1

“Know thyself!” Ever since Socrates the admonition of the Oracle at Delphi has been been the admonition of philosophy itself and has conferred upon it its inescapable task. For the philosophizing subject, the subject who is reflexively conscious of himself, the task of responding to this admonition means that he must ask who in fact he is and how, precisely, he is conscious of himself as an existing subject. What does that mean? How is that possible? What does it mean to be a subject who is conscious of his own existence as a subject?

Philosophical inquiry has always been concerned with the problem of personal identity, using this term in a loose (nonanalytic) sense. And ever since antiquity the problem of personal identity has tended to be approached in terms of the metaphysical-anthropological problem of the union of body and soul (mind). (This has had for its effect to obscure the genuine philosophical problem, which is the hermeneutical one of self-understanding and personhood.) The mind-body problem (as we now call it) has been debated without letup by philosophers—without much success, it must be admitted.

At the beginning of the modern era, when the great and audacious syntheses of medieval philosophy had lost much of their persuasive power for thinking people, Pascal wrote:

And then he added, quoting Saint Augustine, that unique individual who had his feet in two worlds, that of antiquity and that of premodernism: “The way in which minds are attached to bodies is beyond man’s understanding, and yet this is what man is.”¹

An incomprehensible state of affairs, indeed, the more one thinks about it. And it does not appear that much progress in clarifying the matter has been made in philosophy since Pascal’s time. It could even be said that the Cartesianism which permeates all of modern philosophy has made of the problem of the union of body and mind one which is altogether incapable of being resolved.

Indeed, if the terms “corporeal” and “spiritual” or “psychic” are taken to designate two kinds of substances—extended things and thinking things—which by reason of their own proper nature, i.e., conceptually speaking, are absolutely distinct from one another, how could they possibly ever be united so as to form not a mere juxtaposition of two disparate things but, as is—phenomenologically speaking—obviously the case, one single thing enjoying its own proper reality, namely, the human person? This mysterious unity can be brought about only through some kind of miracle—by divine fiat. However, to accord the secret to God is to take it away from men—who are most in need of knowing it. The outcome of Cartesianism is to set up, on the one hand, a totally objective nature which is fully intelligible in itself—since it is but matter in motion whose laws are capable of being discovered by the objective sciences of nature—and, on the other hand, conscious subjects who are nothing but pure interiorities and who, because they are but gazes [regards] on nature existing nowhere in this nature which is fully intelligible in itself, cannot be intelligible for themselves or the objects of any objective science.

A single word can serve to designate the essence of modern thought from Descartes to Sartre: dualism. And the result of dualism is alienation: the alienation of subject from object, of the psychic from the corporeal, and thus of man from nature as well as from his own proper nature. A consciousness which is alienated from itself is a consciousness which is split within itself, and such a consciousness, as we know from Hegel, is an unhappy consciousness.

The question which, with increasing vehemence, seems to be everywhere forcing itself on us today is: Is there any possibility or hope that postmodern humanity might discover the way of escaping from the unhappiness which is the result of the rupture between the subjective and the objective, the self and the world, the corporeal and the psychic, instituting thereby a new era in the history of thought? There is every indication that today philosophy is increasingly taking this to be its central task.

When one finds oneself in an impasse, as modern thought seems indeed to find itself, it is often because somewhere along the way a wrong turn was made. In such a situation the only remedy is to retrace one’s steps. This is what psychoanalysis does in regard to the disoriented individual who has lost track of his own identity. By forcing him to relive the distorting experiences of his past, it enables him to make a new start in life.

What is to Husserl’s great merit is that he sought to apply this kind of treatment to modern man. In the work he began on the eve of his death, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl undertook the project of a veritable archaeology of modern consciousness. The aim of this archaeology was to clarify the origin “of the modern opposition between physicalistic objectivism and transcendental subjectivism.”² “What is clearly necessary,” he said, “ . . . is that we reflect back, in a thorough historical and critical fashion, in order to provide, before all decision, for a radical self-understanding.”³ This Rückfrage on his part amounted to a veritable deconstruction of modern philosophy. In the words of his English translator and interpreter, David Carr: “It is an attempt to relive the tradition of which we are a part for the purpose of liberating us from the prejudices that are inherent in that tradition.”⁴

One thing that Husserl succeeded in discovering through his archaeological investigations is how the origin of modern dualism coincides with the emergence of modern science and its viewing of nature as a self-contained world of mere, corporeal bodies. The consequence of this way of viewing nature is, so to speak, to split the world of ordinary, prescientific experience into two worlds, physical nature and the realm of the psychic:

