Intercorporeality, Moral Self-Development and Openness to Alterity: On Merleau-Ponty’s Redeeming of Childhood Experience

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), written after his extensive research in psychology, anthropology, and the other social sciences and also after his intensive encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, is an attempt to leave those malevolent dualisms behind and replace them with a phenomenology that engages with beings as befits their essence and the conditions of their being: a phenomenology that no longer imposes on our experience a morally irresponsible and offensive ontology; a phenomenology that, instead, reminds us of our responsibility as guardians of nature and life and brings to light very new possibilities for ethical life, community, and dwelling on the earth of this planet.

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul”. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [1].

“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation”. T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” [2].

“The largest part of our body, our humanity itself, is still sleeping a deep sleep”. Novalis, Philosophical Writings [3].

“You shall create a higher body”. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra [4].

“If humanitas must be viewed as essential to the thinking of being, must not ‘ontology’ be supplemented by ‘ethics’?” Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, Pathmarks [5].

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Before I begin my argument and narrative, I would like first to let Merleau-Ponty lay out, in his own words, the dimensions and historical significance of the context within which he thought to undertake his lifetime project. For him, phenomenology is much more than a source of self-knowledge and knowledge about the world; its discipline of attention and mindfulness prepares the way to a more enlightened humanism and a deeper sense of our connectedness with nature: “[T]he perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth” [6]1. It is only in returning to the perceived world that we can begin to achieve an understanding beyond the subject: “We are interrogating our experience precisely in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves”. (VI 159). In notes from a late lecture course, Merleau-Ponty is still reminding students that “[W]hat matters is not so much to define the role of nature as to pose the ontological problem, that is, the problem of the relation between subject and object” [7]. Much like Heidegger, whose critical confrontation with metaphysics very much stimulated and guided him, Merleau-Ponty recognized early in his life the ruthless power, cruelty, violence, injustice, and inhumanity inherent in the exclusionary metaphysical dualisms—mind/body, self/other, subject/object—that have been determinative since the anthropocentric beginnings of the modern world, not only in philosophical thought but, just as compellingly, in the social and cultural world of everyday life. The dualisms that continue to haunt us support the culture of an ontology that is exclusionary, divisive, and repressive—in effect, dehumanizing. Can we overcome them?

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), written after his extensive research in psychology, anthropology, and the other social sciences and also after his intensive encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, is an attempt to leave those malevolent dualisms behind and replace them with a phenomenology that engages with beings as befits their essence and the conditions of their being; a phenomenology that no longer imposes on our experience a morally irresponsible and offensive ontology; a phenomenology that, instead, reminds us of our responsibility as guardians of nature and life and brings to light very new possibilities for ethical life, community, and dwelling on the earth of this planet.

So, returning to read the Phenomenology of Perception from the perspective of the philosopher’s later work, we can, I think, appreciate not only what this much earlier work accomplished, but also how it prepared the way for his later reflections on humanism, the stages of moral self-development, and a more ontologically attentive phenomenology, ultimately completing and surpassing Heidegger’s own efforts in liberating us from the metaphysical dualisms projected onto experience.

As Merleau-Ponty observed, “Historical epochs become ordered around a question of human possibilities rather than around an immanent solution of which history will be the result” [8]. Phenomenology, for him, corrects and supplements what neither the sciences of mankind nor metaphysics can fully understand and interpret. And it also draws us into ourselves, to remember a pre-ontological dimension of being—“our natal bond”—that we, having left our infancy behind in order to enter the larger social and cultural world, had to repress and forget. We need to retrieve our bodily carried and bodily felt sense of that “natal bond”. And that means that we need to recollect our earliest—hence “pre-ontological”—experience of being. It should therefore not be surprising that, in his later thought, Merleau-Ponty began practicing phenomenology as the way to a new ontology for our time.

