). Fourth, the imagination also involves a "different

spatial and temporal system" (107) for the presentation,

30 Casey, Imagining, pp. 68, 73-5, 82, 83-6, 77.

 27

which consistently contains a degree of indeterminacy. Fifth,

the imagination is the faculty of exploring possibilities.

"Imagining," says Casey, "is entertaining oneself with what

is purely possible" (119) rather than with possibilities that

are to be applied to experience in the future. The

imagination is ultimately an expression of the ability of

consciousness to transcend the world of actuality and to

embrace the loftiest possibilities.

Perhaps the most radical example of a phenomenology of

the imagination is Jean-Paul Sartre's L'imaginaire. 31 Sartre

declared the essential nature of imagination as a negation of

reality. The image is not a thing but an action performed by

consciousness: "an image is a certain type of consciousness.

An image is an act, not some thing. An image is a

consciousness of some thing."32 The object of the imagination,

as well, is reduced to being a mode of consciousness: "it

does not exist in fact, it exists as image" (ibid., p. 3).

Sartre inaugurates what Alan White calls the "death of the

image"33 as a mental content and concentrates on the image as

an act of consciousness. To see the imagination as a mental

31 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imaginaire (paris: Gallimard, 1948);

translated as The Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Citadel
Press, 1965). See also Sartre's earlier L'imagination (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1936); translated by Forrest Williams as
Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972). The earlier
work provides Sartre's criticisms of other authors, while the later work
presents his own views.
32 Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination, p. 146.
33 Alan White uses this phrase to refer to the imagination theory of
Sartre, Ryle and others in The Language of Imagination (Cambridge: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), Section B.
 28

content is to perfor:m what Sartre called the "illusion of

inunanencej 1134 we must rather understand the image as an act of

consciousness.
What makes Sartre' s phenomenology particularly radical,
however, is the extent to which it identifies the imagination
with consciousness and freedom. All other modes of
consciousness, such as thought and perception, are restricted
by the way that reality presents itself to consciousness. One
cannot alter one's perception at will, for example, but must
see a perceptual object within a particular perspective. The
imagination negates such restrictions to establish a world of
its own making. The imaginer makes the object of a perception
subject to her own desire, by negating the original
structures of perceptual consciousness and creating by fiat
her own fanciful world. Merleau-ponty comments on this aspect
of Sartre's theory: "The imaginary," he writes, is for Sartre
a "negation of negation, an order in which nihilation is

applied to itself" (VI 266/VIF 320). perceptual consciousness

is a negation of reality's opaqueness and transcendence in
the sense that it imposes a meaning onto experience. The
imagination, by contrast, negates the negation of perceptual
consciousness by creating its own meaning and its own world
of objects. Imagination, then, is the ultimate expression of
consciousness as a total negation of reality. Sartre writes:

34 Sartre, ibid., p. 5.
 29

II Consciousness is act, and everything that exis ts in

consciousness exists enacted Either spontaneity is

activity through and through, and consequently transparent to

itself, or there is no such thing. 1135 The imagination for

Sartre is the ultimate expression of human existence as

consciousness and as freedom to negate reality.36

In the philosophy of Sartre, the imagination loses its

mimetic function and becomes identified with human freedom.

He stresses the imagination as a mode of human existence that

negates reality and allows for the creation of personal

meaning. The latter is obtained at the expense of the role of

the imagination as a creator of images as well as its role in

perception. Culminating in the philosophy of Sartre, the

phenomenological imagination develops from the neutralization

of the natural attitude to the negation of reality and the

expression of freedom.

E. Hermeneutics and Postmodernism

From the tradition of phenomenology emerged a new

concern for the mediation of experience. No longer concerned

for the individual thinking subject, nor for attaining some

35 Ibid., pp. 31 and 110.

36 For a more comprehensive exposition of Sartre's views concerning
consciousness and reality, see Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes
(New York: Washington Square, 1956), pp. 3-32. Sartre develops his more
famous concept of nothingness out of his earlier interest in the
imagination. For a good analysis of this progression, see Anthony
Manser, Sartre: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1966) .
 30

sense of imnediate intuition of reality, many philosophers

influenced by Husserl, Sartre and others began to focus on

the role of language in the interpretation of reality. This

change in focus was no doubt influenced by Martin Heidegger's

Being and Time, where he claimed that the analysis of human

existence "is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification

of this word where it designates this business of

interpreting. ,,37 The indi vidual thinker, in other words, is

always in a process of interpreting his being in terms of

language and the world around him. With Heidegger,

transcendental phenomenology gives way to hermeneutic
phenomenology. 38
Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology was further
developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. While

Gadamer played a crucial role in establishing hermeneutics as

a distinct philosophical discipline and wrote extensively on

its relation to aesthetics and history, Ricoeur applied

hermeneutics first to psychoanalysis and language and later

to social and political thought. Both saw language and

history as essential media for the understanding of self and

37 M
, ar t '~n H el'deg?er, Be~ng
'
and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward
~~blnson (San FranClSCo: Harper Collins, 1962), p. 62 (H 37).
The history of hermeneutics, however, goes well beyond Heidegger
For a gO~d account, of the history of hermeneutics, see Jean GrOndin~
Introduct~on t? Ph~losophical Hermeneutics, tr. Joel Weinsheimer (N w
Haven: Yale Un~vers~ty Press, 1994). e
 31

world. In Gadamer's famous words, " Being tha t can be

understood is language. ,,39

What is unique about Ricoeurts hermeneutics is the

extent to which he develops a philosophy of the imagination.

Ricoeur claims that the imagination should not be thought of

in terms of a mental faculty that manipulates images, but as

the ability of human beings to forge their experiences into

meaningful narratives that can be preserved and shared with

others. The primary material for the imagination, then, is

not mental images but linguistic structures. Our images, in

other words, are spoken before they are seen. 40 Echoing

Gadamerts phrase, Gary Madison explains this idea by saying,

"Being that can be imagined is language. 1141

This position is seen in Ricoeur's critique of Sartre.

He argues that Sartre does not see the difference between the

function of the imagination in representing a real obj ect

when it is absent and in producing a new narrative that
reflects nothing I real' or 'pre- existing' at all. 42 When an

author writes a novel, he is not referring to a real

situation in an timaginative' way but is creating a new world

39 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd. Revised Edition, tr.

Joel Weinsheimer (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 474.
40 Paul Ricoeur, "Imagination in Discourse and Action" in From Text
to Action, tr. Kathleen Blarney and John Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1991), p. 171.
41 Gary Madison, The Hermeneutics of postmodernity (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 183.
42 Ricoeur, "Sartre and Ryle on the Imagination" in The Philosophy of
Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, tr. R. Bradley Deford (La
Salle: Open Court, 1981), pp. 169-73.
 32

that did not pre-exist the novel. A theory of the imagination

must take into account its ability to create new meanings

within the medium of language and not simply focus on its

ability to negate reality.43

The forging of new meanings is made possible by means of

metaphor. This literary device, long regarded by linguists as

a mere ornamentation of language, is for Ricoeur the

generator of novel meaning. The metaphor allows for the

clashing of two disparate semantic fields so that a new

interpretation of a gi ven situation is made possible. The

metaphor 'man is a wolf', for instance, forces one to think

the two terms, originally held apart, as if they were the

same. 44 Thi s double- take on the meaning of the words, tha t

they are and are not the same, causes one to think about each

term in a new way. In this case, one comes to see the wild

nature of man that is brought out by a comparison to the

wolf. Without the metaphor, 'man is a wolf', one would never

43 Thomas Busch provides a good commentary on the relation between

Sartre and Ricoeur in "Sartre and Ricoeur on Imagination, II American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1997), pp. 507-18. He agrees with
Ricoeur that Sartre's earlier writings suggest a theory of the
imagination that does not take into account the role of the imagination
in producing narratives. But Busch observes that Sartre started to
change his view concerning the role of language as a medium for
expression, and that throughout his career Sartre saw the imagination as
useful in the creation of positive social relations. He writes:
"Ricoeur's critique of Sartre's views on imagination neglects the
positive place imagination comes to occupy in authentic life for Sartre"
(516). See also pp. 510-13.
44 Ricoeur, Henneneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and tr. John
Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 169-70 and
190.
 33

have been able to articulate this meaning. 45 A metaphor, then,

is not merely a comparison of two fixed meanings but the

development of a novel meaning within the medium of language.

The power of metaphor is essentially the productive

power of the imagination. "The imagination," writes Ricoeur,

II is this competence, this capacity for producing new logical

kinds by means of predicative assimilation and for producing

them in spite of ... and thanks to ... the initial difference

between the terms which resist assimilation. ,,46 It is the

imagination that allows for the assimilation of two terms

and, at the moment of their fusion, to forge new meanings.

This suggests a new turn in the theory of imagination. Gary

Madison writes: "Taking the metaphor as our model, we could

therefore say that the essential business of the imagination

(the imagination as it functions in all creative endeavours)

is to bring together disparate semantic or Semiological

fields, the net effect of this bisociative act ... being to

alter the way we think of, categorize, interpret things. ,,47

The metaphor as developed by Ricoeur becomes a

hyperreality in the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard and

the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. While Ricoeur's

metaphor continues to disclose a world to which it refers,

45 Except, perhaps, by a similar metaphor, for example the metaphor

'man is a bear'. The example, 'man is a wolf,' is from Gary Madison, The
Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, p. 189.
46 Ricoeur, "On Interpretation," Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan
Montefiore, tr. Kathleen McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p. 184.
47 Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, p. 189.
 34

the postmodern image drops the function of reference

altogether. This is particularly seen in Derrida's concept of

differance, a French word used by Derrida to suggest a

linguistic device which defers referentiality in the very

moment of assuming a difference between two referents. This

makes the very operation of referring self-divisive, leaving

the function of reference deferred indefinitely. "The verb

'to differ' seems to differ from itself," he writes. "On the

one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality,

or discernibilitYi on the other, it expresses the

interposition of delay. 1148 The essential metaphoricity or

linguisticality of the imagination, then, becomes a limitless

play of signifiers that refer only to one another's

referring, annulling the traditional mimetic function of the

image. The imagination operates as if upon a "bottomless

chessboard where being is set in play" (154).

Derrida provides an illustration of differance in his
comments on Stephane Mallanne's work, Mimique. Mallanne is
writing about a perfonnance by Paul Margueritte of Pierrot

Murderer of His Wife. 49 Derrida writes: "At once page and

quill, Pierrot is both passive and active, matter and fonn,

the author, the means, and the raw material of his mimodrama"

(ibid., p. 198). The mime's art relies on the possibility of

48 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on

Husser1 's Theory of Signs, tr. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), p. 129.
49 A section of Mallarme's text is quoted in Derrida's Dissemination,
tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p.175.
 - - - - - - ._-

35

reference, whether it be a murder, a particular character, or

a general situation. But not only is the reference fictional,

as Ricoeur would say; it ultimately gets lost in the charade

of doubling. The scene is Pierrot (a fictional character)

reenacting the murder of his wife (which never actually

happened) by pretending to be his wife (198-202). The actual

mime, Margueritte, is not actually pierrot, and Pierrot is

acting out an event that is not happening and did not ever

happen, and yet has already happened hundreds of times in

theatres around the world. The mime, as described by Derrida,

is a good example of the postmodern image that loses its

sense of reference in the very act of referring. 50

The progression from the image as referring to the image

as deferring is detailed in Baudrillard's Simulations,5~ where

he traces three stages in this transition of the image. In

the first stage, the image is seen as a counterfeit or copy

of an original reality, such as one finds in Plato's

Republ i c . 52 Second, the image, engaged in incessant

production, loses the original reference but continues to

50 See, for instance, p. 211, where he writes: "The referent is lifted,

but the reference remains: what is left is only the writing of dreams, a
fiction that is not imaginary, mimicry without imitation, without
verisimilitude, without truth or falsity, a miming of appearance without
concealed reality, without any world behind it, and hence without
appearance: 'false appearance'."
51 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and
Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext{e) , 1983). For the different
stages of simulacra, see pp. 11-12 and 83; the first two stages of the
four at pp. 11-12 are conflated at p. 83.
52 Plato, Republic, tr. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992),
509d-511e.
 36

operate 'as if' it signifies something. An example of this is

the ethnologist I s attempt to preserve a primitive culture.

What is important to him is not so much that the culture

survives as that the public curiosity concerning that culture

survives. 53 Finally, the reference is dropped altogether for a

realm of incessant doubling with no beginning or end- -the

stage of simulacra.~ At this stage the image loses its

centrifugal referentiality and implodes on itself and its

play of simulation (ibid., p. 57). The difference between

image and reality, so important for establishing reference,

is called into question. liThe very definition of the real

becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent

reproduction At the limit of this process of

reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced,

but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal"

(146) .

Starting from the hermeneutic phenomenology of Ricoeur,

the philosophy of the imagination has come to be understood

primarily as a function of production. For Ricoeur, this

production involved the creation of narrative forms and

53 Another example that Baudrillard uses is Watergate, in which it is

not so much the truth that mattered to the public as the appearance of
truth; see pp. 13-23 and 26-30.
54 This stage is illustrated by a simulated bank robbery. The police
cannot accept such a simulation, for it undermines the law, so they turn
the simulation into a crime such as disturbing the peace. Baudrillard
writes: "Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only
contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more
dangerous, however, since it always suggests, over and above its object,
that law and order might really be nothing more than a simulation" (38).
 37

metaphors that reveal novel meanings. But in postmodern

philosophy this production becomes an end in itself and drops

all reference to reality. The image becomes the primary

vehicle for an exchange of infonnation that bears only a

semblance of novelty and reference. It is as if the image

were infinitely reflected in a labyrinth of mirrors,

undermining its ability to refer and to trace its origin. 55

We have been examining the general themes of perception,

elemental images, fanciful thinking and aesthetic production

in relation to Western philosophy. Modern philosophy stressed

the imagination's role in perception, but found it to be a

psychological mystery. The Romantics found this mysterious

power to be a source of inspiration and artistic truth,

decentering the Modern concern for perception and scientific

knowledge for an interest in aesthetic production. The

development of psychoanalysis conceived the imagination as

the ability of the unconscious to conceal unsatisfied drives.
Lacan shows how the imagination causes a radical schism

between the inner drives of the self and its external

identity. We can see here both the imagination's ability to

act in a fanciful manner and its ability to contribute to the

development of self - identi ty. Bachelard finds in elemental

images a rich source of inspiration for the production of

55 The image of the labyrinth of mirrors is from Kearney, The Wake of

the Imagination, p. 31.
 38

poetry. With Husserl, the imagination remains essential for

the discernment of essences, but this importance gets

overshadowed by an emphasis on fanciful thinking in the

imagination theories of Casey and Sartre. Both see the

imagination as a moment of freedom in which consciousness can

entertain a number of possibilities for action and can

ultimately change its environment. Finally, we found in the

hermeneutics of Ricoeur the imagination as a producer of

narrative forms and novel meanings. With Derrida and

Baudrillard, this production takes on a life of its own,

collapsing the difference between fiction and reality and

eliminating the possibility of unmediated perception.

We have seen the imagination described as having at

least four different functions: (i) synthesizing perceptual

experience, (ii) interpreting elemental images, (iii)

fanciful thinking, and (iv) aesthetic production. In the next
chapter, these different functions will be examined in some

depth with explicit regard to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy.

 CHAPTER THREE: IMAGINING

A. Introduction

On hot summer days, my family and I would pack a lunch

and head for Cap Lumiere- -a stretch of land extending out

into the New Brunswick side of the Northumberland Strait.

Lining the cape is a long stretch of beach with white sand

that slopes gracefully into the ocean. The waves crashing

into the shore keep perfect time, a basso continuo

interrupted by the occasional sound of a gull's cry. The sand

is soft to the touch, scorching hot to bare feet from the

baking sun overhead. In the shallow water, the colour of the

sand at the bottom is blurred by the murky substance which

reflects the sunlight, sparkling like crystal on the surface.

The waves caress my feet as I walk along the shore, like the

tentacles of an octopus luring me back to sea.

What's in an image? This water, rubbing up and down my
ankles, this hot, white sand, soft and soothing as it

trickles through my fingers, this air, bright blue and

infinite in expanse, salty and with a touch of seaweed to

taste and smell, this searing orb of yellowish light that

infuses the rest with energy and warmth. Are these images
simple qualia, bits of absolute data, that I receive

instantly like the infonna.tion transmitted through a

telephone wire or across the internet?

39
 40

If we continue to explore the seashore, we realize that

these images contain more than simply information for mental

processing. The water soothes me, cools my body from the

scorching heat, and recalls my pre-natal ocean in the womb.

The sand provides a natural cushion for my body, reminds me

of Adam's creation out of dust and of the soil that nourishes

the sea grass and flowers. The air betrays an infinite

distance, symbolizing both the infinite possibility for

motion in space and the infinite time that it has taken for

the sunlight to approach me. The light is a source of heat

and energy, bringing the entire scene to life by replenishing

the sea grass and inaugurating an endless play of reflections

on the water's surface. All four, the water that perpetually
cascades over the horizon (however close to the horizon I

travel), the innumerable grains of sand, the infinite expanse

of the air, and the distance traversed by the sun's beams,

provide me with my first sense of eternity and infinity,
while reminding me of my inescapable finitude.
These seashore images--of water, earth, air and fire--

also reveal a natural communication. The air is full of the

smell and taste of the water's saltiness, the water reveals

the texture of the soft furrows of sand at the bottom. The

sand's white colour and heat betray the working of the sun.
In the heat, each image melts and blurs into the other to

form a single synaesthetic experience of the basic elements.

 41

At the seashore a child receives his first lessons in

chemistry, thermodynamics and the physics of light.

The image is a central theme throughout Merleau-Ponty's

work. From his early writings on the stirrings of filings in

the field of a magnet to his later writings on the grand

transitions of culture and history, Merleau-Ponty finds a

dynamic interplay of images upon a background, of form and

structure being created out of chaos. Images are the handles

upon reality that allow us to invest it with meaning, to

sculpt within the flesh of the world a path for our movement,
to erect upon its surface the products of culture. Philosophy

must unfold the significance of the image, of the medium of

exchange between consciousness and world, in order to

establish itself as a science of experience.

B. Perceptual Imagining

Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by vision. Claude Lefort

has argued that his entire philosophy is a philosophy of

vision. It is also Lefort who reports that, at the time of
Merleau-Ponty's untimely death, a book was found open at his

desk, one that he had discussed several times throughout his

career and seems to have been still thinking about up until

the end of his life--Descartes' Dioptrique. 56 From the

initiation of his phenomenology in The Structure of Behavior

56 Claude Lefort, Sur une colonne absente: Ecrits autour de Merleau-

ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 140.
 42

to the unfinished manuscript of The Visible and the

Invisible, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy was centered around the

question of perception and, in particular, the aporia that

have arisen in the philosophy of vision.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception must be

understood as a blend of Husserlian phenomenology and Gestalt

psychology. From Husserl, Merleau - Ponty adopted the concept

of the 'lifeworld' (Lebenswel t) , while from Gestalt

psychology he adopted the concept of a gestalt as a single

structure consisting of a figure on a background.

Later in his career, Husserl began to see that a
philosophy of consciousness could no longer simply take stock
of how consciousness discloses meaning, but must also take
account of its historical and cultural background- -what he
called the lifeworld. Even the most objective science, writes

Husserl, "is a human spiritual accomplishment which

presupposes as its point of departure, both historically and
f or each new student, the intui ti ve surrounding world of
life, pre-given as existing for all in common."57 Every act of
understanding, as a mode of human existence, occurs within a
context that we do not completely understand. In Merleau-
Ponty's words, the lifeworld is lithe natural setting of, and
field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions"
(PP xijPPF v). And like Husserl, Merleau - ponty claims that

57 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology, ed. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University press,
1970), p. 121.
 43

phenomenology is the study of "phenomena" via "an inventory

of consciousness as milieu of the universe" (SB 199/SBF 215).

But because of the prominence of the lifeworld, this science

is never totally accomplished. Reflection is a secondary

experience, grounded in an original sense of insertion into a

world over which we have only limited control. 58

From the Gestalt psychologists, Merleau - Ponty came to

understand the basic structure of perception. Whenever we are

able to focus on a part icular obj ect, say, a white cup, it

appears upon a background, such as the table, the cafe, and

the streets of Paris outside. If I change my focus to the

table or the cafe, the cup becomes blurred and indeterminate,

and becomes part of the background. All perceptual experience

occurs in this fashion, as well as every other kind of

experience. Even the work of the mathematician occurs within

a context of problem-solving and within a community of

scholars that is never completely understood (prP 32-3/PrPF

83 - 5) • For Merleau-ponty, this suggests a special

relationship not only between the perceiver and her world,

58 Merleau-Ponty explains reflection in the following way:
"Reflection never lifts itself out of any situation, nor does the
analysis of perception do away with the fact of perception, the thisness
of the percept or the inherence of perceptual consciousness in some
temporality and some locality. Reflection is not absolutely transparent
for itself, it is always given to itself in an experience, ... it always
springs up without itself knowing whence it springs and offers itself to
me as a gift of nature" (PP 42-3/PPF 53). But reflection is not
superfluous. He writes: "this unreflective experience is known to us
only after reflection" (ibid.). He explains: "Experience anticipates a
philosophy and philosophy is merely an elucidated experience" (PP 63/PPF
77). The ground of philosophy is the lifeworld which provides an
"ambiguous domain" of meanings. Reflection "transforms the phenomenal
field into a transcendental one" (ibid.).
 44

but between the objects themselves as they are united within

a particular gestalt. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-

Panty explains that there is an image that unites the entire

structure of the reflex (SB 23 and 51/SBF 22 and 54). The

reflex cannot be understood in terms of Single forces, but as

an irreducible context of stimulus and response. The image is

the total structure of significance that makes the reaction

to a stimulus possible. And this is all understood on the

basis of the model of a figure on a background, which

Merleau-Ponty borrows from Gestalt psychology.59

Merleau - Panty elaborates on this idea by showing that

any bit of sense information can have a meaning only as a

"figure on a background" (PP 4/PPF 10) and not as a simple

and indubitable piece of knowledge. The background, in turn,

can cause our experience to vary, so that there are no

absolutes in sense experience. Gray on a black background,

for instance, reinforces the colour of the background, while

the same gray on a gray background is made to look darker. A

ring of gray on a yellow background appears blue (SB 80-1/SBF

89-90). In each of these cases, the colour that is actually

59 In The Structure of Behavior and the introduction to Phenomenology

of Perception, Merleau-ponty argues that both empiricism, which
attempted to explain perception in terms of empirical events, and
intellectualism, which attempted to explain perception in terms of a
judgment of the mind, are flawed in not accounting for how, on the one
hand, an empirical event could be said to unify experience and, on the
other hand, how a judgment could relate to sensation. Gestalt
psychology avoids this problems by focusing on the totality or form of
an experience that is neither made up of individual units nor imposed by
the mind (SB 7-128/SBF 6-138; PP 3-12, 26-3S/PPF 9-19, 34-45).
 45

seen is affected by its context rather than reflective of an

absolute shade. To determine the true shade would require

understanding the relation of the colour to its background.

That background, as well, does not assume a determinate shade

but "tends toward neutrality" (SB 82/SBF 91). The moment that

we focus on the colour of the background, we see not a

'blackness' or 'grayness' upon which other colours stand out,

but a new figure with a new background behind it (a gray

'area', for instance, whose colour fades into neutrality on

the fringes). Each time that we focus on the colour of the

background, it comes forward as the figure of our experience
and another background emerges to take its place (PP 5-6/PPF

11-12). Sense experience always involves a background that

can never be broken down to absolute and irreducible

impressions.

We can especially see the contextual nature of sense

experience in the education of colour perception. Children
learn to distinguish colours not by identifying absolute
shades but by a gradual process of differentiating colours,

beginning with very general categories until they arrive at

the spectrum that adults usually use (PP 29-30, 175-6/PPF 38,
204-5). In the reverse case, colour awareness is lost not by

losing the ability to see particular shades but by a gradual

blurring of colours until there is only a single nondescript

 46

hue. 6o A colour is not an absolute shade but bears a meaning

in terms of its difference from other colours. Blue, in the

spectrum, is 'literally' a shade 'between' all of the others,

a 'place' allotted to it by us wi thin the general colour
spectrum. 6 l.

Colour is a differential field in which colours are

meaningful in terms of their differences from each other.

Red, for example, bears a certain relation to green (as more

bright and arresting) that is slightly different again from

blue and gray (as even more bright and arresting). These

relations do not hold between absolute shades, as can be seen

in cases where the interpreted colour is not the same as the

actual shade. A white object in the shade will be experienced

as white despite its 'absolute' shade of gray. When the

artist uses gray to depict this speck of white, we

immediately translate it into white (such as the shades used

to depict white in impressionism). Blue paper in gaslight and

brown paper in daylight are in fact the same shade, as

indicated by a photometer, but they are seen by us in their

60 Merleau-Ponty also explains the contextual nature of perception in

terms of tactile experience. A prick on the skin is distinguishable only
in relation to other moments in which the point of skin is not being
pricked. If we repeatedly prick the same spot, we will eventually fail
to sense a prick and will rather have a burning sensation (PP 74-5/PPF
88-90). Rudolph Arnheim explains that we need to have an experience of
difference (between the prick and other moments of rest) in order to
have sensation at all. See Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969), p. 20.
61 Even standardized colours make sense only on the background of a
field, with a standardized colour and level of lighting. Merleau-Ponty
compares standardized colour with surface colour (PP 306/PPF 353) .
 47

natural shades (PP 307/PPF 353). A colour, then, cannot be

identical to absolute shades or physiological information,

but is the nucleus of a series of relations to other colours,

and a particular way of differentiating the colour field.

The perceptual gestalt, so far, has been shown to

provide a general sense to a given experience. It must not,

however, be taken to be an objective unity. The

differentiation of colours in a particular context (the gray

circle appearing blue on a yellow background, for instance)

is not due to causal relations within that particular whole,

so that if the context were to be repeated, similar results

would follow as a matter of course. 62 Merleau - Ponty argues

that the context carmot be broken down in an objective,

causal way. One context, set up by Muller-Lyer, involves two

line~ of equal length that are made to look as if they are

unequal. 63 When asked whether or not the lines are equal,

62 Merleau-Ponty's criticism at this point is mostly directed at

Gestalt psychologists. Though they contributed to the study of
perception by emphasizing the context or form over absolute bits of
sensory information, many of them still explained the relation of parts
to the whole in a causal way (so that the whole distributed its parts in
causal ways). In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-ponty explains that
these forms are not 'objective' and existing in the external world.
"Form is not an element of the world but a limit toward which physical
knowledge tends and which it itself defines ... Thus form is not a
physical reality, but an object of perception; without it physical
science would have no meaning" (SB 142, 143/SBF 153, 155). The form is a
limit of our knowledge of an object, and thus is affected by how we
experience it. But the form is also not purely subjective: form and
structure are "two dialectical moments and not two powers of being" (SB
142/SBF 153). They are both abstract terms of a single phenomenon in
which the subject and objects are inevitably interrelated. See PP 49/PPF
61 and PrP 23-4/prPF 63; see also Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-
Ponty, pp. 4 and 14-15.
63 The first line has reversed arrowheads at each end so that the
tails of the arrowheads form a Y at each end, while the second line has
 48

Merleau-Ponty responds that "it is only in the objective

world that this question arises" (PP 6jPPF 12). Usually, we

do not resort to an objective background to make sense of the

world, but rather to one of "an indeterminate vision" (ibid.)

in which obj ects appear in an ambiguous fashion. 64 We treat

each line in its own universe, as an "equivocal" or

"expressive" (ibid.) meaning, such as a simple design drawn

in the sand or a sign along the road (perhaps for an upcoming

bridge, or a fork in the road). It is only when we set out to

measure the two lines that a determinate relation between

them exists. In each case, the meaning of the lines "is not
so much copied as constituted. 1165 This suggests that lithe

perceived, by its nature, admits of the ambiguous" (PP IljPPF

18). The relation of the form of perception to individual

sensations cannot be interpreted in a purely objective way.

The ambiguity of perception is especially shown in the

experience of foreshadowing. We perceive an arc not by adding

together the points on its circumference but within a general

perceptual Gestalt in which each point implies the overall

arrowheads on each end in the normal fashion. The effect is that the
first line looks longer, even though they are of equal length (PP 6/PPF
12} •
64 Merleau-Ponty describes the usual context for seeing things as
"that strange zone in which contradictory notions jostle each other"
(ibid.) i in the case of the MUller-Lyer's lines, the notions are
equality and inequality.
65 PP 9/PPF 16. "Constituted" is my translation of Merleau-Ponty's
"constitue," which Colin Smith translates as "composed". I retain the
stronger meaning of the word to show that Merleau-Ponty is contrasting
empiricism with intellectualism (in which all meaning is understood to
be constituted by consciousness). Shortly after this section, Merleau-
Ponty turns the tables on intellectualism as well.
 49

shape of the arc (PP 14-17/PPF 21-5). Concerning perceptual

obj ects , we observe their depth and volume in tenus of the

foreshadowing that occurs within their particular contexts.

We do not 'first' see a stone in the foliage, and 'later'

realize that it was a rabbit. At first we are unsatisfied

with the spectacle; it resists our focus, and draws us

towards it. As we approach the foliage, its original sense

begins to alter. The planes and surfaces that we could detect

from the lines and colours are at first blurry and confused,

but begin to fall into an identifiable pattern as we approach

the scene. Some fragments that originally belonged to the

background begin to emerge into the foreground and take on a

new meaning; what we thought was probably a twig behind the

blurry figure slowly blends with the figure itself until we

see that it is an ear.66 The appearance of the 'twig' was not

mistaken, for we could tell that it was blurry and demanded

further investigation. Along with all of the other elements
of the spectacle, this appearance foreshadowed the depth and

66 some other examples used by Merleau-Ponty are that of a ship' s

mast which, from a distance, looked like one of the tree trunks in the
background, and that of a hexagon camouflaged in a series of lines that
is more readily identifiable if we look at an isolated hexagon
immediately before looking at the hidden one (PP 17 -19/PPF 25 -7) .
Likewise, a recent experience with a ship or a rabbit would alter the
examples already mentioned (so that we would identify the object
faster). Some of these patterns of seeing are less arbitrary, such as
the pattern that we use to identify a face. When we see a face upside
down, we immediately recognize the distorted perspective without having
to explore it, as we do with the ship or rabbit (PP 19-20/PPF 27-8). See
also PP 50/PPF 61, where Merleau-Ponty writes: "One phenomenon releases
another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those
which link together in natural events, but by the meaning which it holds
out."
 50

structure of the overall object. Merleau-Ponty comments that

by "following up this hint, and stealing into the fonn of

existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought into

relation with an extenlal being" (PP 2l3/PPF 247). The

original spectacle presented itself to me as a "muddled

problem for my body to solve" (PP 214/PPF 248). In order to

grasp a perceptual object, we do not need to escape the flux

of sense information to synthesize it again in the world of

objective thoughti we need only follow up the "vague

beckoning" (ibid.) of each experienced quality until the
entire scene assumes a particular shape and clarity.

