the hold the lived body has upon the world. This hold presupposes anticipation: prior to actual perception, the body has an inkling of what will be perceived. The perceiving body is prethetically familiar with the world without, however, constituting the world. This familiarity is grounded in an original intertwinement of body and world: the body is openness to or participation in the world and the world is a world to be perceived. In this way, Merleau-Ponty replaces an atomistic and mechanistic (extrinsic) explanatory model with a holistic account based on reciprocal determination (intrinsic). Body and world form a unity or style, which is always already given with perception. This style is the field from which a specific perception receives its meaning. The actual perception can then be understood as the activity of making explicit, of shaping, this implicit, given familiarity with the world.
Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Thought
I have already mentioned that Merleau-Ponty believes that thought “must be brought to appear directly in the infrastructure of vision” (VI, 145). Therefore, and in dialogue with the foregoing observations about perception, I will examine whether thought also needs to be understood as a direct hold upon the world, rather than as the construction of representations that mediate our access to the world; and also whether it needs to be situated somewhere in between the thinking subject and the thought world, rather than in the thinking subject itself. In order to answer these questions, I will refer to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Descartes. Strangely enough, Merleau-Ponty adopts a crucial idea of the godfather of cognitivism, whom he otherwise so much contests, namely, the idea that the relation between the thinker and the world cannot be external: in order to think, thought first needs to be present to itself. Needless to say, Merleau-Ponty draws a different conclusion from this idea.
The Truth and the Falsity of the Cogito. As a phenomenologist and an opponent of empiricism, Merleau-Ponty cannot agree with the idea that thought would have access to reality itself, that is, to reality as it is, independently of how it appears to us. The reason is that a reality whose possibility we cannot presuppose will remain unnoticed, even if it is situated within our visual field. It is as in Meno’s objection to Socrates: if we have no inkling of the idea we are looking for, we will not be able to know whether we have found it. Hence, reality first needs to exist for us in order for it to be actually perceived and spoken about. Seeing a tree requires a “thought about the tree” (pensée de l’arbre) and a “thought about seeing” (pensée de voir) (PP, 370). This primordial knowledge of the things is actually a knowledge of ourselves; or, more specifically, it is thought’s awareness of itself, thought’s contact with itself. Why? If thought already needs to sketch the object it is eventually to “discover” in perception (and speech), the object cannot be considered external to thought. At this stage, which precedes perception and language, the relation between thought and the world is actually a relation between thought and itself. Since this relation between thought and itself is what we call self-awareness or self-consciousness, we have to say that perception and language, as well as positing or thetic thought, require a thought that is conscious of itself: “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” (PP, 371).
The philosopher who is known to have demonstrated the primacy of thought and the direct contact thought has with itself is, of course, Descartes. In order to gain a better understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s position on this matter, we will compare it to the position of Descartes.
Descartes’s discovery of the certainty of the cogito is usually explained as follows: While I can doubt the idea that I saw my mother yesterday, I cannot doubt the fact that I think I saw her yesterday. I cannot give a decisive answer to the question of whether my mental content corresponds with external reality. There is no doubt, however, regarding my having these mental contents. In other words: I can be uncertain about what I am thinking but not about the fact that I am thinking.
Merleau-Ponty translates the cogito as follows: It is absolutely certain and indubitable that I think because, were I to doubt that I am thinking, I would already be performing the act of thinking and, in so doing, thus proving that I cannot doubt it. What makes it certain is my “doing” the thinking, not my possession of mental contents. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty (PP, 378–82) remarks that I can be sure of my emotions only if my behavior corresponds to the possession of these emotions. For example: It is hard to believe that I am in love with someone, that my being is in the pangs of love, if my behavior remains entirely indifferent toward the object of my affection. Only when my behavior becomes that of a person in love (which does not mean that it needs to conform to the “standard” behavior of someone in love), only when my concrete existence is shaped by my being in love, can I be certain that I am in love. It is by performing the act of being in love, the praxis of being in love, and not by having amorous thoughts, that I am transformed into a person truly in love.
However, Merleau-Ponty differs from Descartes in the way he understands the certainty of the act that grounds the certainty of the cogito. For Descartes, the act of thinking is certain because it is based on a coincidence of subject and object. I am certain that I am thinking because I am the one who creates my mental contents. I cannot doubt the fact that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday, because I am the one who constitutes this idea. Thought, in Descartes, has divine characteristics: It not only precedes what is seen and said; it is, moreover, constitutive of the latter. Hence, nothing exists outside thought. Thought has no outside; it “compresses into itself everything at which it aims” (PP, 372). It is not limited by anything. Descartes (PP, 371) describes thought in a way that makes it completely autarkic and autonomous, and the result is the absolute transparency of the object to the subject.
Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not believe that an act presupposes a coincidence of subject and object. On the contrary, an act is always oriented to an outside. This need not mean that the object is uncertain. Unlike Descartes, who affirms that it is impossible to doubt the act but doubts the object toward which the act is oriented (my belief in the existence of the world could be the effect of a malicious demon), Merleau-Ponty believes that if the act is certain, the object is so too.5 The reason is that it is impossible for the act to be oriented toward something and, at the same time, to deny the existence of this thing. This is not to say that we cannot be oriented toward objects that do not exist in reality, as in the case of hallucinations, but then we do not conceive of them as being unreal in the moment of the performance.
Hence, Merleau-Ponty succeeds where Descartes fails: he is able to affirm the certainty of the world. His grounds for doing so are different from the grounds of Descartes, though, for he does not stop the possibly endless chain of doubt by making subject and object coincide. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty thinks that every thought can be doubled into a thought of a thought (I think, I think that I think, I think that I think that I think, etc.); that there is no “thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it” (PP, 400). This chain of doubt can be stopped only by referring to an existential context, that is, to the fact that in real life, subject and object are always separated but nevertheless connected in certainty. Merleau-Ponty thus inverses Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum: he does not deduce my existence and the existence of the world from the cogito, but grounds the cogito in their existence, in our carnal being-to-the-world. Allow me to illustrate this with the example of geometric thought.
Geometric Thought. Suppose we have the following geometric situation: We have an arbitrary triangle with angles A, B, and C. Through its apex, C, a line is drawn that is parallel to its basis. This line generates two new angles, D and E, each at either side of the angle formed by the apex C of the triangle. How do we understand the geometrical truth that the sum of the three angles, C, D, and E, equals the sum of the three angles, A, B, and C?
Before we are able to understand how the conclusion can be
