Rereading the Phenomenology’s Recasting of Perception: The Path to a Differing and Interwoven Temporality, Imaginal, and Poetic Ontology

Abstract

The point of this Special Issue of Philosophies and of this essay is to look deeply into Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, and to “read backwards” from the later works (whether published, transcripts of the later lectures, or the unpublished notes) in order to find the inchoate ideas that were already present in the Phenomenology that was to be developed into the series of ideas of the later ontology of the flesh of the world. The presence of these inchoate ideas is subtle and not as clearly developed as in the later works, but now we can see them more clearly. The dispersed, decentered, and intermittent sense of self, the circulation of sense into the depth of the world, the radical temporality of institution, the latency of sense, the imaginal lining of all perception and its role in Being, the invisibility of the visible and the poetic flesh ontology will be touched upon in this essay as all of them are developments of the initial move in the Phenomenology to make perception the access to the real. This essay will go further than the many recent interpretations that look at some of these developing ideas to articulate that this is a necessary trajectory from Merleau-Ponty’s starting point in the Phenomenology of Perception and that all these phenomena to which these ideas point can only come forward in their interrelated interwovenness. This would mean that all these strands are integral to the chiasmatic nature of the flesh of the world.

1. The Phenomenology’s Articulation of Perception Takes Philosophy in a New Direction

Although it was obvious when Merleau-Ponty published the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 that a new direction in philosophy was being staked out, the radical nature of this new direction only seemed to crystallize with his last publications. When the essay, “Eye and Mind”, was published as a separate little volume in France in 1960, and the incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, was published in France in 1979, this radical turn in thought and language was clearly announced. However, the point of this Special Issue and of this essay is to “read backwards” from the later published works, transcripts of the later lectures, and the unpublished notes to discern that the seeds of these ideas were already present in the Phenomenology. Their presence is subtle and not as clearly developed as in the later works, but the direction that must lead in the later works to a series of ideas is already articulated. When Merleau-Ponty began the Phenomenology of Perception with the famous words at the beginning of its preface, “Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, as it is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have the law of its making; it is the natural setting of a field for all my thoughts and my explicit perceptions” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, x) [1], buried in this proclamation were trajectories of thought that are only being fully realized eighty years after its publication by those who are furthering his ideas. For Merleau-Ponty himself, these trajectories were to lead him in a continuous development of his thought and to a radicalization of phenomenology and philosophy itself.

The trajectories of this description of perception lead from a previous idea of phenomenology to a new kind of ontology, from a centered and gathered sense of self and agency to a decentered self as a dehiscent incompleteness open as the conduit of the world’s expression, and also from being the site of a present sensory registration of a determinate world to an invitation to an inexhaustible deepening of a latent inseparably sensible, imaginal, memorial, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive sense. Especially by finishing this opening proclamation from the Phenomenology with the further sentence that, “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man’, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xi) [1], Merleau-Ponty is saying not only to a tradition exemplified by Augustine whom he is quoting but also addressing phenomenology that to take perception as he will articulate it means that the human is not self-subsistent and isolable from the world but is embedded ontologically in an inexhaustible depth of the world that undermines the locus of a centered and transcendental self or of a Husserlian ego to a decentered, indeterminate, and ever-becoming sense of self that must relinquish the pretension of being the knower mastering the world. However, in addition to this shift in self, there is also an implicit opening to a more radical temporality, to latencies of sense that will lead to a greater role of the imaginary and to the invisible of the visible, and to a poetic ontology of the flesh.

Merleau-Ponty’s work on the implications of the Phenomenology of Perception that lead to these more radical insights throughout his later essays, monographs and course transcripts and summaries began almost immediately and continued until his untimely death in 1961. Now, reading back from those later works, the beginnings of these directions are even more obvious. Right after the Phenomenology’s publication in 1945, not only Merleau-Ponty but the philosophers of postwar France saw these trajectories of Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of perception in the Phenomenology as undermining traditional philosophy and leading phenomenology beyond its beginnings or even beyond Merleau-Ponty’s initial explicitly articulated insights. They were skeptical that this project would progress successfully, as evidenced in the recorded discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas at the Société française de philosophie on 23 November 1946. Although his fellow philosopher, Bréhier, finds many of the descriptions of perception apt, he raises the challenge that “Merleau-Ponty changes and inverts the ordinary meaning of what we call philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 28) [2]. The inversion is making perception our access to the world and to the real, when Bréhier states “it was from ordinary perception and by getting away from it that men began to philosophize” (28). Bréhier claims that immediate perception will never allow philosophy to satisfy reason, to avoid relativism, articulate ethical positions, or avoid contradiction. Bréhier concludes that “I see your ideas being better expressed in literature and in painting than in philosophy”. He also objects that this analysis of perception means the access among persons is a reciprocal one, which he finds to be a distorted description of human relations (30–31). Jean Hyppolite, in reaction to the book, claims that the description of perception cannot have any ontological outcome and does not ground any of Merleau-Ponty’s claims about what Hyppolite calls “an ontology of meaning” (40). Merleau-Ponty answers that the description of perception is inseparable from a new ontology. In Emmanuel de Saint’ Aubert’s book, Vers une ontologie indirecte, he states that Merleau-Ponty was stung by Hyppolite’s comments and this lingering feeling led him to write more than a decade later in his working notes to the Visible and the Invisible his two comments of February, 1959 (Saint Aubert 2006, 23) [3]:1 “I must show that what one might consider to be ‘psychology’ (Phenomenology of Perception) is in fact ontology” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 176) [4] and that the “results of Ph. P—Necessity of bringing them to ontological explication” (183). These trajectories were already present in the Phenomenology of Perception but required his later writings to achieve what he hoped, which is to make this new ontology more pointed and fully articulated.