The perceptual gestalt introduces a function of the

imagination that is similar to the neutralizing role that it

plays in Husserl's phenomenology. Merleau - Ponty writes that

"we can elucidate this singular fact [of what something is]
only by varying it somewhat through the agency of

imagination, and then fastening our thought upon the

invariable element of this mental experience. 1167 By means of

the imagination, we are able to experience the obj ect as

transcending its particular appearance in a blending of
perspecti ves and possibilities. But the image is not the

product of human psychology. The imagination is not an

"anthropomorphic imagination dissimulated behind the

mechanism which we posit as an instrument of its power." 68 The

67 PP 63/PPF 76. See also PP xvii/PPF xii.

68 SB 4S/SBF 51. He is citing L. Lapicque.
 51

task of phenomenology "is to understand these strange

relationships which are woven between the parts of the

landscape, or between it and me as incarnate subject, and

through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a

whole scene or become the imago of a whole segment of life"

(PP 52/PPF 64). Phenomenology is a study of the 'image' as it

stands out from the background of embodied experience; the

phenomenologist must explore the "immanent meaning" (PP

49/PPF 61) of this structure, and not simply a meaning that

is intuited by consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty thus extends Husserl's phenomenology to a

philosophy of the perceptual gestalt. He proceeds to say that

all understanding is ultimately based on perception. "By

these words, the 'primacy of perception,' we mean that the

experience of perception is our presence at the moment when

things, truths, values are constituted for us; that
perception is a nascent logos i that it teaches us, outside
all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself;

that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action" (PrP

25/PrPF 67). Perception is the most basic contact of the body

with the world and forms a medium through which meaning is
established and discovered. My perception of the cup, or of

the waves at the seashore, occurs on a level that is below

explicit consciousness, and contains an irreducible
 52

background that I can never completely understand. 69 It also

contains an immanent meaning that I do not put there--the cup

lures me to explore its other side, or to peer inside; the
waves are already understood to be opaque and full of power. 70

What is basic are not meanings posited by consciousness but

Ita whole charged with immanent meaning, the structure,
the spontaneous arrangement of parts" (PP S8/PPF 70), that is
at work in the cafe or on the seashore, when I perceive an
object and become aware, through the imagination, of its
hidden aspects and meanings. There is an " , operative'
intentionality" (PP 418/PPF 478) that I discover and enact

rather than establish, that I embody rather than control.

Upon the structure of perception we posit a " 'faith' or
'primary opinion'" (PP 343/PPF 39S) in the world around us,
before we begin to think or to talk. 71 In order to understand
ourselves and our world, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we must
dig down to this layer of meaning like an archeologist (PrP
S/INF 403). The phenomenologist, explains John Bannan, "must

69 By thiS, Merleau-Ponty does not mean that perception is the

ultimate truth. "I have never claimed that perception (for example, the
seeing of colors or forms), in so far as it gives us access to the most
immediate properties of objects, has a monopoly on truth. What I mean to
say is that we find in perception a mode of access to the object which
is rediscovered at every level" (PrP 34/PrPF 87). Scientific knowledge
appears upon a background, and draws from perception. Merleau-ponty
describes it as being "cut from the earth (a ras de terre)" (PrP 35/PrPF
88) .
70 Merleau-Ponty stresses that these structures indicate "the natural
aspects of the world" (PrP 7/INF 405) and not a meaning posited by
consciousness.
71 Sam Mallin describes our relation to the perceptual world as a
'primitive contact'. Merleau-ponty's Philosophy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979), Chapter One.
 53

discover/ in short, how things and meanings emerge from our

general perceptual involvement in the world and take their

place around us. 1172

We see this theory of imaginative perception at work in

Merleau-Ponty's description of qualities. He describes the

quality red in the following way:

This red patch which I see on the carpet is red

only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it/
its quality is apparent only in relation to the
play of light upon it/ and hence as an element in a
spatial conf iguration. Moreover the colour can be
said to be there only if it occupies an area of a
certain size / too small an area not being
describable in these terms. Finally this red would
literally not be the same if it were not the
'woolly red' of a carpet. 73

Sense qualities do not appear as absolute bits of matter but

as particular configurations of an immanent/ bodily meaning.

Within the context of a particular perceptual gestalt, the

red is not seen primarily as a particular shade in a

spectrum, but as a unique opening to a world that I can

inhabit. Here/ the red is seen in the concept of carpet as a

soft support for my feet/ a place of potential passage/ an
absorbent material of rain from my shoes and of the sound of

approaching footsteps. OUtside of this particular situation,

the quality would cease to have its existential value and

72 Bannan, p. 59.
73 PP 4-5/PPF 10. See also PrP 5/INF 403: "[Slensory qualities are
not opaque, indivisible 'givens', which are simply exhibited to a remote
consciousness--a favorite idea of classical philosophy. We see too that
colors (each surrounded by an affective atmosphere which psychologists
have been able to study and define) are themselves different modalities
of our co-existence with the world."
 54

would became a flat hue, a shade in a spectrum. Qualities, in

the prior case, assume an "active" role in the establishment

of a meaning for the situation. A wheel lying flat on the

ground is perceived as having a different meaning than a

wheel bearing a load; an object can be found to be repulsive

even before associations between it and illness are

recognized. "Sense experience," says Merleau-Ponty, "invests

the quality with vital value, grasping it first in its

meaning for us, for that heavy mass which is our body" (PP
52/PPF 64). Far fram being mere shades in a spectrum,

colours, textures and smells are infused with meaning and

depth that condition the body in many ways.

The meaning of a particular quality, however, is not

restricted to the meaning offered by a particular situation.

Qualities also bear a universal value. The red of the carpet

recalls the red of the Russian Revolution, the red of blood,

the seductive red of a woman I S dress, or the colour of roof
tiles (VI 132/VIF 174). But the universality here is not an
absolute shade or a concept. Merleau-Ponty explains colour in

terms of the body, especially in terms of how a colour can

elicit particular responses from the body. Qualities contain

"a certain rhythm of existence" (PP 213/PPF 247), such as the

energizing effect of red or yellow, or the soothing effect

that the colour of the sky has on me as I lie on the beach.

Merleau-Ponty explains that "before my body synchronizes with
 55

it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning." He

continues:

As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set

over against it as an acosmic subj ect; I do not
possess it in thought, or spread out towards it
some idea of blue such as might reveal the secret
of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this
mystery, it 'thinks itself within me', I am the sky
itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as
it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is
saturated with this limitless blue. 74

Picasso is noted for having had a 'Blue Period I in his

career. In a similar way, staring up into the sky inaugurates

a blue period for us, a moment of repose, which becomes a

universal meaning of blue. We come to hear the waves in this

'blueness' as relaxing our thoughts, the smell of seaweed as

sweet perfume. Imagine the difference if we were in a boat,

under the same sky, but feeling queasy and cursing every

sound of the wave, every scent of salt and seaweed. Here we

are not concerned for qualities, but focused inward on our

own dizziness, clOSing off the blue of the sky. Qualities do
not, then, provide an immediate and absolute meaning, but

bear within themselves a whole universe to explore, if we

have the time and patience to explore it. 7s

74 PP 214/PPF 248. The passivity of the subject here is brought out

even stronger in the following quote: "The sensible gives back to me
what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first
place" (ibid.).
75 The meaning of the object is not subjective, however. Gary Madison
explains: "As an overflowing fullness the thing reveals to us the
existence of a depth of being which transcends us." The Phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty, p. 32.
 56

Qualities are also experienced as implying each other.

We saw earlier how the sun was implied by the touch and

colour of the sand. Cezanne has allegedly claimed to be able

to paint smells (SNS 15/SNSF 26). "Synaesthetic perception is

the rule," argues Merleau - Ponty . "For the stibj ect does not

say only that he has the sensation both of a sound and a

colour: it is the sound itself that he sees where colours are

fonned" (PP 229/PPF 265, 264). The whitecaps of the waves

contain the roar of the angry water, and the slightly

greenish hue betrays the smell of seaweed. We also understand

completely the texture of certain sounds- -the sharpness of

breaking glass, the hollowness of a sounding bell (PP 230/PPF

266). The intertwining of these different qualities is made

possible by means of the perceptual image, which offers up

its own logic and reveals a multi-sensory world.

It is also by means of a latent logic of synaesthesis

that we perceive an obj ect. The perceptual gestalt not only
exposes a particular quality of an object, but provides "a

way into the thing" (PP 305/PPF 352) as an "intersensory

entity" (PP 317/PPF 366). The thing is nan organism of

colours, smells I sounds and tactile appearances which

symbolize, modify and accord with each other according to the

laws of a real logic" (PP 38/PPF 48). This logic is not that

of an eternal fonn underlying a host of secondary qualities.

"The unity of the thing beyond all its fixed properties,"

argues Merleau-Ponty, "is not a substratum, a vacant X, an

 57

inherent subject, but that unique accent which is to be found

in each one of them, that unique manner of existing of which

they are a second order expression" (PP 319/PPF 368). This

'accent' is less a fonn than a "distinctive perceptual style"

(PP 39/PPF 49) which, like a style in nrusic, is developed

over time and which "disintegrates and refonns ceaselessly"

(PP 38/PPF 48). The identity of objects, then, is based on a

dynamic logic of synaesthesis that is never complete.

Sam Mallin offers a rigorous analysis of synaesthesis.

He observes that the difference between two colours, red and

green for instance, will show up more or less clearly

depending on whether the obj ects involved are lights

themsel ves, transparent, or opaque. For example, red and

green are distinguished to a high degree when they take the

form of traffic lights compared to red and green stained

glass or red and green carpet. Mallin claims that this can be

explained in a numerical fashion. The relation of clarity

between two colours, say red and green, will change slightly
(on a diminishing scale) from the colours of transparent
objects to those of opaque objects. But the difference

between red and green opaque objects in white light is still

clearer than the difference of red and green light sources in

another, less differentiated, light source (such as blue

light). Thus we can tell both the reflective quality of the

obj ect and the light source from the difference between two
 58

colours. 76 According to this interpretation, light sources,

glass and carpet are not I colour' qualities, although they

are represented by the very appearance of the colour. They

suggest, rather, a certain tactile quality of the object (in

terms of how they might resist or accommodate my touch) and

qualities of sound as well (how, well they might reflect or

absorb sound). All of this is indicated by the mere

appearance of colour. Wi thin a colour, the other media are

presented within a logic of lighting that synthesizes the

qualities into a single sensuous experience.

There are some problems with Mallin's analysis, however.

First, it is difficult to see how one might include other

senses such as smell and taste into this framework. Though it

may be easy to see that a reflective object is most likely

vitreous and thus brittle, it is difficult to see what

associations one could make between visual qualities and

smell or taste. Thus Cezanne's claim to be able to paint the

smell of a scene must be referring to something else. Second,
it is clear that Merleau-Ponty does not mean to suggest that

synaesthesis occurs by means of a positive sign in one sense

domain that refers to another sense domain. At one point,

Merleau-Ponty compares the inside and the outside of a glove

as not two sides that resemble one another, but as two

dimensions that encroach upon each other (VI 263/VIF 317).

76 Mallin, pp. 146-7.

 59

Likewise, the qualities of different senses need not resemble

each other, but only encroach upon and imply each other. A
colour, we have seen, is based on its difference from the

others, and not by means of a positive sign or a particular

intensity or quality of light. I come to learn colours not by

lining them up but by comparing how they differ from one

another, and how they each differentiate a general field of

colour. Likewise, each sensory field is understood in tenns

of the other precisely in how it differs from the others

within the common medium of sense experience. The juncture of

the two realms serves as "the pivot of a system of

equivalencies" (VI 205/VIF 258), and appears not as a

positive sign in each realm but as an abyssal opening to the

other field. Mallin's explanation of synaesthesis in terms of

the positive register of the other senses in a quality of

light is mistaken. Synaesthesis is rather the ability of

qualities to not appear, to serve as a dimension rather than
a positive sign. "It is that separation (ecart) first of
all," concludes Merleau-Ponty, "that is the perceptual

meaning" (VI 197/VIF 250).

The dimensionality of perceptual qualities as offered by
the perceptual gestalt is developed by Jacques Garelli in his

essay, "Voir ceci et voir selon," which roughly translated

means 'seeing that' and 'seeing by means of,.77 He argues that
77 JacquesGarelli, "Voir ceci et voir selan," Merleau-Ponty:
Phenomenologie et experiences, ed. Marc Richir and Etienne Tassin
(Grenoble: Jer6me Millon, 1992), pp. 79-99.
 60

in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception there is a

priori ty gi ven to perceptual obj ects as a means for seeing

rather than as something to see. He cites one of the working

notes from The Visible and the Invisible, where Merleau-Ponty

writes: IIPerception is not first a perception of things, but

a perception of elements (water, air ... ) of rays of the

world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I

slip on these 'elements' and here I am in the world, I slip

from the 'subjective' Being. 1178 As the title of Garelli's

essay suggests, the perceptual image is not something that I

look at as much as something that I see through, that enables

me to see, like a dimension or a ray of Being (Garelli,

ibid., pp. 87-88). Likewise, a perceptual object, also

occurring wi thin a perceptual gestalt, is not, as Renaud

Barbaras explains, lIin front of me, as an object that I can

exhaustively reveal, but around me; I do not perceive it, I

perceive by means of it. 1179 within the contextualization or

'dimensionality' of the perceptual gestalt, a quality and an

object are visible precisely because they themselves are

offered up as potential dimensions for perception. It is on
the basis of an interchange between the different qualities

and their respective fields that the perceptual image makes

synaesthesis possible.

78 VI 218/VIF 271. What Merleau-Ponty means by • element· will be

discussed later on in this chapter.
79 Barbaras, p. 279.
 61

The perceptual image has been shown to be a general

structure or gestalt within which the various sensuous
dimensions of our world coalesce into a single style or motif
of appearing. We usually do not notice this gestalt not
because it is not there, but because by means of it we are
enabled to engage with a particular aspect of the world. Thus
if we are to come to understand the nature of the perceptual
image, we must switch our focus to this margin. But the
swi tch in focus should not be towards an inner thought or
cognition, but towards the very qualities themselves which
alone provide for the interchange of dimensions and sensory
fields- -we must, to use an expression of Mikel Dufrenne,
alter our thinking so that it is "flush with the image." so The
perceptual image is the point of exchange between these
different dimensions, a lacuna of lacunae, the ultimate
dimensionality of Being. On the basis of the perceptual
image, Being is able to be differentiated along the fault
lines of a number of different sensual dimensions, held
together not by means of a positivistic sign system, as
suggested by Mallin, but by means of a chiasmatic and poly-

80 Mikel Dufrenne, In the Presence of the Sensuous, tr. Mark Roberts

and Dennis Gallagher (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), p.
29. Dufrenne describes qualities as possessing an affective a priori
significance for us. "What haunts subjectivity at its most secret point
is the images invested in it by Nature during its prehistory." By
"thinking flush with the image," we are able to tap into the "secret
plenitude" of these "vectors of psychic energy" (29).
 62

dimensional opening, what Martin Heidegger calls the

'Worldhood of the world,.81

We shall discuss this dimensionality further throughout

this and following chapters. It would help, for the moment,

to explore some of the other kinds of imagining so that we do

not risk reducing dimensionality to a single type of

imagining.

C. Aesthetic Imagining

In Merleau-ponty's later works, he expands the domain of

the image to the work of art. This image serves as an image

of the second order, a double of the image of perception.

This double is not a simple copy of nature, as Plato

suggested, but a re-enactment of the very genesiS of

perceptual images. In the paintings of Cezanne, for instance,

the lines demarcating the edges of solid objects seem to be

alive, to bear a physical meaning as weighty, as textured, as

bending around the object and disclosing its depth (SNS 14-

15/SNSF 25). The "flexuous line" (PrP 183/EMF 73) serves not

as a positive element in the painting, but disappears in the

spectacle of an object with weight and depth. The line is, in

a sense, invisible, and by means of its being invisible, an

object, the bowl of fruit, is made visible. What is

particularly important in this observation, claims Merleau-

81 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 91-95 (H 63-6) and 134-48 (H
101-13) •
 63

Ponty, is that the magic of the line is itself visible: we

can examine the line with our eyes, follow the transition of

colours and the build-up of paint that brings the line alive

and allows it to symbolize depth and texture. The power of

the work of art, the invisible ciphers of a particular

appearance, is made visible by the artist in the fonn of

lines and colours on a canvas.

The secret ciphers of the painting are interpretations

of similar ciphers that exist in ordinary perception. Before

we have an experience of commonly recognized objects, we are

in a whirl of qualities with depth and invisible functions

such as the line in Cezanne's painting. The artist is aware

of these "inward traces of vision" (PrP 165/EMF 24). Even the

light of day that illuminates ordinary objects "must have its

imaginaire" (PrP 178/EMF 59). Even ordinary perception taps

into the magic of vision that the artist manipulates. This is

because any quality can serve as a background for other
qualities. The black line, for instance, can serve as a

positive element in its own right, or can sink into the

background of a scene upon which another quality can serve as

figure. Merleau-Ponty explains:

Every visual something, as individual as it is,

functions also as a dimension, because it gives
itself as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What
this ultimately means is that the proper essence of
the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in
the strict sense, which it makes present as a
certain absence. (PrP 187/EMF 85)
 64

We see this especially in the case of light, where we can

treat a particular colour of light as a level (such as the

electric bulb in my office) or as an object (a yellowish orb)

upon the background of daylight (PP 311/PPF 359). This

duality of visibility and invisibility permeates all of

being. Every act of perception is an interpretation, an

exploration of the invisible depths of each quality, an

imagining of the infinite possibilities of a particular

opening onto a scene, a particular colour or texture.

To illustrate this, Merleau - Ponty quotes Andre Malraux

who recounts the story of an innkeeper at Cassis. The

innkeeper noticed Pierre Auguste Renoir painting next to the

ocean, and was surprised to discover that what Renoir was

painting was not the ocean but the brook in The Bathers. Why
would Renoir paint a brook by looking at the sea? Merleau-

Ponty explains; "Because each fragment of the world- -and in

particular the sea, sometimes riddled with eddies and ripples

and plumed with spray, sometimes massive and immobile in

itself--contains all sorts of shapes of being and, by the way

it has of joining the encounter with onels glance, evokes a

series of possible variants and teaches, over and beyond

itself, a general way of expressive being" (S 55-6/SF 70).

Renoir realized that the sea expresses the same general sense
of disclosing Being as the water in a brook- -that the same

invisibility of water as the background of a scene can be

found in any instance of water I but most especially in the

 65

rich and dynamic quali ties of a churning sea. Renoir's

experiment testifies to the fact that we do not perceive

qualities in a unilinear fashion, but as part of a dynamic

and interpretive interweaving of their invisible functioning

with their visibility in depth and texture. 82

Like the perceptual image, the aesthetic image acts as a

dimension for our experience, so that "it is more accurate to

say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see
it" (PrP 164/EMF 23). This reference clearly presents the

same sense of 'seeing by means of' as opposed to ' seeing

that' expressed by Garelli in relation to the perceptual

image. The artwork is less like a material object than a new

organ, like the blind man's stick that becomes an extension

of his ability to touch the world (S 52/SF 66). The aesthetic

object is a "visible of the second power" (PrP 164/EMF 22) ;

it subverts ordina:ry vision and reveals the creativity of

vision that the artist first practiced when she examined the
landscape and that the viewer is now able to witness and
explore.

An aesthetic image, like that of perception, provides a

"system of equivalences" (S 54/SF 68) which are understood

systematically only in terms of their differences from one

another, be they lines, colours, shapes, textures, or any

other visual element. Within such a system, the artist is

82 For a discussion concerning Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics, see The
Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen
Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
 66

able to externalize traces of her experience. The artwork

forms Ita blueprint for the genesis of things" (PrP 183/EMF
74), indicating within an amorphous and oneiric mass the
direction in which things generate themselves in ordinary
perception as a visual landscape in the making. The aesthetic
object provides clues as to the kinds of objects that are
emerging in the new visual landscape, like a pre-historic map
of Atlantis whose vague outline betrays the contours of
future continents. And since the painting is an
externalization of the artist's experience, the sum of
artworks could be understood as a general reservoir of
experiences, of dimensions or organs of vision that we can
share with others. 83
The work of art is a festival of vision, a feast for the
eyes, the making visible of what is not visible and will
never become visible: the motif of the scene expressed by the
artist. Since the artist must rely on the fragments of Being
that she encounters in the landscape, she is never completely
free in her expressive activity. But her art develops a
sensitivity to the appearing of Being and "awakens powers
dormant in the ordinary vision" (PrP 182/EMF 70), powers by
which she transcends habitual experience and returns to the
mysterious depths of potentially expressible Being.

83 The choice of the word 'organ' over 'lens' is deliberate, and

consistent with Merleau-Ponty's essays. A lens calls upon only the eye
to see, while an organ suggests the involvement of the entire body.
 67

P. Fanciful Imagining

In addition to treating the image as a perceptual

gestalt and as a work of art, Merleau-Ponty also explores the

image as a fanciful product of the mind. Especially in

several places in the Phenomenology of Perception, he

compares the image to dreams and hallucinations. His

preoccupation with this kind of image has led many scholars

to claim that in his earlier works, Merleau-Ponty identifies

his theory of imagination with that of Sartre, in which the

image is an act of consciousness against the world. He writes
that unlike a perceptual object that we must explore further,

the imagined object is given immediately and has no sense of

depth: "In the realm of the imagination, I have no sooner

formed the intention of seeing than I already believe that I

have seen. The imaginary has no depth, and does not respond

to our efforts to vary our points of view; it does not lend

itself to our observation." 84 Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty seems

to be stressing that the imagination is secondary to

perception, and is a negation of perception and the rules for

perceiving. To see the cup, I must adjust my position; to see

an object requires that I see it as having an unseen inner

side. The image, by contrast, is given all at once in its

totality, with nothing left behind or within it to teach us

something new about the world. And the image makes sense only

84 PP 323-4/PPF 374; the quote is even followed by a reference to

Sartre's L'imaginaire.
 68

in relation to a reality that has been negated and reduced to

a phantom. The image "always forms round a sensible nucleus I

however small, and it is in the sensible that its

verification and fullness are found. 1185 This has led many

scholars to assume that Merleau - ponty holds a Sartrean view

of the image in Phenomenology of Perception and The

Structure of Behavior, and changes his view in the later

works. 86

Such a view is too extreme. At the very least, the two

books contain a vacillation between a Sartrean conception of

the image and the view that I have been developing in this

chapter. For example, while at times Merleau-Ponty seems to

treat the imagination and perception as polar opposites (such
as at PP 35/PPF 44, where Merleau-Ponty says that perception

is "the antithesis of imagination"), at other times he claims

that they are simply different modes of presenting objects to

consciousness (such as SB 196/SBF 211-12). It is also unclear

how his statements about the imagination in relation to
Sartre are to conform with his other statements concerning

the 'image' of a scene and of Husserl' s eidetic variation.

There is no clear case in favour of the view that Merleau-

Ponty was a full-fledged Sartrean concerning the imagination;

it is rather more likely that Merleau-Ponty was over-

85 PP 293/PPF 359; see also PP 343/PPF 395, where he compares

imagining to hallucinating as grounded in perception.
86 Mazis, "La Chair et L 'imaginaire," pp. 30-42 and Dastur, p. 47.
 69

concerned with perception and the body, so that he made the

explicit connection between the body and imagination only

later.fJ7

But despite the lack of an explicit unity of these two

conceptions of the imagination, it is perfectly in keeping

with Merleau-Ponty's writings to say that he intended to

treat the imagination in a broader manner than Sartre. Even

the statement, above, that the imagination and perception are

opposed to each other could be taken to mean only that a kind

of imagination is so opposed to perception, namely, fanciful

thinking, which approximates a Sartrean negation of reality.

Other kinds of imagination, such as artistic creation and the

discovery of perceptual gestalts, are not opposed to

perception. Thus it seems that Merleau - ponty is suggesting

that the imagination is more than simply a negation of

reality.
Confusion occurs mostly when statements are taken out of
context, such as Merleau - ponty' s apparent priori ty given to

perception in saying that "our power to imagine ... borrows

from vision. ,,88 The fact that the imagination rests on

perception is as primary as the reciprocal claim that

perception requires the imagination in order to have the

structure that it does. Merleau-Ponty writes, with equal

87 In Chapter Five, it will be shown how Merleau-Ponty's

phenomenology of the body implies that the imagination plays a prominent
role in perception.
88 PrP 187/EMF 83-4. See also PP 296 and 424/PPF 342-3 and 485.
 70

conviction, that "our waking relations with objects and

others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of

principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams

are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the
cleavage between the real and the imaginary" (TFL 48/TFLF

69). Far from stressing the radical separation of imagination

from perception, Merleau-ponty stresses their mutual

dependence and implication. Without perception, the

imagination would have no possibilities to explore and

develop; without the imagination, perception would be flat,
with no depth and structure. 89 Thus while holding that

fanciful thinking is similar in many ways to how Sartre

describes the imagination, Merleau-Ponty continues to extend

it to the areas of artistic creation and ordinary perception.

The 'imago' is not only the product of free-thinking, but is

also, and more primarily, a product of perception and

aesthetic creation.
By looking at a few experiences in which perception and

imagination begin to blur, we can come to see the importance

of not separating them as radically as Sartre. Concerning the

importance of imagination in perception, for example, we have

the problem of perceptual error. One game that I would play

with my siblings while lying on the beach was to try to spot

89 Glen Mazis points out that "without the playing of the imaginary,
it is the perceptual which becomes thin, loses its possibilities for
sens" (ibid., p. 36). But he attributes this view of the imagination
only to Merleau-Ponty's later work.
 71

Prince Edward Island in the distance. On a clear day, you

could barely see a strip of bluish gray in the distance, but

it was always impossible to tell if we were really seeing the

island, or imagining it on the horizon. Between the water and

the sky we found, as children, a magic place where perception

and imagination became blurred and confused. Similar sea-side

illusions are quite common, from the appearance of ghost

ships to the humped backs of m;yt.hical sea monsters. These

perceptual illusions are real and inevitable, and disclose

the gaps in scientific conceptions of perception and

imagination. Children are quick to learn that such illusions

are nonsense, and to leave their experience behind for the

conventions of mathematical precision and nautical

calculation. "Of course Prince Edward Island is over therej I

can see it on the map!" But the question remains: was I

'seeing' the island, or imagining it? Did I confuse an image

for a percept?

Sartre would have to argue against the view that images

and percepts can be confused if imagination and perception

are radically separate modes of consciousness. He argues that

we never mistake perception for imagination, but at worst

only perceive vaguely, and mistake a particular strand of

blue to be land when in fact it is really a cloud. 9o He refers

90 Sartre writes: "To perceive a man where a tree stands is not to

form an image of a man, but merely to perceive a tree poorly. One
remains on the terrain of perception, and up to a point one perceives
rightly: there is indeed an object in the shadows, ten feet away. It is
indeed a thin body, slender, about six feet tall, etc. But the deception
 72

to an experiment in which a subject is shown a faint image of

a banana on a screen which appears blank, and is told to
imagine a banana. Sartre argues that there is no mistaking of
perception for imagination in this case, but does not
elaborate his point. Edward Casey adds that the subject could
be seen as imagining the obj ect in spi te of the image, so

that regardless of what is actually perceptible and appearing

on the screen, he is clearly in the act of imagining and not
perceiving. 91 Casey's suggestion seems to preserve the
difference between perceiving an image and imagining it.
Merleau-Ponty's theory of imagination, as developed
above, suggests that a radical difference between imagination
and perception is unnecessary. He admits that, in cases like
those mentioned above, there is no confusion of modes of
consciousness but a gradual development of a sense that is
immanent in the landscape. If I were to approach the mirage
by boat, either the cloud would dissipate and an island would
appear, or vice versa. 92 Though Sartre is correct in insisting

lay in the manner of grasping the import or meaning of the obj ect, "
Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p. 97.
91 Casey, Imagining, pp. 148-50; Sartre, The Psychology of
Imagination, p. 75.
92 Concerning a similar mistake of seeing a spot of light as a flat
stone, he writes: "I cannot say that I ever see the flat stone in the
sense in which I am to see, as I draw nearer, the patch of sunlight. The
flat stone, like all things at a distance, appears only in a field of
confused structure in which connections are not yet clearly articulated.
In this sense, the illusion, like the image, is not yet observable ...
I cannot unfold it before me by an exploratory action" (PP 296/PPF 343).
The flat stone, like the invisibility of the painting, is like a phantom
that exists only in the particular experience; when we attempt to see it
more clearly, it vanishes into the background and becomes the visible
stone.
 73

that we do not confuse imagination for perception, the above

case does not justify Sartre' s radical separation of them.
Edward Casey argues: "Combination or compromise [between
imagination and perception] is ruled out [by Sartre]: you
must choose either the real or the imaginary, never both. Yet

no such strictly exclusive choice operates in ongoing human

experience, which is often composed of a subtle mixture of
real and imaginal elements. ,,93 There is, no doubt, a

difference between perceiving the island out at sea and

daydreaming while lying on the beach. But there is no need to
radically separate them, like Sartre, and such a separation

goes against how we ordinarily experience the world. Merleau-

ponty is able to account for this difference while avoiding
the radical division of perception and imagination found in

Sartre's theory.
Another experience in which Sartre' s theory seems
extreme is the phenomenon of seeing a form with multiple
aspects, such as wittgenstein's duck-rabbit. 94 Sartre would be
required to say either that the imagination is at work and
there is no 'seeing', or that the interpretation is intrinsic
to the perception. 95 Due to the multiple meanings of a more

93 Casey, "Sartre on Imagination," The Philosophy of Jean-Paul

Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (La Salle: Open Court, 1981), p. 156.
This statement, however, seems to contradict Casey's claim that the
imagination and perception are radically separate modes of
consciousness.
94 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 194-97 and
213.
95 See, for instance, Sartre's discussion of seeing a face in the
fire, The Psychology of Imagination, pp. 49-52.
 74

polyvalent form, such as an inkblot, it becomes difficult to

believe that the imagination is not involved; but we seem to

detect the image immediately 'as' a duck, or 'as' a rabbit,

suggesting that it cannot be the result of fanciful thinking.

While Wittgenstein believed the case to be a unique blend of

perception and cognition, Warnock and Casey both see it as an

obvious instance of the imagination at work in perception. 96

On the surface, Merleau-Ponty sounds the same as Sartre,

stressing that a two-dimensional picture of a cube can be

seen as sitting on the ground or suspended from the ceiling

immediately. 97 But he never denies that the imagination is

aiding the perception, nor does his latent theory of

imagination force him to deny such a role for the

imagination. Again, Merleau-Ponty's theory of imagination is

less problematic and extreme than that of Sartre, allowing

the imagination a role in the interpretation of perceptual

experience.
While Sartre fares poorly in the above objections, it is
Casey who fares poorly when it comes to describing the

spatiality of a fanciful image. There is uncertainty

concerning Casey's radical separation of imagination from
depth and spatiality. Casey concedes that images are not

completely depthless, but have a "quasi-depth" (92) and a

96 Warnock argues: "All perception is seeing as," thus radicalizing

Wittgenstein's theory that only some perception is seeing as
(Imagination, p. 186); Casey also agrees that the imagination is
necessary for aspect seeing (Imagining, pp. 142-45).
97 PP 263/PPF 304; see also PP 17/PPF 24-5.
 75

pseudo-horizon or background; but he claims that this depth

"resists exploration, since it does not remain to be
explored" (92) . This is because "everything in the
presentation is in some sense apprehended since the

presentation itself is nothing beyond what it is apprehended

as being" (54). This margin or background is "unthematizable"
(53); "we imagine it through a kind of lateral or tandem

consciousness" (54). Casey, however, seems to beg the

question here. It is one thing to say that a fanciful image
contains I less I depth than a perceptual image, and even to
say that it is on the verge of being depthless, and another
thing to say that the fanciful image is completely depthless.
When I imagine the number of columns in the Parthenon, my

fanciful image fails to provide me with the opportunity for

exploration and verification that a perceptual experience

would provide. But perception, as we have seen above, is also

experienced laterally, and perpetually occurs upon a margin
of experience that we can never completely grasp. To see an
imaginative image as indeterminate is still similar to seeing
something on the margins, such as when I notice an
approaching automobile out of the corner of the eye in time
enough to escape collision. Lateral seeing suggests depth-
seeing, the possibility of exploration even if such

exploration will not produce an exhaustive report. Lateral

seeing also recalls aspect - seeing, since an element in the
imagined margin can become a theme for a new image. Contra
 76

Casey's claim, I can attempt to explore the margins of an

image, which provides it with a quasi-space that is,

nonetheless, a 'space' in some ways similar to that of

perception. This infusion of space into the image and dream

cannot be explained away as something that is immediately

given to consciousness, but that remains to be explored like

a perception. 98

It is interesting to note that Sartre, unlike Casey, is

very determined to give to the image a certain material or
content. Despite his bold statements concerning the image as

an act of consciousness, he also stresses the importance of a

material component to the image. "I have recourse to a

certain material which acts as an analogue, as an equivalent,

of the perception. "99 A photograph, for example, provides the

material for seeing my absent friend, and a mime the proper

gestural material for the creation of an image. The material

of the photograph, however, is negated, and operates as a
background for my friend's absence now made apparent to me.