“Natural-scientific rationality” thus makes possible psychology in the modern sense of the term whose object is the “psychical, ” as opposed to the “physical.” The development of this psychology from Descartes through the British empiricists up to contemporary experimental psychology amounts to the development of a struggle between objectivism and transcendentalism. In the eyes of Husserl, phenomenology’s historical vocation in this regard is to resolve this conflict by showing how the so-called objective world is precisely not selfsufficient but is rather something that is entirely relative and which in fact has its origin in transcendental subjectivity. It is the latter which itself constitutes the Seinssinn of the world, “the ‘objectively true’ world.” The world of objectivistic science is nothing more than a structure of transcendental consciousness.⁶

We might well wonder, however, if Husserl genuinely overcame modern dualism or if he did not rather simply substitute for a dualism of substances (body, mind) an epistemological dualism (objectivism, transcendentalism). To be sure, naturalistic objectivity is in Husserl absorbed into transcendental subjectivity which is thenceforth conceived of as omnitudo realitatis or, as Husserl said in Ideas, the only universe which exists—all of which, it must be admitted, constitutes a kind of modern-style reductionism (corresponding to physicalism’s reduction of the subjective to the objective). All forms of reductionism, nevertheless, presuppose dualism, conceptually speaking, and thus do not overcome it. It can therefore legitimately be wondered if Husserl’s transcendental idealism which accords the decisive privilege to transcendental subjectivity is, when all is said and done, any more satisfactory than an objectivistic materialism which makes of consciousness a mere epiphenomenon of a physical body.

It would appear that Merleau-Ponty did not think so and that he was put off by Husserl’s transcendental idealism. It is clear that he could not accept the notion of a transcendental Ego which does everything, which constitutes everything—in the first instance its own body as a wordly thing.⁷ It is likely that the difficulty Husserl ran into in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation of defending himself in a fully convincing way against the objection of solipsism sufficed to convince Merleau-Ponty that Husserl’s transcendental idealism was still a form of subjectivism—and thus a prisoner of modern dualism. He might well have said of Husserl what in fact he did say of Sartre: “For Sartre, it is always I who forms depth, who hollows it out, who does everything, and who closes from within my prison in upon myself—”⁸

For Merleau-Ponty there was never any question of a sovereign transcendental Ego or even, as Husserl would have said, of a “soul” or “spirit” which is somehow directly accessible by means of “internal perception.” Referring in fact to Husserl, he stated: “ . . . there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”⁹ And what his first great work, Phenomenology of Perception, aimed to show was that there is absolutely no dualism between me and my body, between this body that in fact I am and the world which it inhabits and animates, and between me and the other.

If modern dualism is but the result of a certain arbitrary way of viewing the world, if it is in fact the product of scientific abstraction and idealization, as in Crisis Husserl quite accurately said it was, then the rediscovery of the Lebenswelt underlying the objectifying thought of science furnishes us with the means of overcoming modern dualism. This is precisely the lesson Merleau-Ponty drew from Husserl. However, Husserl’s (never fulfilled) aim was to go on to show how the Lebenswelt is itself the product of a constituting Ego, and this is something Merleau-Ponty refused to accept.

By reason of his attempt to overcome definitively modern dualism and subjectivism, Merleau-Ponty is fully a part of the mainstream philosophical current of our times. His philosophical effort is in this respect allied with that of Heidegger. One could even go so far as to ask whether Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to overcome modern dualism does not make of him a postmodernist. The question is whether or not by destroying the primacy of consciousness and by deconstructing the Cogito, by insisting on the priority of the unreflected over reflection and on the fact that consciousness is not a constituting power but is rather given to itself out of the obscure life of the body, out of a polymorphous flesh which is a kind of confused anonymity and generality, Merleau-Ponty was not in fact a herald of that mode of thought which has flourished after his death and which has assigned itself the task of deconstructing the very notion of subjectivity, throwing overboard in the process all of modern thought and, in the first instance, the very idea of the rational and autonomous human subject, that is to say, “man.”

Certain sociologists have used the term “postmodern” to refer to this mode of thought. Representatives of it everywhere abound at the present time. One such is the American writer Norman O. Brown, who in his books Life against Death and Love’s Body has celebrated polymorphous perversity and has proclaimed the superiority of the pleasure principle over the reality principle, instinct over reason. Brown’s effort was to dethrone consciousness in favor of the dream. For him the essential thing was to dissolve the self into the body, to eradicate all limitations, boundaries, and distinctions—between the self and the body, between man and woman, between subject and object, between the psychic and the physical, between man and nature. In his eyes these divisions amounted to the Original Fall, the fall into divisions and lies, and what he sought was the abolition of “all dualisms.”

Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and other poststructuralists and French Nietzscheans exemplify in their own way various trends in postmodernity. What characterizes much of postmodernity is its refusal of all distinctions and all divisions—for example, between body and spirit, the physical and the mental, reason and the irrational, the intellectual and the sensual, the self and the other, nature and culture, reality and utopia. On the one hand a rejection of order, limits, restrictions, the control and mesure of reasonable consciousness, the apollonian and, in general, what up to our times people generally referred to as “civilization,” it is, on the other hand, a celebration of the dionysian, delirium, the oneiric, the erotic, libidinal sensuality, the instinctive and the spontaneous, narcissism. Being antinomian and anti-institutionalist, utopie and anarchic, an appeal for the suppression of oppressive consciousness, liberation of the instincts, emancipation of sensuality, it forms a ready alliance with political radicalism.

The question I would like to consider here is how we should interpret Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of modern dualism and subjectivism. How, more than twenty years after his death, should we situate him in regard to contemporary thought? Since human understanding is always retroactive (we live forward but understand backward, as Kierkegaard said), the way we understand what was is by situating it in relation to what then did not yet exist, in relation to what in fact has followed it in time and now is. Should we then view Merleau-Ponty as a precursor of postmodernistic thinking? Or, on the contrary, should we interpret his critique of modernism in quite another way, so as not to make of him a mere “proto-poststructuralist”?

2

In his very first book, The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty assigned himself the task “of understanding the relations of consciousness and nature.”¹⁰ In other words, the relations between the objective and the subjective, the exterior and the interior, the corporeal and the psychic. This problematic was to remain the central problematic of all of his subsequent work. Let us therefore take a brief look at how in his first two works the younger Merleau-Ponty responded to the question.

It is worth noting, first of all, that in The Structure of Behavior he explicitly dealt with the classical problem of the union between soul and body. And what he categorically rejected was the idea that what is involved here is the union of two substances or two orders of reality, two worlds, as Husserl would say. This is to say that he completely relativized soul and body and insisted that they have absolutely no reality in and of themselves. What they are is rather two variable terms of a single structure which is nothing other than existence itself. The relation between the two is entirely dialectical: “It is not a question of two de facto orders external to each other, but of two types of relations, the second of which integrates the first” (SB, pp. 180-81).

It is nonetheless important for us to note that if here Merleau-Ponty rejects all dualism he is not for all that advocating a simple monism. The integration of body and soul is in no way a fusion. To be sure, there are not two substances in the human being, yet the human being is not a rigidly monolithic entity. There does indeed exist a “soul” and a “body,” but the body is a human body only by being the very foundation of the soul, the visible expression of a “spiritual” life, and the soul is a soul only by means of a body which is, as it were, its own manifestation. Between soul and body there is something like a tensional polarity, and the total human being is nothing other than this tension which is continually renewed. Thus, if Merleau-Ponty categorically denies here all dualism in the human being, he nonetheless still insists that that there is a certain duality to that being. “There is always a duality,” he says, “which reappears at one level or another.” This is to say that “integration is never absolute and it always fails—at a higher level in the writer, at a lower level in the aphasie” (SB, p. 210).

It is also important to note that if soul and body are entirely relative and are but two moments of a single structure or Gestalt, this structuration is nevertheless vertical. This is to say that “soul” designates that which, at whatever level, pertains to what is superior in human behavior, “body” designates that which pertains to what is inferior.¹¹

It is just as important to note that, in opposition to a certain persistent tendency in thought, Merleau-Ponty never attempts to explain the superior in terms of the inferior. The advent of the superior suppresses what is autonomous in the inferior by integrating it into an enlarged and more finely structured behavior.¹² Just as Husserl insisted that abnormality is but a variant of normality (and not the reverse, as some postmodernists would maintain),¹³ Merleau-Ponty maintains that the abnormal and the pathological must be understood in terms of so-called normal behavior.

The conclusion we should draw from this is that at this time Merleau-Ponty had absolutely no intention of abolishing “all dualisms,” at least in Norman O. Brown’s sense of the term. How do matters stand in regard to the Phenomenology of Perception?