The more traditional philosophical stance that to articulate the real is to distance oneself from perception is contrary to the aim of the Phenomenology’s beginning announcement that “describing our perception” is “describing our primordial knowledge of the ‘real’ … as that upon which our idea of truth is forever based” since “the world is what we perceive” (xvi) and is the “access to the truth”. When Bréhier attempts to disparage Merleau-Ponty’s founding philosophy on the basis of perception as access to the real as not being philosophical but instead expressing ideas that are more appropriately expressed through literature or art, he is actually expressing a direction of thought that Merleau-Ponty will come to see increasingly as being the direction that philosophy should take. The literary use of language is not to be seen as a defect in philosophical or phenomenological methods and will come to assume greater prominence in not only Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy but also in his way of writing philosophy. The arts in general will open avenues to the real. When speaking on “The French Culture Hour” on the radio in 1948, Merleau-Ponty explains that his thought in order to “bring the world of perception back to life” has had to turn towards painting “because painting thrusts us once again into the presence of the world of lived experience” (Merleau-Ponty 2004, 93) [5]. He adds that “this was how painting led us back to a vision of things themselves” (93), which, of course, is the expressed original aim of the Husserlian phenomenological project. Now, the return to “the things themselves” is being transformed into another sort of method and articulation. Merleau-Ponty says of literature and its use of poetic language (and poetry itself) that “the poet … replaces the usual way of referring to things, which presents them as ‘well known’, with a mode of expression that describes the essential structure of the thing and accordingly forces us to enter into that thing” (100). This means that if Merleau-Ponty is to continue in the project of articulating this primordial embodied level of experience, it will require a use of poetic language. Only later will Merleau-Ponty be able to express extensively how this poetic or “originary” use of language opens up a contact with Being, covered over by the more traditional philosophical language and the empirical language of everyday usage. Equally congenial to Merleau-Ponty’s direction of thought is Bréhier’s other objection that Merleau-Ponty’s description of perception in the Phenomenology “reduces” the self to being inseparable from its relation to others, a conclusion Merleau-Ponty finds instead of being a problem is rather a salient correction to the tradition’s insistence on the self-subsistence of the subject. This direction of this thought will deepen considerably with his lectures at the Sorbonne in 1949–1952 (captured in his essay, “The Child’s Relations with Others”) and his lectures at the Collège de France in the 1950s.

In this essay, we will explore how in the Phenomenology of Perception, there is an articulation of perception as an emplacement within the world in such a way that the perceiver only returns to themselves at the end of a circulation of sense through the depths of the world that transforms continually both the sense of the world and the sense of the perceiver, dispersing and displacing self and already on the way to the flesh ontology. In a related aspect to this, the essay will explore how Merleau-Ponty could only articulate the primordial level of perception that he sought to articulate by coming to the realization that the perceiver is time2 [6] and that this temporality was radically different than traditional analyses of time, even that of Husserl whom he initially seems to follow in the “Temporality” chapter of the Phenomenology. However, other aspects already present in his analysis of perception will lead him ultimately to reject Husserlian temporality as too successive and integrated. This new articulation of the temporality was to be pursued throughout the decade of the 1950’s under the rubric of the temporality of “institution”, which is a radical temporality of becoming. However, this idea appears first within the key sentence that concludes the “Sense Experience” [Le Sentir] chapter in the Phenomenology (242): “…the unreflective fund of experience … a past which has never been a present”. It is the work of the next decade and a half that allows us to see the full implications of these declarations about the nature of time and the self. As David Morris states, once this sense of temporality is articulated in the Phenomenology, “what is manifest by temporality is an opening to a challenging new ontology” (Morris 2018, 104) [7].

This essay traces out how Merleau-Ponty’s movement from a phenomenology of the perceptual to an indirect “ontology of the flesh” was not a shift in his thought, but merely a deepening of the insights of the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as tracing how the development in temporality, latency, invisibility, the imaginal, poetic expression, and the flesh ontology all emerge together from this beginning in their interrelatedness. For Merleau-Ponty, perception itself is a happening within a time in which the past has never been present until that past comes to be, retrospectively, the sense of time just alluded to as first suggested in the Phenomenology. We will see how this undercuts any foundational ontology. Then, we will trace out how this description of temporality is also a description of how the subject of perception is not a subject per se but an interplay of fields, dispersed and intermittent. Of vital import among these fields is that of the imaginal that will be articulated by Merleau-Ponty as within the latent depths of the perceptual. This essay will trace out Merleau-Ponty’s developing articulation of this kind of the imaginary. We will see how in the Phenomenology, there are two kinds of imagination that are suggested, and only later does Merleau-Ponty explicitly identify their difference and develop the more radical sense of the imaginal3 in the depths of the perceptual. One is the imagination that Sartre described and was Sartre’s focus throughout his works, and the other kind of imagination became increasingly vital to Merleau-Ponty as a key to understanding his later ontology, and we will trace out the development of this idea from his original insights in the Phenomenology of Perception.

2. Time and Perception as “One Single Explosion” Undercutting Foundational Being

Descartes sought a firm foundation for philosophy as grounded in an absolute Being. The Phenomenology of Perception’s insistence that perception is the access to the real begins the articulation of an ontology that undermines any absolute foundation to knowledge and reality and allows for a true philosophy of becoming. Insofar as Merleau-Ponty is true to the project of phenomenology, the real must emerge from within experience, instead of underlying it or being of another realm. This is also a philosophy in which the world as perceived is ambiguous is not seen as a defect thwarting insight into truth but rather reveals an inexhaustibility of sense leading back to a differing sense of time: “Thus, to sum up, the ambiguity of being in the world is translated by that of the body, and that is understood through that of time” (85). What Merleau-Ponty will come to refer to as “institution”, radicalizing Husserl’s notion of Stiftung, is first broached by his famous statement quoted above about the nature of time as articulated by looking at the upsurge of self, others, and world through perception at the conclusion of the chapter in the Phenomenology called “Sense Experience” [Le sentir]. It is right after stating that the traditional concepts of “object”, “subject”, and “sensation” fall away as failing to articulate “primordial experience”, which is perception’s access to the real, that he contrasts these concepts gained through a reflective distancing of perception with an embrace of the unreflective perceptual coming forth of experience, which is this “original past”, such that it has never been present. This articulation of the temporal dimension of existence means that the past is not a given Being that is added to by the successive further unfoldings of time, but rather that the past is always coming to be as the present becomes manifest. It also means that this dynamic sense of being comprises something more than itself that will lead Merleau-Ponty towards articulating a latency within being or what David Morris calls a unique kind of non-being: “This is a key ontological observation: the being of time entails a lack, a non-being of the past and the future, that is, however, a non-being peculiarly intrinsic to the being of time … a peculiarly positive negative right there in time” (Morris 2018, 105) [7]4. This means that like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty is articulating that time is an ongoing birth of novelty or, in other words, that time is a true becoming5. This idea was already suggested earlier in the chapter by Merleau-Ponty when he expressed that each moment of perception is “strictly speaking, the first, last and only one of its kind, is a birth and a death” (216). The appearance of time is real insofar as each moment is unique or truly novel. Each present moment as perceived and each action are spontaneously “ever new”, as he is to phrase this idea later in The Visible and the Invisible6. Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, this does not mean that time is made of instants ever new and unrelated to other instants except through external synthesis, but rather that the past itself is “ever new”, as it is always becoming within the always-becoming present and is held within the depth of the moment7.