"I really do see something, but what I see is nothing" (70).

The material for mental images is more difficult to
determine. It cannot be anything perceptual, and so must be

98 It is less cumbersome to say, with Merleau-ponty, that imagination

involves a different 'kind' of space than to argue that its space is a
'quasi' -space with no depth. In other wordS, while Casey radically
separates the imagination and perception in order to maintain a
particular notion of space, Merleau-Ponty allows space to assume a
variety of meanings for the imagination and perception which need not be
radically separated. Most likely Casey would hold a different view today
with his more recent works on spatiality. See PP 293/PPF 339.
99 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p. 23.
 77

"solely from the intention that animates it" (23). He

concludes by saying that whatever this content is, an

analysis of it inevitably becomes "reduced to conjectures"

(77). By his own admission, Sartre I s theory of the mental

image becomes reduced to a study of the probable. 100

Most cri tics, such as Warnock and Casey, argue that

Sartre would have been more consistent had he stuck to his

position of the imagination as a pure negation of reality

with no recourse to any material at all. 101 And no doubt

Warnock is correct when she claims that Sartre ends up

replacing the intentionality of consciousness with the

intentionality of the analogue. 102 With the photograph serving

as an analogue of the absent friend, the photograph becomes a

signifier of the object and the image becomes a thing. NOW,

in place of imagining an object (rather than perceiving it),

we are imagining an obj ect through another obj ect that we

neither see nor imagine (since we cannot imagine the friend

and the photograph at the same time and, if we imagined both,

then there would be no need f or the analogue in the first

100 The second part of The Psychology of Imagination is entitled "The

Probable."
101 Sartre 1 S reason for attempting to find a material for mental
images was to distinguish the imagination from eidetic analysis. He
claims that Husserl confuses two functions of the imagination as a
neutral domain for the analysis of essences and as a faculty that is
diametrically opposed to perception. He writes, "the distinction between
mental images and perceptions cannot derive from intentionality alone. A
difference in intention is necessary but not sufficient. The matter must
also be different" (Imagination, p. 143).
102 Mary Warnock, "Imagination in Sartre," Existentialist Ontology and
Human Consciousness, ed. William McBride (New York: Garland Press,
1997) I p. 107.
 78

place). According to Warnock and Casey, Sartre' s theory of

the analogue seems to cause more problems than it solves.

But it could be argued that Sartre is only insisting on

the fact tha t in order to imagine, we require some kind of

perceptual basis or medium. 103 We must see the invisible

through the visible, as we see the depth of an object in the

very thickness of the artist's line. It is through the

content of the analogue that we are able to see the absence

of the object; the inner lining of the analogue is its very

reference to the object as not there, as only 'quasi'

present. Like the artist, Sartre's imaginer is making use of

the secret ciphers of the visible in order to make the absent

present. Without realizing it, Sartre was tainting his pure

imagination with perceptual content.

Though I agree with the view that every image involves

some kind of material, I disagree with Sartre I s claim that

the material of images must be completely different from

sensation. Rather, images and percepts are sensual through

and through. Of course, mental images are little more than

the result of vibrations in the eye. The phantom-like image

of the columns of the Parthenon that I see as I peer into the

103 Thomas Flynn stresses the role of the analogue as a priority of

the real over the imaginary in Sartre. "Absence presupposes presence;
de-realization realization" (liThe Role of the Image in Sartre's
Aesthetic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 [1975J, p. 433).
Though the real is usually a polar opposite in Sartre, this statement
and Sartre's insistence on keeping the problematic notion of an analogue
could suggest that he was starting to see the role of perception in
imagination and the problem of severing the two completely.
 79

blank wall before me serves less as a picture for me as a

means of relating to an object that is present in a fanciful

way. The combined effort of my mind, my emotions and the

blank space before me (or the dark wall I form by closing my

eyes) provides the backdrop for the fanciful appearance of

the object--the Parthenon with its radiant white columns. The

fact that we appeal to some kind of content is shown by how

we insist, when imagining, on focusing on a blank space, or

on closing our eyes, exposing the expanse to the slightest

movement of the eye or the slightest affect. 104 Fanciful

thinking borrows from ordinary perception and extends its

influence to the point of vanishing, though this influence is

never completely left behind.

My position concerning the perceptual nature of fanciful

thinking is perfectly consistent with the view that the

imagination is at work in perception and artistic creation.

Though we learn from Sartre the importance of having some
kind of content for imagining, we find as well that his
insistence on identifying the imagination with pure

consciousness leads to a narrow view of the imagination as a

fanciful negation of reality. By appealing to Merleau-Ponty's

theory of the image as a perceptual gestalt and a work of

art, and by dropping Sartre's insistence on their separation

104 See, for instance, The Psychology of Imagination, pp. 116-17.

 80

from the imagination, we are able to attain a broader and

richer theory of the imagination.

The fanciful image must be understood as the extreme
pole of a continuum of images, from the dense and rich images

of perceptual experience to the fanciful images of fancy and

daydreams. Rather than reduce the image to the status of

fancy, Merleau-Ponty attempts to maintain the image in all of

its various and irreducible fo:rms. There is, throughout his

philosophical work, a genealogy of the imagination.

E. Elemental Imagining

There is another, more striking, similarity between

Sartre and Merleau - Ponty, one that will help to explain the
full extent of Merleau-Ponty's conception of the image.

Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were both influenced by Gaston

Bachelard, who saw the imagination as a primordial connection

to the world. In particular, Bachelard argues that there is a

difference between formal and material imagination, the
fonner being merely the reproduction of mental images, and

the latter being an exposure to the inner meanings of

matter .105 The material imagination taps into the sources of

meaning provided by the four elements of earth, air I water

and fire. At the root of our experience, qualities contain a

psychic meaning for us, and detennine how we can think about

105 See, for instance, Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination, p. 37.

 81

ourselves and the world. 106 Analyzing the meanings native to

each element is not a superfluous word play or a subjective
enterprise, but follows certain laws set down by nature .107
These laws are older than the laws of physics; before we had
a physicalistic conception of the world, there was the world
of the poets, the world of the aboriginal Australian that was
perpetually sung into being, the world of the African tribe
that saw little difference between the living and the dead.
Bachelard claimed that such a world underlies our Modern
world of computer technology, at the chiasm of the psyche and
matter .108
Sartre, like Bachelard, sought to inaugurate a
"psychoanalysis of things." 109 He writes: "Material meanings,
the human sense of needles, snow, grained wood, of crowded,
of greasy, etc., are as real as the world, neither more nor
less I and to come into the world means to rise up in the
midst of these meanings" (765). His proposed analysis is "to
be concerned with establishing the way in which each thing is

106 Bachelard believed that poets could be categorized according to

the particular element from which they draw most of their inspirational
power. He said that Nietzsche, for instance, drew from the power of air,
as shown by the many references to empty spaces and mountainous heights
(ibid., pp. 42-53).
107 Bachelard writes: "If meanings become too profuse, [the image] can
fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can
fall into didacticism" (ibid., p. 28). He later writes that these
poetical laws of interpreting images "are as positive as experimental
laws" (37).
108 unfortunately Bachelard' s poetics was drawn too closely in line
with psychoanalysis. He claimed that his phenomenology of our oneiric
ties to the universe had nothing to do with natural science.
109 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 768.
 82

the objective symbol of being and of the relation of human

reality to this being" {768}. He continues:

All this comes to pass as if we come to life in a

universe where feelings and acts are all charged
with something material, have a substantial stuff,
are really soft, dull, slimy I low, elevated, etc.,
and in which material substances have originally a
psychic meaning which renders them repugnant,
horrifying, alluring, etc. No explanation by
projection or by analogy is acceptable here. (771-
72)

One of Sartre' s examples is the symbolic nature of ' the

slimy'. We readily see a metaphorical connection between the

experience of physical slime and the smooth-talking of a used

car salesman. This occurs naturally and not by means of

explicit association or enculturation. In particular, the

slimy "represents in itself a dawning triumph of the solid

over the liquid- -that is, a tendency of the indifferent in-

itself, which is represented by the pure solid, to fix

liquidity, to absorb the for-itself which ought to dissolve

it" (774) . What is worse, this triumph is delayed

indefinitely; a solid object sinks slowly into the sticky

mass "like a retarded annihilation" (775). In this quality, I

witness my factical helplessness before the elements of

nature, and I am threatened by a continual death, which is

both horrific and alluring. We would not get the same meaning
from water which melts everything into the same, or from fire

which voraciously enraptures and consumes. Thus each element

has its own law that pre-dates us. "The gluey, the sticky,

the hazy, etc., holes in the sand and in the earth, ... all
 83

reveal to [a child] modes of pre-psychic and pre-sexual being

which he will spend the rest of his life explaining" (780).

In order to understand the extent of control that nature has

over our thinking, we must explore these influences and their

meanings for consciousness. 110

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau - Ponty, as

well, suggests the need for a "psychoanalysis of Nature" (VI

267/VIF 321). Our experience of qualities reveals a law of

their appearance that we do not give to them, and that the

artist only begins to explore in her paintings. "What is

indefinable in the quale, in the colour, is nothing else than

a brief, peremptory manner of giving in one sole something,

in one sole tone of being, visions past, visions to come, by

whole clusters" (VI 135/VIF 178). These clusters form general

archetypes of meaning, such as the archetypal meanings of

water, earth, air and fire. In order to understand our

relation to the world, we must stop playing with formal

structures of meaning posited by consciousness and embrace

these clusters of meaning. We must explore how an image is

given to us, and how it gives to us a perspective on Being.

We must understand how the image embodies our world and

structures what it can mean for us.

110 Ibid., p. 767. In order to maintain his radical separation of

imagination from perception, Sartre stresses that the imagination is not
involved in the perception of these qualities. Mary Warnock, however,
provides a good argument suggest ing that Sartre' s descript ion at thi s
point betrays a powerful "concrete imagination" that undermines Sartre's
actual comments concerning the imagination (Warnock, "Imagination in
Sartre," p. 110).
 84

Archetypal images pre-pattern our experience,

interweaving with each other within a common fabric that

constitutes the world. All of being is mediated by this

fabric and surrounded by it. In Chapter Six (Section B), we

shall explore the ontological significance of this fabric,

which Merleau-Ponty comes to call the flesh of the world

(chair du mande). For the moment, I wish only to stress the
essential relation between this mundane fabric and the four
elements. Merleau-Ponty writes:

To designate [the flesh], we should need 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
spatia-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of
incarnate principle that brings a style of being
wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is
in this sense an 'element' of Being. (VI 139/VIF
184)

To illustrate this, Merleau-Ponty comments on how the element

of water has its own laws that are revealed when we see tiles
at the bottom of a pool. What to the Modern eye would be
distortions in colour and size are in fact the very grammar

of a logic of water, revealing the tiles as 'straight-while-

submerged' (rather than as 'straight-while-in-open-air'). We

do not see the tiles despite the distortions of the water,

but precisely by means of the water and its own laws of

delivering up the appearance of objects. Water has its own

effects on the objects as they appear to us, distorting their

sizes, muffling their sounds, and it also has a blurring

effect on our senses so that we can decipher the appearance

 85

(PrP 182/EMF 70-1). These laws are neither given by the

subject nor fixed in nature, but present a general medium for

experiencing the tiles. They also elicit a number of psychic

meanings, like the values of homogeneity and physical

liberty, and the virtues of cleanliness, innocence and

forgetfulness. Likewise, all of the elements provide general

laws by means of which they can serve as a level or medium

for the appearing of Being. Hi

When Merleau-Ponty refers to flesh as an element, he

means it in the sense of the Presocratic philosophers. Before

the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, philosophy in Greece

was based on a mix of religious and scientific ideas. To

these philosophers, an element was an ultimate substance of

the universe r holding it together by means of a common

meaning. 'Element' should not be mistaken for Empedocles'

conception of the 'atom', but resists such reductionism in

favour of a more mythical understanding of Nature. Perhaps

Heraclitus' use of fire as the primal element is most

appropriate. Fire is not a static 'thing' but lives by means

of its own consumption. Fire is a spirit of life and

consumption, of energy that is spent and rejuvenated. The

111 Even as early as Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty

suggests that there are dynamic laws of perception that we do not
control. In spite of his occasionally calling them "natural signs" (PP
49/PPF 61), he stresses the fact that they do not involve a "natural
geometry" (PP 205/PPF 237) but are rather similar in nature to the
dynamic unity of the body schema. For a good description of the dynamic
nature of perceptual laws, see his description of approaching a ship, PP
17/PPF 24-5. This distinguishes Merleau-Ponty from Bachelard, who saw
elemental laws as laws of nature (On Poetic Imagination, p. 37).
 86

Presocratics, due to a sensitivity to Nature, blended the

sensual experiences of water, earth, air and fire with the

loftiest thoughts of universality and abstraction. l12

Renaud Barbaras explains the extent of Presocratic

influence on Merleau - ponty' s conception of the elements. He

claims that, like the Presocratics, Merleau-Ponty understood

'element' to mean a sense of homogeneity, of sameness and

interchange among the different elements. Water, when boiled,

becomes steam or air, because water is in some way similar to

air. Picking up on this philosophy of sameness, Barbaras

argues that one element can act as a measure or dimension of

another. He writes, "the element is a secret principle of

equivalence, the carnal invisible of phenomena, concrete

generality. ,,113 we saw earlier how red can act like other

colours qua dimension for other colours, as well as qua

colour within a particular dimension provided by another

colour. But the two occurrences are never simultaneous; there

is also an essential heterogeneity to elements, such that

Merleau-Ponty diverges from the Presocratic conception of a

single Urstoff that holds the cosmos together. An element is

essentially an act of differentiation, inaugurating a

differential realm or diacritical system. Barbaras explains,

112 T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1987), especially Fragment 49a. See also G. Vlastos "On
Heraclitus," American Journal of Philology, Vol. 76 (1955), pp. 365-67;
and Merrill Ring, Beginning with the Presocratics (Mountain View:
Mayfield, 1987), pp. 14-17.
113 Barbaras, p. 222.
 87

"the element is not subjective, nor is it that which is

perceived, it is the dimension by means of which perception

takes place" (222). It is thus not simply a means for

achieving unity, but also for achieving difference, an

"active producer of heterogeneity (actif producteur

d'heterogen<§ite) " (220) . we must conceive of elemental

images, then, not simply in terms of a single matter that

underlies all of being, but as the potential differentiation

and mediation of Being along a particular line or direction

(sens)--a particular trace for the spacing and temporalizing

of Being. An element does not offer a unity for the cosmos

but "the identity of being and mediation" (223).

The fact that these elemental images inaugurate and

engage in an irreducible mediation suggests, for Barbaras, a
new sense of metaphor. We saw earlier (Chapter Two, Section

E) how Ricoeur criticized the traditional view of metaphor as

a deviation of sedimented meaning or as a linguistic

ornamentation. The metaphor, rather, by clashing two

disparate semantic fields, gives rise to new meanings that
were impossible to express before. Prior to the forging of

the metaphor 'Man is a wolf,' we were unable to articulate

the experience of man's animality. This meaning was present

only as a divergence between 'man' and 'wolf', civility and

animality, waiting to be expressed in terms of a new semantic

unit. Rather than simply elaborating on a previously
 88

established language, metaphors expose that language to

change and renewal.

We have also already discussed how, for Ri coeur, the

metaphor is not an escape from reality or from

intentionality, but continues to bear a reference to a

fictional reality that remains indetenninate and

ontologically neutral. Since the hermeneutical metaphor

establishes at the heart of Being a moment of creativity,

Barbaras lauds it as an "ontological doorway" (267) opening
onto a new conception of the world. But Ricoeur's analysis of

metaphor stresses an ostensive reference to reality. A

metaphor remains, for Ricoeur, a paradoxical union of an

ostensive reference and a deferring of reference (Barbaras

pp. 273-74). Thus even Ricoeur's concept of metaphor leads to

a paradox that he is unable to solve.

Barbaras argues that it is for this reason that Merleau-

Ponty avoids making use of the concept of metaphor in his
later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty writes: "There is no metaphor

between the visible and the invisible metaphor is too

much if the invisible is really invisible, too little if it

lends itself to transposition" (VI 221-222/VIF 275). Too

mUCh, in other words, if elemental images are subjective and

fanciful, since metaphors are entrenched in a diacritical

system and attain a sense of stasis and materiality; too

little if it is supposed to translate a fixed and static mode
of being, since metaphors defer their ostensive references.
 89

Merleau-Ponty is arguing that in saying that two things are

and are not the sarne (that a man is like a wolf, while not
being identical to a wolf), one is already dealing with two
sedimented semantic fields (however 'open' those fields might
be to change). But flesh, in relation to elemental images, is
the very origin of such fields as a primordial openness of
Being to differentiation. Before we can have a clash of
meanings leading towards a new meaning (and thus a metaphor),
there must already be meaning in the form of a difference of
Being from itself. Metaphors presuppose an order of elemental
images. 114
Barbaras admits that this reference in Merleau-Ponty's
work might bring his own theory of the element as a metaphor
into question, but responds to such opposition by claiming
that Merleau - Ponty overlooks another kind of metaphor: that
of originary meaning. Thus, according to Barbaras, "it is not
metaphor that is the concern here, but a certain conception
of metaphor. ,,115 And had Merleau-Ponty given metaphor more
thought, he would have conceived of elemental images in this
way. 116

114 This is not to argue, however, that there is a sense of unmediated

being. It only brings into question the central role of metaphor in the
establishment of that medium. As we will see shortly, in order to grant
metaphor this unique role in the inauguration of meaning, we must
radically change our not ion of metaphor. I suggest, on the contrary,
that we stick with the term 'elemental image' to play this role,
although I admit that using metaphor to explain flesh can be useful.
115 Barbaras, p.284.
116 We should keep in mind that the quote from The Visible and the
Invisible is from the working notes and do not represent a 'finished
thought' of Merleau-ponty.
 90

Thus Barbaras argues that elemental images involve an

"originary metaphorici ty,,117 of Being. He explains: "The
metaphor invites us to the originary presence of the
perceived, reveals an elementary communication there where

language circumscribes the defined differences." It reveals

the elemental image as "a dimension or generality" (281), so

that "we must define being by a fundamental metaphoricity as

the constitutive excess of the visible on itself" (284). In

other words, Barbaras gives to metaphor the same meaning that

Merleau-Ponty gives to the elements.

We find a similar extension of the meaning of metaphor

in Edward Murray's description of archetypes. In Imaginative

Thinking and Human Existence, 118 he explains archetypes as
root metaphors which, rather than fostering the clashing of
semantic fields to produce new meanings, tend to draw several
different meanings towards them like magnets. An archetype is
described as "a ganglion of metaphors around which, indeed,
families of metaphors might cluster. ,,119

117 Barbaras, p. 281.

I
118 Edward Murray, Imaginative Thinking and Human Existence
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1986).

\
119 Ibid., p. 143. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe the logic
of metaphorical systems, showing how different metaphors combine to
provide a Single meaning. Arguments, for instance, are seen both as war
(needing reinforcement and buttressing), and also as containers (as
being empty or dense). The result is a complex structure of metaphors.
This is not, however, the same thing that Murray and Barbaras are
talking about. Lakoff and Johnson's metaphorical system presupposes a
level of meaning that is already articulated. See Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 98-99.
 91

Murray does not say what these meanings 'are', and tends

to leave them to the level of thought. But the four elements

can be seen to do the same thing, at a level prior to

explicit thought and action. Even in the very sensual

experience of water, earth, air and fire, clusters of

meanings begin to form. If we consider water, for instance,

the fluid and clear substance offers the tiles at the bottom
of the pool to vision according to unique laws. When

poetically expressed, these laws can lead to a series of

associated images. It might suggest innocence and cleansing,

or unity and homogeneity. The Greek goddess, Aphrodi te, was

born from a shell, free of the messy labour of human birth,

and the innocence of Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott found

proper burial in the forgetfulness of water. Water allows us

to forget the guilt and suffering of past sins, and to pass

successfully fram this world to the land of the dead. These

are literary expressions, no doubt, but of a sense of water

that precedes all literature, all separation of fact from

fiction, in our immediate discovery of a world around us of

sounds and sights, and of qualities that radiate from within.

By 'element', Merleau-ponty was not talking about an Ancient

myth or an abstract concept, but the "intentional tissue" (PP

53/PPF 65) that connects us to the world. Within this tissue

or texture of Being are elemental images that cluster round

about them a host of meanings that we spend the rest of our
 92

lives discovering and developing--these images of water,

earth, air and fire.

Thus it seems that there is a sense of metaphor that

operates on the level of elemental images. There is also, in

Murray's explanation, a clear reference to a verticality of

the archetype that is lacking in ordinary metaphors--a

centripetal organizing force or style that establishes a

cluster of meaning, rather than a centrifugal deferral of

meaning that we find in ordinary metaphor.

But have we not returned to the implosion of the image,

to the simulacrum of Baudrillard? It was shown earlier

(Chapter Two, Section E) how he claimed that the history of

the image has gone through a series of transformations, first

as a copy of an original nature, then as the concealment of

the absence of an original nature, and finally as a doubling

of itself with no ostensive reference. At one point,
Baudrillard explains the phenomenon as an implosion of the

image on itself, a reduction of all unity and reference to a

co-existence of infonnation- -the human being reduced to DNA

which can be reproduced indefinitely, and the implosion of

aggression in a cold war where power is immediately
transformed into impotence. 120 Are elemental images like DNA?

Though Baudrillard brilliantly describes the simulacrum

as a new development of the image, he overestimates the power

120 Baudrillard, pp. 56-75.

 93

of this kind of image to absorb every instance of imagining.

Whatever the worth of his analysis of simulacra, it is

begging the question to insist that all images follow in
their wake.
It is clear that this is not what Merleau-ponty has in

mind for elemental images. The centripetal force of elemental

images is not the implosion of simulacra, but the verticality

of Being that establishes the differences among the senses

that we have been discussing throughout this chapter.
Barbaras explains: lithe known horizon in the manner of
something horizontal, as a potentiality of consciousness, the
opening of a halo of perception, rests on a horizon of an

originary or vertical sense of a presentation of the world

that is totally present. 11121 Merleau-Ponty is not content to

see the originary sense of being reduced to a play of

signifiers or simulacra, but insists on the fact that the

world maintains a differentiation that is essentially
vertical. By this he means that we cannot reduce all images
to the level of the same, but rather find them scattered
throughout an interchange of a series of diacritical systems,
between which one can find yet another exchange of
differences. Yellow is understood as being different from
green, and both occur within a diacritical system of colour
that collides with that of touch in a diacritical system of

121 Barbaras, p. 250.

 94

sense experience, and all of them in turn are different from

the world so that, between the sentient and the sensible,

another 'differential system' is established.!:!:! Though each

of these systems provide for a being in flux, a being in

creation, they do not, as Baudrillard would suggest, become

reduced to a level of sameness. Being is essentially self-

differentiation, and holds itself together not along lines of

similarity, but along folds and divergences, in the joints of

things which serve as "archetypes and variants of human

life" (VI 116/VIF 156). There is, inherent in Being, an

irreducible verticality that is held in place by elemental

images. Thus while Being can be seen as a "poetic

productivityll (VI 116/VIF 155), along the lines of Barbaras,

Murray and others, it cannot be seen as the double of

simulacra.

Though I find Murray's and Barbaras' descriptions of an

originary 'metaphoricity' of Being to be consistent, I think
that it is questionable to stretch the meaning of metaphor to
such extremes. It can certainly be asked (though I refrain

from elaborating here) whether language should assume such a

universal status as the medium of expression for Being's

originary dehiscence. Might it not, indeed, be a stretch of

122 A good description of this layering of diacritical systems is

provided by John Barry in "The Textual Body: Incorporating Writing and
Flesh," where he writes that "it is only our difference from that other
flesh [of the world} that makes the open dialectic of flesh" (24). In
this case, it is the relation between the flesh of the world and of the
imagining body that is being discussed (Philosophy Today 30 [1986J, pp.
16-31) •
 95

metaphor to assume that language can serve as the model for

every mode of expression? Is using metaphor to explain

elemental images a possible misuse of metaphor?

I think that Merleau-ponty avoided a development of

metaphor in order to stress the proximity of the sensible in

its elementary revelation. Metaphors still suggest, for many

people, an intellectual achievement rather than something

that is more immediate and sensual. But there is no apparent

contradiction in using metaphor to understand what these

elements are, as long as we remember that we are using the

term in a special sense .123

We can now see even more clearly the wealth of meaning

in Merleau-ponty's description of Renoir's painting the water
of the brook by looking at the sea. It is not only that water

reveals, in a sense, all of being, but that it constitutes an

elemental image that conditions our thinking and grounds it

in the poetical play of Being. Cezanne once wrote: "What I am

trying to translate to you is more mysterious; it is entwined
in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of

sensations" (PrP 159/EMF 7). Renoir was able to paint the

water of the brook by looking to the sea because both partake

of the same element, both tap into the same source of

123 For a lengthy discussion of Merleau-Ponty's use of metaphor, see

Jerry Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metapbor (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities
Press, 1991). Gill stresses that metaphor plays a central role in
Merleau-Ponty'S philosophy as a philosophy of expression. See especially
chapter six, where he considers the role of metaphor in philosophical
expression. Unfortunately, Gill says very little about Merleau-Ponty's
negative comments concerning metaphor.
 96

meaning, the same style or ray of Being that is opened by our

sensing of water. Water, along with the other elements,

provides us with a medium for relating to the world; they

provide "the soil of the sensible" (PrP 160/EMF 12) that

plants us within a multi-sensory world. Together, these

elemental images guide us in weaving together a single scene

or perceptual gestalt. The seashore scene that opened this

chapter is already more basic than the images of fanciful

thinking and the images of the artist, is itself grounded in

elemental images. Merleau-Ponty's reference to Renoir

painting water suggests that he had in mind water as a

primordial image, a primordial way of being open to Being. 124

I am not suggesting that these meanings are fixed and

uni versal; by virtue of being di vergences , they could not

assume such a status. The meaning of water, no doubt, has

many cultural variations. Merleau-Ponty would also not

restrict the number of elemental images. Each element
provides a cluster of significance that embeds us in the

world in a manner that is more immediate than words or

culture, that is as close and intimate as the skin on our

bodies- -as close as the sea to the strand (VI 130-31/VIF

124 It seems that Casey agrees with this reading of the elements. He
writes: "AS imaginatively projected in the guise of fire, air, earth or
water, the real reveals itself in a way that is distinctively different
from, and yet no less valid than, the way in which it exhibits itself in
ordinary perception" (lfSartre on Imagination," p. 150). But it is
difficult to see how such an imagination can have any impact on
perception at all, if it is strictly the "purely possible--as having a
positive thetic character that allows imagined content to escape certain
empirical limitations" (162).
 97

173). At the heart of experience is a spiritualism and

psychologism that perpetually circumscribes reason like a

mist. Thales is noted for having said that the gods dwell in
everything. Here, too, there is a transubstantiation of

earth, air, water and fire into a mix of human and divine,

finite and infinite, visible and invisible. And this event

occurs not in a church or a synagogue, but wherever Being

emerges into the medium of signification, itself

differentiated further into the levels of elemental images,

fanciful images, aesthetic images and perceptual images.

The image has been shown to take many different forms,

from fanciful mental images to elemental images of earth,

air, water and fire. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy accounts for

this rich family heritage of the image, descending not only,

as in Sartre's theory, from a French tradition of literature

and Cartesian thought but also from Greek philosophy.

Escaping the confines of a philosophy of mental images,

Merleau - Ponty discovers at the heart of Being a perpetual

play of images that affects how we experience the world. This
primal dance of imagining, it will soon be shown, is

simultaneously the fact of our embodiment. For the moment, it

is enough to see that Merleau-Ponty's theory of imagination

incorporates many of the family meanings that we considered

in the first chapter: as essential for perception, artistic

creation and fanciful thinking, as well as being capable of

taking on a life of their own, both at the surface of Being,

 98

as in the case of simulacra, and at the heart of Being, as we

have just seen with elemental images. We have also come to

see a faint outline of an ontology of a dynamic Being that

allows itself to be mediated by the image, that imagines
itself into being. We will return to this imagining Being,

Being personified as muse, in Chapter Six.

The next two chapters explore the imagining body as a

response to the images discussed throughout this chapter.

While Being is already partially determined for us,

especially in relation to archetypes that form central fault

lines of meaning for our existence, the body is our original

response to these images. And the body, too, has its own
mythology, its own inner logiC that we find ourselves already

using and never completely understanding. It is to the body

that we now turn, to understand how our originary images are

embodied and lived before we speak and think them- -to the
body of the mime, and her silent shadow play of embodied
meanings.
 CHAPTER FOUR: BODIES

A. Introduction

In Chapter Two the imagination was shown to involve at

least four different functions! (i) perceptual imagining,

(ii) aesthetic imagining, (iii) fanciful imagining, and (iv)

elemental imagining. In Chapter Five, it will be shown that

each function of the imagination is a form of embodiment.

Before this can be shown, however, we nrust first develop a

theory of the body. The following will explain the nature of

the body according to Merleau-Ponty.

When asked to visualize the body, our first thoughts are

usually of a physical body, complete with head, torso and

limbs, probably clothed and involved in a particular action.

In its physical appearance, the human body resembles the

bodies of other organic creatures that are alive and in

motion. When physiologists engage in a study of the body,

they usually adopt a different set of terms than those used

in the physical sciences. But the methods used in each is

frequently the same: a theory is developed, and then tested

on a particular subject, using laws of induction in order to

arrive at a causal explanation of the phenomenon. This kind

of analysis is often of use to us, especially with respect to

repairing the body I s chemical or physiological structure by

means of various medicines and exercises. But physiological

99
 100

illness is only the tip of the iceberg for possible

malfunctions in 'bodily' experience. To understand these

pathologies, and several other, normal experiences, we must

treat the body as something that transcends causal

mechanisms. The body, it would seem, involves far more than

flesh and bones.

