and moreover…this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world…they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 248).
Nevertheless, the relation between the seer and the perceived, self and other, is definitely not symmetrical. The fact that there is only one flesh hardly means that significant difference is precluded. To the contrary, while reversibility entails commonality, it rests no less inescapably on difference. Hence, Merleau-Ponty tells us that all flesh is not the same (1968: 250): “The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh, nonetheless…in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibles…that it is therefore absolutely not an object, that the blosse Sache [brute fact] mode of being is but a partial and second expression of it…The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, i.e. is a Being that is eminently percipi, and it is by it that we can understand the percipere…there is Being, not Being in itself, identical to itself, in the night, but the Being that also contains its negation, its percipi. ” If the flesh of the world is not sensible in the same way as is my flesh (which is sentient), must we then conclude that Merleau-Ponty does not mean what he says when he describes the trees as returning the painter's look? As long as we bear in mind that self-sensing flesh remains flesh, that it is the issue of the flesh of the world (which equals a “pregnancy of possibles”), then the answer must be no. The flesh of the world really does see, but it sees potentially, a potentiality that is realized in the painter's capacity to see herself according to or with the trees. From this understanding of imminent vision, it is tempting to slip back into thinking that Merleau-Ponty's description of the trees as sighted is merely a figure of speech. But as long we see the painter, ontologically, as continuous with the trees, we must take Merleau-Ponty to mean just what he says.
Nevertheless, it would appear that the difference between the sensible and the sentient does constitute an asymmetry. The painter and the trees both do and do not see in the same way. It is important to recognize that the asymmetry runs deep—much deeper than may seem to be the case at first sight. Despite the fact that the difference provided for in the flesh of the world is a matter of degree, it is also, paradoxically, a question of kind. Since the being constituted by the flesh of the world is, as Merleau-Ponty says, not identical to itself but inclusive of its own negation, it cannot but present an infinite difference. And difference of this kind, unfathomable and irredeemable, cannot help manifesting itself in terms of values, that is, in terms of a difference between good and bad. It cannot because it bears with it the negative, which, when construed as an act rather than a concept, “slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii). And to the degree that these “intentional threads” are slackened, that is, to the extent that we enjoy a relative ‘distance’ or distinction from the world, we are free to determine our own ends. In which case, the world, even as it ever remains our ground, is also, in imperfect but consequential measure, ours to refuse and thus to transcend.
There is value only relative to evaluation, and there is evaluation wherever there is a transcendent end, which is to say, an end that is no less willed than determined in the nature of things. Such an end—a primordial choice, if you like—involving as it does, implicitly or not, evaluation between one thing and another, amounts to a good and therewith implicates the not-good or, at least, the not-so-good.
In view of this argument about the critical role of negation and valuation in the flesh of the world, the asymmetry between the two ways of seeing, the painter's and the tree's, is not simply logical but also, by implication, axiological. The possibility of evaluation rests on the relationship of negation as between sensibility (the way trees see) and sentience (the way we see). With the development of radically sentient beings, beings in whom reflexivity (which Merleau-Ponty identifies as the elemental dynamic of corporeality) has become acute to the point of conspicuous reversal, the will becomes manifest. In effect, where there's the way (of all flesh), there's a will; and where there's a will, there's a transcendent end, which is to say, a synthetic good. Hence, the ontological fact of reversibility becomes also a uniquely human or ethical modality.
By their very nature, such goods are particular and contextual rather than universal. As synthetic, they are products of history, singular courses of events significantly determined by willful acts under conditions of fundamental uncertainty. These acts are performed by reflective but embodied beings and are therefore, like all material processes, subject to contingency. Nevertheless, there is one end that all the others presuppose, for which reason it may be said to enjoy a certain universality. I have in mind the end of having ends. No matter how hard we try, we cannot help but engage the world with a view toward some particular end. In other words, we always take a stand and thus define a good, even when we aim to refrain from doing so. Merleau-Ponty put it this way (1962: xix): “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.” While the relaxation of our ties to the world allows us to give meaning—that is, assign value—to our particular situation, the fact that those ties are slackened but never broken ensures that we cannot do otherwise. We remain bound—as Merleau-Ponty would say, ‘embodied’—as the condition of our own freedom. As a result, the end of having ends enjoys a singular status.9
Like all other ends that are taken for granted, the end of having ends is both given and constructed—a synthetic a priori or primordial choice. But unlike our other ends, this end is given not only pre-reflectively but also ineluctably. Whatever humans do, wherever and whenever they exist, the end of having ends is necessarily implicit—which cannot be said of any of our other ends. Nor is this end a construct in quite the same way as the others. For unlike the latter, when this end is brought to the light of consciousness, it is not open to revision. We can do away with it to be sure, but only by ceasing to exist. Which is why, as I argue in this book, acts that run directly contrary to the end of having ends, although they are logically self-inconsistent and continue to entertain that end in all their contrariness, are essentially lethal. Nevertheless, the end of having ends remains synthetic, in that it is not a question of natural law but of human existence. It is made to appear only in virtue of beings whose defining nature it is to transcend or fashion themselves—not to be but to become.
Therefore, the end of having ends may be construed as, rather than a mere good, a hypergood. It is a synthetic a priori, but its syntheticity is more strictly limited and its a prioricity more categorically closed than is the case with the other goods. In the sense that the other goods always presuppose it, the end of having ends may be thought of as a kind of human universal. Its universality, though, has little to do with our received acceptation of this notion, which connotes a positively fixed certitude, a natural law. In contrast, the end of having ends remains an offer, but, to invoke the language of the cinema Wiseguy, “an offer that can't be refused.” That is to say, like all offers it may indeed be refused, but its terms of refusal carry with them the threat of death.
As a hypergood, the end of having ends presents what might be called, oxymoronically, a natural good. What makes this end no less decidedly synthetic than given is that by determining the producing of synthetic ends or goods, it transcends itself. That is to say, it is determining, but what it determines is its own partial negation as a determinant. Uniquely defined by this hypergood, human existence, insofar as it takes itself as its own end, necessarily presents a natural (a priori) but axiological (synthetic) bias toward the end of having ends.
It must follow from the fact of this bias that the asymmetry defined by the difference between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, is a matter of value. It is not merely a question of qualitatively different ways of touching and seeing, but of relative worth. Just as in each and every one of our acts we are condemned to meaning, so we are predestined to differential value. But, one might well ask, which side of the difference—between the sensible and the seen on the one hand, and the sentient and the seer on the other—makes the greater good?
Merleau-Ponty's ontology leaves no