The events of the past are “there in front of us, without there being any need to resynthesize them”, and each moment has its temporal “panorama … presenting itself with a precise physiognomy” (130). Each moment, like each thing or animate being, has a face or an expression which it presents to us in a perceptual encounter with it. Even though Merleau-Ponty has again used a Husserlian term, Fundierung, to explain how the past as founding is sedimented within the present (127), to suggest how, like the metaphor that that which has been flowing remains now as part of a more encompassing temporal being, he warns his readers in the Phenomenology, “but the word ‘sediment’ should not lead us astray: this acquired knowledge is not an inert mass in the depths of our consciousness” (130). Always, he continues, what is now present from the past has to arise as “nourished” by each new moment [“elles se nourissent à chaque moment” (Merleau-Ponty 1971, 151)] [6], and even though he will draw upon Husserl’s notion of temporality in the Phenomenology, he will later go beyond these ideas as he draws out the implications of the dehiscent and generative aspects of temporality that he has started to explore in the Phenomenology. When in a working note from May 1959, he takes Husserl to task that there is not “a present that breaks up toward the past” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 192) [4], but rather the present is a “symbolic matrix” whose encompassing of difference is generative and open-ended, and he also says the same of Husserl’s sketch of the future, “and besides there is no objective segment of the present that descends from the future” (195), his criticisms are already implied in the Phenomenology. When in the chapter “Space”, Merleau-Ponty defines depth not only in spatial terms but also temporally as the dimension of envelopment in which “this being simultaneously present in experiences which are nevertheless mutually exclusive, this implication of one in the other” (264), he has laid the groundwork for realizing that time plays off itself in differing aspects of itself, folds back on itself, and brings together that which seemingly would never have gone together as a generative dehiscence, or what he will come to stress in the coming decade as the play of ongoing differentiation that is not a mere negation but the opening up of a space of new sense. Time is the way the always new which had been the latent in its depths bursts forth into manifestation, or as Rajiv Kaushik expresses it, “the past means nothing in itself and is instead a plurality that works itself through times other than itself” (Kaushik 2019, 113) [11].

The outcome of these suggestions in the Phenomenology culminates in the passage in the late chapter, “Temporality”, when he states, “temporal dimensions, insofar as they perpetually overlap and bear each other out and confine themselves to making explicit what was implicit in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion [un seul éclatement] or thrust [ou une seule poussée] which is subjectivity itself” (422). The description of time as the way differing temporal horizons are enjambed and encroaching upon one another yet emerge as manifesting within the interplay of difference an explosive push and energy to time as manifestation comes in the paragraph in which Merleau-Ponty is explaining how “I am myself time” (421) as a perceiver. There is no longer a “subject” as a site “within” time and as “opposed” to the world, but rather he tells his reader to understand “time as the subject and the subject as time” (422). In articulating this notion of time, Merleau-Ponty has opened a non-foundational articulation of the being of the world and of ourselves as what exists “when the spark is lit between the sensing and the sensible”, (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 163) [2] as he will call the being of the perceiving body and our human life a decade and a half later in his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”. The metaphor he uses there in the rest of sentence is that this interplay of sensing and sensible is an ongoing fire that burns as the ongoing happening of perceiving. This is quite a different characterization than the Cartesian search for firm foundations and the apprehension of indubitable essences of a static Being which requires of the sensed to be reduced to the clear and distinct act by the intellect in a linear time. Rather, for Merleau-Ponty, the conclusion that followed on the next page of the Phenomenology is to declare that “there is no seat of time; time bears itself on and launches itself afresh” (423). There is no foundation to time and to being, there is only an encompassing becoming. This conclusion is the result of following out the ramifications that perception is the access to the real8.

These ramifications will lead Merleau-Ponty from a phenomenological approach to an ontology. As he states in a working note from April 1960, remaining with an analysis of consciousness and its acts, phenomenology can sketch out the unity and duration of time and even articulate its openness, but to uncover “the immersion in a Being in transcendence not reduced to the ‘perspectives’ of the ‘consciousness’” but rather the interrelation of a “factual present to a dimensional present or Welt or Being, where the past is ‘simultaneous’ with the present in the narrow sense”, which is “the point where it becomes a philosophy of transcendence” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 243–244) [4]. The Phenomenology had suggested that time is an ongoing bursting forth in such a way that its past was not brought along as a perduring acquisition but equally emerged from this explosion, which encompassed both world and perceiver. More than a decade and half later, Merleau-Ponty continues this articulation with his notion of the “vertical being” of the flesh of the world which takes him beyond Husserl’s analyses of internal time consciousness: “The whole Husserlian analysis is blocked by the framework of acts which imposes upon it the philosophy of consciousness”. Rather than a consciousness or agency making sense of a world, Merleau-Ponty seeks to describe the way in which the body as embedded in the world as a circulation of sense reversibly emerging in and with the world becoming what it is. Embodied consciousness has been replaced by the flesh as the “Speaking-listening, seeing-being seen, perceiving-being perceived circularity (it is because of it that it seems to us that perception forms itself in the things themselves) [in which] Activity = passivity” (264). What Merleau-Ponty now envisions in place of a firmly located subjectivity confronting the world is rather a “spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not a consciousness facing a noema)” (244). Rather than the Husserlian analysis of the intentionality of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty seeks the latency which is more of a “intentionality within being”. However, Merleau-Ponty says of this insight “that it is not compatible with ‘phenomenology’” but can only be practiced as his indirect ontology of the flesh. This sense of a constituting consciousness of a more traditional phenomenological approach had already been abandoned in the Phenomenology.