Consider, for instance, the experience of the body as an

anchorage or perspective on the world. We are not ghosts who

float above a world that reveals itself to us as a mere

spectacle. We are entrenched in the world, and require great

effort to move around and stay alive. This anchorage is what

some theorists call our 'zero point', a point from which all

points are experienced. The body as anchor cannot be examined

by us or anyone else, since to us, we see only a mirror image

or a part of the body (such as a hand or foot), and to others

we are always 'somewhere else' and a 'consciousness from

afar' (PP 67, 100/PPF 81, 117). Our 'here' is never explained

in terms of a position in space. When we examine our own body

in the mirror, the image moves with us, rather than allowing

us to examine all of its sides as we can the coffee cup on

the table .125

Another experience of the body that is unexplainable in

terms of causality is that of double sensation. When I touch

my left hand with my right hand, a blurring of sensation

125 PP 91/PPF 107. Seymour Fisher, Body Consciousness (Englewood

Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 3.
 101

takes place (PP 92/PPF 108). If I clear my mind, I can begin

to lose track of which hand is touching and which is being

touched; conversely, if I try to monitor and analyze the

experience, I am unable to detect both roles of touching and

being touched in one hand at the same time, in spite of the

fact that the two roles are constantly present. Double

sensation involves "an ambiguous set -up in which both hands

can alternate the roles of 'touching' and being 'touched'

. . .. The body catches itself from the outside engaged in a

cognitive process; it tries to touch itself while being

touched, and initiates 'a kind of reflection' which is

sufficient to distinguish it from objects" (PP 93/PPF 109).

Both the experience of the body as anchor and zero point and

the experience of double sensation suggest an "inner

cormnunication with the world" (PP 96/PPF 113) --a

communication that defies phYSiological explanation. We are

internally related to the world by means of the body as zero

point, and sense an inner communication between the two roles

of the body qua object and the body qua subject.

The body, then, is extremely elusive. It acts like an

object, affected by the doctor's chemical remedies and

observed by other people. It acts like a subject, observing

the world around it from a particular position. It acts like

a magical combination of objective and subjective elements,

an interface of exchange between the experience of sensing

and of being sensed.

 102

B. Traditional Theories

In The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of

Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues for a new way to understand
the body by first criticizing traditional theories of the

body. He does this, first, by explaining the body in terms of

what it is not. The body is not a mechanism of reflexes or

brain functions, nor an idea in the mind. By squaring

empiricist theories off with mentalistic theories (what he

calls ' intellectualism' ), Merleau - Ponty hopes to clear the

way for a new way of understanding the body.

Empiricism suggests that bodily experience is

explainable by means of the causal relations that hold

between its physical parts .126 The life of the body as a

unified mode of existence is a fiction composed out of the

functioning of individual cells and nerves. Central to this

theory is the structure of the reflex. Merleau-Ponty

describes the reflex as lithe action of a defined physical or

chemical agent on a locally defined receptor which evokes a

defined response by means of a defined pathway" (SB 9/SBF 7) .

When a bird flies across the sky, I follow it with my eye

because I am hard-wired to do so. The impression of the bird

on my retina elicits the eyes to dilate and focus, and then

to move so as to keep the bird in sight. When I later say

that 'I watched the bird in flight', I am giving an

126 By empiricism, I mean only a very general theory that assumes a

causal and mechanical explanation to all phenomena, and not to any
particular theory, such as the British Empiricists.
 103

artificial meaning to a simple reflexive process, and

assuming an element of choice that does not really exist; it

is not the case that I watched the bird, but that the bird

elicited certain movements of my head and eye. Likewise, when

I experience my body as a unified structure of possible

movements and sensations, I am artificially imposing a

meaning on a series of unconnected reflexes. The phenomenal

body, according to this theory, is the product of a causal

line of independent events, understood as a unity only after

the fact.
This theory runs into problems because it explains away

the role of the organism in reflex action. The scientist sets

up a controlled situation to test her hypothesis, and changes

the context in order to produce different results. The

scientist assumes a certain role in the context, controlling

it and contributing to its overall meaning. This is

acceptable as long as the scientist's contribution is
recognized, and as long as that contribution is not assumed

to apply to every situation. But often the scientist assumes

that the organism has no role to play at all. The example of

watching the bird suggests not that we passively follow the
bird's flight. The context assumes that I am already open to

the spectacle and that I already open my eyes to 'see' the

world in certain ways. It is by means of our expectation of

seeing something that the flying bird can 'catch my eye' (SB
31/SBF 31). The bird is like a fish that surprises the dozing
 104

fisherman only to the extent that the fisherman has already

cast his net into the water. We already cast a net of
expectations onto the spectacle when we open our eyes to
see. 127 "For the excitation itself is already a response, not

an effect imported from outside the organism; it is the first

act of its proper functioning" (PP 31/PPF 31). Empiricism
assumes that the excited entity is passive, and contributes

nothing to the situation. But in the case of observing the

flying bird, the observer is not a passive receptor but is
actively involved in the creation of the context. Treating
the reflex as a universal structure of experience overlooks
the possible impact that the receptor can have on the

stimulus. 128
Empiricism also does not deal with the effects of the
overall context on the meaning of reflex action. The form or

total situation is treated as an artificial result of

combining individual events, such as the reception of visual
impressions on the retina and the eliciting of certain
movements in the body. To Merleau-Ponty, the causal relation
is the other way around: the overall context comes first, and
gives meaning to the individual events. There is "something

127 The image of the net is used in the introduction to Phenomenology

of Perception to show that we discover meanings only because we are
already aware of meaning. See PP xv/PPF x.
128 The empiricist theory of reflex action not only assumes that the
subject has no active role in the situation, but that this objective
stance on the action is primary. But we do not always assume the role of
the scientist, and often allow our own interests and emotions to affect
the overall meaning of a situation. The empiricist provides no grounds
for giving priority to their own position.
 105

general in our reflexes" (SB 30/SBF 30) that makes it

possible for the stimulus to motivate us in the first place.

Rudolph Arnheim observes that frogs who 'instinctually' catch

flies with their tongues will starve to death when surrounded

by dead flies. His explanation is that the frog does not

respond to particular stimuli (such as a particular colour or

shape), but to a general situation in which ' Ii ttle black

orbs' are 'behaving a certain way'. 129 There is a general

'fonn' of the situation that makes it of interest to the

organism, in so far as the fonn is related to the life of

that organism. The organism's interests detennine the

"descriptive nonns"130 with which it makes sense of its

environment, so that it can react to it in a certain way (SB

13/SBF 11-12). "The function of the organism in receiving

stimuli is, so to speak, to 'conceive' a certain fonn of

excitation" (PP 75/PPF 89). This fonn is provided by the

organism's "proper manner of offering itself to actions from
the outside. ,,131 If the fonn precedes the individual events,

then it is not based on individual reflexive events, and the

129 Arnheim, pp. 22-3.

130 SB 28/SBF 28; Merleau-Ponty also refers to this form as a
"preferred distribution (distribution privilegies) " (SB 46/SBF 48), the
preference being dependent on the organism'S interests.
131 Merleau-Ponty explains that the law is articulated in terms of
body-meanings such as the rhythm, figure and intensity of the impression
on the receptor. All of these meanings suggest a gradient or field of
differences, in which one degree of intensity, for instance, can be
meaningful in relation to the others. The organism's law "gives a bodily
existence to those beings of reason such as the rhythm, the figure, the
relations of intensity and, in a word, the global form of local stimuli"
(SB 31/SBF 31) .
 106

reflex action becomes a secondary structure without the

importance that empiricism warrants it.

Merleau-Ponty argues that the reflex is an abstraction

of a more basic causal relation between the organism,

stimulus and the overall form of the situation in which all

three are internally related and affect one another. There is

a "circular process,,132 of causation in any bodily experience

that is irreducible to Simple reflex action. My readiness for

the spectacle affects the meaning of the situation in which a

bird is made manifest to me, so that I find it irresistible

to follow the bird I s flight. The synthesis of this bodily

experience cannot be explained exclusively in terms of reflex

action--to do so would be to abstract from the phenomenon. 133

Another empiricist explanation of bodily experience is

provided by neurology. Some theorists suggest that we obtain

a general sense or form for experience by means of a unity in

the brain: the different elements of a given experience bear

a one-to-one correlation to innervations in the brain. 134

There is evidence that some relations can be drawn between

behaviour and particular locations in the brain. For example,

132 SB 46/SBF 48; Merleau-Ponty also refers to it as a "circular

causality" (SB 15/SBF 13).
133 Gary Madison writes: "Already in its beginnings life is oriented
upwards; there already exists here a kind of movement of transcendence,"
The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 9.
134 The psychologist that Merleau-Ponty attacks most bitterly in this
respect is I. P. Pavlov in Chapter Two of The Structure of Behavior. He
refers to F.J.J. Bytendijk who described the central sector and its
relation to behaviour as a rudder that steers a boat. Bytendijk later
rejects this theory (SB 61/SBF 66).
 107

the stimulation of a particular part of the brain can make a

limb appear larger or smaller. 135 There is also a pathological

condition called the 'phantom limb' in which an amputated

limb continues to be felt by the patient. It is often assumed

that, since the presence of the limb can occur without the

limb's existence, the awareness is strictly a product of the

brain (PP 76/PPF 90) .

But a closer examination destroys all confidence in the

theory. Though damage to the brain inevitably leads to

changes in behaviour, relations to brain lesions can only be

drawn in the most general way. Damage to different parts of

the brain can cause the same behavioral pathology, and damage

to the same part can cause different pathologies (SB 62-3/SBF

66-7). "Only a mixed conception of localization and a

functional conception of parallelism can be accepted" (SB

72/ SBF 79), concl udes Merleau - Ponty . Two studies conducted

more recently confirm Merleau-Ponty's objections. The tests

were performed on patients before and after their operation

which involved the amputation of a limb. The researchers
wanted to see if there was any difference in two-point

recognition between the original limb and the stump. It was

assumed that the ability to distinguish between two pricking

sensations close together on the skin was better at the

distal regions of the body (fingers and toes, for instance)

135 Seymour Fisher, Sidney E. Cleveland, Body Image and Personality,

2nd. rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 7.
 108

than in the more central regions (like the upper arm or

chest), and that this distribution involved a one-to-one

relation between parts of the brain and the different body

parts. The researchers wanted to see if the sensitivity of

the upper arm remained the same when it became a stump,

reinforcing the idea of an absolute distribution of bodily

sensitivity by the brain. They found that the stump gradually

comes to assume the same sensitivity that was originally felt

by the amputated limb. 136 This suggests, according to Seymour

Fisher, a psychological aspect of the body that is not

identical to the physiological body and that can be

redistributed after amputation. l37 These tests also suggest

that the awareness of the body cannot be associated with a

particular brain function, but operates according to its own

"law of behavior" (SB 26/SBF 25) .

Mer1eau-Ponty is also suspicious of intellectualist

theories that try to explain the body in terms of mental

images or memory. The phantom limb, for instance, is

explained in terms of a memory of the limb infused with

136 The first test was conducted by Teuber on 38 men who had their
knees amputated, and the second was conducted by Haber on 25 men who had
their arms amputated. The tests are cited in Fisher and Cleveland, p.
11. It has also been reported that massaging the stump helps to speed-up
the process of adjusting to the new body.
137 "One may say then with some confidence that after amputation a
radical change in the sensitivity gradient does occur, and the stump
takes on an increased sensitivity usually found only in more distal
areas .,. At another level, these results suggest that following the
amputation of a limb there are forces mobilized to maintain a pattern of
body responses as closely similar to the preamputation pattern as
possible" (Fisher and Cleveland, p. 11).
 109

intense emotional value. The limb is the product of a

calculation or will that fails to obtain 'bodily' support.

The opposite case, when a body movement fails because of a

lack of calculation, lends support to the view that mental

states, and not physical ones, detennine behaviour. When a

patient fails to perform an abstract motion (such as touching

the nose on command), intellectualism suggests that the

patient has failed to calculate where the nose is in relation

to the hand. The patient laboriously reconstructs the

obj ective situation by following, step by step, the motions

of the doctor or the subject's own motions in a mirror. The

normal subject translates instantaneously the doctor's

request into bodily action, lias on a taximeter the distance

is given already converted into shillings and pence." 138 But

the intellectualist theory breaks down when we observe that

the same patient who could not perform abstract motion can

readily locate the position of a pricking sensation or a

mosquito on the arm. 139 Another patient who loses her voice

when separated from her lover can still speak in limited,

138 Henry Head, cited in PP 140/PPF 163. The example of calculating

the required space to get through a tunnel is also given by Head (PP
143/PPF 167). Merleau-Ponty's objection is that even though Head does
not think that these judgments are explicit, they are still judgments
based on an awareness of the body as an object. This gives precedence to
an objective view of the body and its parts, rather than to the general
shape of the gesture or action involved. See also PP 103-4/PPF 119-20.
139 Ibid. Merleau-Ponty writes: "The whole operation takes place in
the doma in of the phenomena 1 i it does not run through the obj ect i ve
world" (PP 106/PPF 123). He adds: "My body has its world, or understands
its world, without having to make use of my 'symbolic' or 'objectifying
function'" (PP 140-1/PPF 164).
 110

concrete situations, and has lost not "a certain stock of

movements but a certain type of acts, a certain level of
action." 140 The phantom limb does not persist as a memory of
the old, but is seen as deformed and shrinking (PP 76, 81/PPF
91, 96). The limb is not a mental note of what is 'absent'

but an "ambivalent presence" (PP 81/PPF 96) of a way of being

in the world that continues to linger even when the actual

limb is gone. The body cannot be explained in terms of the

presence or absence of a thought or calculation, but in terms
of a general mode of existence that escapes the control of

consciousness.
Merleau-ponty has shown that we have an immediate grasp

of our body as an instrument for action and reaction to the

world. We know immediately what we are capable of doing:
whether we can squeeze through a narrow opening, catch a

softball that has been thrown towards us, or reach for the
alarm as we awake in the morning. In each of these actions,
the parts of our bodies are called upon instantly and are
forgotten as soon as the task is completed. How are we to
explain this 'knowledge'? Not, according to Merleau-Ponty, by

means of a radical dualism of mind and body; such theories

inevitably involve the problem of putting the two substances

140 SB 64/SBF 69.Merleau-Ponty addresses the same pathology in

Phenomenology of Perception in the chapter, "The Body in its Sexual
Being." The problem, he argues, is not that the girl has lost her
ability to speak or has forgotten how to speak, but that she has had her
social life disrupted. It is corrected not be working on her
physiological body or on her memory, but by a gesture like holding her
hand (PP 160-3/PPF 187-90).
 111

back together (SB 208-9/SBF 225-6). Instead, Merleau-ponty

suggests that the body is 'phenomenal', and proceeds to

describe it in a phenomenological way. The body, he argues,
must in some ways be like the mind.

c. Bogy Schema and Bogy Image

It is in terms of the 'phenomenal' body that the body's

imagination begins to make sense. Many psychologists over the

past century have come to believe that we have a tacit

awareness of the unity of the body, allowing us to call upon

our different limbs to perform various actions. This

awareness is called a 'body schema'; by means of the body
schema, we can locate and manipulate our body parts
instantly, without referring to thought or a specific image

of the body in our mind. When we are bitten by a fly, we know

instantly where to strike without calculating the distance
between the spot and the position of the striking hand. We
are also aware of the different parts of the body in an
internal way. We feel our hand as it touches another object,
and experience it as our own. This phenomenon has come to be
called 'proprioception'. We also have an internal sense of
our bodies as they move through space that we do not deduce
from the changes of our position in physical space- -what is

known as 'kinesthetic' experience. 141 Our bodies are given

141 Kinesthesis will be discussed in Chapter Five, Section B.

 112

already with an instructor's manual that we know completely,

and we respond to its instructions without thought as an
organist who plays a song 'by heart'.142 And in the process of
carrying out its instructions, we experience each movement of
our bodies as internally motivated and felt. 143
The body schema also affects how we understand the world
around us, before we consciously give it meaning. By means of
the body schema, we can tell how our body relates to objects
around it. We ' duck our heads' when approaching a narrow
passage, suggesting a 'secret' knowledge of the dimensions of
the world and their proportion to our bodies. It is as if the
body, of its own will, determines how we will engage
ourselves, and offers us a medium that is already geared for

142 Merleau-Ponty writes: "The subject knows where the letters are on
the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is" (PP 144/PPF 168).
143 This is only one alternative of conceiving of the body. Another
direction that is possible is to see the body in terms of a disunity of
drives and urges that threaten the unity of the body and social
intercourse. Inspired by Freud and the Marquis de Sade, such
philosophers as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze have developed this
alternative. For a comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault's
conception of the body, see Richard Cohen, "Merleau-Ponty, the Flesh and
Foucault," Philosophy Today 28 (1984), 329-37, where he argues that
Foucault focuses on specific modes of embodiment rather than on an
enveloping flesh of the world, and concludes that the difference between
the two philosophers is only "a difference in tone" (335). But I doubt
that Foucault would agree to such a conception of the unity of being in
flesh at all, making the difference between the two thinkers more
radical than Cohen suggests. For a discussion concerning Merleau-
Ponty's relation to Deleuze with respect to the body (as well as a
comparison to Bergson), see John Mullarkey, "Duplicity in the Flesh:
Bergson and Current Philosophy of the Body," Philosophy Today 38 (1994),
pp. 339-55, where he sees Bergson as a bridge between the pole of unity
(which he attributes to Merleau-Ponty) and the pole of division (which
he attributes to Deleuze). But these poles are drawn at the expense of
the complexity of Merleau-Ponty'S notion of the flesh of the body which
is not simply a moment of unity within the body but an opening and
exposure, in some ways similar to Mullarkey'S 'Deleuzian' pole (not to
be conflated with Deleuze). See especially pp. 342-4 and 348-51.
 113

action. We cannot say that this is our 'conscious' mind

imagining, since it occurs at a level below explicit

consciousness. It is as if the body had a 'mind of its own'.

Far from being a fad in psychology, the body schema

continues to be relevant today. But there is a lot of

confusion conqerning
,
the difference between the body schema

and the body image. For example, two of the pioneers in body

schema research, Henry Head and Paul Schilder, vacillate

between the views that the body schema is an immediate sense

of the body and its abilities and that it is an actual image

or mental representation of the body in the mind. They also

are not consistent with their use of such terms as 'body

schema', 'body image' and 'body concept. ,144 In more recent

literature, Seymour Fisher And Sidney Cleveland continue this

confusion. They describe 'body image' as "a term which refers

to the body as a psychological experience, and focuses on the

individual's feelings and attitudes toward his own body. It

is concerned with the individual's subjective experiences

with his body and the manner in which he has organized these
experiences." 145 This definition suggests that the body schema

is a representation in the mind, and not an immediate sense

of the body and its abilities.

144 They are quoted in Shaun Gallagher, "Body Schema and

Intentionality" in The Body and the Self, ed. Jose Bermudez, Anthony
Marcel, Naomi Eilan (Boston: MIT Press, 1995), p. 227.
145 Fisher and Cleveland, p. x.
 114

It seems that we experience both a body schema and a

body image, and that we should not reduce one to the other.
Many people with eating disorders have a distorted view of

their bodies as being too large, even though they maneuver

their bodies in ways that only normal subj ects would. When

they approach a tunnel, they adjust their posture to the

extent that is actually needed, and not to the extent that

would be needed for a larger body. The person with the eating

disorder seems to operate with two unique things, a body

schema and a body image.

Recent research by Shaun Gallagher suggests that it is

imperative that we separate the two concepts, 'body schema'

and 'body image'. First, there have been tests conducted on a

patient who has lost all proprioceptive awareness of his

limbs and bodily abilities below the neck. The patient can

see his limbs, and with extreme effort he can use his

understanding of the body to maneuver his arms and legs, but

he cannot determine his posture or the location of his limbs.
Gallagher concludes that the patient's body schema is greatly

defected while the body image is still intact; the patient

cannot spontaneously move his body, but he can make use of an

expl_~cit body image to imitate normal behaviour .146 Another

experiment suggests that while the body schema is intact, the

body image is defective. A patient with no sense of the left

146 Gallagher, "Body Image and Body Schema in a Deafferented Subject,"

The Journal of Mind and Behavior 16 (1995), pp. 374-76.
 115

side of her body is able to make basic movements with the

left arm and leg. She is able to walk with a normal gait, but

does not stoQ walking when her shoe falls off. She appears to

have no sense of the left side of her body, and yet can use

that sige for spontaneous movements. It seems I in this case,

that there is a body schema intact while the body image is

truncated to include only the right side of the body.147 Both

experiments suggest the need for a clear distinction between

body image, as a representation of the body in the mind, and

body schema, as an immediate sense of the body and its

abilities.

When Merleau-Ponty discusses the body I he is quite

consistent in using the term 'body schema' .148 He introduces

the term by first explaining its traditional use:

'Body schema' was at first understood to mean a

compendium of our bodily experience, capable of
gi ving a commentary and meaning to the internal
impressions and the impression of possessing a body
at any moment ... When the term body schema was
first used, it was thought that nothing more was
being introduced than a convenient name for a great
many associations of images. (Pp 99/PPF 115)

But Merleau-Ponty proceeds to attack this view. In order for

the different associations to work in unison, we would need

a "superimposed outline of the body" and "a single law" or

"purpose" (ibid.). This law or purpose, then, would be an

147 Shaun Gallagher and Andrew Meltzoff, "The Earliest Sense of Self
and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies,"
Philosophical psychology 9 (1996), p. 215.
148 The French reads schema corporel (pp 98/PPF 114). Colin Smith's
translation is "body image" rather than "body schema." By contrast, John
O'Neill translates the term as "body schema" (TFL 129/TFLF 177).
 116

image of an image, and we would have the new problem of

explaining how this 'super' image relates to the others. "We

are therefore feeling our way towards a second definition of

the body schema, II he argues. "[I] t is no longer seen as the

straigh~!orward result of associations established during

experience, but a total awareness of my posture in the

intersensory world, a 'fonn' in the sense used by Gestalt

psychology" (PP 99-100/PPF 115-16) . Merleau - Ponty thus

separates himself from traditional psychology in order to

stress the global nature of the body schema. 149

The body schema, far from being a mental representation

of the body, comes to be seen by Merleau-ponty as a felt

sense of the body. We spontaneously move our limbs and adjust

our posture without any explicit thought or judgment, and

live our bodies as if they were already programmed in a

number of ways. The body schema, however, is not completely

in our control. Beneath the level of conscious, personal
existence, lies a level of generality that we never have in
our complete control. "[0) ur body comprises as it were two
distinct layers, that of the customary body and that of the

body at this moment" (PP 82/PPF 97-8). The second level is

personal existence, in which I engage my body in consciously

149 A good summary of Merleau-Ponty's relation to prior body schema

research is provided by Douwe Tiemersma, who traces the concept back as
far as 1905. See "'Body Image' and 'Body Schema' in the Existential
Phenomenology of Merleau-ponty," Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 13 (1982), pp. 246-55. Tiemersma's article, however, is
more exegetical and historical than critical, and does not account for
the body schema and body image distinction.
 117

chosen proj ects . The customary level is a general mode of

being, capable of perfonning 'what anyone could do' (lice
qu' on peut manier, II ibid.), and giving to my existence a
stock of general behaviour. By means of this general
existence, I am aware of what my body can do and how it can
bring me into contact with the world. liMy organism, as a pre-
personal clearing to the general fonn of the world, as an

anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath my personal

life, the part of an inborn complex. It is not some kind of
inert this, it too has something of the momentum of
existence ll (PP 84/PPF 99). By means of the body schema, I am
able to open myself to the world as an embodied being with

certain capabilities, such as the ability to take in the

world as a spectacle, to grasp objects with my hands and to
walk around them and explore their hidden sides. The body

inserts me not in tenns of fixed reflex responses, but in

terms of a complex of practical activities that I can make
use of to explore the world.
In the pathologies mentioned above (the phantom limb,
failure to perform abstract movement, et cetera), the problem
occurs not in a reflex or a thought, but in the body schema
as a general mode of existence. Concerning abstract motion,
Merleau-Ponty explains that the patient is forced to resort

to objective motion because of a failure of the body

 118

schema. ISO In contrast to the patient, the normal subject need

not resort to such motion. Merleau-Ponty explains:

In normal imitation, the subj ect' s left hand is

immediately identified with his partner's, his
action immediately models itself on the other's,
and the subject projects himself or loses his
separate reality in the other, becomes identified
with him, and the change of co-ordinates is pre-
eminently embodied in this existential process.
This is because the normal subject has his body not
only as a system of present positions, but besides,
and thereby, as an open system of an infinite
number of equivalent positions directed to other
ends. What we have called the body schema is
precisely this system of equivalents, this
immediately given invariant whereby the different
motor tasks are instantaneously transf erable. (PP
141/PPF 165)

The normal subj ect has an immediate sense of what his body

can do, and immediately imitates the actions of the doctor

without recourse to objective motion. The patients, however,

are unable to do this because their body image is out of sync

with their personal projects. In some cases, such as swatting

a mosquito, the patients can respond without difficulty, but

they are unable to use their bodies beyond such concrete

cases because their world has become "reduced to concrete and

immediate experience" (SB 64/SBF 69). In the case of the

phantom limb, the old way of opening to the world with the
limb persists as a mode of action without physical support,

150 The patient understands the task of touching his right hand to his
right ear and his left hand to his nose, but he touches both hands to
his nose, or to his nose and eye. "In other words, the right and left
hand, the eye and ear are still presented to them as absolute locations,
and not inserted into any system of correlations which links them up
with the corresponding parts of the doctor's body, and which makes them
usable for imitation" (PP 141/PPF 165).
 119

and only gradually becomes absorbed in a new body schema that

is proper to the physical body in its present form. lSI

Merleau-ponty talks less frequently about tne body

image. One of the few places where the body image is

mentioned is in "The Child's Relations with Others," where he

describes it in terms of a 'specular image' (1' image

specu1aire, PrP 125, n. 13/ROF 42). Taking his cue from the
work of Jacques Lacan152 and others, Merleau-Ponty shows how

151 Alluding to his claim later in Phenomenology of Perception that

the body image is synonymous with temporality, Merleau-Ponty explains
the phantom limb as follows: HImpersonal time continues its course, but
personal time is arrested" (PP 83/PPF 98). The body schema, as
I impersonal time I , continues to control the patient I s grasp of the
world, despite his conscious attempts to overcome the pathology.
152 See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Formation
of the I," PP. 1-7. I do not wish to detail the complex relation between
Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. I only wish to point out a particular
difference between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. Though both see the mirror
stage to be forma t i ve f or the chi ld • s body image, they di sagree
concerning what is affected during this stage. Martin Jay shows that
Merleau-ponty sees the mirror stage as formative of the super-ego which
rests on a prior ego that was already related to the Other before this
stage. ThuS there is a difference between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty in
tt~t Lacan sees the mirror stage as formative of the ego (PrP 136/ROF
56; Lacan, ibid., p. 2). This difference leads Helen Fielding to argue
that while Lacan bases sociality on an essential alienation of the self
from itself (through the mirror image), Merleau-Ponty sees this
mediation as a stage in one's existence which is already essentially
social. David Michael Levin agrees with this position. He writes that
"there is a schematism of mutual recognition already inscribed in the
flesh, and it implicates the achievement of an ideal corrununicative
situation." Lacan, however, does not take account of this essential
sociality by over-stressing the alienation of the mirror stage. See
Martin Jay, "Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of
Sight" in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p.174; Helen Fielding,
"Envisioning the Other: Lacan and Merleau-ponty on Intersubjectivity" in
Merleau-ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World,
ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New
York press, 1999), pp. 194-95; David Michael Levin, "Visions of
Narcissism: Intersubjectivity and the Reversals of Reflection" in
Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ed. M.C. Dillon (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), p. 53.
Another point of comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan is
Lacan's essay, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty," Les Temps Modernes 184-85
 120

our sense of self is at first diluted into a general sense of

social existence. When an infant hears another infant crying,

he begins to cry because he has no sense of separation from

the emotions of others (PrP 124/ROF 40). But around the age

of six months, the child begins to experience an alienation

of other people in the form of their mirror images (PrP 127-

B/ROF 44-5), and later discovers the same phenomenon to occur

for himself. It is only at this point, claims Merleau-Ponty,

that the child comes to separate himself from others. But

even this development of a self is based on a sense of

reciprocity with others- - in this case, a reciprocity of the

ability to be made visible. Merleau-Ponty explains that "what

is true of his own body, for the child, is also true of the

other's body. The child himself feels that he is in the

other's body, just as he feels himself to be in his visual

image" (prP 134/ROF 53). On the basis of the reversibility of

the Other and her mirror image, and thus of her subjectivity

and her ability to be seen, the child comes to see the same

reversibility within himself. And on the basis of this

reversibility the child comes to see himself as separate from

others. Thus the body image emerges in the mirror phase as an

idea of the self in comparison to others. It is not reducible

(1961), pp. 245-54. Lacan argues that Merleau-Ponty promotes a priority

of presence over the workings of the unconscious in perception, language
and art (pp. 250-53). We have already seen above (in Chapter Three) that
Merleau-Ponty is not stressing presence in a metaphysical sense, but as
the dimensionality of qualities that harbour within them a sense of
absence. The unconscious and the claim that Merleau-ponty promotes a
metaphysics of presence will be discussed in Chapter Five, section E.
 121

to anyone of the single visual images appearing in the

mirror, but is a general sense of self and other that the

child develops throughout the mirror stage. Merleau - Ponty

distinguishes the body image (or, in his words, the specular

image) from the actual physical image in the mirror (l'image

du miroir, PrP 129/ROF 46). The body image, then, could be

seen as the specular image that is developed during the

child's mirror phase.

The difference between the body schema and the body

image is crucial to making sense of embodied existence. One

instance of the need for maintaining this difference is in

determining the origins and extent of sexual and cultural

differences .153 Merleau-Ponty tends to address these
~

differences only at the level of the body image. The "battle

of the sexes" (PrP 103/ROF 10), for example, is based on the

reciprocation of meanings at the level of the body image.

Thus Gail weiss is correct in criticizing Merleau - Ponty for

not taking into account the full extent of sexual and

cultural differences. 154 But Weiss's own analysis conflates

the body schema with the body image, so that it is difficult

to tell when she is talking about the effects of the body

image on the development of differences, and the extent to

153 I do not wish to embark on a comparative analysis of specific

differences at this point; I only wish to show the need for recognizing
the difference between the body schema and the body image when
discussing sexual and cultural differences.
154 Gail Weiss, "Body Image Intercourse: A Corporeal Dialogue between
Merleau-Ponty and Schilder" in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and
Exteriority, pp. 131-4 and 137-9.
 122

which certain differences are innate in the body schema or

incorporated into it by means of habituation. To the extent

that certain habits may be divided across sexual or cultural

lines, we could begin to discuss such differences at the

level of the body schema. But these differences would be

different fram those found at the level of the body image--

those that Merleau-Ponty focuses on, for instance. iSS

It is also unclear when the body schema and body image

are formulated. According to Merleau-ponty, a child does not
really interest himself in his body until about the fourth

month. It is also around this time that there is a union

between interoception and exteroception--between the inner

awareness of the parts of his body and the awareness of an

external world (PrP 122/ROF 37). liThe consciousness of one IS
own body, II concludes Merleau - ponty, II is thus fragmentary at

first and gradually becomes integrated; the corporeal schema

becomes precise, restructured, and mature little by little"

(Prp 123/ROF 39). Merleau-Ponty is repeating the claims of

Jean Piaget, Henri Wallon and others, that the body schema is
developed and not innate.