However, as Merleau-Ponty points out, “If it is not to be ignorant of itself, a philosophy of reflection [as in, e.g., Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Husserl], is led to question itself about what precedes itself, about our contact with being within ourselves and outside of ourselves, before all reflection” [9]. Thus, the task for philosophical thought is to make possible “that openness upon being that is our perceptual faith”. (VI 88). But: “If philosophy is to understand an initial openness upon the world, […] it cannot be content with merely describing it; it must tell us how there can be openness […]”. (VI 28). And so, the philosopher argues in that text that,

What will always make of the philosophy of reflection not only a temptation but a route that must be followed is that it is true in what it denies, that is, the exteriority of the relation between a world in itself and myself, conceived as a process of the same type as those that unfold within the world—whether one imagines an intrusion of the world in myself, or, on the contrary, some excursion of my look among the things of the world.

(VI 32)

“But”, he continues, “does it [i.e., a philosophy of reflection] properly conceive the natal bond between me who perceives and what I perceive?” This is a crucial matter, because, as he argues, “we must reject the idea of an exterior relation between the perceiving and the perceived”. (Ibid.) The philosophies of reflection that we have inherited—grandiose systems of subjective idealism—mistakenly “assume that they can comprehend our natal bond [notre lien natal] with the world only by undoing it in order to remake it, reconstituting it, and fabricating it [in the immanence of subjectivity]”. (Ibid.) Consequently, Merleau-Ponty will argue that “It is a question not of putting our perceptual faith in place of reflection, but on the contrary, a question of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from the one to the other”. Thus, as he states, “We have to situate the relation [between myself and the perceived object] within a more muted relationship with the world, that is to say, within an initiation into the world upon which it rests and which is always already accomplished when the reflective return intervenes”. (VI 35). He adds, however, that “we will miss that relationship—which we shall call here our openness upon the world [ouverture au monde]—the moment that [we depend solely on] the reflective effort to capture it”. (VI 35).

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Phenomenology could be neatly defined as the method, discipline, and exercise of attention. But, as such, its respect for the truth of our experience means that it has a crucially critical role in questioning and resisting the social-cultural forms and typologies that try to impose their prejudice on our experience, closing it to the claims of alterity. The dualisms of self–other and subject–object are, in effect, projections that challenge and deny the claims of otherness, difference, and diversity. So, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty will delve into the more open dimension of our experience that preceded and continue to underlie the ontological dualisms imposed on the being of beings. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger called it “the pre-ontological”, but in later thought abandoned the concept, instead going directly into the phenomenology of reversibility—but still without any recognition of the body’s role in this experience. So, unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty will return to the body’s experience of infancy and early childhood in order to retrieve and learn from its embodiment a truly primal ontological openness that gets increasingly closed and defensive as the infant enters the social–cultural world. And, also unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty will explore how that early experience could schematize and guide our development of moral character.

Ethical life requires of us the openness of sympathy and imagination: a willingness to consider perspectives and viewpoints different from one’s own. In the narratives of literature and the experiences evoked by poetry, the education of the sensibility that ethical life requires is always underway. In the greatest works of narrative fiction and poetry, as in the adventures of philosophical thought, there is always a moment of unsettling deconstruction: a realism beyond realism, an idealism free of transcendental delusion, and a truth beyond correctness, challenging our habits of attention, perception, and concept-formation. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is a method, a discipline of attention, that tries, beyond fidelity to our experience as lived, to respect the very being (Wesen) of whatever is encountered in the world. Phenomenology is therefore also, for him, a way of speaking about our experience that engages our deepest sense of humanity and shares that sense with the other: “We will arrive at the universal”, he says, in a late text, “not by abandoning our particularity, but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable” [10] Thus, in a final bold move, Merleau-Ponty will begin invoking ontology and using the term “flesh” to name this ontological universal. Ontology, which concerns what beings are and how they are, is for this reason inseparable from the ethical. In his much later thought, he came around to realizing and understanding the immense significance of this connection. However, I contend that the phenomenology of intercorporeality can ultimately provide a much more powerful and compelling argument for this connection than can the invocation of our universal flesh. “Flesh” basically universalizes that intercorporeality, making it, in effect, a concept with a critical and ethical function in the development of our humanity [11]. That is certainly an important move for the philosopher to make; however, when we look back at the Phenomenology of Perception from the standpoint of the later works, it becomes possible to appreciate that much earlier emphasis on the “natal bond” and reversibility, even though they imply a less explicitly universal formulation than what the flesh represents, bearing as it does an inherently stronger ontological claim on our responsibility and ethical obligation.

