Earlier in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty has employed the example of the right hand touching the left hand to address the subject-object shifting phenomenon. In The Visible and the Invisible, he extends from tactility to sight, using the seeing-seen analogy to reiterate the reversible characteristic of perception. That is, with our comprehension on the primacy of perception and the role of the body, we should further recognize the two interactive roles as constantly reversing and never truly coinciding. In the thesis of reversibility, Merleau-Ponty reveals our perceptual
experiences further as latent with a chiasmic paradigm:
The chiasm is that: the reversibility ... realized by the doubling up of my body into inside and outside - and the doubling up of the things (their inside and their outside). It is because there are these 2
doublings-up that are possible: the insertion of the world between the two leaves of my body and the insertion of my body between the 2 leaves of each thing and of the world. This is not anthropologism: by studying the 2 leaves we ought to find the structure of being. Start from this: there is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another. (263-64)
First, the doubled-up phenomena delineate the folding-back of perception during every encounter, a “return” that simultaneously allows a percipient to be an equally
sensible being, and vice versa. Secondly, the opening-up of these dimensions renders every perceptual contact with a chiasmic structure. Merleau-Ponty clearly intends it that without the to-and-fro proceedings, perception becomes incomprehensible.
Therefore, since vision, sound, and haptic experiences usually occur conjointly (when we see something, we intrinsically move our hands toward it), the reversibility of perception ultimately demonstrates our existence as a chiasm, enriched by the interchangeability of “I-the world” and “I-the other.” For Merleau-Ponty, the chiasm
pertains to “an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the ‘objective’ body, between the perceiving and the perceived” (214). The term
“encounter,” therefore, indicates the spectrum of chiasm from the most personal
aspect (inter-sensory envelopment) to the unity of body-mind –other-world.
However, we need to be aware that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reversibility does not imply a perceived thing “seeing” us in turn. Instead, reversibility demonstrates the
same Visibility we all share, and the fact that when we see, we are meanwhile visible from the side of the perceived. Or, as Dillon addresses it in the case of touching, “... I cannot experience the table touching me in the same way the hand touched can taken up the role of touching. The plain fact of the matter is that the table is neither part of my body nor sentient in the way my body is” (159). What Merleau-Ponty proposes lies in reversibility (chiasm) as an enfolding process that exhibits a natural harmony.
Encroaching upon one another, the perceiving and the perceived manifest the existential relations of transgression, announcing the interrogative process of
perception to worldly phenomena. Merleau-Ponty later names such an interweaving reciprocity as “flesh.” As a new philosophical concept in The Visible and the Invisible,
flesh is described as an element, “in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being” (139). In this manner, flesh represents
what sustains the chiasmic constitutions of body-mind-other-world uniformity. Now, we should delve into the notion of flesh further through Merleau-Ponty’s later discussions of visibility in The Visible and the Invisible.
According to his statement, vision occurs when a visible “turns back upon the whole of the visible” (139). Visibility resembles the two mirrors facing each other,
where two series of images belong to neither one of them, but always rejoin with one another. We are “caught up” in the visible, and through “a fundamental narcissism of all vision” (139), we, as seers, also seem to feel “looked at” by the visible. In the
words of Merleau-Ponty:
... so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this
generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh ... The flesh is in this sense an “element”
of Being. [Flesh is] Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to
location and to the now. (139)
The Visibility that implies the “commerce” of the seer and the visible, and the latent
linkage by virtue of the generality and anonymity of perception, manifest the significance of flesh. By means of reversibility, flesh possesses a natural chiasmic structure indicative of the ground of communion such as Visibility, Tangibility,
Audibility, etc. In fact, we can observe the notion of flesh as an ontological re-thinking that strengthens what Merleau-Ponty has already brought forth in
Phenomenology of Perception. It not only demonstrates or makes thorough the
multi-dimensionality of the lived body, but also extends from our body, as the exemplar, to the world as it is, for flesh also constitutes the “fabric” of the world.