Current research, however, suggests that the opposite is

true. In a recent study by Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith

Moore, infants were shown to be able to imitate facial

155 Weiss's analysis would benefit from a comparison with that of Iris
Young who studies the different kinds of habits that women develop as
opposed to men. See Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990), pp. 141-59.
 ----------------

123

gestures, recognize faces according to previous gestures, and

return the same gestures when unsolicited; the infants were

also shown to frequently develop and simplify the gestures to

suit their own preferences .156 This requires at least some

unity of the body schema and of its relation to the image of

the other person that is imitated, suggesting an innate

relation of the body schema with exteroception. It also

suggests that the infant has an interoceptive awareness of

his body, which Gallagher takes to be an instance of the body

image. 157 It seems, then, that Merleau - Ponty would need to

modify his view of the fragmentary nature of interoception

and exteroception at birth. 15S But it would not contradict

Gallagher's analysis to say that, at birth, the body schema

and body image are quite basic and indetenninate, and that

they are in need of radical development such as occurs when a

child learns to walk and speak, and when he passes through

the mirror stage and develops a more mature sense of self and

Other. Thus while admitting that there is some kind of vague

unity of bodily motility and self-awareness, the mature forms

of these bodily phenomena are the result of many years of

development, including many radical stages such as the mirror

stage and the acquisition of language.

156 Andrew Meltzoff, M. Keith Moore, "Infant's understanding of People

and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk psychology" in The Body and the
Self, pp. 48-58.
157 Gallagher and Meltzoff, pp. 223-4.
158 This is suggested by Gallagher and Meltzoff on pp. 225 and 228.
 124

What is the extent of the body schema? So far, we have

explored it as a synthesis of motility and of our awareness

of the location and relation of the parts of the body. By

means of the body schema, we are able to treat our bodies as

potentialities for experience and to be situated in the

world. The body schema allows us to experience the world by

means of potential body movements. These movements are not

remembered in a step-by-step fashion, but as components of a

more general type of behaviour that can be modified depending

on the situation. 159 A cat that learns to pull on a string to

receive food modifies the behaviour by first pulling with its

paw and later with its teeth. What the cat possesses is not a

set of individual skills but a general type of behaviour that

discloses the situation as a place for possible action rather

than a factual state of affairs .160 This general type of

behaviour assumes the form of habits, by means of which the

body schema is enriched and expanded. Merleau-Ponty describes

habits as "our power of dilating our being in the world" (PP

159 " [T] he subj ect does not weld together individual movement sand
individual stimuli but acquires the power to respond with a certain type
of solution to situations of a certain general form. The situations may
differ widely from case to case, and the response movements may be
entrusted sometimes to one operative organ, sometimes to another, both
situations and responses in the various cases having in common not so
much a partial identity of elements as a shared significance" (PP
142/PPF 166) .
160 SB 96/SBF 106. Merleau-Ponty writes: "Thus, to learn never
consists in being made capable of repeating the same gesture, but of
providing an adapted response to the situation by different means. Nor
is the response acquired with regard to an individual situation. It is
rather a question of a new aptitude for resolving a series of problems
of the same form." A cat s ability to deal with new situations is
I

limited compared to that of humans--it involves the use of 'signals'

rather than 'symbols' (see SB 112/SBF 122) .
 125

143/PPF 168). A habit lIelucidates the nature of the body

schema ll (PP 143, n.3/PPF 168, n.l), and allows us lito acquire

a certain style of seeing, a new use of one's body; it is to

enrich and recast the body schema II (PP 153/PPF 179). The

habit of pulling a string to receive food, for instance, can

be repeated in new situations and modified to suit the new

situation. Within this habit, the body schema of what the cat

is capable of doing and achieving with its body is modified

and enriched, so that both the mouth and the paw become

instruments in addition to their other, more natural

functional values. Habits develop the body schema and allow

us to experience the world in a general way regardless of the

specificity of the situation. 161

We have seen the body schema to be a general structure

that underlies human experience. It cannot be explained in

"
terms of physiology or conscious thought, but resembles more
of a habit that we tacitly possess and make use of without

explicitly thinking about it. The body schema assumes the

form of lIa certain style ll or manner of existence, that both

inserts consciousness into a particular complex of potential

action and transcends its immediate context in terms of

styles of behaviour. Personal and general existence are poles

of a dialectic in which old habits are developed to meet new

161 Edward Casey has written an interesting article on the temporality

of habituation. He argues that 'body memory' in the form of habituation
is a missing link in Merleau-ponty's early conception of temporality.
See "Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty," Man and World 17
(1984), pp. 279-97.
 126

situations, and general body structures are applied to

consciously chosen proj ects. These levels of existence are

involved in an "imperceptible twist" (PP 88/PPF 104) in which

they seek greater and greater integration but "never quite

coincide" (PP 87/PPF 103). By means of the dialectic, all of

the different modes of existence (sociality, sexuality,

dreaming, et cetera) are integrated into "a woven fabric" (PP

166/PPF 194) that is both grounded in the world and open to

new possibilities.162 The body schema makes sense only within

this dialectic between the constituted and the transcending,

as the ground for meaning of every experience.

162 Merleau-ponty describes the body schema as a work of art, since

its meaning is indistinguishable from its expression. lilt is a focal
point of living meanings, not the function of a certain number of
mutually variable terms" (PP 151/PPF 177). For this reason, we are
unable to discern the body schema in purely positivistic terms.
 CHAPTER FIVE: IMAGINING BODIES

A. Introduction

In Chapter One we started to think about the body as an

imaginative medium. The mime, in particular, draws from the

body's secret powers to cormnunicate an entire scene to the

audience without speaking a word. On the surface, the mime

seems to merely imitate real life experiences--the

embarrassment of falling through a chair in public, the

nervousness of going on a first date, the drama of witnessing

a criminal's execution. But the source of the mime's

inspiration is found in the depths of the body as lived,
below the cultural level of ordinary social practices. Anyone

can 'imitate' a teenager on his first date, but the mime

turns this imitation into an art. How does she do this?

The body has a beauty of its owo. Even the simplest

movement of an arm or a leg can be performed gracefully and

simply, or awkwardly and disjointedly. When we first learned

to walk, the 'art' of the body was at the forefront of our

attention, as important as the art of speaking, and it is

later, when we have 'mastered' our owo motility, that we

forget the body as a medium for expression. In many ways, it

is similar to our attitude towards art in general. There are

many adults who continue to draw 'like children', and are too

embarrassed to develop their artistic skills. But this is

127
 128

because they stopped drawing when they were children and not,

as they claim, because they lack a 'gift'. Likewise, we lose

the art of the body quite early, as soon as we have developed

it sufficiently to navigate ourselves safely throughout a

given space. It is only when we see a mime performing her art

that we remember just how expressive the body can be.

The most obvious starting point f or a theory of the

imagining body is the body image, the mental picture or

representation of the body. Therapists have found that by

making a patient's body image explicit, the patient is able

to confront his or her image and to either accept it or

attempt to change it. An anorexic, for instance, can be made

to explicitly deal with her view of herself as overweight,

and to explore the social or psychological causes of her body

image. It is not enough simply to hold up a mirror to her and

compare her image to the 'actual' body. A change in behaviour

must begin with a creative change of her body image.

In what way could the body schema. be said to be an

instance of imagining? If the body schema is mostly a bodily

synthesis that we do not control, and that operates much like

the visceral components of our body, in what way COuld it be

said to be creative and to involve images? We would not, for

instance, say that our kidneys imagine anything, so why would

we be led to say that the body schema imagines?

We have already seen, however, that the body schema is

not a hard-wired set of instructions but an open and creative

 129

medium for human existence. We find, even in some animals, an

innate ability to perfect basic actions in order to attain a

particular goal. The cat, we saw, learns to pull a string to

obtain food with different body parts, simplifying the action

and forcing its environment to meet its own needs and

preferences. In the studies mentioned earlier by Andrew

Meltzoff and others, we saw how newborn infants possess a

similar capability to develop the body schema. As adults, we

develop our bodies in a number of ways, learning new skills

and adjusting to changes due to illness and age. We find

ourselves in a perpetual state of developing the body schema.

There seems to be a paradox here between the body as

given and the body as creative. Merleau-Ponty argues that we

receive our bodies as already equipped and determined to be

open to reality in a number of ways. "Acquisition must be

accepted as an irreducible phenomenon" (PP 393/PPF 450). But

this constitution is never total: "[I]n the first case we are
acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number

of possibilities" (PP 453/PPF 517). The body schema is not a

set of actual and pre-determined instructions that we are

forced to follow, but a finite field of open possibilities

that we can develop in a number of ways. "The body is

essentially an expressive space" (PP 146/PPF 171), like the

keys of a piano, determining a range of possible sounds that

allOW, rather than prohibit, the pianist to express

 130

herself. 163 The actual body schema has an aura of virtuality,

exposing it to potential development. The body schema

involves a dialectic between the acquired and the developed,

the constituted and the constituting. There is room in the

body schema, then, for imaginative development .164

163 Very early in The Structure of Behavior is a reference to the body

as an instrument: the body is like "a keyboard which moves itself in
such a way as to offer--and according to variable rhythms--such or such
of its keys to the in itself monotonous action of an external hammer"
(SB 13/SBF 12).
164 Sam Mallin describes this as "creative specification" (64), in
which we are given a "primordial understanding of the world" (80) by
means of the body schema, but as something that requires further
development. The body schema provides only vague and indeterminate
instructions that we must develop in different ways if we are to turn
them into concrete actions. This suggests that even though the body
schema is innate and already determines our existence to a large extent,
it also forces us to construct symbols and meanings out of our
experience and to develop our primary contact with the world in a number
of different ways. As Mallin says, "We cannot speak of these details,
entities, or attributes as existing in themselves before their
discovery, since they are a function of my creativity." The body schema
is the original source of creativity that allows us to construct for us
a world of meaning. See Mallin, p. 71. See also Michael Yeo'S
dissertation, Creative Adequation: Merleau-ponty's Philosophy of
Philosophy (Hamilton: McMaster University, 1987), pp. 185-7.
An important issue that arises at this point is Merleau-Ponty's
theory of freedom. It was shown in Chapter Two, Section D, that Sartre
and Casey both saw freedom in terms of an imagination that separates
itself from reality and establishes its own meaning. Merleau-Ponty's
theory of freedom is less extreme in that it sees freedom as essentially
bound to the imagining body. This may seem, at first, to be a paradox.
The body schema conditions our existence, and seems to limit rather than
enable our freedom. Merleau-Ponty admits that we acquire our body as a
fate or destiny (PP 438, 444/PPF SOl, 507) that conditions our existence
"before any personal decision is made" (PP 449/PPF 513). The body'S
physical limitations provide an additional limit to our freedom. "In so
far as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which
are not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my surroundings in
a way which I do not choose" (PP 440/PPF 502). But despite the fact that
we are conditioned by the body schema, we still possess "that strange
power" (PP 371/PPF 425) to transcend our immediate situation and to give
to it a personal meaning. Such transcendence could never take the form
of absolute freedom, since without a situation and a body, any project
would become impossible and human action would be reduced to a series of
instantaneous acts. (See Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Sartre at PP 452-
3/PPF 516-17 and AD 101-14/ADF 139-55. For a good volume on the
comparison of Merleau-Ponty with Sartre, see Jon Stewart, ed., The
 131

The body schema is also described as a symbolic medium.

Unlike some organisms that appear to react to the world

instinctually, the body automatically categorizes the world

into different types and symbols. "Each situation," claims

John Bannan, "is the analogue of many others, and what our

experience with them generates are global aptitudes, not

repeatable gestures. ,,165 The cat experiences its situation in

terms of the global meaning of the task of attaining food,

and in light of that global meaning it can explore different

ways of achieving the goal. The cat also experiences its body

as a global system with symbolic parts, rather than as a

collection of parts each with its own prescribed operation.

The paw is not hard-wired as a tool for grasping and the

Debate between Sartre and Merleau-ponty [Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1998].) Rather than appealing to an absolute form of
freedom, Merleau-Ponty suggests that freedom is found in the dialectic
between using old habits of the body and acquiring new ones. "Thus it is
by giving UP part of his spontaneity, by becoming involved in the world
through stable organs and pre-established circuits that man can acquire
the mental and practical space which will theoretically free him from
his environment" (PP 87/PPF 103). It is by giving up the dream of total
freedom that real freedom can be found in the body as an expressive
medium. The imagination, then, continues to be essential for freedom,
but unlike the theories of Sartre and Casey, the imagination is found
here in the expressive body and its creative appropriation of sedimented
habits. The different ways that the body imagines will be discussed
throughout the rest of this chapter.
165 Bannan, p. 39. See Merleau-Ponty'S description of this symbolic
activity in the following: "The subject does not weld together
individual movements and individual stimuli but acquires the power to
respond with a certain type of solution to situations of a certain
general form. The situations may differ widely from case to case, and
the response movements may be entrusted sometimes to one operative
organ, sometimes to another, both situations and responses in the
various cases having in common not so much a partial identity of
elements as a shared significance" (PP 142/PPF 166). There is an
interesting comparison of this essentially human ability to symbolize to
other organisms, in particular, to chimpanzees. See SB 95/SBF 104 and
following.
 132

teeth as a tool for chewing, but both became significant as

symbols of a common meaning for the body as a whole. The

body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is "that strange object

which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for

the world ll {PP 237/PPF 274}. Each part can become a symbol

for an entire activity or meaning. These symbols are not

arbitrary, however, but rely on the body schema for their

original orientation and meaning. 166 The body schema

recognizes that some parts are better for particular tasks

than others. It provides a set of preferences, so that the

cat, for instance, comes to prefer using its teeth rather

than its paw. The body schema also provides us with natural

gestures, such as a cry for food, the bearing of teeth to

inf lict f ear on others, and the downward glance of

embarrassment. 167 All cultural gestures are a development of

natural gestures; without the provision of natural gestures

by the body schema, we would not have the ability to create

new gestures. The body schema provides not only an original
stock of natural gestures and expressive abilities, but the
ground for a continued life of expressing meaning.

166 Merleau-Ponty writes: "The body is the vehicle of an indefinite

number of symbolic systems whose intrinsic development definitely
surpasses the signification in 'natural' gestures, but would collapse if
ever the body ceases to prompt their operation and install them in the
world and our life" (TFL 9/TFLF 18).
167 There is substantial evidence in recent research suggesting that
many of these gestures are cross-cultural and even found in some
primates. See the selection of articles in Nonverbal Communication:
Where Nature Meets Nurture, ed. Ullica Segerstrale and Peter Molnar
(Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997).
 133

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe the body

schema's expressive nature in terms of bodily metaphors. They
claim that there are a number of basic bodily metaphors out
of which we construct not only a sense of space but a sense
of logical concepts and relations. "The essence of metaphor,"
they argue I II is understanding and experiencing one kind of
thing in terms of another. 11168 A child discovers the meaning
of exclusion and inclusion when it experiments with its thumb
or rattle, and develops a sense of spatial orientation as
well as of the relations of forces both within and outside of
its body. These basic experiences form the bodily metaphors
that the child will use throughout his life in order to make
sense of his experience.
Since linguistic metaphors occur within a language, so
bodily metaphors must occur within a bodily language. Johnson
and Lakoff' s analysis suggests that the activities of the
body can be treated like a language. We see this treatment
especially in the bodily narratives told by the mime.
Maravene Sheppard Loeschke claims that a mime sequence can be
divided into a number of sections and movements which operate

168 Lakoff and Johnson, p. 5. In this book, they argue that even
conceptual and linguistic metaphors are ultimately based on an
experiential basis, such as the body'S experience of up and down. On the
basis of this experience, we can arrive at such metaphors as a computer
being 'up and running' (rather than 'down and out'); the experience of
in and out also allows us to understand the concept of logical inclusion
and exclusion. see especially Chapters One to Four. A more detailed
examination of these metaphors in embodiment is provided in Mark
Johnson, Tbe Body in tbe Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987) •
 134

much like the words and punctuation of a language. For

example, the mime sequence, "The Big Date," includes a number

of sections including getting ready, leaving the house, and

dri ving to the date. These sections can be divided further

into units, such as looking at the clock and having a shower,

and again divided into beats, such as pulling back the shower
curtain and turning on the shower. 169 The mime is aware of

bodily experience as an intrinsic and silent language that we

speak without explicit knowledge every moment of our lives.

The body schema, far from restricting our ability to express

meaning, enables us to develop an entire language of gestures

and silent meanings .170

There is a limitation to the analysis of bodily

metaphors by Lakoff and Johnson concerning the nature of

bodily language and space. Though they are correct to see

embodiment in terms of a language, they treat it as a

language that is already mostly written. They do not, for

instance, explore how it is that a child comes to distinguish

between up and down, inside and outside, but seem to suggest

that the child already makes use of these distinctions as

innate categories of embodiment. But according to Merleau-

Ponty, language does not operate in this fashion, and rather

169 Loeschke, pp. 31-32 and 43-45.

170 Julias Fast, in a book called Body Language, tells the story of a
psychologist who held a party at which nobody was allowed to speak.
After a few minutes of awkwardness, the guests were surprised by how
much they could communicate with their bodies. See Body Language
(Richmond Hill: Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 24-25.
 135

involves differences within an open and dynamic diacritical

system. Merleau - Ponty writes: "This primordial level of

language may be approached by defining signs, as Saussure

does, not as the representations of certain significations

but as the means of differentiation in the verbal chain and

of 'oppositive, relative and negative entities' in speech"

(POW 31/POWF 45). Lakoff and Johnson do not take account of

this dynamism of language, due to their being influenced by

Modern philosophy, and so also miss this dynamism at the

level of the human body. Thus while they are helpful in

showing us that the body is like a language of metaphors,

they do not explore the true nature of such metaphors. Rather

than developing bodily metaphors along the lines of Barbaras'

ontological metaphoricity, they appeal to the traditional

view of the metaphor as a clash of already established

semantic fields.
Lakoff and Johnson also rely on a traditional theory of

space that is criticized by Merleau-Ponty. The child's body

is assumed to develop bodily metaphors within Euclidean space

and in relation to external objects. Not only does this seem

to contradict with the fact that children do not have a sense

of external obj ects at an early age l7l , but it reduces

spatiality to a single model. Merleau - Ponty I by contrast,

sees spatiality as dynamic and essentially based on a

171 See, for instance, Meltzoff and Moore, pp. 44-45 and 59; and James
Russell, "At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-world
Dualism" in The Body and the Self, pp. 127-39.
 136

divergence between subject and object. Space, he claims, is

not a simple frame for experience (VI 260/VIF 313). He uses

the example of the inside and outside of a glove, and writes

the following note: "Reversibility: the finger of the glove

that is turned inside out- -There is no need of a spectator

who would be on each side. It suffices that from one side I

see the wrong side of the glove that is applied to the right,

that I touch the one through the other (double

'representation' of a point or plane of the field) the chiasm

is that: the reversibility" (VI 263/VIF 317). Spatiality is

not the glove as container or the container of the room where

the glove is found, but the divergence between the two

surfaces. Johnson and Lakoff reduce the nature of space to

externality and base their theory of bodily metaphors on this

reduction. The result is a narrow conception of bodily

metaphors .172

It may still be asked, however, how it is that the body

schema can be treated as an instance of imagining if it

mostly occurs without our being aware of it. How can it be

said that we develop the body schema in a creative way if we

do not, for the most part, even see it at work? However,

despite the predominant absence of the body schema, it is

erroneous to assert that it does not exist at all, or that it

172 For a good discussion of Merleau -ponty and space, see Edward
Casey, "The Elements of Voluminousness: Depth and Place Re-examined" in
Merleau-Ponty Vivant, pp. 1-41.
 137

is completely beyond the auspices of consciousness. Merleau-

ponty explains:

If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with

both hands, only my hands are stressed and the
whole of my body trails behind them like the tail
of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the
whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but these are
simply swallowed up in the position of my hands,
and my whole posture can be read so to speak in the
pressure they exert on the table. (PP 100/PPF 116)

We do not lose contact with the body schema; it is still

present in a kind of absence. This phenomenon is developed by

Drew Leder in his book, The Absent Body, in which he argues

that different parts of our bodies 'disappear' into the

background without ceasing to be present for us as part of

the background. D3 Thus it would be wrong to say that the body

schema is a set of operations that occur below the level of

consciousness; it would be better to say that consciousness

is made possible by means of the body schema that is always

present in some manner. 174

At this point, we can see that the body image is really

only the virtual aspect of the body schema. We saw above how

the body schema involves not simply an actual synthesis of

bodily sensations and abilities at a given moment, but also a

global sense of the body as an open field of possible

developments. This means that the actual body schema contains

173 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago press,
1990), Chapter Two. Though I agree with Leder's description of the
absent body, I disagree with his giving equal priority to both flesh and
the visceral system. I criticize this in Chapter Six, Section B.
174 Merleau-Ponty and the unconscious will be discussed in Section E
of this chapter.
 138

its own virtuality or invisible lining. This lining is what

we work on when we learn a new habit. We inhabit a virtual

extension of the body schema as actually lived, and find

ourselves perpetually in this magical chiasm of the actual

and the virtual. The body image is simply the virtual pole of

such an extension. On the basis of a general sense of the

body as both actual and virtual, we are able to conceive of

different ways to live our bodies and picture our bodies. We

can picture ourselves when young as bipedal like our parents

only because we discover within our body schema the

potentiality for walking; likewise, we can see ourselves as

overweight only because part of our actual body schema is

already equipped with an ability to entertain alternative

possibilities, such as the possibility of being overweight.

The body image, far from being radically separate from the

body schema, is really only the virtual extension of the body

schema. 17S
We must now see in what way the imagining body can be
shown to be at work in the instances of imagination developed

in Chapter Two: (i) perceptual imagining, (ii) aesthetic

175 This view need not contradict with Shaun Gallagher's distinction
between the body image and the body schema. Gallagher has stressed that
such a distinction, however useful in analysis and treatment, need not
be seen as absolute. I would also add that none of the patients
mentioned in Gallagher's research are completely without either a body
schema or a body image. There is always at least part of the image and
schema intact. Thus we find between them less a relation of opposites
and more a relation of poles in a dialectic.
 139

imagining, (iii) fanciful imagining, and (iv) elemental

imagining.

B. perceptual Embodiment

It was shown above that perception involves both the

discovery of positive qualities and the concealment of

certain features that make those qualities visible. These

invisible aspects of the scene were shown to be developed

into the work of art, so that we could see how a given colour

or form can make visible various dimensions such as depth,

volume, texture and sound. In what way could it be said that

these aspects of the visual scene are related to the

imagining body?
We have already seen how a simple patch of red can also

suggest a background and a range of colours. There is already

a logos of the general scene in the form of an

interpretation. Merleau - Ponty claims that "prior to stimuli

and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner

diaphragm which determines, inf ini tely more than they do,
what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in

the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of

our life" (PP 81/PPF 95). Gary Madison echoes the claim that

perception is essentially an interpretative process.

perception is not a passive reception of data, he claims, but

"a semantic or metaphorical innovation whose purpose is to

make our lived-though experience intelligible to ourselves,

 140

to explain it." 176 Colors are like words or symbols, "command

posts" that control "the structural properties of perception"

{SB 85/SBF 94}, already endowing our experience with a
particular meaning.

But these 'perceptual metaphors' are not the determinate

concepts of logic, and follow a law or grammar that we do not

completely understand. "[T]here is a significance of the

percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the
understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the
objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet

determinate being" (PP 46-7/PPF 58). Rather than treating

perception as a product of consciousness, it would be better
to understand it as a text that is already writing itself,

already partially defined, and made complete by the human

touch of interpretation. In this way, both the percept and

the perceiver contribute to the meaning of perception. "All

perception," says Merleau-Ponty, II is already primordial
expression" (S 67/SF 84). There are, in a sense, two authors,
but a single, primordial expression.
Perception, as we have seen, is also an instance of
imagining. The red patch suggests not only an implied
background and interpretation of reality, but also the
possibility of serving as a background for something else.

176 Gary Madison, "Did Merleau-Ponty have a Theory of Perception" in

Merleau-Ponty, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch and
Henneneutics,
Shaun Gallagher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p.
84.
 141

Red can be intended as a positive shade or as a symbol for

depth or weight in an artist's painting. Either way, the
colour is already an interpretation of a gi ven experience.
Perception contains a background of virtuality; my experience
involves "an interlacing of significations such that, when
certain among them are perceived and pass into actuality, the
others are only virtually intended" (SB 217/SBF 234). The
experience of red as a vibrant colour, for instance,
overshadows the possible experience of the world as vibrant
by means of red light. Perception itself, then, is like art
or poetry, awakening us to possible modes of expression: "It
must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken and recall
our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or
seen" (S 52/SF 65). Perception is not only an interpretive
act, but an instance of creative expression and a poetry of
the senses.
What we have not seen (at least explicitly) is that
perception is also a mode of embodied imagination. We find
that in our very discussion of perception, we appeal to a
number of corporal metaphors: we glance at an obj ect, we
grasp it and hand it over to others, we reach out of our
inner selves into a world that is ready for our bodily
contact. "We must therefore recognize that what is designated
by the terms 'glance', 'hand', and in general 'body' is a
system of systems devoted to the inspection of a world and
capable of leaping over distances, piercing the perceptual
 142

future, and outlining hollows and reliefs, distances and

deviations- -a meaning- - in the inconceivable flatness of

being" (S 67/SF 83). The system of systems that allows this

contact is none other than the imagining body. The body is

"an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which

reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours" (PP

236/PPF 273). The world of perception consists of a number of

bodily capabilities: the cup that is graspable, the plate

that I can reach and touch. "The visible world and the world

of my motor projects are each total parts of the same

Being. ,,177 The knowledge of perception is based on the

knowledge of the body schema and what it can do, a "kind of

knowledge that is very close to praxis" (TFL 8/TFLF 17). This

knowledge is something like what Gilbert Ryle called 'knowing

how', a practical ability rather than an understanding of

what something is.DB But this pragmatic knowledge is prior to

particular proj ects and to concepts and is based on our

original insertion into the world by means of the body .
percepts suggest a way that I can Ii ve my body, and only

secondarily do they suggest real objects with a determinate

size and shape or use. "My body is the fabric into which all

objects are woven" (PP 235/PPF 272). Objects are first

understood in terms of my bodily-abilities I as bearing a

177 PrP 162/EMF 17. See also S 66/SF 82, where Merleau-ponty writes,
"the spirit of the world is ourselves, as soon as we know how to move
ourselves and look."
178 Ryle, pp. 26-60.
 143

"physiognomy" (PP 144/PPF 168). Thus to perceive is to

imagine the body according to the cues of the perceptual

scene.
The above description of perception suggests that the

body plays an essential role in perceptual experience. The

perceiver must be situated in the world and must assume a

particular perspective. The unity of an object is not

determined by abstractly thinking of its structure as it

persists beyond that perspective, but by following up on the

foreshadowing of the scene within which it appears. The

hidden sides of an object are present as suggested by

horizons, foreshadowed by the tension of lines and colours

around the edges, and by the resistance of its texture to my

touch. On the basis of this bodily experience of the object,

I can then discern the number of sides and its constant shape

and colour. 179 Without the perspectival nature of perception,

an experience of a unified obj ect would be impossible. And

perspective is possible only for a situated body, suggesting

that the body schema, as my insertion into the world, is

essential for the unity of the perceptual object (PP 203/PPF

235) .
The body schema mediates the experience of a perceptual

object in a number of ways. First, it establishes a zero-

179 Merleau-ponty explains that even the geometric definition of a

cube is based on bodily experience with the object. The definition
provides a "limiting idea whereby I express the material presence of the
cube which is there before my eyes" (PP 204/PPF 236 -7). See also VI
202/VIF 255 and Jacques Garelli, "Voir ceci et voir selon," pp. 83-4.
 144

point fram which we can relate to objects. The horizons of an

object make sense only in relation to some position. As I

explore the object, I need some way of determining if it is

my body that is moving around the object or the object that

is moving around me. Merleau-Ponty explains that the body

detennines its relation to objects. The body is experienced

as an unsurpassable 'here' from which everything else is seen

as ' there'. "The word 'here' applied to my body," explains

Merleau-Ponty, "does not refer to a determinate pOSition in

relation to other positions or to external coordinates, but

the laying down of the first coordinates." 180 Rather than

being a position amongst positions, the 'here' of the body is

our initial insertion into a world. The body as zero-point is

shown in the example of moving throughout a particular

landscape. Usually we can tell immediately whether we are

moving or the scene itself is moving, and immediately

translate the new relations that we have to the changed

environment. "When I intend to look left, this movement of

the eye carries within it as its natural translation a

vacillation of the visual field: the objects remain in place,

but after a moment's fluctuation. This consequence is not

learnt, but is one of the natural procedures of the

180 PP 100/PPF 117. Merleau-Ponty describes the relation of the body's

location with other points in space as the backdrop of their appearance,
with the same role of "the darkness in the theatre to show up the
performance" (ibid.). He also argues that the position of the body is
not determined by thought but is a horizon that I live through and
experience immediately (PP 304/PPF 350-1).
 145

psychosomatic subject. It is, as we shall see, an annex of

our body schema, the immanent meaning of a changed direction

of the 'gaze'" (PP 48/PPF 59). The body schema establishes

our relation to objects, so that we can move about the

spectacle without losing track of 'where we are,.181

The body schema also makes it possible for us to

experience sense qualities. Sensation is actually a slice of

our embodied experience, which qualities determine in various

ways. Colour and sound, for instance, are bodily attitudes

that the scene invi tes us to adopt: blues and greens are

invitations to relax and explore the scene at will, while

reds and bright yellows catch our attention and cause us to

be exci ted or even to f eel intruded upon. 182 "When we say that

red increases the compass of our reactions, we are not to be

181 Merleau-Ponty attacks a traditional view that our orientation

within the world is provided by 'kinesthetic' sensations that make us
aware of our own movement. He argues that body movement is radically
different from moving obj ects; the former is direct and self -moved,
while the latter is indirect and involves an agent that is external to
the moved object. The latter kind of movement relies on the first, and
the first assumes that the mover is already inserted into a place and
aware of its position in that place. The traditional sense of
'kinesthetic' fails to account for this (PP 94/PPF 110).
For this reason, Merleau-Ponty reserves the expression
'kinesthesis' (kinesthesique, PP 303/PPF 349) for a global bodily
attitude towards the sensible world. He contrasts this with a localized
attitude, such as an ability to grasp or bend the knee (PP 303/PPF 349) .
Constant colour, for instance, is not the result of physiological
stimulation but of the body's global ability to recognize colour in any
medium of light, so that the body attitude involved is not reducible to
physiological explanation. Also, the touch of linen is identifiable not
only to the local organ with which the body learned the behaviour (such
as the hand) but to any other skin surface on the body (such as the
back, PP 317 /PPF 366). The experiences of qualities do not specify a
single mode of action, but a general mode of relating to the world. See
Mallin, p. 131.
182 This is why yellow and red are traditionally associated with
caution, attention and revolution; see PP 210-11/PPF 244.
 146

understood as having in mind two distinct facts, a sensation

of redness and motor reactions--we must be understood as

meaning that red, by its texture as followed and adhered to

be our gaze, is already the amplification of our motor being"

(PP 211/PPF 245). Other senses could be described in a

similar way: a rough edge is identified by how it affects my

touch (PP 314-17/PPF 363-6), and a cacophonous noise by how

it affects my comfort within the soundscape. In all of these

examples, sense experience is shown to be primarily an

invitation of the body to move in certain ways, rather than

to passively receive information. 183

Ultimately, the unity of an object is provided by the

unity of the body schema. The object is presented to us in

terms of things that the body can do, which in turn are

understood and organized by the body schema. We interpret

shading at the outlines of a figure as signs of depth only

because we already understand our hands to be capable of

feeling around the object, and our eyes to be capable of

sweeping the spectacle and achieving a particular focus (PP

142/PPF 166). These abilities are synthesized into a single

"synergetic system," operating as a single organism and

providing a Single, "general action of being in the world"

183 I stress that perception involves an 'invitation' of the body to

move and is not identical to body movement. Merleau-ponty is sensitive
to this difference, despite Yorihiro Yamagata's claim that Merleau-Ponty
conflates perception with kinaesthesis. Yamagata's article will be
discussed later in this section. See Yamagata, "The Self or the Cogito
in Kinaesthesis" in Self-awareness, Temporality, and Al terity, ed. Dan
Zahavi (Netherlands: Kluwer, 1998).
 147

(PP 234/PPF 270). By means of this general action, we are

able to see unified objects rather than a flux of sensations.