Merleau-Ponty had demonstrated in the Phenomenology that depth is perceived when the railroad tracks that receded in the distance are both parallel and meeting (261), that the sides of the cube are six sides that are square and are never seen as square by a perceiver of the cube (264), that the space of the smug listeners of a concert are startled when the concert is over because the space of the music is not the same space as that of the concert hall they must navigate afterwards (225): culminating in the definition quoted already of depth being the going together of what should [logically] be mutually incompossible (264), and in the next paragraph, he describes how the distance in space is inseparable from the disjunction in time, yet both are of an inseparable field such that despite differences “this simultaneity is contained in the very meaning of perception” (265). This notion of depth is key to Merleau-Ponty’s development of the ontology of the flesh as he will say in a November 1959 working note after he has been writing again about the example of the cube just before that in September: “It is hence because of depth that the things have a flesh” (219). Merleau-Ponty will come to develop these insights into the notion of the “vertical world”, which he describes as “the union of incompossibles, the being in transcendence, and the topological space and the time in joints and members, in dis-junction and dis-membering” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 227) [4]. Instead of time being linear and successive, time is chiasmatic. This means that it is dehiscent with differing times bursting forth in differing moments of sense and manifestations of being, even though logically they should not comprise the same moment. They are enjambed, and this is the depth of time.

Despite the everyday notions of time and the philosophical tradition of treating time as a dimension in which existence is ordered and successive and we are bound in specific “points” of time’s unfolding, this is not to uncover time as it is experienced within the world, but instead is an intellectual construct. Merleau-Ponty states in another note from November 1960, “The Stiftung of a point of time can be transmitted to the others without ‘continuity’ without ‘conservation’, without fictitious ‘support’ in the psyche the moment that one understands time as chiasm” (267). Time as a vortex circling the vortex of perception folds back on itself, and times come forth more like “gusts” of time (Proust 2003, 7) [13], as Proust expressed this bursting forth of moments of time in the beginning of Swann’s Way (and we know how much Merleau-Ponty was impressed with Proust’s articulation of time)9. Merleau-Ponty’s original description of depth in the Phenomenology as well as his description of perception, in which “spatial synthesis and the synthesis of the object are based on this unfolding of time” (239), already implied that space and time themselves were in a chiasmatic relation, as an inseparable non-foundational field of space–time or as quoted above in the later notes as a “spatializing-temporalizing vortex”. This space–time field is expressed in more concrete late descriptions such as that of a landscape one perceives: “In what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to … other moments of time and past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side ‘in’ time” (267). The ontology of the flesh is an ontology of the encroachment of differing dimensions such that they are both distinct and inseparable.

Merleau-Ponty continually returned to the project of an embodied ontology and even in his last writings felt the crisis of philosophy had never been “so radical” that called for this “necessity of a return to ontology” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 165) [4]. In January 1959, he continues saying philosophy needs “a conception of time … which takes up again, deepens and rectifies my first two books—must be entirely carried out from within the perspective of ontology” (168). He believes that the ontology of the flesh, vertical being, or “wild being” [l’être sauvage] is the key, which he explains means in part that “the serial time, that of ‘acts’ and decisions, is overcome” (168). Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the early work on perception leads to this ontology of the flesh and to a sense of the world and of the self as vertical being, which we will discuss in the next Section, and that it “deepens” and makes clearer what had only been implicit in The Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception10. When in the beginning of the Phenomenology, he is explaining that the phenomenology of perception will only advance by seeing that it is not a matter of achieving adequation of description, but rather in describing the world as physiognomies, phenomenology will become a “creative operation” by entering into a “field’ which is the “advent of being” (61), or in other words by realizing as he states at the end of the book in the chapter on temporality that “we are the upsurge of time” (428) and as such can only bring forth the latent “past” that had never been present.

A few pages later in describing memory, Merleau-Ponty says we can only experience time as believing “that there is a truth about the past” because “we base our memory on the world’s vast Memory (70). Temporality as taken up into that ongoing upsurge or explosion of time has no subject/object dichotomy but is rather what will be called at the end of the book an “openness to fields of presence” (423). In the intervening chapters, right after defining depth as the going together of incompossibles, Merleau-Ponty states that the primordial depth is of being within “the same temporal wave” (265). To be a perceiver for Merleau-Ponty is not to live in linear successive time, but it is to join up with a field of manifestation that is encompassing: “Through my perceptual field, with its spatial horizons, I am present to my surroundings, I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out beyond it, and all these perspectives form a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants. Through my perceptual field with its temporal horizon I am present to my present, to all the preceding past and to a future” (330–331). To be caught up in time in this way means that “to be present is to be always and for ever” (422). Once again, Merleau-Ponty identifies time as “the explosion or dehiscence” (426) and says that this openness of time as a field is like the light that makes things visible and, in an analogous fashion, makes significance open to be apprehended (426). Since we perceivers are this upsurge of time, “we hold time in its entirety” (424), not as a clear and distinct possession, but as a primordial depth of time present within every perception. This is what Merleau-Ponty meant to indicate when he qualified our presence to “all the preceding past and future” by adding, “at the same time, this ubiquity is not strictly real, but is clearly only intentional” (331), that is to say as we seek further significance, we are enveloped in a depth of time that is inexhaustible but not infinite in a linear, successive manner.