Merleau-Ponty’s elaborations on the notion of flesh thus contribute to the
sensible-sentient dynamism that clarifies or unleashes the communicativeness of our
body. The shared act of perception eventually exhibits how the perceived “inserts”
into the “two leaves” of my body (vice versa), and how our body is meanwhile
“prolonged” to the open perceptual fields through the same opening of our body.
Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of reversibility in perception and its chiasmic framework bring to light a process of temptation and evocation that allows for appropriation and
enactment. Neither the percipient nor the percipere occupies a privileged stance. The
entwining relationship can be further comprehended with the picture of “one sole movement in its two phases” (138). In this simultaneous co-functioning, we can
understand the two leaves of our body and the sensible working not in separate modes, but together molding the meaning of the encounter.
The self-mirroring flesh thus implies that we exist no longer in space, but “of”
space, and through vision, we are essentially “of” the visible. According to
Merleau-Ponty, if the body-subject “touches them [the visibles] and sees them, this is only because ... it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because 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” (137). The interconnectedness can thus
be understood not only in terms of how Merleau-Ponty describes the body’s organs to
“envelop each other,” but ultimately the same entwinement among worldly beings through this “inter-corporeality” sustained by flesh. At each perceptual moment, the
crisscrossings reveal a form of inclusion that accommodates confirmations and compromises, belongingness and isolations, as well as similarities and divergencies.
As Madison addresses the body-subject and the perceived world, “ ... [they] are the differentiations of the same fabric ... this can only be because they are both derivative
expressions of a more profound reality which binds them together and which guarantees their cohesion as well as their (relative) opposition” (175). That is,
Merleau-Ponty not only emphasizes the mutual referential significance between percipient and percipere, but points out their ultimate linking relations. The notion of flesh, therefore, refers to the idea of the interplays in the realm of commonness that brings to light the cruciality of the process of becoming, during which we can
hopefully achieve the natural/ pre-predicative unity of human existence and the world.
However, as suggested above, the reversibility of perception indicates an
incomplete process. Such a notion on the one hand identifies flesh serving as the
“formative medium” lying under, while on the other hand denotes the inevitable and
necessary in-between spaces in the chiasmic relations. In fact, for Merleau-Ponty, the
reason why we should not consider a certain phenomenon with a settled-down presentation lies in the “thickness” of our body, things, others, and the world, a
distance-within-proximity that reversely supports the chiasm. In this manner, when we speak of thickness, we meanwhile suggest the thickness of flesh. In The Visible
and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes it not as a hindrance, but the “means of
communication” between the seer and the thing. More importantly, the thickness of flesh is constituent of “the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity” (135).
In this regard, contrary to how we normally relate distance with the impression of alienation or indifference, Merleau-Ponty considers it as a crucial vehicle by which the understanding of ourselves and the world can be possible. Here, we can approach such a necessary distance as a form of existential mutual respect, or sympathy, to recognize autonomy in harmony. It is within this realm of spacing that we can understand the desire to transcend the indefinibility of the exterior-interior opacity.
For Merleau-Ponty, a Visibility always involves a “non-visibility.” It is as if we are in an ambiguous realm of enigmatic expressions, where the utmost human attempts rest in self-revelation and the uncovering of the sensible in the name of flesh.
The thickness of flesh and the resultant enfolding processes in perception then demonstrate the medium with fissures, gaps, or écart. When the “dehiscence” opens
my body and the sensible in two, the dimension of depth in flesh further unveils. Such
an aspect in flesh first explains why Merleau-Ponty rejects the view of the world
“from above,” and then how he later proposes the overlapping and encroachment in terms of the things “pass[ing] into us as well as we into the things” (123). The
reversible perceptual contacts and the simultaneous “bursting-forth” of the body toward things (vice versa) indicate the inter-communications in the most basic regard of our life. It is in the folds and the gaping-open that we are rendered beings with
depth and that the embodiment of the paradox of expression becomes possible. Or, as Cataldi puts it, “These ‘folds’ in the ‘fabric’ of Flesh are also openings to which we ...