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But how can we reach out to others? And how can we actually reach them? In “Chocorua to its Neighbor”, stanza nineteen, the poet Wallace Stevens voiced his response to the poet Friedrich Hölderlin [12,13]2, who began a statement of his thoughts regarding the finitude of mortals in relation to the divine by asking us, his readers, to permit him “to speak in a human way”:

• To say more than human things with human voice,
• That cannot be; to say human things with more
• Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
• To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
• Of human things, that is acutest speech.
(CPP 266-67)

Venturing to understand the emergence and character of moral sensibility, Merleau-Ponty will attempt to achieve a compelling new vocabulary, a way to speak more humanly about our sensible, bodily felt experience, hoping that this will bring to light real possibilities not only for personal self-development but also for the transformations that will create a more humane world.

For Merleau-Ponty, to think “humanly” of human things is to engage with things phenomenologically, because phenomenology is a way of connecting and learning that is uniquely respectful of our experience. “True history”, he says, “gets its life entirely from us”. In fact:

It is in our present that true history obtains the force to refer everything else to the present. The other whom I respect receives his life from me as I receive my life from him. A philosophy of history does not deprive me of any rights and privileges. It simply adds to my personal obligations the obligation to understand situations other than my own and to create a path between my life and the life of others. But the lines between one life and another are not traced in advance. It is through the action of culture that I come to abide in lives that are not mine. I confront them, I reveal them to one another. I make them share equally in an order of truth. Responsible for all of them, I awaken a universal life. […]

[14] (pp. 86–87)

In the last years of his life, Merleau-Ponty interpreted this universality in terms of the metaphor of flesh, challenging the extreme idealism in systems of thought for which what unifies everything is the mind. More on his strange notion of flesh is still to come.

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Just how far we are, in this time of our destitution, from an ontology free of the “will to power” and the old dualisms it imposes comes starkly to light when we consider a very moving report by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which he tells us of an ontologically significant experience he had that revealed the ethical and spiritual role of the body’s deeply kept sense of an ontological connectedness that lovingly, caringly, and selflessly embraces the being, the humanity, of all human beings—and perhaps even embraces all non-human beings, plants, animals, and the environment: an experience, in fact, that bears very directly on the question of our ability to transcend the subject–object and self–other structures for the benefit of a more humane community:

I remember the manifold cord—the thousand or the million stranded cord which my being and every man’s being is…, so that, if everyone should claim his part of me, I should be instantaneously diffused through creation and individually decease… I am alms for all and live but by the charity of others.

[15]3

What Emerson remembers and retrieves here is what Merleau-Ponty described in his later years as the intercorporeality and reversibility—all the intertwining threads of intentionality—that have claimed him, in nature’s gift of embodiment, for the promise of a new ontology and new humanity. So, what Emerson is remembering is, first of all, his solidarity with the oppressed and the destitute—a question of ontological respect, sympathy, and responsibility.

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For Merleau-Ponty, too, remembering—understood to be getting in touch with our body’s felt sense of the ontological connectedness that engages us in our relations with other beings—is crucial: “For the structure of the perceived world is buried under the sedimentations of later knowledge”. (POP 5). It is buried, and even repressed. So then, there is something that we need to recollect and retrieve. And why is this task necessary? It is necessary because what is “buried” concerns the moral development of our way of living with all the other beings passing through the world.

In this regard, Emerson will once again serve as a source of inspiration. Having already adumbrated the deeper dimension underlying the philosophical projection of metaphysical dualisms, he expressed his conviction that, as he says in his essay on “Nature”, “Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities”.