When one reads the report of the conference Merleau-Ponty gave under the title “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” in which he discussed the main theses of the Phenomenology, it is clear that many of his listeners thought that he wanted to dissolve the Cogito in the anonymous existence of the body—in the Lebenswelt—and that he was denying the existence of the rational, autonomous subject. Did he not want to celebrate what he called “la spontanéité enseignante du corps” at the expense of the arduous work of rational reflection?

The Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology was nevertheless not an advocate for the irrational or the unreflected, and it is a bit ironic that some sought to criticize his central project, that of reflecting on the unreflected as such, by saying that it was a contradiction in terms, since the moment the unreflected is laid hold of by reflection it ceases to be, precisely, unreflected. It is impossible to return to and coincide with the unreflected as such. The irony is that Merleau-Ponty never proposed to make reflection coincide with the unreflected. His philosophy was a properly reflective philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, and he never maintained that the important thing is to return to merely lived experience in order to remain there. Philosophy was for him a reflective enterprise, thus something altogether different from experience straightforwardly lived-through in an unreflective way. What he wanted to do was something properly apollonian; he did not want to renounce reason but wanted rather to enlarge it. Referring to Hegel, that great Apollo of modern times, he said that “the task of our century” is “to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason.”¹⁴ What he wanted to understand was rational consciousness itself—insofar, precisely, as it possesses itself only on the basis of an unreflected existence from which it emerges, but which it also transcends (which is to say, therefore, to which it is absolutely irreducible).

The two following texts say just about everything that needs to be said on the subject:

Since by his own account he was working for the enlargement (agrandissement) of reason and was opposed to the dissipation of consciousness in ignorance of self and in chaos, the younger Merleau-Ponty, we are obliged to conclude, was in no way a prophet of that new Dionysus, postmodernistic man, the man who seeks to dwell in the realm of dream and desire and who is at last liberated from the tyranny of self-consciousness (which means, of course, the consciousness of his separation from himself, from nature, and from others).

3

Can we say as much for the later Merleau-Ponty? Is it not rather the case that in The Visible and the Invisible everything has been turned upside down and set adrift? Does he himself not say there that it is necessary for philosophy to “recommence everything (tout reprendre), reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over,’ that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them” (VI, p. 130)? When he recognized the “Necessity of a return to ontology,” an “ontology of brute Being” (VI, p. 165), to the “barbaric principle which Schelling spoke of,” was it not all dualisms that he then wanted to overcome, and in a decisive way?

In any event, it is evident that he believed that this new ontological interrogation would have important ramifications on “the subject-object question,” “the question of inter-subjectivity,” “the question of Nature” (VI, p. 165). Is it thus not the case that in plunging into “the basement of phenomenology”¹⁷ of consciousness, into the obscure realm of the unconscious (whose existence he had formerly, somewhat like Sartre, denied), Merleau-Ponty found himself on the other side of the barricade, the other side of all philosophy of consciousness and of subjectivity itself? It seems that this was more or less the impression Sartre had. “In one sense,” the latter said, “nothing in the ideas that he defended in his thesis [PhP] has changed; in another sense everything is unrecognizable. He has plunged into the night of non-knowledge [nonsavoir], in quest of what, now, he calls the ‘fundamental.’ ”¹⁸ Is it possible that in the end Merleau-Ponty had become a disciple of that great precursor of postmodernity, Baudelaire, who had written at the end of his poem Le Voyage:

In any event, to the new “fundamental” that Merleau-Ponty discovered in his descent into the basement of consciousness he gave a name: the flesh. It is undeniable that the flesh is not simply another name for what traditional philosophy has called the body; “one knows,” he said, “that there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate that” (VI, p. 139), to designate what this philosophically unheard-of word is meant to designate: the flesh. Thus the exploration of the flesh was inevitably to lead Merleau-Ponty to some “extravagant consequences” (VI, p. 140).

It was in fact to lead him to a kind of philosophical monism beyond all dualisms. Being neither the objective body nor the body which the soul thinks of as its own, the flesh is rather the sensible itself, “the sensible in the twofold sense of what one senses and what senses” (VI, p. 259). The flesh is the formative milieu of both the corporeal and the psychic, of object and subject; it is the undivided Being (l’Être d’indivision) existing before the consiousness-object split. It is the “generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself” (VI, p. 139). In a working note of November 1960 Merleau-Ponty wrote:

The discovery of the flesh calls for nothing less than a “complete reconstruction of philosophy” (VI, p. 193). Philosophy can no longer be mere psychological reflection or even transcendental reflection (VI, p. 158). The entire vocabulary of traditional psychological reflection is to be rejected. “We must, at the beginning, eschew notions such as ‘acts of consciousness,’ ‘states of consciousness,’ ‘matter,’ ‘form,’ and even ‘image’ and ‘perception’ ” (VI, pp. 157—58). In his late philosophy, Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to reject the key term of his earlier thought, perception!