ontologically belong. It is because of the percipient side of our flesh - this sensitive
‘other side of our body’ and its distancing from the depth of perceptible flesh - that we are ‘incomplete’” (66). The idea of incompletion signifies a modality of existence that
throws incessant questions to Being. It exhibits the nature of our “situational” grasp, and the ontological fluctuations in the ambiguity of all embodied encounters. Situated in various forms of circumstances, we always strive for a present balance to human conditions and the natural world in hope for a more desirable future.
When Merleau-Ponty describes depth as a dimension of flesh where the
“incompossibles” are brought in unity through the crossovers in perception, he
meanwhile emphasizes on the flexibility of perspectives that calls for the attentions to the “embeddedness” of our surroundings6. As stated above, in the midst of the visibles, we are constantly lured by the sight, and it is when we always “eclipse” one another that the “springing-forth” of Being emerges. That is, when the innate thickness of the
sentient and the sensible renders the activity-passivity dynamism, the in-between distances also empower the dimension of depth and its opening-up to be the access to the primordial world. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “... carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible”
(136). The notion of flesh should thus be understood as multi-dimensional, enfolding,
and gaping-open to all worldly phenomena. With the diverse forms of perceptual
“fissions,” which ground the proceedings of our becoming and our relationships with
the world, Merleau-Ponty emphatically calls for the attentiveness to what we normally ignore: absence, invisibility, a bodily attitude, and the primacy of perception.
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty does not provide a definition of
6 As briefly suggested in chapter Two, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment have gained wide academic interests in recent decades, such as architectural design and performance art. His notion of flesh acquires similar attentions in ecological studies. In Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, Hamrick states that “This felt sense of obscurity is an experience of depth; it is evocative of the depth of deep ecology movements and our deep, intercorporeal belonging to the sensible. Merleau-Ponty tries to capture with his claim that visibility and invisibility are intimately entwined in the ‘flesh’ of the world” (7).
flesh. With different accentuations, flesh is described as “elemental,” “for itself the exemplar sensible,” “a general manner of being,” and innate with a latent chiasmic structure that sustains “breaks” and “in-betweenness” to allow transcendence in the
dialectical movements. From the flesh of our body, the flesh of the sensible, and the flesh of the world, we can contrive the novel notion as a connective tissue that dissolves the dichotomy of materiality and non-materiality. More importantly, the re-doubling of flesh renders possible each perceptual experience as self-emptying and self-fulfilling, since each phenomenon we encounter already represents its presencing of flesh to us. Taken these features of flesh into account, we can obtain a
comprehensive understanding of it as an never-ending opening-up process of Being that is as much alive as all phenomena. As a “medium” and a “principle,” flesh
possesses the polymorphous resilience that incorporates things and incarnate beings with their depth and “leaves.” The dehiscent and chiasmic status of flesh represents
what Merleau-Ponty states as the co-existent structure of human and the world and the transcendental moments from the “hollows.” His explications present a framework where our being and others’ bodies together form an inter-subjective system. Our
fields are overlapping and doubly-articulated, and the situations that are truly lived through human embodiment can be finely called the world.
As Merleua-Ponty once states that “there is a germination of what will have been
understood” (189), the notion of flesh represents a similar process to rediscover or
uncover what has gone amiss in our pursuit of life. In this manner, what we formerly
grasp as opacity can now be perceived as dimensionality, which renders all the sensible as veiled with layers and “insights”. It is through such a perspective that we
can literally describe ourselves as dwelling in conversations (verbal or silent). A diversity of landscapes unveils in front us in the form of time, space, things, others, civilization, and the natural world. In this regard, as a mysterious space where reality and dream seem to coexist in a shared structure, Dangmai can be further approached from its ruinous situations to its inherent significance from Merleau-Pontian flesh.