and ends up in them” (S, 17–18). Such reciprocal determination deprives the classical ground of its absolute and autonomous character: the ground itself needs the grounded. Hence why Merleau-Ponty drops such notions as “constitution,” “cause,” and “effect,” and replaces them with such terms as “culmination” and “propagation.” The condition or the ground culminates in the conditioned or the grounded. It fixes or completes itself in the conditioned (S, 173).
In this new grounding relation, it can no longer be said that the ground precedes the grounded. On the contrary, as the notion of speaking speech illustrates, the ground and the grounded almost seem to coincide. Merleau-Ponty, however, immediately nuances this relation: “The idea of complete expression is nonsensical, [. . .] all language is indirect or allusive” (S, 43). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide, when expression is complete, so to speak, are not only rare, they are also momentary. Even after speaking thus originally, even after managing to create ideas on the spot as opposed to limiting ourselves to communicating given ideas, we still have the feeling that there is something left untold. There will always be a surplus or excess of the signified over the signifying (PP, 390). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide are only waypoints in a process of expression that never stops being resumed. They are moments in an endless process of trying to bring together thought and speech, and that means that a full coincidence with the latter is impossible (see the discussion of “partial coincidence” in chapter 4 on Bergson). The moment speaking appears to coincide with thinking, thought is already “elsewhere.” In other words, even if Fundierung brings the ground and the grounded closer together in the sense that the ground ceases to be autonomous and ceases to precede the grounded, it does not, for all that, make them coincide. The expressed still has ontological priority. As we will see in the chapter on Proust, the late Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of institution precisely in the effort to dissolve the asymmetry or hierarchy still present in the notion of Fundierung, though without reducing the ground to the grounded or vice versa.
Before we return to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Descartes, there are three points I would like to highlight about the “two-way relation” between the ground and the grounded captured in the notion of Fundierung. Although I have already mentioned this, it is worth repeating that even if the expressed can manifest itself only in the expression, it does not follow that the former can be reduced to the latter. No expression is capable of entirely capturing the expressed. But that does not mean the ground is transcendent, that it belongs to an otherworldly order and is, as such, ultimately ungraspable. We do have the feeling that we understand what the other is saying, that is, that we can grasp the ground of his expression. Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: it is not that the ground is transcendent, but that it transcends itself in the expression.
The second point, related to the immanence of the ground, is Merleau-Ponty’s idea that speaking speech, despite its original character, still makes use of sedimented language. Or, more precisely: the originality of speech in speaking language is always conditioned by sedimented language. When we think as we speak, we always use words and phrasings that already exist. That we modify and reorganize these words and sentences does not change the fact that we do appeal to and use them. The new meaning we try to express is always culled from between the cracks of other expressions. It is also in this sense that the expression can be said to determine the expressed. Combining this idea with the ontological priority of the expressed, we can say that the condition of a new expression is the expressed as it exists through already given expressions.
Finally, we can see Merleau-Ponty’s implicit idea of excess as a suggestion for how we are to understand the immanence of the ground that transcends itself in the expression. I have already mentioned the idea that the expressed is a surplus or excess over the expression, insofar as the expression cannot fully grasp it, as we have seen. In his extremely clear and convincing Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, Lawrence Hass suggests that the impossibility of the expression to grasp the expressed entails neither a shortcoming of the former nor a transcendence of the latter: “The reason such a reorganizing, crystallizing operation is required for knowledge is not because our experience of the world is impoverished, but rather because it is so full of half-hidden forms and figures, overflowing in meaning and possible perspectives” (2008, 160). Because the expressed is understood as being full of perspectives and meaning-directions, formulating a specific idea or expression entails making a selection, choosing an order, and not constructing something out of thin air. This understanding of the expressed guarantees an immanent relation with the expression (the expressed somehow already needs to be there), whereas the idea of an expression ex subjecto leaves the relation with the expressed unexplained. This is not to say, however, that only the expressed is characterized by an excess. The expression can also be “in excess”; it also has, if you want, a transcending force. I have described how every perception of a specific object—the blue carpet, for example—always implies other actual or virtual perceptions, such as, for example, the blue sky I see out the window, the sound of the carpet, and the blue of the ocean in my dreams. The transcending force of the expressed and of the expression ensures their intertwinement or mutual dependence.
Back to the Cogito. Let us now return to Descartes’s cogito. According to Merleau-Ponty, the cogito reveals not so much the certainty of my having mental contents or ideas—I can always doubt my idea that I saw my mother yesterday—as the certainty that I am performing an act of thinking: I cannot doubt that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday. Since it is impossible to be certain of the act without also being certain of the object to which the act is oriented, I can say that if I think I saw my mother yesterday, then it is impossible to doubt the reality of my having seen her. If I think I saw her yesterday, then I am also sure (though this certainty is not necessary) that my seeing her was real. Since this certainty is based on the performance of the act of thinking, and since this act always transgresses itself toward something outside of ourselves, this certainty cannot be said to stem from a coincidence of subject and object, one that in its turn implies a complete immanence of the latter to the former. In contrast to the certainty whose necessity is based on the coincidence of subject and object, this certainty involves a kind of contingency. For the way in which I am performing the act of thinking is determined, as the example of geometric thought illustrates, by my psychophysiological constitution and by the constitution of the world. But since the world, and I myself, could have been constituted differently, the certainty is fundamentally contingent. Hence, Merleau-Ponty concludes: “Ontological contingency, the contingency of the world itself, being radical, is, on the other hand, what forms the basis once and for all of our ideas of truth. The world is that reality of which the necessary and the possible are merely provinces” (PP, 398).
Descartes argues that the cogito reveals the certainty of the act of thinking. This certainty, however, does not reveal, as he also believes, that I coincide with myself. On the contrary, it reveals that I am always oriented toward something outside myself: “The primary truth is indeed ‘I think,’ but only provided that we understand thereby ‘I am-to-myself insofar as I am-to-the-world’” (PP, 407; translation modified).9 Or, in the words of Alphonse De Waelhens: “It is true [. . .] that the subject has a certain immediate contact with itself, but this contact, far from being a meaningful truth, is only an invitation for it to constitute one, and that immediately throws us back onto the world, its certainty and its ambiguity” (1970, 285). The cogito does not reveal the closed character of a world constituted by me, but an open world. Merleau-Ponty replaces Descartes’s closed cogito with an open one: “What I discover and recognize through the Cogito is not psychological immanence, [. . .] the blind contact of sensation with itself. It is not even transcendental immanence, the belonging of all phenomena to a constituting consciousness, the possession of clear thought by itself. It is the deep-seated momentum of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being” (PP, 377).
How, then, are we to understand the presence of thought to itself mentioned earlier? What does it mean to say that the world needs to