What he calls for is a “complete reconstruction” of our language itself. “Language is a power for error,” he says, “since it cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things and to the past and is installed between ourselves and that tissue like a screen” (VI, p. 125). Postmodernist thought is perhaps right in thinking that subjectivity and language are inseparably bound together and that if the former is to be abolished, the latter must be radically transformed. What Merleau-Ponty sometimes appears to be saying at this late moment in his life is that the language philosophy must search for is “a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak. . . . It would be a language of which he [the philosopher] would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor [le trafic occulte de la métaphore]—where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges.” Is not this language which has been liberated from the stranglehold of calculative and manipulative consciousness, from its clear and distinct meaning-intentions, this metaphorically wild language which speaks when to all appearances nothing is really said, which speaks in occult suggestions, is this not precisely that language fashioned by those philosophers and writers who have come to occupy the front stage of our culture since Merleau-Ponty’s death? Is not the “complete reconstruction” called for by Merleau-Ponty that complete destruction wrought by various postmodernists?

However that may be (we shall return to the question), it is necessary to recognize that the discovery of the flesh and of brute or wild being led Merleau-Ponty to say things which from a traditional point of view are indeed “extravagant.” He says, for instance, that “the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things. . . . That language has us and that it is not we who have language. That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being” (VI, p. 194). The point of view of the speaking and thinking subject seems at last to have been fully left behind: “ . . . things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us.”¹⁹

Even the idea of man seems to have dropped out of the picture, since it is no longer he who, strictly speaking, does anything. “It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder—it is not we who speak, it is truth that speaks itself at the depths of speech—Becoming-nature of man which is the becoming-man of nature—” (VI, p. 185). As in postmodernity, the distinction man/nature seems to have been abolished and man is reintegrated into la nature naturante. Anthropology has been deconstructed. “When we speak of the flesh of the visible,” he insists, “we do not mean to do anthropology . . . ” (VI, p. 136). Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy would indeed seem to be no longer a philosophy of man but the thought of a polymorphous or amorphous being, a being of promiscuity and transitivism.²⁰ Merleau-Ponty states that his philosophy would have to work itself out “without any compromise with humanism” and that “the visible has to be described as something that is realized through man, but which is nowise anthropology” (VI, p. 274).

An overcoming of all dualisms of this sort would be such as to effect a cure for the unhappiness of modern consciousness brought about by subjectivism and the separation of consciousness from Nature, which is “the flesh, the mother” (VI, p. 267), “polymorphic matrix” (VI, p. 221), “Being in indivision [Être d’indivision]” (VI, p. 208), “pregnancy of possibles” (VI, p. 250). A cure by means of a return to the maternal womb and to the union before separation.

In this way that most painful separation of all would be overcome, the separation between the self and the other. “There is here no problem of the alter ego,” he says, “because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general . . . ” (VI, p. 142); “there is transitivism by way of generality” (VI, p. 269). Myself and the other, “we function as one unique body” (VI, p. 215); “he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality” (S, p. 168). If there is a break,” he says, “it is not between me and the other person; it is between a primordial generality we are intermingled in and the precise system, myself-the others” (S, p. 174). What basically exists is a “corporeality in general,” which, like “the child’s egocentricity,” is “transitivity and confusion of self and other” (S, p. 174). As civilized adults who have learned to view our lives “as a series of private states of consciousness” (S, p. 175), we have also “learned to distribute the pains and pleasures in the world among single lives. But,” Merleau-Ponty insists, “the truth is not so simple” (S, p. 175). Thus his conclusion: “We must conceive of a primordial We [On] that has its own authenticity and furthermore never ceases but continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each of our perceptions” (S, p. 175). Husserl’s “egology” and “sphere of ownness” are thereby dissolved in favor of “attaches primordiales.” And thus “the compresence of my ‘consciousness’ and my ‘body’ is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person”; the presence of me to myself and the presence of me to the other are “substitutable in the absolute presence of orgins” (S, p. 175). The flesh is therefore not my flesh or your flesh but the indivisible flesh of the world, of a brute and wild Being, of the Earth Mother which englobes us all.