When Merleau-Ponty in the note cited from January 1959 declares that in order to continue to articulate “this new ontology”, serial time must be overcome, he follows that with a phrase in apposition: “the mythical time reintroduced” (168). Although Merleau-Ponty mentions a mythical presence within the encompassing sense of space quite a number of times in the Phenomenology, such as when he states, “there is a mythical space in which directions and positions are determined by the residence in it of great affective entities” (285), and a mythical sense of presence or manifestation, such as his explanation that “The myth holds the essence within the appearance; the mythical phenomenon is not representation, but a genuine presence” (290), in saying that the world is ambiguous and encompasses these differing ways of appearing (294), he does not yet explore the mythical dimension of time as he will in his later writings, but these further explorations are certainly resonant with these earlier statements. Merleau-Ponty will articulate this further dimension of time as an upsurge that is non-foundational, dehiscent, and chiasmatic but was already implied in the Phenomenology’s characterization of perception as being of one single temporal wave. He speaks of a dimension that is given within time is a “time before time” or a “mythical time” that is present in all perceptual events as its depth of horizon. In the working note from April 1960, Merleau-Ponty states that in finding this dimensionality to time, it is no longer about a consciousness of time but is a “philosophy of transcendence” entering into time as a “massive Being” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 244) [4]. This is what Galen Johnson means when he says that in Merleau-Ponty’s later writing, there is “an order to time other than serial time, and this other order of time is about ‘event’ and advent … multiple historical times that encroach upon one another, multiple cultures and individuals that do not exist in a single serial space and time, but in many spaces and times that pile up, proliferate and encroach upon one another” (Johnson 2010, 230) [15]. Johnson argues that this differing sense of time emerges in Merleau-Ponty’s work and the ontology of the flesh articulates a sensible and felt experience of this dehiscence and thickness of time that brings together beauty and the sublime (232). This is a depth of time that is an inexhaustible matrix.

The mythical time is a “time before time”, as Merleau-Ponty calls it (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 243) [4], and in some sense is about a “past” that he puts in quotation marks to distinguish it as not being a directly experienced past, but as a past belonging “to the prior life”, that is to say, the sense we have as perceivers emerging from the upsurge of the world and time as the depth of that temporal wave of which we are a part but never fully fathom. The time that Merleau-Ponty referred to in the Phenomenology of Perception as perception entering into the “world’s vast Memory” is finally sketched out in these later writings by articulating how the perception of the world contains a time that outstrips any particular perceiver but is nevertheless an ever-present depth of its temporality. In 1960, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “philosophy of geography” as “opposed to a philosophy of history” in articulating how the perceiver returns from the depths of an upsurge of the world as the rejection of traditional notions of time, even phenomenological ones, as being “too immediately bound to individual praxis, to interiority’, such that “it hides too much its thickness and its flesh” (258). There is an intertwining with the life of the planet, of the Earth itself. However, Merleau-Ponty continues the working note by writing that it is really neither geology nor history to which he is referring, but rather a “nexus” between the two of space-time, that is more fundamental than either and is ultimately the invisible that is accessible only through the visible.

This sort of time is discussed by Edward S. Casey as what he calls “the immemorial past” that comprises a sense of the past of “what was never before encountered as such in conscious experience” (Casey 1991, 267) [16]. It is not merely a collective past either to which Casey refers, but another sense of time that subtends other senses of time as a deeper layer: “beyond the personal and collective past is a past which is expansive rather than contractive. Such a past is timeless time, inchoate and antedating history or personal experience … mythic in status, and its temporality is that in illo tempore: in that time, a time before measurable, Chronic time” (268). All perception must in its depths incorporate this sense of the time beyond our lives, beyond humanity itself and this, too, had already been suggested when in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty states “I am never quite at one with myself” (347) as caught in a deeper existence than my own that in part is a “temporal dispersal which constantly threatens the historical present” (347) and “each present reasserts the presence of the whole past which it supplants” (420). Merleau-Ponty discusses how we dismiss this sense of time as not fitting our “common sense” of objectified serial time, and this is why he says in contrast there is “more truth in mythical personifications of time” (421–422). Such mythic personifications make us aware there is a dialog in perception and a depth of perception that is more than registration of reductively conceived physicalist properties but an envelopment by a deeper sense to any present sense within perception. These suggestions, however, about mythic time and also about the importance to perception of a mythic presence (290), as well as the discussion of how the way the world gestures to perceivers in “a meeting of the human and the nonhuman and, as it were, a piece of the world’s behavior” (403) are all points that Merleau-Ponty develops not only in terms of mythic time but also as an expansion of perception itself with regard to the key role of the imaginal as latency of sense.

3. Drawing out Latent Perception’s Depth with Physiognomic Imagination

The articulation of time as dehiscent and explosive leads Merleau-Ponty as he continues to work out the implications of the Phenomenology to deepen the sense of perception, both in regard to what he will call “the world side” and the “subject side”. In his course notes for his course on institution and passivity in 1954–1955 at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty reiterates his aim has always been to articulate the identity of the perceiver and the world as surpassing the activity and passivity distinction, which in turn entails seeing “the past is not a ‘real’ fragment added to the present”, (193) but rather “a hold across qualitative regions” (195). The present “is not therefore categorical subsumption” but is “is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world” (165). Seeing temporality as being an openness that also integrates divergent aspects of the perceived world allows Merleau-Ponty to further radicalize what perception achieves and how it does so11. He writes in these notes, a plan for continuing his phenomenological ontology that overcomes any traces of a Cartesian taking in the world in an instant, as all traditional ontologies have tended to do, and instead to enter the becoming within time, which yields a different sense of the world:

“(1) World side: do not limit oneself to the static image of the perceived world taken at an instant. Consider, not abstract perception in an isolating attitude, which I have done too much (hence, overestimation of sensing or of the quality as mute contact with an endpoint) but take up the analysis of the perceived world as being more than sensory. For example, my whole perception at each moment is only the relation of a human action, absolute plenitude is the result of isolating analysis. [The] sensible world [is] full of gaps, ellipses, allusions: objects are ‘physiognomies’, ‘behaviors’,—[there is] anthropological space and physical space” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 124) [18].