"It is my gaze which subtends colour," writes Merleau - Ponty ,

"and the movement of my hand which subtends the object's

form" (PP 214/PPF 248). The unity of our body movements, of

course, is the body schema. "The identity of the thing

through perceptual experience," writes Merleau-Ponty, "is

only another aspect of the identity of one's own body

throughout exploratory movements; thus they are the same in

kind as each other. Like the body image, the [object] is a

system of equivalents not founded on the recognition of some

law, but on the experience of a bodily presence. "194 Just as

the colours of the object present a way of engaging my body

with the scene, so the overall structure of the object

provides a composite action for us to assume or reject. 1SS

Far fram being mere physiological abilities, the bodily

attitudes that the senses provide us with are modes of

184 PP 185/PPF 216; see also PP 233/PPF 270, where he argues that "if
we want to account for the things as the transcendent terminus of an
open series of experiences, we must provide the subj ect of perception
with the unity of the body schema, which is itself open and limitless."
185 Merleau-Ponty strengthens his argument by demonstrating what
happens to our perception of an object when the body image breaks down.
If a marble is placed between the index and middle fingers so that both
fingers touch the marble, it appears that there are two distinct
objects. This is because the inner sides of the fingers are not usually
used for sensing an object, and present two different yet co-existing
tactile fields (with their respective 'objects'). When the marble is
touched at the edge of the two fingers, the regular unity of the body
schema is resumed and the singularity of the obj ect restored. "The
synthesis of the object is here effected, then, through the synthesis of
one's own body, it is the reply or correlative to it, and it is
literally the same thing to perceive one single marble, and to use two
fingers as one single organ" (PP 205/PPF 237) .
 148

existence capable of infinite development and generalization.

Merleau-Ponty claims that "there is an immediate equivalence

between the orientation of the visual field and the awareness

of one I s own body as the potentiality of that field" (PP

206/PPF 238). The visual spectacle is automatically a

situation of action for our eyes through which we are present

to visual objects; the rest of the fields coalesce into a

general situation of action within which we engage with

obj ects .186 Combined, the body acts as an intentional tissue

for our proj ects and establishes "that vital communication

with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting

of our life" (PP 52-3/PPF 64-5). "OUr own body is in the

world as the heart is in the organism" (PP 203/PPF 235), as a

vital organ that breathes life into the world as a

possibility that we can live through and experience. And like

any mode of existence, we can develop our contact with the

world in a variety of ways, and personalize our existence in

terms of preferred habits and perspectives. One may wish to

focus only on certain actions, or may give priority to

hearing over vision. We are not bound to anyone way of
living our body schema, but can develop it in different ways.

But the body obeys our personal commands only so far.

The body schema, it is true, determines how we perceive so

186 " [Tl he sensible has not only a motor and vital significance, but
is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to
us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body,
provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally
a form of communion" (PP 212/PPF 245-6) .
 149

that ,,[tJ he theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a

theory of perception" (PP 206/PPF 239). But initially, the

body schema is an anonymous self "on the periphery of my

being" (PP 215/PPF 249) that establishes my hold on the world

as a "primal acquisition" (PP 216/PPF 250). Sensation is

established as a "modality of a general existence, one

already destined for a physical world and which runs through

me without my being the cause of it" (ibid.). Before I am

able to develop the body schema, it already opens me to the

world a certain way, and establishes a logic of perception

that I inherit as a "perceptual tradition" (PP 238/PPF 275).

This tradition consists of a "latent knowledge" (ibid.)

concerning the world and my relation to it that is never

completely understood in an explicit way. Far from being the

creation of consciousness, the body schema detennines (to

some extent) how consciousness can relate to the world. iS7 On

the basis of the body schema and its modalities of sensation

and perception, we accumulate a stock of familiar habits and

attitudes that are used to make sense of the world.

Barbaras stresses the relation between perception and

the body by focusing on its relation to kinesthesis. We saw

earlier how kinesthesis allows us to be aware of our movement

lB7 "My act of perception, in its unsophisticated form, does not

itself bring about this synthesis; it takes advantage of work already
done, of a general synthesis constituted once and for all, and this is
what I mean when I say that I perceive with my body or my senses, since
my body and my senses are precisely that familiarity with the world born
of habit, that implicit or sedimentary body of knowledge" (Pp 23B/PPF
275) •
 150

without referring to changes in our perspective of the

immediate situation as it adjusts to our changes- -the house

getting larger as I approach, its colours getting sharper, et
cetera. There is, says Barbaras, a sense of self that is

discovered at the heart of movement, a zero point that

grounds the experience within a particular perspective.

II Perception," writes Barbaras, "is not to be understood apart

from motility, the truth of perception resides in self

movement. ,,188 This is not to reduce perception to the

traditional view of kinesthesis as a sum of psychic events

that corresponds with a sum of bodily movements. Kinesthesis,

explains Barbaras, is an "intentional exteriority" (230) and

not the persistence of an interiority that observes itself

and its movement 'from within'. By means of this 'intentional
exteriorityf, we are able to maintain simultaneously an

engagement with the perceptual object and a distance from it,

precisely because our movement is neither a thought floating

above the world of perception nor another obj ect alongside

the perceptual one. "The subj ect' s movement, " writes
Barbaras, "is equally distance and proximity to [the

perceptual object], placed in a nascent state, always already

begun and never deployed, dynamism without extension. The

Sich bewegen [self-movement] is the effective identity of

entering [the object] and leaving it" (231). Kinesthesis, as

188 Barbaras, p. 228.

 151

the site for this proximity-at-a-distance, is essential to

perception.
It is important, at this point, to stress that while
Merleau-Ponty believes there to be a proximity between body
movement and perception, he does not conflate the two, as
some critics have argued. Yorihiro Yamagata, for instance,
argues that Merleau-ponty sees kinesthesis and perception to
be "synonymous ... 189 The justification for this claim is the
following quote, from The Visible and the Invisible:
Wa1u:nehmung [perception] and Sich bewegen [self-
movement] are synonymous: it is for this reason
that the Wahrnehrnung never rejoins the Sich bewegen
it wishes to apprehend; it is another of the same.
But this failure, this invisible, precisely attests
that Wahrnehrnung is Sich bewegen, there is here a
success in the failure. Wa1u:nehmung fails to
apprehend Sich bewegen (and I am for myself a zero
of movement even during movement, I do not move
away from myself) precisely because they are
homogeneous, and this failure is the proof of this
homogeneity: Wa1u:nehrnung and Sich bewegen emerge
from one another. A sort of reflection by Ec-stacy,
they are the same tuft. (VI 2SS/VIF 308)
If one identifies Sich bewegen not only with self-movement
but with kinesthetic self-awareness, as Yorihiro Yamagata
does, then it seems that Merleau-Ponty conflates perception
with kinesthesis .190

189 Yamagata, p. 12.

190 Yamagata argues that perception and kinesthesis should be
separated, so that within kinesthesis we will be able to find a passive
awareness of self, a kinesthetic version of the Cartesian Cogito, along
the lines of a Husserlian transcendental subjectivity that is aware of
itself in its very bodily movement. Yamagata continues, saying that
Merleau-Ponty overlooks the presence of an immediate self-awareness
because he conflates kinesthesis with perception and thus sees it as
mediated by experience. Mer1eau-Ponty, of course, denies the possibility
of an immediate self -awareness in the quote above, as well as in his
 152

Yamagata's reading of this quote, however, shows an

insensitivity to Merleau-Ponty's language. Not only is this

quote from one of the working notes for The Visible and the

Invisible, but it appears in a book that is dismantling the

philosophy of objectivity and identity and developing a new

concept of the flesh of the world. I reserve a discussion of

flesh for Chapter Six, Section Bi it is enough, at this

point, to stress that while Merleau - Ponty says that self-

movement and perception are of the "same tuft", he is not

suggesting that we reduce one to the other. This would be to

overlook the essential nature of each as a differentiation of

a unique segment of the world, one in the realm of

externalized intentions, and the other in the realm of

colours and textures. Thus while agreeing with Barbaras that

the truth of perception lies in self-movement, we do not need

to reduce one to the other as Yamagata suggests. Just as

self-movement involves both a proximity and a distancing

between the body and the world, so self-movement and

perception, as different aspects of our embodiment, encroach

essay on the cog ito in Phenomenology of Perception. We do not have the

space in this thesis to discuss the relation of kinesthesis to self-
awareness, and it has already been discussed at length elsewhere. (See,
for instance, Bill Brewer, "Bodily Awareness and the Self," and Naomi
Eilan, "Consciousness and the Self," both in The Body and the Self. I
wish only to show here that Yamagata avoids a frontal confrontation with
Merleau-Ponty on this matter by focusing on the view that Merleau-Ponty
conflates perception with kinesthesis. Not only is this a misreading of
Merleau-Ponty, but Merleau-Ponty would deny that there is an immediate
self -awareness in both perception and kinesthesis even if they were
different. Thus Yamagata does not really confront Merleau-ponty's
reasons for denying the existence of an immediate self -awareness. See
also VI 257/VIF 310.
 153

upon each other while remaining separate, as different

dimensions within a common diacritical field that is our

embodiment as a whole. 191

The imagining body not only provides an awareness of our

own body and the correlation of its abilities, but underlies

our experience of sense qualities and the perception of

objects. Without the body schema, for instance, we would be

unable to detect our own movement, or to be able to enter

into the "secret life" (PP 38/PPF 48) of perceptual obj ects.

The imagining body schema is not totally in our grasPi it

betrays our having been thrust into the world already

equipped and limited in certain ways. It is as if there were

a secret person deep inside of us, telling us what to do

without giving to us the choice to disagree. Our bodies are

already programmed to receive information about the world in

certain ways--preprogrammed not in the sense of being 'hard-

wired' but of already having a certain way of relating to the

world that we can neither overcome nor do without. On the

basis of the body schema, we can develop this inheritance

into personal styles of perceiving and living.192

191 Another problem with Yamagata's criticism of Merleau-Ponty is the

assumption that Merleau-Ponty is implying that Sich bewegen is identical
with the traditional view of kinesthesis as 'self'-movement. It is more
likely that Merleau-Ponty is deconstructing the traditional German
concept and returning to its more general meaning as simply 'self-
movement'. Merleau-Ponty usually uses the term kinesthesique (PP 303/PPF
349) rather than Sich bewegen, so the unusual German reference suggests
that Merleau-ponty is distancing himself from the term and its more
technical meaning.
192 Merleau-Ponty refers to this grounding of perception not as a
hard-wiring of our bodies to see the world only in certain ways but as a
 154

C. Aesthetic Embodiment

A more obvious place to find the imagining body is

artistic creation. We have already considered the art of the

mime and its immediate appeal to the audience. The mime

communicates by means of the body any number of ideas or

experiences. A large elephant is shown on the stage by the

manner in which she pulls on its imaginary rope, her gestures

of fatigue, and her exaggerated smallness in comparison to

the large imagined animal at the end of the rope. We see the
elephant as we live her body and share the forces and

tensions on the rope that the mime recreates on the stage.

The mime taps into a common expressive medium that is the

body.

Maravene Sheppard Loeschke explains that in order to

create an image by means of mime, one must discover the inner

motivation or truth of the activities that the image

involves. The image 'elephant' suggests immense volume and

inertia, which can be represented either by the mime herself

(exaggerating her own body to represent these proportions),

or by means of her own external relations to the animal. In

tradition of perception that can be altered in certain ways (PP 238/PPF

275). He frequently refers to artists as altering this, as we will see
in the next section. Another example of changing the tradition of
perception is suggested by the radically different conception of colour
held by the Greeks, in which colour consisted more of differentiations
of shade rather than colour as we know it today. Thus certain Classical
references to 'blue' hair and to the 'red' sea are really references to
a kind of differentiation with which we are unfamiliar today.
 155

the above example, she depicts the elephant in terms of the

actions of an elephant trainer dragging the elephant by a

rope. The truth of this movement, then, will concern the kind
of bodily action required to pull the elephant: a particular

center of gravity, a particular configuration and intensity

of muscle tension, and the appropriate facial gestures of

fatigue. But the mime does not simply imitate the actual body

pulling on the elephant i the mime breaks down the entire

bodily experience to a few simple, essential gestures that

communicate immediately the bodily exertion involved in the

act, and with a certain style and grace that the average

person lacks. If one does not discover the inner beauty of a

given action, however mundane that action might be, one does

not arrive at the art of mime. 193

To elaborate on the role of the body in mime, it would

help to consider Maxine Sheets -Johnstone's lengthy study of

the art of dance. She explains that the dancer's body is Ita
center of force which presents changing linear designs. ,,194 By

moving about on the stage, the dancer creates a

"spatialization of force" (124) that the audience can follow,

literally tracing an intricate pattern or image on the stage

floor. Dance is a 'form in the making', the activity of

creating a form with the body. But the form is not

193 Loeschke, pp. 28-9.

194 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 121.
 156

experienced (by either the dancer or the audience) as a

visual spectacle. The dancer does not attempt to picture her

movements from a bird's eye perspective, and the members of

the audience do not watch the dancer as they might watch a

fireworks display. The dancer becomes absorbed in the entire

experience of the movements, from head to foot, from inner

motivation to external expression. Sheets-Johnstone explains:

"The dancer has a fund of Ii ved experience of her body in

movement, and consequently, a highly developed pre-reflective

awareness of the moving spatial presence of her body" (117).

The dancer craftily expresses this inner truth or motivation

of the sequence, which the audience experiences as an

intricate pattern of bodily experience. The inner truth of

the given sequence, however, relies on the body schema as an

expressive medium. "The pattern for the movement is already a

part of the global bodily schema" (118). The members of the

audience recognize the image because they, too, have a body
schema that can be virtually extended in the ways of the

dancer. They follow the dancer not as much with their 'eyes'

as with their virtual bodies and the tensions and kinesthetic

impressions that they would feel if they were to literally

join the dancer on the stage. This means that one could also
experience virtual bodily experiences in the normal bodily

activities of others: while watching basketball, we feel the

upward force of the player's hand as he throws the ball

towards the net, and we feel the vibrations in our virtual

 157

feet as the ball bounces off of the wooden floor. But in

dance, the movements themselves become the focus. "What

differentiates dance from movement is that lived form-in-the-

making is created as a sheer form in and of itself, and

unlike other movement activities, such as basketball,

gymnastics, and the like, it has no meaning beyond itself"

(148). The dance focuses our attention away from everyday

objects and towards the creative movements that are possible

f or an imagining body. 195

It is less obvious how the body applies to other art

forms. Though Merleau-Ponty says little about dance, he

writes extensively about the visual arts. The painter, as we

195 Sheets-Johnstone assumes a Sartrean position concerning the image.

She claims that the "linear and areal qualities [of the dance] exist
within the total illusion of force and have no existence apart from that
global phenomenon" (115). Thus for the dancer there must be a radical
diff erence between imagining the image traced out by the dance, and
experiencing the dance kinesthetically. She claims that a "spontaneous
shift occurs from the imaginative mode to the perceptual mode" (118)
when the dancer switches her focus from the image to the body. The
audience meanwhile experiences only the image. They do not, essentially,
'see' anything at all, but are made to imagine the figure by means of
the analogue of the dance.
Though I would agree that the image does not exist apart from the
global phenomenon, I do not agree with the claim that the image and the
body schema can be radically separated. The members of the audience
understand the dance on the basis of their own bodily experiences, which
means that they must be aware of both the forces on the dancer's body
and the image that is created by means of it. There is no 'shifting'
from perception to imagination, but rather we imagine here by means of
shared kinesthetic and bodily experience.
She also makes use of the difference between drawing a circle in
the air and imagining it to illustrate her Sartrean view of the image.
The dancer is like the person who can draw circles in the air really
well, closing them off perfectly without imagining them (116). But the
same example can be used to show the relation between tactile and visual
space, and not between perception and imagination. Visual space allows
us to see the figure all at once, and to be more precise and thus more
able to close the circle properly, while in tactile space we experience
the parts of a figure over a period of time. The two spaces, then, are
irreducible to each other. See PP 223-4/PPF 257-9.
 158

saw earlier, is involved in presenting how the world first

appears to us, before we make use of regular patterns and

concepts to make sense of it. The artist first disrupts

ordinary ways of seeing and provides a distorted picture,

forCing the viewer to re-explore how she sees in order to

experience meaning in the painting. The painting ttis a system

of equivalences which demands precisely this particular

upheaval, and it is in the name of a truer relation between

things that their ordinary ties are broken ll (S 56/SF 71). The

artist provides this deeper truth of perception by presenting

in visible form the invisible levels and depths that we

experience in ordinary perception. Cezanne, in particular,

was a master of colour and line, showing how the very changes

in the colour of an obj ect t s outline provides a sense of

depth, voluminosity and weight. We usually overlook these

aspects of perception and make use of them as one makes use

of the body schema in ordinary action (SNS 14-15/SNSF 25) .

Merleau-ponty is particularly fascinated by the artist's

creative activity. How is it, he asks, that a painting can be

constructed out of simple brush strokes, and that such

emotion and perceptual depth can be expressed by a few

movements of the hand? There are two sides to artistic

creation: the right side, the work itself, and the IIfeeble

movement of the brush or pen" ( S 45/ SF 57). Like the dancer,

the artist "did not have in his mind's eye all the gestures
possible, and in making his choice he did not have to
 159

eliminate all but one" (ibid.). The 'two sides' metaphor is

dramatized even more in the case of weaving in which the

artist literally works on the 'wrong' side of the artwork.

The artist'S action, however, expresses a more general action

that is irreducible to either the artist I s movements or to

the simple strokes of paint on the canvass: the action of the

eye on the world, and of the body as it forms the background

for the artistic vision.

To understand what this means, we must return for a

moment to the description of the body schema. As Drew Leder

has shown, when one sense becomes my body's focus, the other

senses are still present in the form of an absence or

background. Likewise in art, though vision is stressed, the

rest of the body is implied. The artist expresses, more than

anything, his own embodied relation to the world, and his own

manner of completing its vague meaning in visible form- - in

the form of a painting. This general mode of embodiment is

revealed by the style of the artist. 196 The style cannot be

reduced to actual movements of the hands, since we recognize

the artist's style in a variety of artforms that involve

completely different movements. But there is a style

nonetheless. For some, it is savage and emotional, as in the

196 SNS 20/SNSF 25. Merleau-Ponty sometimes refers to the artist's

life in general, and not specifically to the artist's 'embodiment'. Thus
in the case of Cezanne, Merleau-ponty claims that his art "called for
this life" (ibid.) and required that it be created in "the wretchedness
of his empirical life" (SNS 25/SNSF 43). But following from his other
works on the body, it is clear that this life called for by his art was
one of embodiment within a world.
 160

work of Cezanne and Jackson Pollack; for others, it is very

polished and refined, like the paintings of the French

Classicists. These styles, unique to each artist, are

essentially ways of being embodied in the world that are

universalized in the visible work of art, available for all

to see. 197 The artwork is an expression of the artist's style

of embodiment. The contours of Matisse's women, for instance,

are not mimetic but "veins, as the axes of a corporeal system

of activity and passivity. n199 The work of art, writes

Merleau-Ponty, provides us with "new organs" (S 52/SF 66)

with which to see the world. Without this implied embodiment,

the painting could not bear the meaning that it does,

composed out of "certain gaps or fissures, figures and

grounds, a top and a bottom, a normal and a deviation" (S

54/SF 68). The viewer does not simply look at the artwork,

but must employ her virtual body to reassume the artist's

stance and gaze into the artist's original conception of the
particular scene. A painting invites the viewer to "take up

the gesture which created it" (S 51/SF 64) .

197 Merleau-Ponty writes that the "inner schema" of a painting is the

artist's own embodied life. "It is that life itself, to the extent that
the life emerges from its inherence, ceases to be in possession of
itself and becomes a universal means of understanding and making
something understood, or seeing and of presenting something to see" (S
53/SF 66).
198 PrP 184/EMF 76. Carleton Dallery translates the French "nervures"
as "structural filaments," which is an unfortunate choice because it
discards the 'living' aspect of the French word. Merleau-Ponty uses the
same word again (VI 118-19/VIF 158-9) where it is translated as
"nervure", such as the central vein of a leaf. I have chosen 'vein'
here, to stress the organic quality of the line and its relation to the
body schema of the artist.
 161

The essentially carnal nature of painting is also shown

in cases where movement has been depicted. Merleau-Ponty

compares Gericault's Epsom Derby to a photograph of a running
horse in order to show how art, and not photography, captures

the embodied experience of running. The horse in the

photograph appears to be floating, with all four legs

outstretched. The painting, on the other hand, properly

depicts movement while distorting the horse's actual posture

so that same of the legs are touching the ground while others
are not. The image is a structural story telling how the
horse moves through time, with each hoof signifying a
diff erent moment in time. The gestalt created by the four

hooves represents a temporal passage and an embodied

experience (for the horse). Likewise, a painted picture of a
runner will need to have different temporal moments and

positions represented in order for movement to appear.

Merleau-Ponty explains that while the photograph attempts to
depict the body as it actually is at a given moment, the
painting attempts to capture the embodied, temporal
experience, complete with its virtual future and remembered
past. "(T] he art of painting is never altogether outside
time, because it is always within the carnal" (PrP 186/EMF
81). The essential medium of artistic creation is not simply

the paint or the mind which reconstructs a scene, but the

living body with its position and temporality. Merleau-Ponty

concludes: "To live in painting is still to breathe the air

 162

of this world- -above all for the man who sees something in

the world to paint. And there is a little of him in every

man" (S 64/SF 81) .

D. Fanciful Embodiment

In what way can fanciful thinking be seen as an instance

of embodiment? As we saw in Chapter Three, fancy is based on

perception. On the basis of this premise, and the premise,

developed above, that perception is based on the imagining

body, it follows logically that fancy, as well, will be based

on the imagining body . We have already seen how fanciful

thinking involves a 'quasi-spatiality' that cannot be

completely separated from perceptual space (despite the

efforts of Casey, Sartre and others). It is also clear, in

the few references to fanciful thinking in Merleau-Ponty's

writings, that fancy is based on perception (see, for

instance, PP 343/PPF 395). We can reasonably assume that if

perception is based on the imagining body, then fanciful

thinking will also be based on the imagining body.

I would like to develop the idea of fancy being based on

the imagining body by considering a particular observation

made by Shaun Gallagher concerning a patient who has lost all

proprioceptive awareness below the neck (and thus has lost a

fully functioning body schema). The patient claims to make

use of the imagination in order to carry out basic bodily

movements. In order to walk across the room, for instance,
 163

the patient will 'imagine' what his body is like and how it

is related to objects in the room; using this 'mental image',

the patient is then able to imagine his movement and mimic

the image with his actual body.~9 It could be suggested that

the patient is not using the body schema or the ' imagining

body', but is in fact fabricating the imagining body as a

fiction created by the mind. 200

On closer inspection, however, this interpretation does

not work. The body schema is not identical to the sum of

proprioceptive impressions, and is not the actual unity of

the body as a system of capabilities. The body schema, as

shown above, is also a virtual body, an open field of

possible modes of embodiment that can change and develop. It

is precisely the virtual aspect of the body schema, for

instance, that comes to the fore when we develop a new habit,

distorting and extending our original capabilities to acquire

a new mode of behaviour. When we have learned the new skill,

we allow it to fall back into the rest of the body I to
become, as Leder as shown, part of the absent bodily

background for the particular activity at hand. I think that

Gallagher I S patient is like a person learning a new skill,

but never reaching the point where it can become part of the
background. The patient is like a perpetual learner, living

199 Shaun Gallagher, during a private conversation in Buffalo, New

York, April 30, 2000.
200 This is not, however, Gallagher's position.
 164

in the virtual body but never able to contribute the new

skill to the acquired body. The patient, nevertheless, lives

by means of a virtual body that provides a sense of being

centered and grounded in a virtual situation with a sense of

orientation and gravity. Without this embodiment, the patient

would be unable to inhabit the virtual scene and walk 'as if'

he were the imagined body. Without a functioning virtual body

schema, the patient would be unable to use the imagination to

walk.
This view of fanciful thinking is suggested by what

Merleau-Ponty says about sleeping and dreams. He often refers

to fanciful thinking in the same context as sleeping. Both,

he claimS, are grounded in embodiment and perception. In

order to fall asleep, we imitate a sleeping person by giving

ourselves over to sleep, relaxing our muscles and allowing

our minds to wander (PP 164/PPF 191). When sleep arrives, we

are given over to dreaming which is itself partially guided
by bodily feelings and vital forces that assume a unique
meaning in the world of the dream. We begin, like Gallagher's

patient, imitating a virtual body (that is asleep), until we

become a sleeping body ourselves. And even within the dream,

we continue to possess a 'point of view' and a spatiality

that is unique to the dream. Regardless of the divine

abilities that we have to switch that point of view without

recourse to normal action (like walking or focusing our

vision), the dreamed body is still, nevertheless, a body that
 165

is grounded within a space that it cannot completely control.

Rather than providing an escape from embodiment, sleeping and

dreaming are only extreme instances of existing in terms of

the body schema. We are no longer able to awake at will, but

are connected to the world of voluntary consciousness only by

means of the senses--if we hear a loud sound or see a bright

light {PP 164/PPF 191}. Like the dream or sleep, fanciful

thinking borrows from the imagining body its virtual lining

and extends that lining to an extreme modality of existing;

but the body is still there, however faint and however free

of its usual weight and restrictions. This shows that

fanciful thinking is essentially grounded in the imagining

body.
with the findings concerning fanciful thinking in

Chapter Three, we found that even idle fancy involves a

'quasi-depth' and a 'quasi-space' that is an extension of the

depth and space of perceptual embodiment. Fanciful thinking

is an extreme case of the virtual body, a perspective that is

almost acosmic but bears the traces of the perceiving body

that it can never leave behind. It is better, then, to say

that fancy and perceptual embodiment are not absolutely

separate modes of consciousness, but poles on a continuum of

the body's imaginative existence.

 166

E. Elemental Embodiment

We now arrive at the final type of embodiment: the

embodiment of the elements, traditionally reduced to those of

earth, air, water and fire. We have already seen, in Chapter

Three, Section E, how the elements involve very general and

vague clusters of meaning that we find ourselves engaged with

at a pre- or subconscious level. The water of the ocean is

interpreted by us as soothing and replenishing, even at times
when our minds are focused on something else. We also seem to

have, as Sartre showed, a natural repulsion to the slimy due

to its meaning for us as a slow annihilation. The world

already contains clusters of vague meanings in the form of

elemental images that we embody without explicit thought.

Gaston Bachelard claimed that the elements are the

products of the unconscious as it encounters the world of

sense. We experience a series of meaningful gestalts that

taint our percepts with a psychological meaning, such as the

fear of a slow annihilation in the presence of sliminess. 201

Bachelard believed that we can use poetry to discover the

basic elements of perception. The Presocratic philosophers

were also poets who were sensitive to the inner structure of

the psyche's relation to Being. This secret inner relation of

the unconscious to Being is not only the source of good
poetry but also of the meaning of perception and thought. On

201 This is, of course, Sartre's example, and not Bachelard's. see
Chapter Three, Section E.
 167

the basis of these elemental reflections, Bachelard claimed

to be doing a phenomenology of the imagination. 202

Merleau - Ponty denied the existence of an unconscious.

There is no inner self controlling our behaviour, but only

consciousness as embodied (PP 296/PPF 343). Associations in

dreams present "blurred outlines, distinctive relationships

which are in no way 'unconscious f " (PP 168/PPF 196; see also

PP 160/PPF 191). He argues, however, that the body does

operate in same ways similar to an unconscious by providing a

sense of existence that the subj ect does not determine, and

by inserting the subject into a world that it finds already

bearing a certain meaning. 203 Merleau-Ponty writes that we can

think of this embodiment as an 'unconscious', but it is to be

sought "not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of

our 'consciousness', but in front of us, as articulations of

our field" (VI 180/VIF 234). The body is the site of an

intertwining of the appearing of Being and its hiddenness, of
the dawning of the expression of a being that was previously

in darkness I an inarticulate void like the waters at the

beginning of Genesis. The body inaugurates the expression of

202 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xiv.

203 Merold Westphal argues that Merleau-Ponty makes a good case for
the unconscious in his analysis of politics and history, but that he is
unable, in his writings on consciousness, to account for repression. See
"Situation and Suspicion in the Thought of Merleau-Ponty: The Question
of Phenomenology and politics" in Ontology and Alterity, ed. Galen
Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1990). See also HT 104/HTF 112, where Merleau-Ponty writes:
"Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are
involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less,
or something else than we thought we were doing."
 168

Being, expands it and articulates it. But this is done on the

basis of meanings that are already intrinsic to how Being

appears to us and that remain, for the most part, hidden from

consciousness. These meanings are found especially in the

elemental images of earth, air, water and fire, which provide

us with an inexhaustible source of inspiration. These deeper

meanings do not occur 'behind the back' of consciousness, but

at the body's point of contact with Being. This is why we are

invited to do a psychoanalysis of nature, and not of the

individual psyche. 204

With no clear distinction between conscious and

unconscious, we cannot understand the effects of elemental

images on the body in terms of a causal science, but must

rather appeal to the dynamic and ambiguous method of poetical

204 VI 267/VIF 321; see Edward Casey, "The Unconscious Mind," Merleau-
Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, pp. 52-3.
Lacan disagrees with Merleau·Ponty concerning the unconscious. See
the note above (in Chapter Four, Section B) concerning Lacan's relation
to Merleau-ponty.
There is a debate concerning the influence of psychology on
Merleau-Ponty's work. Claude Lefort, for instance, claims that while
psychology greatly influenced Merleau-Ponty's earlier writings, he came
to distance himself from psychology for a philosophy of Being (Sur un
Colonne Absente, p. 154). Martin Jay, by contrast, argues that Merleau-
ponty becomes more and more indebted to Lacan and Freud in his later
work, including the essay "The Child's Relations with Others" as
discussed in chapter four (see Jay, pp. 173-4). There are also several
references throughout The Visible and the Invisible concerning Gestalt
psychology, Lacan and Freud (VI 204-6, 126, 262, 270/VIF 258-59, 168,
316, 323). Though it is clear, as Lefort shows, that Merleau-Ponty
leaves behind a philosophy of inner consciousness and along with it any
form of psychologism, it is equally clear that he continues to use many
psychological terms to describe the flesh of the world. Not only does he
make use of Lacan and Freud, but he continues to develop the idea of a
perceptual gestalt until the end of his life (see, for instance, VI 189-
90 and 204-6 /VIF 242-44 and 258-59). It seems, then, that Jay's
understanding of Merleau-Ponty's relation to psychology is more accurate
than that of Lefort.
 169

and artistic expression. Merleau-ponty writes that the

artwork "gives visible existence to what profane vision

believes to be invisible" (PrP 166/EMF 29), namely, the

creative emergence of perceptual meaning. We tend to overlook

the creative activity of perception and to treat percepts as

absolute gi vens . In order to return us to the imaginati ve

basis of perception, the work of art presents its colours as

ambiguously placed at the chiasm of background and

foreground, at once visible to the eye and invisible as the

ciphers of depth and volume. To see this intertwining of the

visible and the invisible, we need not resort to another

sense, a "muscular sense" (PrP 166/EMF 27), to supplement our

other senses of touch, smell, et cetera. The work of art

"opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete

sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae.

