and yet remains inseparable from being-in-the-world, which is to say, from bodily existence or experience. Language in this sense, as for Wittgenstein, is a matter of gesticulation and silence before speech. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that perceives and the body that speaks. And the body can do this because, in the first place, it is not the objective phenomenon that science projects. Purely objective phenomena, in Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's philosophy, are nothing but high abstractions, the production of which depends on the as-if existential detachment afforded by the intellectual or theoretical standpoint. Instead of an objective phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty's ‘body’ goes without organs.8 A body without organs is integrally tied to the world and is therefore less than perfectly separate and discrete; but it is tied in a way so open and dynamic that its movements characteristically reconfigure its relationship to the world, thus always transcending itself in its act.
Even if the perceiving being remains tied to the world, though, perception seems still to presuppose a consciousness of sorts. Hence, Merleau-Ponty posited a cogito or ‘I think’, but, in critical contrast to Descartes’, a tacit one. Such a cogito is the name Merleau-Ponty (1962: 371) gives to the self-consciousness that necessarily accompanies all perception, even if perception is essentially bodily, a movement toward the world in which the perceiving being transcends itself by reconfiguring itself in relation to the world: “All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no object. At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence.” Plainly, as it proceeds in action, that is, “through direct contact with…existence,” the cogito of which Merleau-Ponty speaks must be less than transparent to itself, which is why he calls it “tacit” (ibid.: 402).
But despite its pronounced nature as action rather than thought qua thought, the tacit cogito would not be a cogito at all, an ‘I think, if it eluded itself completely. For this reason, the idea of the tacit cogito might still evoke body-mind dualism, rather than the patent ambiguity of a body that is no less a subject than an object, and thus project perception as an act of consciousness. Seeing this and taking an even more radical ontological turn, one that dovetails with Wittgenstein’s (1972: § 142) notion of a system of “mutual support,” in The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was working on when he died, Merleau-Ponty (1968) reconceived “founding” in terms of “intertwining” or “reversibility.” Instead of a movement in which one thing founds another that in turn reconfigures its source (as culture, our second nature, informs the human practice from which it springs), he conceives of a dynamic crossing arrangement (ibid.: 133):
[B]etween my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are…the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it.
Instead of citing the hands, then, as does Moore, in an exercise of ostension, to prove that we can have certain knowledge of the external world, Merleau-Ponty cites them in their dynamic relationship to each other, in order to describe how perception works and how it solicits faith in its act. That is, he brings our hands to bear, not as objects, but as modes of engaging or perceiving the world. The hand can touch because it too is palpable. It can make sense of (behave sensibly in) the world precisely because it is of the world, a part of the same “universe.” There is a substantive identity between it and the world, such that its touch can be relied upon, not because it provides certain knowledge, but because, as Wittgenstein might say, what it touches resonates with it in practical harmony.
Precisely because there is such identity, however, because the hand's ability to touch depends on its status as itself tangible, its touch can never exhaust in perception what it touches. Its own palpability makes its touch self-referential and thus constitutionally limited (“a veritable touching of the touch, when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things, where the ‘touching subject’ passes over into the rank of the touched”; Merleau-Ponty 1968: 133–34). Only if the hand were itself untouchable, the veritable hand of God, would it be capable of transforming what it touches into an object pure and simple (and even then, judging from the Hebraic creation story, as in Michelangelo's glorious Sistine depiction of it, such sheer objectification is dubious). In other words, the relationship Merleau-Ponty describes, the dynamic of perception, cannot be captured by subject-object dualism. The substantive identity between the body-subject and the object-world, the identity that makes perception possible, also precludes the possibility of grasping the perceived phenomenon totally, as a pure object. For its identity with its other ensures that the perceiving being must be less than identical to itself. And inasmuch as it is, it—and of course the perceptible other, which it also is—is by definition always already beyond itself.
This dynamic of identity within difference is for Merleau-Ponty the “ultimate truth” (1968: 155). That is to say, he describes the presuppositional foundation of human existence, not as a foundation in the positivistic sense of the term, a firm and unambiguous edifice, but as (perceptual) movement of the sensible body in the world. Of course, the shibboleth of identity-in-difference recalls Hegel's dialectic. But just as it is the nature of that dialectic to resolve itself, so it is the nature of Merleau-Ponty's never to reach final resolution, never to catch up with itself. For the identity that makes the movement of perception possible also ensures the difference that makes the movement ongoing. This dynamic, a bodily but sensible connectivity, is called by Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 138 and chap. 4) “flesh,” and, in view of the way in which it connects all things to one another in an open whole, a whole that is, paradoxically, less than a totality, he speaks of it as “the flesh of the world” (ibid.: 146).
Holism of this kind bears comparison to Wittgenstein's, wherein together with every proposition one learns, one also ‘swallows down’—which is to say, learns unknowingly—a host of other propositions, for the latter are fundamentally linked to the former, as horizon to theme. Hence, with regard to such attendant propositions, Wittgenstein (1971: 34–35) bids us to “see the connexions,” to show them “in a perspicuous way,” a way that has nothing to do with genetic or explanatory relations but simply allows us to see all at once a meaningful configuration. Both holisms, Merleau-Ponty's and Wittgenstein's, are gestaltist in character, supposing that the meaningful forms of our existence are in a sense always already given, not exactly as ideas, but as lived and affective or ‘bodily’ predications—that is, as synthetic a priori. Although Wittgenstein does not use ‘flesh’ to describe what binds such propositions together, when one considers that the kind of horizon he has in mind is not properly propositional at all but a matter of concrete, everyday practice, Merleau-Ponty's term seems to fit the spirit of Wittgenstein's understanding well enough. Indeed, in light of the fact that Wittgenstein (1971: 41) critically includes in the horizonal context of any perception or understanding the beholder's share (to repeat the quote, with italics added: “the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard”), he approaches the very heart of Merleau-Ponty's holism: that the ultimate context and standpoint of every act of perception—the ineradicable, ‘visually’ enabling blind spot of the mind's eye—is the body-subject.
Of course, we ordinarily think of perception in terms of seeing rather than touching, and the other word Merleau-Ponty uses to speak of the intertwining—“chiasm”—is the physiological term for the crossing of the optic nerves that physically occasions vision. In starting with the example of the hands, Merleau-Ponty wants to show the basically bodily nature of perception, even when it is visual perception in question.
