power not simply to discover or recognize one's own end but to generate the possibility of making and having ends. It would appear, then, that the end of having ends is identifiable with the dynamic of transcendence, the intertwining itself, and not with either of the two sides defined by this dynamic. It is true that if the two sides are taken in themselves, as if they obtained apart from their crossing, then there is no differentiating the one from the other by reference to relative worth. But as soon as they are defined as functions of their crossing, one side appears to enjoy a certain, general primacy over the other. Although both are eminently tied to the intertwining, the one is more so than the other. Indeed, even as they generate and inform each other, one of them—the seer and the sentient—always stands belated relative to the other. This is because, as self-conscious acts, seeing and sentience are logically inclined to exclude—as the outside or the other—the seen and the sensible, whereas the latter, as was noted earlier, include vision and touch as immanent parts or potentialities of their nature.
This differential of generative power is what Merleau-Ponty (1964b: chap. 2) is getting at when he speaks of the “primacy of perception” and pictures perception as most basically a bodily faculty. He is saying that the seen and the sensible, so long as they are understood dynamically by reference to reversibility, constitute the very core of our identity, and that that identity—what we are—must be the starting point of all our perspectives, reflections, and practices, however variable and diverse they may be. It is true that Merleau-Ponty does not speak of the asymmetry between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, as axiological. His later philosophy made it even less likely that he would do so. In The Visible and the Invisible, he attempts to move beyond any cogito whatsoever, even a tacit, experiential one, in order to put behind him once and for all the metaphysics of subject-object dualism. An ontology preoccupied with attenuating the notion of the self or a being equipped to decide merit is not likely to project what there is as innately a matter of value.
If, however, the asymmetry of seer and seen, of sentient and sensible, is aligned with that of self and other, then it at once becomes apparent that human existence is an exercise in value judgment. Deciding on which enjoys primacy of place—self or other—is paradigmatically an ethical question. And since the seer and the sentient always betray selfhood, even if only as a tacit phenomenon, the pertinence of the self-other duality in their case is patent. Merleau-Ponty did indeed come to abandon the tacit cogito, which notion he had originally entertained to capture the self-consciousness implicit in any act of bodily perception. But even his distinction of the visible and the invisible, forged in his effort to do away with any sense of the pure subject, continues to evoke the self-like (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 215): “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar [originary not-present] which is presented to me as such within the world—one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).”
Judging from this quotation, the distinction between the visible and the invisible greatly complicates Merleau-Ponty's earlier organizing distinctions, undercutting their residual dualism. On the one hand, the visible would seem to correspond to the seen and the sensible, but on the other, the invisible paints a much deeper picture than do the sentient and seer. For instead of simply naming an emergent development of the visible (such as vision and touch), the invisible points to the “inner framework” or “secret counterpart” of the visible. In other words, it points directly to the visible's supporting or sustaining framework, that which “renders [the visible] visible, its own and interior possibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 151; my italics).
Thus, the invisible is an aspect of the visible, but, paradoxically, an aspect upon which one can never lay eyes. Merleau-Ponty calls this aspect “meaning,” but one can sense the intonement of spirituality—a philosophical caution against empiricist idolatry—in his usage of the invisible. The point I am making here is that although the invisible is precisely other than the pure subject, it is not intended to do away with subjectivity but rather to conceive of it in irreducibly nondualist terms. The nondualism is focused in the consideration that the irreparable blind spot of the mind's eye, the hole of perceptional invisibility without which perception could not happen, is the body. The body is the unseen standpoint of every perception. But the key thing is that while the notion of the invisible rules out any sense of a pure subject, it nonetheless smacks of inwardness, of “interior possibility.”
Thus, “the invisible” makes a stunning, productive paradox: it identifies self-transcendence or creation with the other rather than the self qua self. The invisible locates “interior possibility” or selfhood primarily in, instead of the seer and the sentient, what is participant of but invisible or other to the seen and the sensible as well as to the seer and the sentient. As a result, the self-other relation is undone as a dualism but not at all erased; it perdures as a primordial and ultimately unfathomable dynamic. If it is the case that the self-other relation obtains thus primordially, what there is is inconceivable, save as a question of differential value. It is a truth to which every religion seems to attest: even when self-consciousness is originarily attributed to the other rather than to the self, it renders the world in terms of the synthetic a priori, and the synthetic a priori is nothing if not value somehow given.
To come to the principal point, under these ontological conditions, by which the capacity to create or evaluate is associated in the first place with the other rather than the self, it is the other that enjoys the axiological primacy of the hypergood, not the sentient or even the sensible. In other words, it follows from Merleau-Ponty's ontology, that the universalistic bias toward the end of having ends, the at once (incomprehensibly) natural and ethical direction of our being, is toward the other.
The Synthetic a Priori and Ethics, Mysticism, and Magic
Merleau-Ponty does not couch his ontology of ambiguity and reversibility in the distinctly axiological terms I have used here. Indeed, although he wrote about the nature of human freedom and was politically concerned, he did not develop a systematic account of ethics. And although Wittgenstein essayed a lecture on ethics, he held that, in line with his dichotomy of showing and saying, philosophical ethics is an attempt to say what can only be shown. But I am anxious to show that Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's recasting of the synthetic a priori in uncompromisingly and irrevocably nondualist terms leads directly to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the driving objectivist pretension of science, at bottom we cannot perceive the world save in the language of non-indifference (cf. Evens 1995: 195ff.). A nondualist ontology entails the understanding that discretion is as generally necessary as it is necessarily particular in the world as we find it.
Merleau-Ponty's observation that we are condemned to meaning and Wittgenstein's that we are ceremonious animals implicate this picture of what I think of as the primacy of the ethical in human affairs. Both of these arguments bear on the diagnostic centrality of convention in human nature, and, as it is definitively void of instinct, conventional conduct proceeds according to its own evaluative ends. The interpretation of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as essentially, if inexplicably, concerned with the ethical nature of human existence is given support in the secondary literature, in the case of Wittgenstein substantially so (see especially Edwards 1982; with reference to Merleau-Ponty, see Yeo 1992).
I have drawn a number of suggestive parallels here between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. It has not been my intention, however, to make a rigorous, detailed comparison of their work; rather, I have tried to bring out a profound commonality of focus between them. That focus is their comprehensive concern to rethink the notion of the synthetic a priori in unrelentingly nondualist terms. As a result of this shared ontological problem, both thinkers, despite the fact that they are not normally mentioned in the same philosophical breath, and however outstanding the differences between them, developed remarkably comparable understandings of human conduct. These understandings picture that