The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house n

(ibid.). The shade of red that we perceive not only presents

a dimension of depth and an opening to other colours, but is

an expression of the texture of Being that underlies all of
perception. It is this texture, the "inward tapestries, the

imaginary texture of the real" (PrP 165/EMF 24) that is

expressed by the notion of elemental images. The texture of

Being, before it is developed into categories for

consciousness, is already inscribed with the rich meanings of

the elements. We experience these different structurations of

Being's texture when we imagine the significance of sand or

 170

water, both as they appear in dreams and as we experience

them in the beach scene illustrated in Chapter Three, Section

A. Between thought and intuition, between the psyche and

Being, are the elements as unique dimensions of meaning that

deliver Being to our expression, and deliver us up to Being's

imagining. 205

When I refer to an elemental imagination, I am referring

to the body as it already imagines itself in its relation to

Being- -the body, in other words, as embedded in the inner

texture of Being, only hinted at by the work of art. At the

point when the body first learns to touch itself, "a blending

of some sort takes place- -when the spark is lit between

sensing and sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop

burning until some accident of the body will undo what no

accident would have sufficed to do" (PrP 163-4/EMF 21). The

body inaugurates a tradition of expression which only death
will undo; this tradition is primarily not a tradition of
language or even of perception, but a tradition of
experiencing the world along various fault lines of meaning,

as represented by the elements. On the basis of these vague

and ambiguous structures, we find that the world is already a

song, already poetry that is half -written and completed the

205 David Pettigrew elaborates on how art expresses this elemental

relation to being in his article, "Merleau-Ponty and the Unconscious" in
Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, pp. 60-5.
 171

moment that we move our bodies and complete the expression of

Being that is begun in these elemental ways. 206
The elemental imagination is the "natal pact between our
body and the world" (PrP 6/INF 404) I a pact that we are
committed to throughout our lives. It provides the source for
our ability to develop the body schema, to perceive the world
in terms of perceptual gestalts, and to renew the imagination
with fresh images from nature. The elemental imagination is a
fundamental mode of embodimentj before we can have perceptual
gestal ts I we must dream the secret powers of wa ter , earth I

air and fire.

We can see, in the relation between the body and the
elements, a possible response to Derrida's description of the
mime. In Chapter Two, Section E, it was shown how Derrida
used the mime to represent an embodied dissimilation of
meaning where the body is constantly doubling and deferring
itself, reducing all sense of authority and authorship to an
endless play of signifiers. But it was discussed above (in
Chapter Three, Section E) that the imagination involves a
verticality that is missing in Baudrillard's analysis. There
are certainly many cases where the production of images seems
to circle back onto itself as if to forget its origins--
feedback loops and the reproduction of computer images being
but two examples. But to focus on this as a model for

206 Merleau-Ponty writes that words, vowels and phonemes are "so many
ways of singing the world (autant de manieres de chanter le monde) " (pp
187/PPF 218) _
 172

imagining is to overlook the verticality present in our

relation to elemental images.

Likewise, in the case of Derrida, the mime's imagining

body cannot be completely reduced to a play of signifiers. In

Chapter Four, Section B, it was shown that the body schema

provides the body with a sense of balance and anchorage

within the world. In Chapter Five, Section B, it was shown

that perception is not possible without the body schema. To

deny an anchorage and a perspective is to obtain not a series

of signifiers, but the total collapse of all meaning. Without

the gestalt structure with its margins and foreground, itself

anchored by the body, there can be no meaning.

Unlike Baudrillard, however, Derrida does continue to

see the play of signifiers to be an 'appearance' of reference

and a 'deferral' of meaning by means of traces that never

become completely present. 207 What Derrida obj ects to most in

Merleau-Ponty's writings is the metaphysics of presence: the

idea that Being can be intuited in some kind of immediate

presence, appearance, or essence. He writes that "differance

is not, does not exist, and is not any sort of being-present

(on) the signified concept is never present in
itself. ,,208 What the postmodern thinker deals with is not a

presence of Being but a 'trace' which is "the simulacrum of a

presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond

207 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 210; Speech and phenomena, p. 153-4.

208 Ibid., pp. 134 and 140.
 173

itselfll (156). The mime refers to nothing but her body as a

white page with no external reference. What we experience is

the 'between' of presences, the ' invisible' of the visible

illusion of the mime.

It has already been shown throughout this thesis,

however, that in this respect Merleau - Ponty' s philosophy of

the imagination is by no means an instance of the philosophy

of presence. Qualities have been shown to be dimensions of

sense as well as positive qualities when appearing within a

perceptual gestalt. 209 Bodily habits fade into the background

of our experience, providing a kind of 'absence' that makes

possible the appearance of an obj ect. And elemental images

expose the body to the most general and vague openings or

responses that the body appropriates in relation to the

world.
It has also been shown that, for Marleau-Ponty, language

must be understood in tenns of a diacritical system. Rather

than referring to anything outside of language, each sign

achieves a meaning only in its differential relation to other

signs. Merleau - Ponty explains: II Since the sign has meaning

only in so far as it is profiled against other signs, its

meaning is entirely involved in language. Speech always comes

into play against a background of speech; it is always only a

209 Nancy Holland shows how Merleau-ponty rej ects traditional

philosophies of perception for a theory which accounts for absence,
"Merleau-Ponty on Presence: A Derridian Reading," Research in
Phenomenology 16 (1986), pp. 112-15.
 174

fold in the immense fabric of language" (S 42/SF 53). We find

such a view even in his earlier writings, for instance in

Phenomenology of Perception, where he says, "there is no

experience without speech, as the purely lived-through has no

part in the discursive life of man. ,,210 Merleau-Ponty also

discusses the "primordial silence" (PP 184/PPF 214) that

grounds language and defers the possibility for a word to

attain a dete:rminate meaning. Thus his theory of language

sounds a lot like that of Derrida, as being based not on the

positive presence of meanings but on the differential

relations among words themselves. 211

But it would be wrong to focus merely on the

similarities between the two thinkers, as many commentators

of Merleau-Ponty are prone to dO. 212 The expressions of the

body cannot be reduced to an arbitrary play of signifiers,

and there is some truth, claims Merleau-ponty, to the theory

of natural gestures. This truth is not found in a world that

is fixed and determinate and merely represented by words

within a syntax. He writes:

210 PP 337/PPF 388. Thus it is wrong to say, as Ricoeur does, that

according to Merleau-ponty the body is some sort of primordial
expression which language merely extrapolates." "Hommage a Merleau-
Ponty," Esprit 296 (1961), p. 1120.
211 It will be shown, in Chapter Six, how Merleau-Ponty'S concept of
'flesh' further decenters presence in his ontology. "For him," writes
Bernard Flynn, "the notion of the flesh does not designate a particular
region of being but being itself as non-coincidence, or as coincidence
deferred." "Textuality and the Flesh: Derrida and Merleau-Ponty,"
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15 (1984), p. 174.
212 See, for instance, the articles by Holland and Bernard Flynn.
 175

It would then be found that the words, vowels and

phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world,
and that their function is to represent things not,
as the naive onomatopoeic theory had it, by reason
of an objective resemblance, but because they
extract, and literally express, their emotional
essence. 213
"The spoken word is a gesture," he adds, "and its meaning, a

world" (PP 184/PPF 214). Like Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty claims

that even within the differential system of language we are

still exposed to a world that is anchored by our bodies.

Words, then, do not close in on themselves, but provide

openings for new ways to understand the world. Words are

"several ways for the human body to celebrate the world and
in the last resort to live it. 11214 The mime does not simply

engage in a bodily version of simulacra, but remains grounded

in the world of perception and affected by gravity and the

values imposed on it by elemental images.

It is also the case that, unlike Derrida, Merleau-Ponty

holds to a theory of truth in tenns of the world as a

'presence-in-the-making', which while not being an absence in

the sense of Derrida' s differance is also not a presence in

the metaphysical sense. Thus Gary Madison is correct to

observe that an essential difference between Derrida and

Merleau-Ponty is that while the fonner gives up on the

213 PP 187/PPF 218. These emot ional essences can be seen as the
effects of elemental images on the body that later get expressed in
words, especially in poetry.
214 PP 187/PPF 218. The French reads "celebrer Ie monde," which Colin
Smith translates as "sing the world's praises." I choose the more
literal translation, "celebrate the world."
 176

possibility of truth, Merleau-ponty attempts to realign it

with an ontology of beconting. He concludes: "Strictly

speaking, reality, like truth, is not; it becomes, it

transpires, elle s'ecrit, and the locus of its most eloquent

(parlante) inscription is the human seeing/writing
subject. n215

In the introduction, an exhaustive and restrictive

definition of the imagination was rejected for a more fluid

definition based on family resemblance. Just as we can

recognize a member of my family by considering a number of

different characteristics, so the imagination was defined in

terms of many different kinds of experience: perception,

aesthetics, fanciful thinking and the experience of elemental

images. The imagination is not a restricted faculty of the

mind, but a universal dimension of virtuality that can be

found working on the margins of every experience. Far from
being a mere escape from reality or a source of illusion and

falsehood, the imagination has been shown to permeate our

existence and to be an essential medium for the discovery and

expression of meaning.

Despite the small number of explicit references to the

imagination in Merleau-Ponty's work, it has been shown how

even from his earliest writings he was dealing with a

215 Madison, "Merleau-ponty and Derrida: La differEnce," Ecart &:

Differance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing, ed. M.e.
Dillon (New Jersey: Atlantic Highlands, 1997), p. 106.
 177

general, expressive power of the body. The imagination, as

expressive embodiment, is a cammon thread throughout his

work. "There is," claims John Bannan, "a development by means

of a phenomenology of imagination that can strikingly extend

its range, allowing it many of the privileges once accorded

only to idea and concept, without rupture with the familiar

and the human from which phenomenology must draw its

strength.,,216 The imagining body, in other words, can be found

not only in the dance of the mime, but in the most mundane

experiences. We see the body imagining when we make use of

sign language, when we attempt to communicate underwater or

at the stock market, when we need to direct traffic or an

orchestra, and when we worship God by means of liturgical

actions. All of these expressions involve the imagining body,

the sarne imagining body that the mime develops into an art.

In order to understand how we experience the world, we are

essentially asking about the art of mime. Katherine Sorley

Walker, a practicing mime, writes: "If you look around,

you'll be surprised how many gestures are quite instinctive

with people. No one thinks of them as Mime. But of course,

that I s what they are." 217 A philosophy of human existence must

be a philosophy of the imagining body; philosophy, as we said

earlier, is grounded in mime.

216 Bannan, p. 268.

217 Katherine Sorley Walker, Eyes on ~me (New York: John Day, 1969),
p. 169. The examples can be found on pp. 162-4.
 CHAPTER SIX: IMAGINING BEING

A. Introduction

If the body is essentially an imaginative medium for

understanding the world, then it must be asked what effect

this has on the understanding of Being. If we return to the

seashore scene of the third chapter, there is also a sense of

Being imagining itself. The sound of the water crashing into

the shore, the smell of the salt and the seaweed in the air,

the heat of the sand beneath my feet, suggest a timeless and

dynamic coming- into- being that occurs according to a fate

that is not of my making. A philosophy of the imagining body

leads to a philosophy of imagining Being.

Towards the end of Merleau-Ponty's career, he started to

focus on the ontological implications of his philosophy.

Though there is no need to say, as some critics dO,218 that

Merleau-Ponty's early works provide an insufficient ground

for an ontology, it is at least fair to say that it is only
in his later works that Merleau - Ponty began to focus on

ontology in its own right. A parallel development in his

philosophy is a progressive shift away from embodied

consciousness to what he calls the flesh of the world. By

developing the concept of the imagining body into the flesh

218 See Lefort, pp. 152-4.

178
 179

of the world, we can see in what way Merleau - ponty intends

for us to think of Being as imagining.

The following will include a discussion of Merleau-

ponty's concept of flesh, and the role that it plays in his

ontology. In Section C it will be shown in what way the flesh

can be concei ved of as the imagining of Being, and in what

way the body appropriates this imagining and makes it more

determinate in acts of expression.

B. Flesh and Reyersibility

To understand what 'flesh' means, we must first revisit

the reversibility of roles that we found in double sensation.

Reversibility both blends together the two roles of sensing

and being sensed and holds them apart: "The act which draws

together at the same time takes away and holds at a distance,

so that I touch myself only by escaping from myself" (PP

408/PP 467). This unity-in-difference is made possible, we

have seen, by the body schema. The body is the place for the

"meeting of the inner and the outer" (PP 454/PPF 518). My

mind, or subjectivity, is totally outside of itself and

engaged in proj ects, while external obj ects are transformed

into possibilities for my phenomenal body. 219 "Inside and

outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am

wholly outside myself" (PP 407/PPF 466-7). The body schema

219 At the core of subjectivity is "the world itself contracted into a

comprehensive grasp" (PP 408/PPF 467).
 180

provides a unique interface for the reversibility of

consciousness and world which is exemplified in the

phenomenon of double sensation.

In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty explains that between the

sensing body and the thing sensed, or rather supporting them,

is a common fabric or 'flesh' of the world. "[T]he world," he

explains, "is made of the same stuff as the body" (PrP

163/EMF 19). This stuff is neither materialistic nor

mentalistic, but is the very blending of roles that we have

already discovered in double sensation. The body emerges at

the point of convergence of activity and passivity, of

sensing and being sensed. "There is a human body when,

between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the

touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and

hand, a blending of some sort takes place" (PrP 163/EMF 21).

This chiasm of the sensible is made possible because the body

that senses is also part of the sensible world. "Visible and

mobile, my body is a thing among things: it is caught in the

fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing"

(prP 163/EMF 19). I cannot escape this exteriorization of my

being: I am literally in the world, transcending myself

towards things. And things resemble my own visibility. The

body "holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an

annex or prolongation of itself; they are encrusted into its

flesh, they are part of its full definition" (ibid.). The

first meaning we have of things is not their Euclidean form

 181

or their pragmatic value, but their "carnal formula" (PrP

164/EMF 22) which determines the ways that my body can relate

to them. A thing is 'graspable' or 'visible' insofar as it

allows me to grasp it or to see it. My body interprets the

thing by grasping it or by focusing on it, by seeing it,

essentially, as manipulable by means of my body. "Everything

I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach

of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the 'I can'" (prP

162/EMF 17). The result is that the body and the thing are

'virtually' the same, in terms of the 'I can' of the body.

"The visible world and the world of my motor proj ects are

each total part s of the same Being. ,,220 One of these ' total

parts', that of the body, establishes a field in which

everything can be seen in terms of a possibility of

embodiment. The other, that of things, makes it so that in

order for me to see at all, I must be a visible like the

things I see. "That which looks at all things can also look

at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the 'other side' of

its power of looking" (PrP 162/EMF 18). If we could not see

ourselves as being also visible, we would not realize

ourselves as being in contact with the world but rather, like

ghosts, would float above things and never interact with

them. We would have, Merleau-Ponty explains, an "adamantine

220 Ibid. 'Total parts' does not mean two distinct parts within a
common whole. It would be better to think of these 'total parts' or
'leaves' as different aspects of a whole, much as sexuality is explained
as a mode of existence that encompasses all of existence while not being
identical to it (PP 169/PPF 197) .
 182

body" (PrP 163/EMF 20). perception involves an "overlapping

(empietement) II (PrP 162/EMF 17) of the two orders of the
sensing and being sensed- -of the visible and the invisible.
And this overlapping is mediated by the fabric of flesh that
is common to both orders.
Flesh is not "in itself, or matter" (prP 162/EMF 18),
nor is it a 'psychic' entity resulting in an animism of
Nature. It is not a positive substance like clay out of which
all beings are made, but is the essential divergence between
sensing and sensed, an opening or ecart through which Being
is made manifest. In order to appear, Being must divide
itself, must inaugurate a dehiscence of itself so that it can
provide the distance and externalization required to have
sense. Flesh, then, suggests that Being is always deferred,
is always separated from itself. Flesh must be understood as
"segregation, dimensionality, continuation, latency,
encroachment" (VI 248/VIF 302). This does not make of flesh a
simple negation of Being, but the opening and development of
Being into a series of dimensions in which it can appear.
Perhaps the best description of flesh is that provided by
David Abram when he writes:
The flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that
underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and
the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own
spontaneous activity. It is the reciprocal presence
of the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible
in the sentient, a mystery of which we have always,
at least tacitly, been aware, since we have never
been able to aff irm one of these phenomena, the
 183

perceivable world or the perceiving self, without

implicitly affirming the existence of the other.221

We experience the roles of sensing and being sensed

simultaneously and cannot imagine having one without the

other. Rather than reducing one mode of being to the other,

Merleau - Ponty sets out to understand their mysterious union

as a primordial dimension of the appearing of Being. To

describe Being and its manner of appearing, we must examine

the medium for Being which is this flesh. "One cannot make a

direct ontology" (VI 179/VIF 233), claims Merleau-Ponty, but

must use the "indirect" or "negative" method of an analysis

of flesh. It is now our task to understand what the flesh is,

and what this essential embodiment of Being suggests about

the imagination of Being.

How are we to understand this medium of Being? If it is

based on the reversible relation between one hand and the

other, how is this relation similar to that between the body

and the world? At times Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that
there is a reversibility between body and world that is
symmetrical to the reversibility we experience within our own

bodies in the phenomenon of double sensation. For instance,

he refers to Paul Klee's story of being seen by Nature. "In a
forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who

looked at the forest. Some days, I felt that the trees were

looking at me, were speaking to me" (Prp 167/EMF 31).

221 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception in a More-than-

Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996), p. 66.
 184

Merleau - ponty himself reports: "I feel myself looked at by

things" (VI 139/VIF 183). There is, he adds, an 'emigration'

of my consciousness to the realm of things where I am "to be

seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it,

to be seduced, captivated so that the seer and the

visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which

sees and which is seen" (VI 139/VIF 183). There is a

remarkable blending of seeing and seen that lies at the heart

of perception, a virtual identification of consciousness with

Nature.
These passages have understandably caused much

confusion. It could be seen, for instance, that Merleau-Ponty

intends a kind of 'animism' or 'psychism' at the heart of

Nature. But Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that this is not his

intention. We are not talking about "that absurdity: color

that sees itself, surface that touches itself" but the
paradox of "a set of colors and surfaces inhabited by a

touch, a vision" (VI 13S/VIF 178-9). It could still be argued

that Merleau-Ponty is challenging traditional conceptions of

vision and redefining it. Though this is true, it is clear

that Merleau-Ponty was not suggesting an animistic conception

of Nature.
A better interpretation is provided by Martin Dillon,

who claims that "we are speaking here in similes,,222 and

222 Dillon, p. 162.

 185

should not read the passages literally. He explains that the

tree, like a mirror, allows me to experience my externality

and visibility--my inability to escape the fact that I am, in

some ways, like the trees (in being visible). The mirror

provides an external image of myself that reminds me of my

being amongst the objects that I see. The tree, obviously,

does not 'reflect' my visibility in the same manner as the

mirror, but the mere fact that it shares with me the

possibility of being seen provides me with the opportunity to

see that my visibility is as embedded in the world as that of

the tree. Dillon explains that Mer 1 eau - ponty "wants to give

consciousness an outside which limits it and makes it visible

as a body which can be seen from external points of view"

(162). The tree, far from assuming an experience and a

reflexivity like my own, is a reminder of the fact that even

my own vision is grounded in the possibility of being seen.
Thus there is no identification of consciousness with Nature,

but a radical asymmetry between my body and Nature: "The

plain fact, II writes Dillon, "is that the table is neither

part of my body nor sentient in the way my body is. There is

an asymmetry in the reversibility thesis emerging here that

needs to be investigated" (159).

The asymmetry between the body and Nature revolves

around the concept of reflexivity. By contrast to Modern

philosophy, which stresses a reflection of the self based on

thought, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that it is the body, and

 186

not the mind, that allows for self-reflection. Mer1eau-Ponty

writes: "There is vision, touch, when a certain visible, a

certain tangible, turns back upon the whole of the visible,

the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part, or when

suddenly it finds itself surrounded by them, or when between

it and them, and through their commerce, is formed a

Visibility, a Tangibility in itself" (VI 139/VIF 183). What

Mer1eau-Ponty is trying to explain is that reflective

awareness occurs not in a thought about self, but in embodied

experience. And this experience, in turn, is an event that

occurs within the flesh of Being, a Visibility or a
Tangibility inaugurated in the very separation or ecart
between sensing and sensed. The body, then, has a unique role
in the appearing of Being. It is an "exemplar sensible, which

offers to him who inhabits it and senses it the wherewithal

to sense everything that resembles himself on the outside,

such that, caught up in the tissue of the things, it draws it

entirely to itself, incorporates it, and, with the same

movement, communicates to the things upon which it closes

over that identity without superposition, that difference

without contradiction, that divergence (ecart) between the

within and the without that constitutes its natal secret" (VI

135-6/VIF 178-79). "The human body," explains Dillon, "is

that particular kind of flesh that allows the flesh of the
 187

world to double back on itself and be seen. ,,223 There is an

asyrmnetry between my embodied experience and Nature because

while Nature can serve as the site for such an intertwining

of vision and the visible, the spectacle can only be seen

fram my side of the divide.

The centrality of the body in embodied reflection gives

to it a central role in philosophical reflection. It is in

the human body, Merleau-Ponty claims, that Being is able to

express itself and to reflect on itself. The body, in other

words, is the site for the institution of a meaning of Being,

albeit an indirect meaning as it is mediated within the flesh

of the world. Referring to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty writes that

"since we are at the junction of Nature, body, soul, and

philosophical consciousness, since we live that juncture, no

problem can be concei ved of whose solution is not sketched

out within us and in the world's spectacle" (S 177/SF 223-4).

Being, he later says, is "realized through man" (S lSI/SF

228). Gary Madison explains: "It is in man, who is an opening

in Being, that the question about Being arises; it is

therefore in man that Being makes its advent or puts itself

into question. "224 This does not make ontology

anthropocentric, because it is not man who first poses the

question of Being. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that "it is

indeed a paradox of Being, not a paradox of man, that we are

223 Ibid., p.169.

224 Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 265.
 188

dealing with here" (VI 136/VIF 180). Thus even though

humanity I in the form of embodied consciousness I has a

privileged position as the site for Being's indirect

reflection on itself (through the medium of flesh and its

reversibilities) I it remains an interrogation that is begun

by Being- -a problem posed l and a domain imagined I from the

heart of Being itself. 225

The matter is far more complex I however. An important

distinction that emerges in The Visible and the Invisible is

that between sentient and non - sentient flesh. Mer 1 eau - Ponty

225 Dillon agrees with Madison that humans actualize the self-
reflection of being. "The flesh of the world," he writes, "also
articulates itself through that part of itself which we, ourselves, are.
Through itself is also through us: we who are both fleshly and
articulate, the flesh of the world that has discovered the signs of its
(and our) self-referentiality" (242). But Dillon goes further than
Madison. The human development of flesh to the point of reflexivity is
only one of many ways that flesh folds on itself. (Note the "also" in
his quote.) He explains flesh in terms of a range of sentience, from
human consciousness to simple organic forms: "There is flesh which is
sensitive to light, flesh which is not, and degrees of sensitivity
linking the extremes. We need not convert the animals, vegetables, and
minerals of the world to humanity to overcome ontological dualism"
(169). There is room in 'sensing' for other creatures, though they will
not achieve the reflexivity that is found in human consciousness. This
agrees with Merleau-Ponty's sensitivity to our proximity to animals as
expressed throughout The Structure of Behavior. Merleau-Ponty explores
the habits of kittens, chimpanzees, and insects in order to understand
how Being emerges from embodied behaviour and comes to reflect on
itself. It is consistent with Merleau-ponty'S writings, then, to suggest
that animal sentience will playa part in his general ontology, although
the human body will remain a unique instance of flesh reflecting on
itself. A philosophy of sentience will need to include animals and
should not refer simply to human sentience. For a good discussion and
criticism of this problem, see David Farrell Krell, "Daimon Life,
Nearness and Abyss," Research in Phenomenology 17 ( 19 87), pp. 23 - 47 .
While Madison provides a convincing argument that animals do not
share the human ability to achieve disinterested juridical discourse
(and thus do not have rights), he does allow dogs some standing as
"quasi-persons." Thus there is room within his interpretation for animal
sentience. "Prolegamena to a Hermeneutical Ecology" in The Politics of
Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Ingrid Harris
(forthcoming), p. 260, n. 38.
 189

writes: "The flesh of the world is not explained by the flesh

of the body ... The flesh of the world is not self-sensing as

is my flesh--It is sensible and not sentient (sensible et non

sentant) II (VI 250/VIF 304; emphasis added). We see here an

obvious support for Dillon's claim that the reversibility

between my body and Nature is asymmetrical, and that the way

that I experience my own flesh is not the same as the way

that flesh appears in Nature. But we are not really any

further ahead. Now, instead of understanding the world in

terms of consciousness or consciousness in terms of the

world, we are left with an obscure concept of a sensible that

is neither material nor sentient. Flesh is neither an opaque

plenum of Being nor human sentience. What is meant by this
I sensible that is not sentient', this material and
exteriority that is neither materialistic nor psychic?

One clue for this is provided by Merleau-Ponty's unique

notion of transcendence. Michael B. Smith explains that, for

Merleau-Ponty, transcendence is an ontological structure, an

ability to be outside of oneself and in the world. In order

to do that, one need not be a Sartrean 'for-itself', a pure

negation with no content. Merleau-Ponty writes, "the for

itself is a hollow and not a void, not absolute non-being. 11226

226 VI 233/VIF 286; see also VI 191, 196, 200/VIF 244-5, 249-50, 253-4
and PP 215/PPF 249. Barbaras explains this by saying that "transcendence
is not a modality of negativity '" it is rather negativity that is a
modality of transcendence" (251). Priority is given to flesh's own
transcendence and not to nothingness (or the for-itself) as the ground
for meaning.
 190

This invisible hollow, further, is not absolutely different

from Being, but is visible like other beings- -it is the

sensible flesh. Smith explains:

While traditional transcendence was a movement from

self to what is outside of self, Merleau - Ponty' s
transcendence of perception does not stop at the
exteriori ty of the outer world, but loops back:
that movement is but one strand of a 'chiasme', an
'Ineinander' or crossing, a Husserlian
'Uberschreitung' that moves from self to world and
from world to self, via the mediating elemental
flesh.227

This suggests a blending of self and Being, an intertwining

in which the self externalizes itself and becomes visible

while the visible infects the self with visibility, is taken

back up into the interiority of consciousness. "To say that

there is transcendence, being at a distance, is to say that

Being (in the Sartrean sense) is thus inflated with non-being

or with the possible, that it is not only what it is" (VI

181/VIF 234). No longer can the self hide behind its absolute
difference from Being, or within its ivory tower of

indubitable existence, since it is the inner of the outer,

and is the sensible turned inside out. The for- itself and
Nature blend with each other, within the medium of flesh.

Flesh must be like both of them in some way.

To go one step further, Merleau-Ponty decenters the for-

itself or transcendence from the self altogether. He argues

that transcendence is not a "possession of the obj ect" but a

227 Michael B. Smith, "Transcendence in Merleau-Ponty," Merleau-Ponty,

Interiority and Exteriority, p. 40.
 191

"divergence" or a "separation (ecart) " (VI 198, 197/VIF 251,

250) within Being, a dimensionality, an ability to reflect

all of being not as consciousness but as the tree mentioned

above (VI 218/VIF 271-2). In other words, the reflexivity of

flesh need not be self-reflection, but can take the form of

the tree or of the colour as a dimension mentioned above,

reflecting our own dimensionality which is for us in terms of

the reversibility of sensing and being sensed. That

reversibility is a unique mode of the same transcendence that

is found within Being itself .228 Transcendence is not the

outward movement of an inner self, but is the ecart or

differentiation of Being. "Ecart is not nothing," writes
Claude Lefort; "it is being as transcendence. ,,229 We must take

Merleau - Ponty seriously when he says that he is going to

replace a philosophy of the subj ect with one of Being (VI

167/VIF 221). He is not only asking about the nature of

subj ectivity, but exploring the possibility of a for- itself

that is prior to sentience, that is the inner lining of the

sensible before the sentient emerges, that is the imaginative

aspect of Being underlying human imagining and perception.

This applies, as well, to embodied consciousness.

Merleau - Ponty argues that "to perceive a part of my body is

also to perceive it as visible, i.e. for the other" (VI 244-

228 Of course, even the reversibility occurring within us is also

within Being, for we are a part of Being. My concern here is to stress a
difference that is found between Being's transcendence and that found
specifically in the thinking subject.
229 Lefort, p. 144.
 192

5/VIF 298). This suggests that the transcendence of the body

depends on its ability to be seen, on its very inherence in
the flesh. My body "assumes this character because in fact
someone does look at it. But this fact of the other's
presence would not itself be possible if antecedently the

part of the body in question were not visible, if there were

not, around each part of the body, a halo of visibility. ,,230

The transcendence of the body is nothing more than this

instance of flesh folding back on itself, creating a
foreground and a background, in this ontological gestalt of
reciprocal roles. For this reason, Lefort is correct to say
of the ecart that "we must think of it with the Gestalt, it
is being as transcendence." 231 The flesh of the body, in spite
of its unique role in the expression of Being, is still only
an instance of a transcendence of Being within the general
medium of the flesh.
The flesh is also not a surface, as some corranentators
have nevertheless suggested. For instance, Drew Leder claims
that Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh gives priority to
vision and the other exteroceptive senses at the expense of
the contributions made to our understanding of reality by the
visceral organs. As shown earlier, in Chapter Four, Section
C, Leder is particularly concerned with how the body is made

230 VI 24S/VIF 298. I have placed a period between the two sentences,
while the original text has two dashes.
231 Lefort, ibid.
 193

present in a sort of 'absence' as a background for

intentional activities, such as when a person relies on the
body to drive a car or relies on her visceral organs to
breathe and to digest food. In addition to the flesh, which
opens us onto a world of presence, there is also a "deeper
blood relation with the world n232 in the form of the visceral
, absence' of the body. He explains: "I am not just a gaz ing
upon the world, but one who breathes, feeds and drinks of it,
such that inner and outer corporeality intertwine. ,,233 Unlike
perception, for example, in which a distance is maintained,
digestion absorbs the world into the self and overcomes
distance. The visceral, he claims, thus introduces "another
sort of depth, another sort of invisibility," a "vertical
synergy" ("Flesh and Blood", pp. 216 and 213) to complement
the horizontal nature of fleshly transcendence. 234

232 Drew Leder, "Flesh and Blood: A Proposed Supplement to Merleau-

Ponty," Hwnan Studies 13 (1990), p. 214.
233 Ibid., p. 215; see also The Absent Body, p. 66.
234 An emphasis on the visceral at the expense of the exteroceptive
aspect of the flesh has led some commentators to resort to Eastern
philosophy in order to make sense of Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh.
Leder himself compares flesh to the Oriental concept of Ch'i, which is a
'vital force' or energy that permeates the universe. "Forming one body
with the universe," he writes, "can literally mean that since all
modalities of being are made of Ch'i, human life is part of a continuous
flow of the blood and breath that constitutes the cosmic process"
(Leder, The Absent Body, 157). But Leder does not explicitly connect
these ideas to Merleau-Ponty. Nor could he. Despite his sympathy for the
value of Oriental thought, Merleau-Ponty would never attempt to
understand it in terms of Western concepts, nor vice versa. The Orient,
indeed, has something to teach us, but this includes only the
rediscovery of "the existential field that [our own ideas] were born in
and that their success has led us to forget" (S 139/SF 175). There is a
lateral universality of history only at the level of embodied existence,
an indirect sensitivity to the Communist plight in China or to the
development of democracy in the West. Each can be understood only within
 194

Merleau-Ponty at one point interprets the body as

bearing only two dimensions: the subjective and the
objective, the sensing and the sensed. Merleau-Ponty writes:

"we say therefore that our body is a being of two leaves,

from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees

them and touches them" (VI 137/VIF 180). Thus it sounds as if

he ignores the visceral and focuses only on the body as

object and the body as experienced. But he immediately

rejects this description for another: "each of the two beings

is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to

the order of the things as the world is universal flesh ...