For Merleau-Ponty, still pondering the phenomenology of perception in his later years, that older and deeper dimension of experience will eventually be invoked and called “flesh”. How did he come around to that interpretation? Let us now get into the narrative that will follow the logic in the evolution of the philosopher’s thinking.

After critically exploring, in The Structure of Behaviour, the humanism in the methodology of the social sciences, Merleau-Ponty realized that what was still needed was a radically different approach to the understanding of the human being. And so, he turned for inspiration and guidance to the contribution of Edmund Husserl. But, precisely because of his methodological commitment to the conception of phenomenology as Husserl defined it in Ideas I, namely, as a method and discipline for describing our experience just as it presents itself, he resisted and renounced Husserl’s transcendentalism, a version of Cartesian thought, rewarding a sovereign subjectivity—“consciousness”—with an absolute power over its objects: “Once mankind is defined as consciousness [subjectivity], he becomes cut off from all things, from his body and his effective existence”4. Philosophy, for Merleau-Ponty, “is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, it begins with an awareness of a world that consumes and destroys our established significations, but also renews and purifies them” ([14], p.17; [16]). Although still unable entirely to break out of the Cartesian legacy, he nevertheless attempted to escape captivity in the dualisms falsely representing and distorting the nature of human experience. This difficult and bold attempt is to be found elaborated in the philosopher’s 1945 work on The Phenomenology of Perception.

Explaining the project in this work in later years, the philosopher argued that, “in order to retrieve the meaning of external nature, we have to make an effort to retrieve our own nature”. That is because, he says: “[i]t is in my own nature that I find the originary state of the interior of things”. And it is also because it is in attending to the disposition of our own bodily nature that we will be able to find the moral claim that the being of other beings makes on us.

This subjectivity inherent in nature is not the result of a projection of a non-I outside of the [sovereign] I. We have to say, on the contrary, that what we call the I and what we call a living being have a common root in pre-objective being.

[7] (p. 40. Italics added)

Convinced that “the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind”, Merleau-Ponty undertook to “restore the world of perception” and, in so doing, to “re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world”. (POP 3). As in, for instance, re-establishing the roots of our vision in a sympathetic sensibility, such that, if we were to find ourselves witnessing terrible pain and suffering, that sight could readily induce the eyes to cry. (Of course, those roots, formed in our infancy, can be damaged, or we can become cut off from the roots, leaving us cold-hearted.)

But is it not significant—if not also uncanny—that our eyes, organs that we tend to think of as structured solely for seeing, can be moved to tears by what they see? In “The Unnameable”, Samuel Beckett’s character says, “I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly” [17]. And in the poetry of a moving confession, T.S. Eliot has his nameless character say “I see the eyes but not the tears/This is my affliction” [18]. In what these two poets have confided, we are reminded of the rooting of vision in a pre-personal, pre-reflective, pre-ontological experience of intercorporeality, attesting to the deep intertwining of lives brought together by the sharing of feeling. A similar phenomenology of shared feeling can also take place, of course, when there is cause for happiness. Thus, as Theodor Adorno remarked, emphasizing the possible moral significance of the sharing: “The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity” [19]. It is certainly our bodily felt sense of what our assumption of humanity means and demands of us that is being claimed in these experiences.

However, getting at those roots—our anonymous, pre-personal, pre-reflective, pre-objective experience—requires more than an appropriate work of recollection. We need, in fact, to go very deep into ourselves to retrieve, by memory, a bodily felt sense of that experience, an exceptionally important experience of innocent unselfconscious openness that we first engage in our infancy and that, by grace of our embodiment, we continue to carry with us, despite the repressive social and cultural forces, into the struggles of our adult lives. I do want to suggest, however, that much more attention needs to be given to the working of memory as a bodily felt sense of the pre-objective, pre-subjective dimension in which, as infants, we once were blessed to live.