In this note from 1954, by realizing that perception is a becoming that is inseparable from the world’s ongoing becoming, the world apprehended through perception is not to be articulated as static and as merely a matter of sensory inputs, as has been the tradition, but instead time’s dehiscent upsurge of the world can be appreciated in its physiognomic sense, as expressive, as behaviors which communicate in the voices of silence12, and as an interplay of differing registers through its gaps. However, once again, we can find the beginnings of these insights scattered throughout the Phenomenology of Perception, such as in explaining how sensible qualities are more than sense data and are echoed in our bodies: “Sensations, ‘sensible qualities’, are then far from being reducible to a certain indescribable state or quale; they present themselves with a motor physiognomy and are enveloped in living significance” (209), or whether, in explaining how the mythical is part of the sense of space, Merleau-Ponty states the following: “We must recognize as anterior to ‘sense-giving acts’ (Bedeutungsgebende) of theoretical and positing thought ‘expressive experiences’” (Ausdruckerlebnisse);” as anterior to the sign significance (Ausdruck-Sinn), and finally as anterior to any subsuming content under form, the symbolical ‘pregnancy’ of form in content” (291), or especially, in the passage articulating the landscape’s expressiveness in explaining how the sleet “gestures” to perceivers, how this is “a piece of the world’s behavior” (403). In the “communion” of perception (212), there are within this back and forth interplays with images of dream or myth or poetic apprehension such that “they really contain their meaning”, because not being a mere recorder of sensations, “the body is essentially an expressive space” (146).

This, however, is only part of Merleau-Ponty’s sketch for the further development of his fleshly ontology. The other part in the 1954 note for the course on institution and passivity continues as follows:

“(2) Subject side: do not consider only the ‘natural’ body, consider everything that is sedimented above and describe the subject resolutely, not as consciousness, i.e., coincidence of being and knowledge, or pure negativity, but as the X to which fields (practical no less than sensory) are open—in particular it is necessary to introduce imaginary fields, ideological fields, mythical fields—linguistics and not only [the] repletion of sensing” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 124) [18].

Instead of a traditional subject or even a nontraditional embodied consciousness, Merleau- Ponty’s articulation of the perceiver of the flesh is an openness to varied fields that play off one another in their difference yet add to the overall sense of what is perceived or what Johnson calls “an ontology of difference as well as relatedness” that is “an oneiric naturalism” (Johnson 2010, 35) [15]. The “linguistics” that go along with this recognition that the imaginal is part of the thickness of the perceptual is the recognition first noted in the Phenomenology of the power of poetic language to more cogently express primordial perception, such as his remark that “singing of the world” on the emotional and gestural level of language is “all-important in poetry” (187), which becomes an increasing theme of Merleau-Ponty’s writing. By the time of the writing of The Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty states, “to rediscover man finally face to face with the world itself, to rediscover the pre-intentional present—is to rediscover that vision of the origins, which sees itself within us as poetry rediscovers what articulates itself within us unbeknownst to us” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 208) [4]. At this point, when he writes this working note in September 1959, it is apparent to him that the ontology of the flesh can only be written in a poetic language and that as he says, “literature and of poetry … this is the theme of philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 126) [4]. This kind of writing is in the service of making contact and expressing the imaginary and mythic and other fields he is locating as that to which the perceiver becomes open.

The imaginal itself, however, will come to the fore in many of Merleau-Ponty’s writings, course notes, and working notes and is probably best represented by the statement in the last published essay, “Eye and Mind”, where he states the imaginary is nearer to the actual “because it is my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the first time” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 165) [2]. At the same time, he says, the imaginary is further from the actual, but his explanation of this is that “because it does not present the mind with an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things; because, rather, it offers up to our sight [regard], so that it might join with them, the inward traces of vision, and because it offers to vision its inward tapestries, the imaginary texture of the real” (165). Both parts of this statement, however, point to how essential the imaginal is to the sense of what is perceived, just that this sense is only latently present, needing further expression. The imaginal is a field interplaying with other fields and is not a separate field of sense as the traditional identification of the imaginary as “make-believe”. It is the inseparable lining of the perceptual, its “other side”.

This might seem surprising since the Phenomenology seems to characterize the imaginary primarily in a way that is at odds with seeing the perceptual and the imaginal as interwoven, much in the way of the dominant traditional way of casting the imaginary. In the Preface, Merleau-Ponty notes that even when there seems to be unrelated play of perceived colors, noises and fleeting tactile sensations that they settle into a place within the world unlike the creations of daydreams, and then he adds, “Equally constantly I weave dreams around things. I imagine people and things whose presence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in fact involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary” (x). These imaginative creations, even though plausible, are not part of the world perceived and have no real hold upon us and tend to soon be dispersed since perception as access to the world is a “closely woven fabric” that does not wait for judgment “before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of imagination” (x). Here is the often-made distinction between the being of the real world and the non-being of the imagined, fictive world. This is what Coleridge calls “fancy” in contrast to a deeper and more revealing mode of imagining that he details in his instructions to writers of fiction. Coleridge advises writers to avoid fancy as being an idle use of the imagination, whereas the other kind of imagination is a powerful “tool” for the serious writer to enlighten through the text (Coleridge 1985, 294) [19]. Merleau-Ponty in many passages in the Phenomenology seems to be focusing on this kind of imagination in relation to perception as at odds with what it reveals about the world. In the chapter, “The Thing and the Natural World”, he states, “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. We never have a hold upon it” (323). This is in contrast to the real of perception that lends itself to unending exploration, since the mark of its reality is that it is inexhaustible. At the end of the chapter when discussing imagination’s facility in creating phantasms or hallucinations, he says of the phantasm that “it glides over time as it does over the surface of the world” (339) unlike the perceptual objects of substance and depth.