There are not in it two leaves or two layers; fundamentally

it is neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility

sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled" (VI 137-8/VIF

181). The actual visibility of the flesh is not important,

but only its virtual visibility, its inherence in the visible

(VI 244-4S/VIF 298). This means that the visceral, like all
other aspects of embodiment, is equally 'available to the

gaze' as well as 'hidden'. To the extent that the visceral is

proprioceptive, it enters the domain of the phenomenal body;

a particular context that precludes holding onto ideas from a prior

context. "Hence the full meaning of a language is never translatable
into another. We may speak several languages, but one of them always
remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a
language [or concept], it would be necessary to make the world which it
expresses one's own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once"
(pp 187/PPF 218). For a good illustration of how one might go about
interpreting another culture, see Merleau-Ponty's own attempt to
understand the life-situation of those involved in the Moscow trials in
Humanism and Terror.
 195

to the extent that it conceals itself from internal

observation, it becomes an organ capable of being seen from

the outside (by a physician, for instance). There is not,

then, a radical difference between the visceral body and

either the objective or phenomenal body, but a single mass

that is both visible and vision, a single tissue or flesh. 235

There is also no priority here given to visibility, but only

to the view that all being is virtually visible, is virtually

an appearing or a becoming, and that nothing remains

inherently in-itself as an absolute plenum. As surely as it

is the vehicle for perceiving presences, the body is also the

locus for absence. The body and its distances or differences

(such as that holding between the visceral and the
exteroceptive), "participate in one same corporeity or

visibility in general, which reigns between them and it, and

even beyond the horizon, beneath [its] skin, unto the depths

of being" (VI 149/VIF 195). It must not be said, then, that

Merleau-Ponty's concept of the flesh is in need of another

dimension of the visceral; rather, flesh is Visibility and

235 Leder refers to the maternal/fetal relation as an internal

relation based on blood and inherence rather than on the 'surface'
functioning of the flesh that we would see in mature intersubjectivity
("Flesh and Blood," p. 215). In a similar fashion, Luce Irigaray claims
that Merleau-Ponty attempts to reduce the maternal-feminine to the
masculine gaze of perception, rather than preserve it in its hiddenness
and immediacy (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. Carolyn Burke and
Gillian Gill (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1993], pp. 152-53, 159,
184). To the extent that Irigaray wishes to preserve the feminine as an
absolute mystery, Merleau-Ponty would certainly give priority to
visibility over mystery. But as I have just shown, he is not attempting
to reduce everything to the gaze of perception, but only to the common
medium of flesh in which all things are potentially visible.
 196

dimensionality, and Leder's analysis is at best the

elaboration of an internal truth in Merleau-Ponty's original
ontology of flesh. 236
The flesh, then, is neither subject nor object, and
fonns a medium between the two for the appearing of Being.

Merleau-Ponty often illustrates flesh in terms of a dynamic

energy grounded in an abyss. There is, he writes, an
"inspiration and an expiration of being" (PrP 167/EMF 31-32);
flesh itself is structured like a series of currents that
coil over each other, allowing Being to radiate from within
them in the form of rays of Being. 237 He refers to them as
"nervures" (VI 118-19, 215/VIF 158-9, 269), central nerves
that bring energy to the sensible and the sensing, themselves
described as "leaves" (VI 137/VIF 180) of Being. Finally,
Mer1eau-Ponty refers to "one sole explosion of Being

(eclatement d'Etre) that is forever" (VI 265/VIF 318), and to

"one sole vortex (tourbillon) II (VI 151/VIF 199) - -what Jacques

Garelli calls lithe turbulent metastability,,238 of Being.

236 Leder does admit that the two levels of the body, the
exteroceptive and visceral, are not opposed to each other but occur
within a "chiasmatic identity- in-difference of perceptual and visceral
life" (The Absent Body, p. 65). The absences of the visceral, he adds,
"always remain depths of a surface, adhering to the esthesiological and
expressive body" (Ibid., p. 67).
237 VI 147, 209, 218, 241-2/VIF 183, 262, 271, 294-5. Compare these
'live wires' of being with the image of a 'net' in the preface to
Phenomenology of Perception to illustrate how essences bring back "all
of the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman's net draws
up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed" (pp xv/PPF
x) •
238 Garelli, "Voir Ceci et Voir Selon," 94; see also 97 and Rhythmes
et mondes: AU revers de l'identite et de 1 'alterite (Grenoble: Jereme
Millon, 1991), p. 358.
 197

It would be wrong, however, as some commentators do, to

understand flesh in tenns of chaos theory. Such a view is

taken up by Glen Mazis in his comparison of Merleau-ponty to

chaos theory. Glen Mazis argues that the flesh, with all of

its openings and dimensions, is similar to a chaotic

structure that is open, dynamic, and yet extremely fragile. A

small change in the system can cause a radical change in the

whole, such as when a decrease in temperature can cause ice

to form on the wing of a DC9 and ultimately cause the plane

to crash. Mazis writes:

Both Merleau-Ponty's ontology and chaos theory not
only face the implications of mortality that
undoing the dualistic retreat from matter entails,
but both conceive of matter as itself part of a
dynamic, unfolding open system of forces. Thus,
they reveal, for the first time, the authentic
fragility of both human and nonhuman existence. 239

Just as a simple change in the environment can cause an

airplane to crash, so Being, it is claimed, can become

radically different from its present condition by means of a

simple shift in the way that it divides itself and creates a

world for us.

Merleau-Ponty denies that flesh is like chaos. Flesh, he

writes, "is not contingency, chaos (chaos), but a texture

that returns to itself and confonns to itself" (VI 146!VIF

192). Merleau-Ponty does talk about a "return to Sige, the

Abyss (L'abime)" (VI 179!VIF 233). But chaos theory suggests

239 Mazis, "Chaos Theory and Merleau-Ponty' s Ontology" in Merleau-

Panty, Interiority and Exteriority, p. 237.
 198

that order follows contingency in the form of arbitrariness;

it is totally arbitrary that ice begins to build on the wing,

or that pressure mounts when exchanged in a feedback-loop. By

contrast, there is an interiority to flesh that is lacking in

a chaotic structure, suggesting that Being does not simply

happen to be structured a certain way, but imagines that

structure from within (VI lSl/VIF 198).

There is also an order to flesh that is lacking in a

chaotic structure. As shown above, there is a radical

asymmetry between the reversibility of double sensation and

of the body's relation to the world, so that one could not

reduce the nature of the world to a Single homogenous

relational structure. Within these asynunetries, the body is

also able to make sense of the world, to discern regularities

and develop universals in the medium of language. 240 "What

there is," writes Merleau-Ponty, "is a whole architecture, a

whole complex of phenomena 'in tiers I , a whole series of

'levels of being'. ,,241 Flesh is not a chaotic structure based
240 Chapter Five, Section E, showed how flesh is structured like a
language. According to Thomas Busch, this marks an essential difference
between Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur: while Ricoeur emphasizes the
distanciation of textuality as a moment of transcendence, Merleau-Ponty
stresses the differential structure of language as a model for
understanding transcendence. He writes: "The model of symbolic systems
becomes the model of thinking about Being .... All 'positivities' are
understood as divergences, oppositions." "Perception, Finitude, and
Transgression: A Note on Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur" in Merleau-Ponty,
Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch and Shaun Gallagher
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p.32.
241 VI 114/VIF 153. Marc Richir uses this idea of an architecture of
being to oppose Heidegger' s view that there is a radical difference
between Being and beings. According to Richir, there is only an
"architectonic difference" between the two, in the sense that Being is
not some primordial silence of language or some primordial truth of
 199

solely on chance, but on a series of divergences and levels

that already partially detennine what the world can mean.
Flesh involves an open and dynamic medium for the appearing
of Being, that is neither subjective nor objective, organic
nor chaotic, but a system of levels and dimensions in which
Being can become meaningful.
It has been shown in what way the flesh is a general
dimensionality, a general medium for qualities to both appear
and to serve as the background for an appearance, as well as
for the body to both be seen and to serve as the background
for seeing. This reversibility at the heart of flesh means
that it can neither be an in- itself matter nor an absolute
consciousness, but a transcendence upon itself that
establishes every mode of appearing of Being.

C. Imagining Flesh
It must now be shown in what way flesh could be said to
imagine itself, and how the body imagines flesh. The flesh,
we have seen, is neither sentience nor sensible, but the
essential ecart that underlies, differentiates and
chiasmatically unites both. The flesh thus precedes any
real/ideal distinction, as well as any actuality/possibility

appearances but is caught up at every level with the contingency of its

appearance. The shift from ontic to ontological, then, pivots upon a
structural and not a radical or "ontological" difference. See "Merleau-
Ponty and the Question of Phenomenological Architectonics" in Merleau-
ponty in Contemporary perspective, ed. Patrick Burke and Jan Van der
Veken (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1993), pp. 46-7.
 200

distinction. The flesh is neither sensible nor sentient

because it contains the possibility of the sentient as the

sensible's inner lining. Flesh, in other words, is the medium

for the possible that is taken up and actualized by the

reversibilities of sensing and sentient, as exemplified in

the imagining body. Merleau-Ponty explains this in terms of

Leibniz's discussion of possible worlds. "I call it flesh,

nonetheless ... in order to say that it is a pregnancy of

possibles, Welt.mOglichkeit (the possible worlds variants of

this world, the world beneath the singular and the plural)"

(VI 250/VIF 304) . Merleau-Ponty is suggesting, like

Heidegger, a primacy of the possible over the actual. Before

the actual experience of reflexivity of Being within the

human body, there must be a possibility for sentience. The

flesh is essentially the first layer of imagining, the

"virtual focus" (VI 215/VIF 269) of Being that is taken up

and creatively developed by the human body.

One of the most frequent metaphors used by Merleau-ponty

to express this virtuality of Being is that of pregnancy and

"embryonic development" (VI 147/VIF 193). For instance, he

discusses birth as deriving not from anything actual but from

a virtuality at the heart of the mother's flesh that develops

its own visibility and actuality. "It can be said that a

human is born at the instant when something that was only

virtually visible, inside the mother's body, becomes at one

and the same time visible for itself and for us" (PrP 168-
 201

9/EMF 32). He later explains that "through a labor upon

itself the visible body provides for the hollow whence a

vision will come, inaugurates the long maturation at whose

tenn suddenly it will see" (VI 147/VIF 193). The flesh, "this
worked-over mass, \I inaugurates an "invagination,,242 in which

visibility emerges. But this is possible only because the

fetus (within the mother's flesh) contains within itself the

ability to explore itself and divide itself, to develop its

possibilizing nature to the point where an actual imaginer is

born- -the imaginer that we are familiar with, the imagining
body. Before we can explore possibilities within our own

bodies, there must have already been an exploration of Being

that imagined our bodies into being and that continues to

replenish us with possibilities for (our own) Being's

appearance. The flesh is essentially the pure imagination,

pure possibility, that does not await actualization but

rather bears it as a mother bears her child. The flesh exists

in latency and virtuality, an imagination before all self-
perception and at the heart of perception.

We can see this more clearly by means of a contrast with

the imagination theories of Casey and Sartre. Both argue that

the imagination has a fundamental role in human existence as

the source for possibility. The imagination, says Casey, is

the locus of "possibilizing" my existence, of developing and

242 VI 152/VIF 199; see also VI 233-4/VIF 287.

 202

exploring alternatives to my present situation. And for

Sartre, the imagination is the essence of human freedom as

the power to negate reality. The imagination rests on an

existential ability to be open to the actual world while

being able to negate it and transcend it either by changing

it according to imagined plans or by living in a fanciful

alternative world. 243

The possibility that is most important in The Visible

and the Invisible is not a negation of the world that is

already there, but the possibility of flesh to fold on

itself, to become sensible and to inaugurate the original

appearing of a world. The "unicity of world" upon which the

imagination theory of Casey and Sartre depends is itself

grounded in another possibility that is provided not by our

own being but by Being itself. "[T] he unicity of the world

means not that it is actual and that every other world is

imaginary, not that it is in itself and every other world for

us only, but that it is at the root of every thought of
possibles, that it even is surrounded with a halo of

possibilities." 244 This means that, unlike Sartre and Casey,

the possibility here is not of consciousness being open to

the world but of the world being open to itself in the matrix

243 See Chapter TwO, Section D.

244 VI 228/VIF 282; Merleau-Ponty is here commenting on Husserl's use
of Leibniz's notion of possible worlds. Elsewhere, he writes: "Every
evocation of possible worlds refers to a way of seeing our own world
(Weltanschauung). Every possibility is a variant of our reality, an
effective possibility of reality (M6glichkeit an Wirklichkeit) " (S
180/SF 227 - 8) .
 203

of flesh. The imagination that is primary is not that of

consciousness, elaborating on a situation that is already

given, but the virtual beginning of flesh in the moment of

the fold, before any consciousness, and before any reality.245

What fonn does such a pure possibility take? Is it

completely indetenninate? At the end Merleau-Ponty's
Ontology, Martin Dillon recalls the Presocratic story of

chaos as the origin of earth and sky, the first

differentiation and order of Being. "Beneath this story,"

writes Dillon, "there is chaos, as there is beneath all such

stories; because all stories, all the logoi, impart all the
meaning and order there is to be had. ,,246 Dillon also alludes

to Anaximander's concept of apeiron, a neutral element out of

which are born the four elements and everything in the

world. 247 Being, as abyss, is pure potentiality, the initial

energy or heartbeat of the entire universe. Being, in this

state, is pure virtuality, pure imagination, a dream that

dreams itself with no real awareness of itself, a pure

interiority that lacks an outer and thus dissolves its

245 The essentially virtual character of flesh as the 'sensible' is

particularly shown in the following: "There are certainly more things in
the world and in us than what is perceptible in the narrow sense of the
term ... Sensible being is not only things but also everything sketched
out there, even virtually, everything which leaves its trace there,
everything which figures there, even as divergence and a certain
absence" (S 171-2/SF 216-17) i see also PrP 7/INF 405.
246 Dillon, p. 241. It is more accurate to say 'abyss' than 'chaos' in
this context; for a comparison of chaos with abyss, see above (Section
B) •
247 See also Marc Richir, Phenomenes, temps et etres: Ontologie et
phenomenologie (Grenoble: Jer6me Millon, 19B7), pp. 84-5.
 204

interiority in a moment of immanence. It is out of this

virtuality that Being is made actual, that it comes to divide

itself in the moment of sensing and being sensed, and as

ultimately actualized and reflected on itself within embodied

existence.

We can also see the latency of flesh in the images of

the Presocratic elements. The four elements are not the

earth, water, air and fire studied by geologists, chemists,

meteorologists and pyrotechnicians. Each suggests a vague and

general sense in which Being is already partially determined

and conversant with itself. Before there is a child to play

in the sand or the waves, in "the immemorial depth of the

visible" (PrP 188/EMF 86), there is a silent logos of the
seashore that we take up, like the crest of a wave that is

borne by a series of hidden forces that we do not see. These

forces already assume a certain shape before they become the

sensible fragments of qualities, such as the green-blue hue

of the ocean or the graininess of the sand. We find, in

Merleau-Ponty, a hint of water as a universal mode of

relating to the world- -a meaning that Renoir could discover

just as clearly in the ocean as in the stream. Water is

fluid, transparent, formless and chaotic. Elsewhere, Merleau-

Ponty discusses the earth as ground, as a vessel that

contains us. In Genesis, the earth was to contain the chaotic

waters and to make oceans out of them, to give them form.

Earth allows for the openness of air and the possibility of

 205

space. 248 It "lifts all particular beings out of nothingness,

as Noah's Ark preserved the living creatures from the flood"

(TFL 122/TFLF 169). But the earth, like Noah's Ark, is buoyed
up by the abyss of water to which the earth was in the

process of giving form.249 Volcanoes and earthquakes remind us

of the fact that the earth's support is shaky and precarious.

Fire is a replenishing lightning flash or "spark

(1 'etince11e) 1\ (PrP 163/EMF 21) of life that breaks Being

open and causes it to develop a sense, to mean and to

imagine. "The ontology of Merleau-Ponty," concludes Barbaras,

\I can be characterized as an ontology of the elements. ,,250

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Merleau-Ponty

intends flesh to mean a primordial Urstoff of reality, a

common substance out of which all beings are made. In Chapter

Three, Section E, the elements were shown to be general

divergences at a level deeper than qualities as a primary

trace for such qualities in the material potentiality of

flesh. But the elements must not be thought of as being

"ontologically prior" to qualities. For this reason, Marc

Richir writes:
The cosmos of Merleau-Ponty is not only
constituted, like that of the Greeks, by the four
elements--again in a sense that we can take back--
because there are, within it, as many elements as

248 S 180/SF 227; see also Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-

Ponty, p. 212.
249 Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty talks about the body as "floating in
being" (VI 144/VIF 189).
250 Barbaras, p. 221.
 206

there are apparent modulations of flesh, the

appearing of appearances of the phenomenal i ty of
the phenomenon. 251

Each modulation of Being bears the possibility of presenting

either some other visible or of appearing itself as a

visible. At the heart of each appearance is a touch of

invisibility, of flesh in latency, of its lateral relation to

everything else.

The imagining of flesh is not pure indeterminacy, an

abstract neutral substance like the apeiron of the Greeks,

but the very phenomenality of phenomena: the invisibility

that makes phenomena visible. This self-inscription252 of

Being takes the form of what Merleau-Ponty calls a "brute

essence (essence brute) U (VI 11S/VIF 155), which is neither

an intuited presence nor a concept, but is found, in the

words of Richir, " I upstream I from concepts and ideas. u253

These essences involve a generality of meaning that assumes

Ita cohesion without concepts, which is of the same type as

the cohesion of the parts of my body, or the cohesion of my

body with the world" (VI lS2/VIF 199). Each essence marks the

place of a certain "excess" of Being, an overlapping or

cantilever of flesh that assumes a general and repeatable
form.254 This form, like a musical style, is then developed

while preserving an inner unity or identity, much as the body

251 Marc Richir, Phenomenes, temps et etres, p. 90.

252 Barbaras calls it an "originary inscription of being," p. 258.
253 Richir, ibid., p. 47.
254 Barbaras, p. 251.
 207

maintains a certain genetic cohesion throughout its

maturation. Thus Garelli defines the development of brute
essences as "a transductional progress of the character of a
differential and amplified variation, which invests its wild
rhythm in the metastable system in which it is inscribed. ,,255
At this pOint, it can be seen in what way the imagining
body takes up the pure potentiality of the flesh and develops
it into the modes of imagining with which we have become
familiar. Marc Richir and Jacques Garelli explain how the
discussion of brute essences in The Visible and the Invisible
is an elaboration on Husserl's eidetic variation as discussed
in Chapter Two, Section D, in which the imagination allows us
to vary the essence of an object in order to develop it along
the lines of its various appearances, such as the different
sides of a perceptual object. By neutralizing any concern for
the reality of a given object, the imagination allows us to
synthesize the various presentations of an object into a
single, generative essence. 256
The method of phenomenology, however, becomes not a
neutralizing imagination, but a productive one, an aesthetic
imagination such as we found in Ricoeur's philosophy (Chapter

255 Garelli, Rhythmes et mondes, pp. 359-60. one is reminded here of

Baudrillard's simulacra as an implosion of being to the level of DNA
where everything is simply doubled (see Chapter Two, Section E). This is
clearly not what Garelli has in mind. See especially p. 358, where he
explains that there is an essential gravity to metastability which is
reminiscent of the verticality that was discussed in Chapter Three,
section E.
256 See Richir, Phenomenes, temps et @tres, pp. 67-103; Garelli,
Rhythmes et mondes, pp. 359-72; VI 105-29/VIF 142-71.
 208

Two, Section E). 257 There is, according to Merleau - Ponty, no

intuition of essences but rather an encroachment upon them

through the inexhaustible divergences of flesh- -a sort of

"auscultation or palpation in depth" (VI 128/VIF 170). We are

reminded, at this point, of Bachelard's theory of the

resonance of Being found in elemental images that the

philosopher responds to and already interprets in terms of a

particular affective situation. This means that there is no

direct ontology, and that philosophy, rather than obtaining a

bird's eye view of the dehiscence of Being in the flesh, is

merely its interpretation and expression, or better its

production and actualization at the level of the symbolic.

Richir explains that surrounding each essence is a halo

of fiction. The essence, he explains, appears by virtue of

two illusions: the illusion of centering, that there is a

universal and primordial sense behind the appearance, and the

illusion of decentering, that the appearance is only a sign
of a universal idea. 258 This suggests that essences emerge out

of the imaginary, creating a faith in the world, much as we

saw in Hume above, where there is no 'actual' or 'real' world

with which to correspond. In order to reflect on this

production of reality, we must consider flesh as a "poetic

257 Or, to put this another way, Barbaras makes the comment that what
is neutralized here is not the world but consciousness as a negation of
the world in favour of a transcendence of things (250 and 260) .
258 Richir, Phenomenes, temps et ~tres, pp. 78-9.
 209

and oneiric power. 1/259 This means that the artist is perhaps

closest to these brute essences. Jocelyn Lebrun explains:

"Art becomes the only means of restoring a sense of the world

of Being as a world of phenomena, in that the artist is this

sublime illusionist who makes us feel like real this world of

phenomena. ,,260 Though Lebrun's position is extreme (for

certainly other forms of expression also encroach upon brute

essences), it does show that art assumes a prominent role in

the expression of Being. The imagination expresses and

reflects the poetic power of flesh when it is engaged in

aesthetic production, carrying forward a potency and

productivity that has already begun, nruch like Coleridge I s

artist who reenacts the Divine production. All other

instances of the imagination, be they fanciful thinking or

perception, are modes of this productivity of flesh that is

exemplified in the work of the artist and the interpretation

of elements found in poetry.

Each of these modes of irnagining--fanciful thinking,
perception, aesthetic production and elemental interpretation

--are based on the body as we found throughout Chapter Five.

The lived body makes manifest the reversibility of the flesh

in the form of double sensation and its reversible relation

to the world. It is the body that makes actual and

determinate the general traces of meaning laid out for it

259 Ibid., p. 102.

260 Lebrun, p. 207.
 2lO

within the metastable tissue of flesh. John Russon explains

that .. in the absence of bodily contact, the world remains

only indeterminate possibility .... Embodied existence, then,

is something which is performed, and its perfonnance is a

motivated creation of meaningfulness in which an

indeterminate situation is resolved into a determinate

relation of a determinate subj ect and a determinate

obj ect . ,,261 It is the body that I sings the world I (PP 187/PPF

218), that makes specific the general traces of Being.

Without the body, the world would be held, as it were, I in

suspense', would be 'bracketed' by its own indeterminacy from

expressing itself in the form of language and gesture.

There is, in Being, a sense of its own imagining, its

own emergence out of the plenum of immediacy into the rich

and varied polymorphous flesh that supplies the asymmetrical

dimensions for its own appearance. On their own, these

dimensions are still vague and indeterminate, waiting to

become the qualities of a Visibility or a Tangibility- -the

blue of the sea, the grainy texture of the sand. They await

the advent of the imagining body that will develop them into

determinate meanings, like the animals that waited for Adam

to name them. The imagining of Being awaits its actualization

in the imagining body that develops these traces into a

situation and a life. Just as Cezanne found in his own

261 Russon, pp. 294-5.

 211

situation a life to live and a creative profession (SNS

20/SNSF 35), so we all find ourselves, by means of the

imagining body, with a particular trace of Being that we are

called to express in our own way. The direction and meaning

of these traces contain the illusion of immanence and

ideality, the illusion of a reality to which we can compare

our interpretations. But this sense of reality is created by

the imagination as a dream folded onto itself, the product of

an oneiric substance that, like a work of art, never ceases
to have its whole life before it (PrP 190/EMF 92-3) .

The imagination aSS'lllnes a prominent role in Merleau-

Ponty's ontology. We have found within the notion of the

sensible flesh a transcendence that is not explicit

reflection but a kernel of potency and virtuality that

precedes the imagination of the body. There is a sense, as

Bachelard once wrote, of a narcissism of Being: "The cosmos,

in some way, has a touch of narcissism. The world wants to
see itself. ,,262 I suggest that this imagining of Being is an

unthought thought of Merleau-Ponty (VI 119/VIF 159). Being

imagines itself through our own imagining, and obtains a

meaning that, through us, is nevertheless its own and guided

by its own logic. And this logic is essentially one of

virtuality and the imaginary. Our perceptual life is grounded

262 Gaston Bachelard, On poetic Imagination and Reverie, p. 77.

 212

in a plenum of possibility the extent of which we can only

begin to imagine.

D. Conclusion

The imagination is a primary mode of human existence.

Far from being merely a secondary activity, the imagination
underlies every experience as its virtual lining and an
openness to new developments. The imagination is particularly
at work in the body schema, a basic mode of being in the
world that allows for the experience of anchorage and
perspective as well as creative production and freedom.
Without the body schema, there would be no meaning; Being
would remain in its immanent narcissism, unable to be
imagined by the human body.
A philosophy of human existence must be a philosophy of
mime. The mime illustrates the extent of creative power that
the body possesses. Like the mime, we continually use
gestures and bodily experiences to discover and create
meaning and to communicate those meanings to others. But we
usually fail to realize the extent of our potential to
imagine the body in different ways. Philosophy must
appropriate the mime's silent art and use it to enrich
ordinary life and philosophical expression.
I have attempted to take the mime's lead by imagining
the body with Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes
embodied experience as an unsurpassable and essential ground
 213

for every mode of existence. We first looked at the different

kinds of imagination in order to determine what a theory of

imagination must involve. These kinds included perceptual

imagining, aesthetic imagining, fanciful imagining and

elemental imagining. All were shown to be parts of a single,

genealogical meaning of imagining.

The body was then looked at in some detail, in order to

reveal it as an imaginative medium for engaging with reality.

It was shown how Merleau-ponty made use of the concept of a

body schema that is still in use in psychology and cognitive

science. The body is not primarily an inert sum of organs but

a unified experience of anchorage and motility that allows us

to engage with the world in terms of habits and creative

acts. Creative embodiment was then treated as the ground for

all four kinds of imagining, so that perception, aesthetic

production, fanciful thinking and the interpretation of

elemental images were all shown to be modes of creative

embodiment. The body, then, must be the basis for the

imagination; imagining is essentially to imagine the body.

In the final chapter, it has been shown that Being is

not a pure in-itself reality but an open and dynamic

potentiality for meaning. Being must be understood as a

dehiscence of itself between the reversible roles of sensing

and sensed. The dehiscence of Being follows its own traces

and asymmetrical structures that affect it prior to the

body's imagining; but it is the body that allows these traces

 214

to become detenninate modes of being, in the fonn of human

gestures and symbolic language.

The body provides a relation to the world in tenns of

the material meanings of the elements. These vague traces of

meaning are made detenninate by means of an affective

response, such as a fear before the presence of 'the sl~'.

The body also already finds the world demarcated by means of

certain structures of meaning I such as the different fields

of sense that are appropriated by perception. But the body is

not an inert or passive reception of Being's appearing;

rather, the body helps to develop the meaning of Being by its

interpretation and its creation of novel structures. In order

to make sense of the elements and qualities of experience,

the body creates for itself a situation of meaning, and

reflects that situation in works of art and poetry. The

imagination can be found, then, not only at the level of

elemental and perceptual images, but in the development of
works of art and even in flights of fanciful thinking.

The body does not, however, act as a perpetual creator.

The body contains the ability to incorporate certain

abilities into its flesh and to recall them as it recalls its

ability to move a limb. Possibilities can be acquired and

retold without explicit thought. But such acquisitions must

be fragile and open to change if the body is to achieve its

greatest potential as a free and imagining being. The body as

found in Merleau - Ponty' s philosophy is an imagining being I

 215

continually exploring the depths of its inheritance while

exposing that resource to ever-opening horizons.

What does it mean to end a text, and to render the rest

of its meaning to silence? Heidegger's analysis of Stefan

George's poem, "Words," can help to make this clear. 263 The

poem tells of an adventurer in search of the essence of

language and its secret ability to make Being appear. After

obtaining the prize, he hurries home only to realize that it

has trickled through his fingers. The essence of language

cannot be brought into language, and serves as an always

invisible lining of every spoken word. The last line of the

poem is telling: "Where word breaks off, no thing may be."

Where word breaks off, Being no longer appears, and we are

left with nothing to see. But in this Silence, we are also

open to the essence of language as transcending all words and

as the ground of all things. With the last line, we arrive at
a paradoxical moment of closure and opening, of the twilight

of a philosophy that makes use of language, and the dawning

of a philosophy of language.

As this text comes to a close, are we left with

Heidegger's moment between philosophy and thinking,

metaphysics and mysticism? Or are we left, like the reader at

263 Stefan George, "words," in Heidegger, On The Way to Language, tr.

Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 140.
 216

the end of Wittgenstein IS Tractatus,264 with a clear picture

of reality, leaving all else to silence?
Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger, believes that philosophy
must end in silence. At the end of Phenomenology of

Perception, he admits that when all is said, we return to our

lives and live through our bodies, immersing ourselves in

everyday concerns. But this does not mean that we cease from
imagining new possibilities, and does not suggest a retreat
to a private world. "Man is but a network of relationships,
and these alone matter to him. ,,265 Even when we return to our
silent existence, we are still related to others in terms of
our intercorporeality. Our body still speaks to others and
listens to others in the sea of significance that surrounds
us as the flesh of the world. Even when words fall back into
silence, we continue to imagine our bodies in relation to the
world.
We see this especially in the case of the mime. Without
the use of words, the mime continues to cast a spell on her
audience and to communicate to it in ways that are louder
than words. And even when the festival in Dundas is over, and
the mime returns to her ordinary life, the imagining of the
body continues. She continues to imagine new ways to be aware
of her body, new ways to perceive the world around her, new

264 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. D.P. Pears and

B.P. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), Section 7.
265 A. de Saint-Exupery, quoted in PP 456.
 217

ways to explore the elasticity of space and time, and new

ways to endow a personal significance on her surroundings.
When word breaks off, we do not return to a silence of
nothingness, but to the silent language and open future of
the imagining body.
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