One of the philosopher’s first tasks in this project of restoration must be to correct the philosophical tradition in regard to its understanding of the human body. For phenomenology, the human body that we inhabit and are—Leib, not Körper—is not first of all an object, a substance, but a living, organized system of capacities and capabilities. I am my body; I do not first of all have a body as one has a tool, an instrument or machine. Thus, in “An Unpublished Text” appearing in The Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says: “The body is no longer to be thought as merely an object in the world. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space”. (POP 5). The human body cannot be properly understood, however, in a philosophical project that takes consciousness to “constitute” the objective meaning of the world. For his phenomenology, “the relationship between subject and object is no longer that relationship of knowing postulated by classical idealism, wherein the object always seems to be the construction of the subject—but a relationship of being in which, paradoxically, the subject is his body, his world, and his situation, by a sort of exchange”. (SN 72). In this way, as he explains, phenomenology can rescue our embodiment from its objectification, returning us in mindfulness to traces and vestiges of our earliest years of bodily engagement with being:

It is precisely my body which perceives the body of another person, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person’s body are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

(PP 354)

Thus, for instance, in the kind of dialog required by a flourishing democracy, “there would be constituted between the other person and myself a common ground”. My thought and that of the other could be “interwoven into a single fabric”. And in this way, we would, or rather could, become “collaborators” for each other “in consummate reciprocity”. Our perspectives could merge into each other; we would “co-exist through a common world”. (Ibid.)

Rescuing the human body not only from the natural and social sciences but also from the philosophical paradigms of behavioral empiricism and transcendental idealism is, however, only the beginning of what Merleau-Ponty wanted to accomplish in his phenomenology of perception. He must also break through the various common cultural constructions—our myths, superstitions, prejudices, stereotypes, and conceits. He is moved, no doubt, by the hope of uncovering something of the universal dimension of nature, in which the secret being of all human bodies could appear as unified, sharing their belonging to the same world.

So, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty accordingly began what, for a reason I shall explain, he later would call his “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” [20], deconstructing the way that the structure of perception is represented, and enabling him thereby to take us into precisely that ignored and neglected dimension of experience, where our bodily existence is inextricably intertwined with the being of the world. Preceding our personal life, and remaining submerged and forgotten in it, there is, he says, a “prepersonal, anonymous and general existence”, a “deeper intentionality”. Thus: “When I turn toward perception, I find at work in my organs of perception a ‘thought’ older than myself, of which those organs are a mere trace ”(See [21] (pp. 351–352); [22]; [23]; [24], (p. 47); [25] (pp. 27, 39); [26,27,28,29,30,31,32]). This means:

We must rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent object, that primordial stage at which both things and ideas come into being.

(PP 219. Italics added)

In this phenomenology, providing, as if in anticipation, the unifying primal corporeal dimension that Heidegger’s early phenomenology called for but missed until his texts of the late 1950s [23]5, the formation of the subject and object dualism is disclosed to be a later-constituted ontic structuring of our experience. (PP 430).

Now, if we really experience and understand this, we would inevitably be involved in a radical change in ourselves; there is, between my lived body and the being of the world, an anonymously functioning form of communication “more ancient than thought”, engaging my body’s sensorium long before I have even acquired the words to express myself. Henceforth, “as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person’s body are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously”. (PP 284). Thus, for instance, when my hand and yours meet, the hand that is touching the other is also being touched; the one touched is also feeling some touching.

This sets the stage for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological elaboration of what Heidegger calls “being-with” (Mitsein): my body “discovers in the other body a prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world”. (PP 354). And this “prolongation” forms, in effect, a “communication with the world more ancient than thought”, such that “I am [always] already in communication with others” (PP 254). This truth is already to be found, as Merleau-Ponty argues, in the contagion of cries—a familiar phenomenon in the nursery, where one infant’s crying can induce mimetic crying in other infants. Recognizing what this fact reveals could have significant consequences for our ethical life, not only encouraging mutual acknowledgement and communication, but giving substance to our mutual responsibilities toward, and for, one another.