It is not surprising that in describing the imaginal in this way, Merleau-Ponty cites Sartre’s work in L’Imaginaire. When Sartre’s book appeared in 1936, Merleau-Ponty gave it a rather favorable review. However, his criticism at the very end of the review, which is only suggested briefly, is indicative of the differing directions the two thinkers will take in regard to imagining and its relationship to perception. Merleau-Ponty suggests that Sartre had only taken imagining in one way and that there is “a deeper significance” to images than the sense of imagination that Sartre explores, a sense that is present in Bergson’s Matter and Memory (Merleau-Ponty 1992, 113–14) [20]. In general, Merleau-Ponty sees several dualisms in Sartre’s treatment of imagination in this early text, even though it has valid phenomenological insights. This is what can be said also of those passages in the Phenomenology of Perception that detail the imaginal as “make-believe” or non-being: there is indeed an important aspect of imagination that can be manifest in this way (in contrast to the latent imaginal sense given within perception). In Sartre’s 1940 more extensive phenomenology of the imagination, The Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre makes very clear the cleavage between the “make-believe” of the imagination that he is exploring and that which is given in perception: “for the image and the perception, far from being two elementary psychical factors of similar quality and which simply enter into different combinations, represent the two main irreducible attitudes of consciousness. It follows they exclude each other” (Sartre 1968, 153) [21]. Furthermore, Sartre ends the chapter by stating of the imagination that its objects “become infected with the character of unreality” and the “imaginary life” is comprised by “behavior towards the unreal” (156). This remains the locus of Sartre’s characterizations of the imaginary, as he follows out its important role in bad faith and other alienations.

By contrast, Merleau-Ponty increasingly sees another kind of imagination as key to fully describing perception and to developing the ontology of the flesh, and Sartre is increasingly a foil to these ideas. In his Sorbonne lectures of 1949–1952 on child psychology and pedagogy, Merleau-Ponty states that “Sartre makes an absolute distinction between the real and the imaginary domains. However, we now see that this distinction cannot be maintained absolutely” (Merleau-Ponty, 2010, 181) [22]. In keeping with his earlier insistence that the mythic dwells within perceptual space, Merleau-Ponty adds to his critique: “Sartre’s absolute distinction does not suffice to resolve the problem of the imaginary. In order for the imaginary to be capable of displacing the real, we do not need to consider them antinomies, as different as day and night. In such a conception, there would be no room for myth. Myth belongs in this third oneiric order” (between real and imaginary)” (181). In these lectures, Merleau-Ponty finds that the child does not live in a the “bipolar world” of the adult who makes this absolute distinction between the real versus the imaginary, but instead “inhabits a hybrid zone of oneiric ambiguity” (182). However, similarly to other aspects of the child’s experience, Merleau-Ponty sees this as an abiding acquisition that is also true for adult perception. He concludes that “a dialectic as well as an ambiguity, exists between the real and the imaginary. No rationality is possible other than the one that accepts the irrational frame of life and perception” (182). This sort of imaginary does not skim over the surface of the world and is not indicative of the unreal, and already in 1950–51 when drafting the unfinished manuscript, The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty had claimed, “The imaginary is lodged in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 47) [23]. Such a statement is in contrast to the tradition of seeing imagination as only a subjective reworking of sense from the world. This is the kind of imaginal that I have called the “physiognomic imaginal” as the part of sense that is integral to seeing the physiognomic significance of beings in the world, but is only latently perceived, yet open to further articulation and apprehension13.

In the lectures on childhood experience, Merleau-Ponty brings together perception and imagination in statements such as “Imagination always concerns itself with the perceived object; to imagine is not to contemplate an image. The imagination always refers itself to a unique object” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 177) [22]. Here, he comes to state that there is the imaginary that Sartre has explored and there is yet another imaginary: “The imaginary is of two sorts, two phenomena of different orders, such as in the hidden aspects of real landscape that I have before my eyes, on the one hand, and, on the other, the evocation of an absent friend” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 453) [22]. The first sort of what I have been calling the imaginal (or the physiognomic imaginary) is essential to perception which as inexhaustible always has more aspects to the perceived than what is the focus of the current perception and is “hidden” or latent, and the second is the conjuring up of a presence of something absent from what I am perceiving. Merleau-Ponty continues, “On the margins of what I perceive, a quantity of elements of the nonperceived world exists, but they are taken in the context of existing things, this zone of marginal perception makes a whole with perceived zones” (453–454). The latent, which is part of the margins or background or depth of the perceived is part of its makeup, its Gestalt, and is of the world and the real. Merleau-Ponty says of the other imagination (that which this essay, following Coleridge, has called “fancy”) that with it there is a margin or distance between it and the real. Again, however, there are suggestions of this direction of thought in the Phenomenology of Perception, especially in the “Space” chapter, when Merleau-Ponty states, “The phantasms of dreams reveal still more effectively that general spatiality within which clear space and observable objects are embedded” (284). By this, Merleau-Ponty does not mean to dispel the founding of space in the world of real beings, but to show how their context is one that is run through by what he calls “existential tides” of sense and place. Examples of these streams of latent sense are given by Merleau-Ponty, such as space might have either a bird of hope soaring through it implicitly, or a disintegrated, fallen bird of despair weighing it down, just as there might be implicit to the sky’s sense a “black sky” (of fear or depression) behind the blue one that is there not only for the person with schizophrenia, but is a nuance of sense that the imaginal can bring forth from anyone’s perception (287). For most of us, these nuances of imaginal sense are latent, hidden and only emerge through exploration or unusual moments.