What the retrieving of our bodily felt experience of infancy and early childhood can teach us is its innocent, vulnerable openness to alterity. There is now the possibility of a sympathetic caring-for-the-other that breaks free of, and goes beyond, the subject–object structure, the structure in which the ego’s concerns prevail. Merleau-Ponty describes this stage, involving at once our self-understanding, our sense of who we are, and our experience of the being of the other, as engaging a certain reversibility in relationships that promises to be beneficial for our participation in the ethical and political life of the community. We need to attend to our bodily felt sense of this reversibility, drawing on what vestiges, traces, and echoes still carried by our adult bodies we can still recollect and retrieve from our earliest experience of intertwining relationships.

In Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Martin Dillon contends that “the reversibility thesis is already surfacing in the Phenomenology of Perception, although it is obscured by the traditional language of that work” (See [21] (pp. 383, 406–408); [32] (p.106)). I agree, in that reversibility—a “syncretic sociability”—is already implicit in the descriptions of our experience encountering other persons; it will still be some time before it is explicitly acknowledged, describing an anonymous, pre-personal, pre-reflective modality and dimension of bodily experience that first takes place in infancy and that continues to underlie the experience of the adult. Carried into our later years of life by the body’s ability to recollect, this early experience of the human relationship, not yet formed into the structure of subject and object, needs to be remembered and learned, preparing us for the exigencies of ethical life and participation in a flourishing democracy. In a democracy that recognizes and values diversity, education should be committed to teaching the new generations how to get in touch with the intercorporeal experiences of reversibility that are taking place in their various social interactions; it should demonstrate how that experience bears on the principles of reciprocity and fairness. Education must not be afraid to challenge the prevailing cultural codes—especially those that are divisive.

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Merleau-Ponty summarized his extensive research into infancy and the early years of childhood, reporting his findings and insights reported in “The Child’s Relations with Others”, a text he was working on intensely in the years before his untimely death [22,34,35,36,37].

In later work, undoubtedly influenced to some extent by Heidegger’s own later thought, Merleau-Ponty began thinking about overcoming the dualisms in terms of their effect on ontology, characterizing his project, in “The Philosopher and His Shadow”, as undertaking an “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” [20]. This concern for ontology—for how, in today’s world, we experience the being of things—marks a new development in the unfolding of his project. It recognizes, and enables us to think about how the dualisms have distorted the mind–body, self–other, and subject–object relations—and consequently, how we might achieve the urgently needed transformation in these relations. Thought about in this way, the experience of the other in infancy could be called “pre-ontological”, thereby connecting his phenomenology of intercorporeality and reversibility in the infant’s experience and the adult’s retrieving of it to the “pre-ontological experience” invoked by Heidegger in the “Introduction” to his 1927 work, Being and Time. Heidegger, however, neglects the entire dimension of embodiment, even though that makes great trouble for his entire ontological project.

By contrast, in his later thought, especially in the texts published under the title The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the embodiment of the pre-ontological experience. Moreover, illuminating the intercorporeal reversibilities in terms of ontology induced the philosopher to think about the universality of this experience in terms of the flesh. This notion opened up a whole new dimension for phenomenological thought. But we must have a proper understanding of this terminology. What Merleau-Ponty is calling “flesh” is not a substance, but, as he tells us, rather too abstractly, it is instead “the concrete emblem of a general manner of being”. (VI 147). “Flesh”, says Galen Johnson, is a way of recognizing and talking about “the trace of the other, the inscription of the other, in the subject’s own selfhood. What ‘flesh’ means is that the subject is [even] for itself only an inchoate openness to an otherness outside itself”. “Flesh” essentially universalizes the experience of reversibility. And so, the “universality” of the flesh simply refers to fact that, regardless of all the different ways of being—all the different ways for beings to be—everything, whether it be stone, plant, animal, or human, and for better or worse, is gathered into one and the same world, one and the same situation. The fate of all is the fate of the planet. “Flesh” is a radically new way of saying that. In the Phenomenology of Perception, however, the philosopher had not yet come to this insight. But the late invocation of “flesh” is as much a sobering summons to responsibility as it is a celebration of what holds us all together in our remarkable difference and diversity.