In two of Merleau-Ponty’s latest writings, “Eye and Mind”, and The Visible and the Invisible (and the working notes published with it), the descriptions of how perceptual and the imaginal are inseparable and add to the ontology of the flesh are quite pointed. In a working note of April 1960, he writes: “But this visible not actually seen is not the Sartrean imaginary, presence of the absent or of the absent. It is a presence of the imminent, the latent, of the hidden—C.f. Bachelard saying that each sense has its own imaginary” (245)14. This latent or hidden of perception is the calling of the artist to bring forth as understood by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind”. After Merleau-Ponty relates that the artist reveals “the imaginary texture of the real”, he goes on to say that this vision is also the vision of any perceiver: “Vision assumes its fundamental power of showing forth more than itself. And since we are told that a bit of ink suffices to make us see forests and storms, light must have its imaginaire” (178). Beyond or deeper than what first appears to us in perception, there are what Bachelard called “reverberations” that have a latent sense to them of the imaginal as lodged within the real. As Annabelle Dufourcq expresses this idea in Merleau-Ponty’s work, she states, “The real, the world, others and the inexhaustible source of sense are always present right within the imaginal that seems, however, to extend quite as specifically from them”15. Delving into the latent of perception, opening its depths, is the way to open the primordial experience of the world in expression or as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “The painter’s vision is a continued birth … This prehuman way of seeing things is the painter’s way” (168). Given the articulation of time as non-foundational becoming, there is no “going back” to this primordial experience of the world, but there is a way to launch into further expression of it that makes manifest what had not been present until it is so expressed. This is what art and painting accomplish: “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out it oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings” (169). The continued exploration of the depths of perception carried on from the suggestions and sketches of the Phenomenology leads to a new ontology. As Richard Kearney sums up this continuing development of the imaginal and how it is inseparable from the articulation of the ontology of the flesh and its articulation of the invisible of the visible: “In other words, the imagination addresses an invisible meaning in the world of the visible and the world responds only because both participate in a common core of Being” (Kearney 1998, 123) [25].

As this essay began with referencing the dialog of Société française de philosophie in 1946, where various colleagues gave their reaction to the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception and Merleau-Ponty’s response to Jean Hyppolite that “it is necessary to develop a theory of imaginary existence”, (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 40) [2] one can see that Merleau-Ponty took this idea seriously and carried through on this project. This developing of the role of the imaginal as the lining of the perceptual and the access to the real progresses so far that in a working note of November 1960, Merleau-Ponty almost seems to exclaim when he writes, “Incomprehensible in a philosophy that adds the imaginary to the real” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 262) [4]. Yet, of course, this is not only what Sartre has carried out in his writings on imagination, but in the focus on this kind of imagination, Sartre is following most of traditional philosophy in its Greek to modern European lineage. Merleau-Ponty continues by declaring he will “understand the imaginary through the imaginary sphere of the body—and hence not as nihilation that counts as observation but as the true Stiftung of Being … the dream is inside in the sense that it is the internal double of the external sensible is inside, it is on the side of the sensible”. The imaginary as a bodily phenomenon, the way we have access to the world and the real through perception is the way to an ontology that is also of the institution of Being16.

The role of the imaginal is inseparable from the kind of becoming endemic to the temporality first described in the Phenomenology of Perception. It is only by taking these comments seriously, and by seeing how they grew out of Merleau-Ponty’s early analyses of perception, that sense can be made of a statement found among Merleau-Ponty’s papers at his death among his notes for the course he was teaching that semester on Descartes: “All ontology is a copy of imagination, all imagination is an ontology. There is an imagination which is in no way a nihilation (position of the unreal as unreal) which is a crystallization of being” (Saint Aubert 2006, 259) [3]. The depths of the perceptual interwoven with the imaginal are gusts of a differing time that Merleau-Ponty’s journey of thought from the Phenomenology of Perception to his latest writings uniquely articulated.

4. Conclusions

In the section of “Eye and Mind” that contrasts Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of perception and the significance of art with Descartes, Merleau-Ponty suggests that if Descartes had paid attention to secondary qualities, then “he would have been obliged to find out how the indecisive murmurs of colors can present us with things, forests, storms—in short the world; obliged, perhaps to integrate perspective, as a particular case, with a more ample ontological power” (172). We know this is contrafactual, that Descartes did not do this, but it is what Merleau-Ponty did accomplish in following out all the threads of perception: by both abandoning the Cartesian ontology of the instant and instead following how perception gathers its sense only as being within a temporality of transformative becoming that is processual and how the perceptual has a latent depth that reveals another sort of imaginal, and that both of these insights are part of the movement towards the ontology of the flesh. Both of these movements of thought go together: the dehiscent and chiasmatic nature of temporality opens the perception of the world to the interplay of fields, as Merleau-Ponty put it, and one of those vital fields is the imaginal, and similarly, the latent aspects of perception only burst forth because they are within a time whose past only is as a becoming in the present that it never was before—the “retrograde movement of truth” or the temporality of institution. As David Morris states of Merleau-Ponty’s first articulating this sense of the time in the Phenomenology: “That is time will provide a phenomenological model or matrix for the sorts of contradictory tensions at work in sense, between givenness and non-givenness” (Morris 2020, 103) [12]. If this is the case, then Merleau-Ponty’s sense of depth as the going together of impossibles, the unique sense of nonbeing or negativity as the presence of what is not yet here or is present only latently, the invisibility of the visible as the realm of the ideational and of value, and the dispersed and intermittent circulation of sense between the perceiver and the world all follow.

In looking back at the Phenomenology of Perception after reading these later articulations of the ontology of the flesh, one can see that the seeds of these insights were already present there in the description of perception as primordial experience, the interplay of fields in the Gestalt of the world’s givenness, and the revisioning of time as a coming to be of what was not yet present yet latently there17. Once Merleau-Ponty had put forth the primacy of perception as occurring within this time of what Morris calls a time of “disparity”, which simultaneously brings together and separates events and beings, the ontology of the flesh was the only possible outcome of this trajectory of exploration (Morris 2020, 111) [12]. What might not be evident, however, is not only that the seeds of these various strands of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought were already destined to be brought forth from his starting point in the Phenomenology (and in some ways even from The Structure of Behavior, given Beith’s reading) but also that they are all interwoven in such a way that they all overlap and are a necessary development of fully articulating perception as access to the world in an embodied phenomenology: chiasmatic temporality, the latency or unique negativity of perception, the invisibility of the visible, the imaginal lining of perception, the need for poetic expression of primordial experience, and the ontology of the flesh of the world. Each is a strand in the knot of the experience of the world and the world’s beckoning forth of that experience that cannot pulled apart from the other without unraveling Being, yet these strands never cease to constantly wind and unwind in a never-ending lacework.