So, what I want to argue here is that it is the experience of intercorporeal reversibility, rather than the more abstract theoretical notion of a universal flesh, which ultimately must instruct and guide us in a process of self-development that will prepare us for our responsibilities as participants in the moral life of our community. For Merleau-Ponty, this process begins in the pre-personal, pre-reflective, pre-ontological experiences of infancy. The retrieving of these “pre-ontological” experiences in a work of recollection sets the stage, as he implies, for the adult’s assumption of moral responsibility for being and, consequently, for the being of the beings in our world, relating to things, of course, as befits their essential nature.

In ontological reversibility, there is an organismic basis for sympathy and the moral principle of reciprocity. Emerging in the unknowingness of infancy, this reversibility continues to structure our experience, carried by the body and encoded in the flesh, available for possible retrieval in later life by an organismic memory. So, by grace of the reversibilities we inevitably live, we already have, in the flesh, a preconceptual understanding of the reciprocity necessary for the kind of communication and relationship—mutual recognition and reciprocity—that a rational and just society requires. In the transpositions and reversibilities always already structuring the child’s flesh, Merleau-Ponty sees a new form of subjectivity emerging. And in fact, a self that recognizes itself as essentially constituted through social relationships of reciprocity is already being schematized in a preliminary and rudimentary way. But of course, we need to connect in recollection with that experience, so that it schematizes the moral sensibility fitting adult life.

In an essay on “The Idea of Equality”, Bernard Williams argued that “some of the capacities with which we are endowed as human beings, e.g., our capacity to feel pain and our capacity to perceive suffering in others, give rise to moral claims on ourselves and others” [38] (second series. Italics added). This observation is certainly correct. But it leaves untouched some important questions regarding the embodiment of this claim. How are those capacities given to human nature as potentialities to be cultivated, encouraged, and realized? How can a moral claim emerge from perception? And how should a bodily felt sense of the claim give recognition to our moral responsibilities?

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The narrative that I have been unfolding in this essay should clearly indicate my agreement with Duane H. Davis, who argues, in “Reverse Subjectivity”, that, “by examining Merleau-Ponty’s reversible subjectivity, […] a new notion of responsibility can now be unfolded, overemphasizing neither universality nor rationality” [25] (p. 39). Because, as Davis notes: “The explication of this reversibility discloses the ideality of human existence and renders intelligible in a new way the responsibility shared between interlocutors” [25] (p. 34). However, it still is necessary to project the philosopher’s thought into the ethical realm, precisely “insofar as reversible subjectivity can be extended to be a virtual focus of responsibility as well as a focus of experience” [25] (p. 39).

So, what I want to suggest here is that Merleau-Ponty’s very late attention to ontology, inspired and encouraged, I suppose, by Heidegger, requires above all that we give thought to the character of our interactions, our relationships—how we engage with being as such and how we engage with the being of all beings as befits their nature. Ontology, concerned with the meaning of being (what it means for something to be) is not only a question for our knowledge; it is also very much a question for our ethical life on this planet.

In “The Yogi and the Proletarian” (POP 215), Merleau-Ponty says, in no unequivocal wording, that “humanity is humanity only in name as long as the greater number of men have abdicated their moral responsibility and as long as some are masters and the others slaves”.

The ontological moment of responsibility, our responsibility for the being of the beings that figure in our world, is, if deeply felt in our very embodiment, a matter of sympathetic caring. In the last years of his life, Merleau-Ponty succeeded in at least adumbrating the moral dimension of his project. It began in a phenomenology of perception and attained its theoretical completion in an ontology that prepares us, in learning from the experience of reversibility, for the responsibilities and reciprocities constitutive of ethical life.

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In Purgatorio, acknowledging the struggles that a moral life requires of us, Dante Alighieri offers the poet’s encouragement: “Everyone vaguely apprehends a good in which the soul may rest; but longing for it, each one struggles to come to it” [39].

Merleau-Ponty readily concedes that, “Nothing guarantees us that morality is possible, as Kant said in a passage which has not yet been fully understood. But even less is there any fatal assurance that morality is impossible”. (POP 26).

Just as the perception of a thing opens me up to being, by realizing the paradoxical synthesis of an infinity of perceptual aspects, in the same way the perception of the other founds morality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego, of a common situation, by placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field of another and of all the others.

(Ibid.)

Today, with artificial intelligence creating cynical suspicion and doubts regarding the difference between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, we desperately need the experience of intercorporeality and its reversibility, in order to recover a shared reality—and a shared sense of trust and moral responsibility. Retrieving something of this intercorporeality and our body’s felt sense of reversibility, perhaps we could learn the importance of reciprocity, a fundamental condition necessary for the institution of justice. Such, I think, is the intention behind the distinctively ontological inflection in Merleau-Ponty’s last revisioning of his phenomenological project.

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But are we prepared, in our way of living, to take on that momentous task? Have we learned from the philosopher’s deep phenomenology how to serve as guardians of nature and ethical life? Do we understand what reversibility means for our way of relating to nature? Have we, learning from Merleau-Ponty’s passage from phenomenology into ontology, undertaken in self-development the changes in character and disposition that the being of our world desperately needs? And are we learning from the personal and individual experience of reversibility the importance of institutions encouraging and defending reciprocity and justice?

In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the dimension of our embodiment that is “our first nature” already constitutes the gift, or say grace, of an initial, preliminary ethical and moral orientation, inscribed in its latency in the flesh. For better—or for worse—“first nature” emerges and develops into “second nature”, its capabilities, potentialities, and dispositions of character depending very much on the social, economic, and cultural conditions, forces, and influences operative in the community and home life of the infant and young child. Thus, in a childhood that is subjected to stereotyping, discrimination, indifference, neglect, abuse, cruelties, and violence, the blessings of “first nature” can be severely corrupted, warped and twisted, repressed, and left undeveloped—or even much worse, turned into the tragic curse of malevolence.

To be sure, the passage from experiencing reversibility (“first nature”) to living a life based on the principle of reciprocity (“second nature”) will never be easily achieved. But we can always at least begin to learn the meaning of reciprocity by retrieving bodily carried, bodily felt vestiges of the reversibility that by nature happens in infancy and early childhood. In fact, as Merleau-Ponty himself learned in the course of his research, the infant’s natural openness already schematizes this passage; thinking of that schematism in terms of ‘flesh”, as he did near the end of his life, universalizes it, indicating the way to continue our moral self-development.

In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty expressed his hope for the phenomenological project, noting that, “It is characteristic of cultural gestures to awaken in all others at least an echo if not a consonance”. (PW 94). “To choose history”, he said, “means to devote ourselves body and soul to the advent of a future human being” (PW 83) and, as he said elsewhere, it also means to commit oneself to the creation of “an ideal community of embodied subjects, an intercorporeality” [40]. This is not going to be living in Paradise, but it could make a better world for us and the generations coming after us [33]6.

Thus, with something like that ideal in mind, Jürgen Habermas urges us, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, to realize that, as he expresses it, “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models suggested by another epoch: it has to create its normativity out of itself” [36] (p.7). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology shows us the way to accomplish this critical moral task, retrieving the past for the sake of a future we have fatefully lost sight of.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher suggests that, “What haunts the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate” [42]. And we are, today, despite significant progress, still struggling, as a society and culture, to overcome the dualisms that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology sought to vanquish for the sake of a better future.

Dedicating his thought to the understanding of our experience as it unfolds from infancy and can be developed into maturity, Merleau-Ponty shows us just what philosophical responsibility can mean and achieve for the future of our humanity.