Time itself, lastly, is abolished, the time of the man who is wakeful and conscious of himself, the source of all distinctions and all suffering, the Es war of Nietzsche, origin of resentment. “It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an ‘ever new’ and ‘always the same’—A sort of time of sleep. . . . The sensible, Nature transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle” (VI, p. 267).²¹

Such, then, is the philosophically unusual and, indeed, extravagant mode of discourse adopted by the later Merleau-Ponty. It must be admitted that it is such as to be somewhat disconcerting for a philosophy of the subject which, while rejecting—like Merleau-Ponty—modern dualism and subjectivism, refuses nonetheless to be drawn into the postmodernistic dissolution of the subject itself—which, indeed, refuses to believe that the concept of “self’ is nothing more than an arbitrary and groundless creation of the modern epistemē. The moment has therefore arrived to raise the question as to the exact signficance of the later Merleau-Ponty’s seeming rejection of “all dualisms.”

What must first be noted in this regard is that if Merleau-Ponty wanted—as, indeed, it is clear he did—to overcome decisively modern dualism, there is yet no evidence to indicate that he was prepared to deny all dualities and to abolish all distinctions (viewing them, as postmodernists would, as artificial, repressive limitations imposed on the fullness of lived experience). The flesh is not the key notion of a philosophy of Identity beyond all Difference. To say that two things are inseparable is not to say that they are one and the same thing. It is true, of course, that the flesh is not the “body” (as modernism calls it). It is, rather, that which contains both the corporeal and the psychic; it is the unique reality of which soul and body, subject and object are but “total parts.” If, however, one can even speak of “total parts,” it is because the words corporeal and psychic still retain a meaning; they continue to designate something—not, to be sure, two substances²² but, rather, two irreducible dimensions of a being which is conceived of as dimensionality itself. The flesh is nothing other than the fact that between the psychic and the corporeal, between the subject and its body, between it and the world, between the self and the other, there exists a relation of circularity and even of reversibility. However, reversibility is not coincidence. “It is time to emphasize,” he wrote, “that it is a question of a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact.” When one of my hands touches the other when it is in the process of touching a thing, “I never reach coincidence.” This coincidence is always aborted, and thus there remains something like a “hiatus” between the two sides of the lived body (le corps propre), the “subject” side and the “object” side (VI, p. 147).

In his late philosophy, therefore, Merleau-Ponty does not attempt to suppress the subject-object duality. Rather, he overcomes it by conceiving of the intentional relationship, the relationship consciousness-object, as one which takes place inside of Being itself, a Being which in its own regard transcends the consciousness-object distinction.²³

If, then, there exists neither identity, fusion, nor coincidence between the psychic and the corporeal, the goal of philosophy itself cannot be that of enabling us to coincide with “the absolute presence of origins.” Its task cannot be that of effectuating a fusion with the sensible, with an undivided Being (un Être d’indivision) beyond the subject-object split. We are thus perhaps in a position now to understand that strange passage in The Visible and the Invisible where Merleau-Ponty spoke of “a language of coincidence” and said that the philosopher must deliver up his language to the “occult traffic of metaphor” (VI, p. 125). Indeed, at the end of this passage he added a remark which I did not quote above and which changes everything. If the philosopher lays claim to a language of this sort, “we have to recognize,” Merleau-Ponty says, “the consequence: if language is not necessarily deceptive, truth is not coincidence, nor mute” (VI, p. 125).

It would thus appear that Merleau-Ponty was in no way proposing that the philosopher “should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made” (VI, p. 125). The situation would actually seem to be something quite different for him. The language of the reflective subject is not a coinciding with the flesh but rather its sublimation, which is something else altogether. The thematization of perceptual meaning (sens) or of the Lebenswelt—the goal of philosophy—must be understood as “a behavior of a higher degree” (VI, p. 176). There is, he says, a dialectical relation between the silence of the origins and the language of reflection: “language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain” (VI, p. 176). And as he also says, in as clear a way as could be desired, the “very description of silence rests entirely on the virtues of language. The taking possession of the world of silence, such as the description of the human body effectuates it, is no longer this silence, it is the world articulated, elevated to the Wesen, spoken” (VI, p. 179). The silence which follows upon language is not the silence which precedes it; it is a product of the work of reflection. Philosophy, therefore, is not useless, mere subjectivistic vanity, since, without it, one would not know what our inherence in the flesh of the world means.

Merleau-Ponty had no intention, therefore, of suppressing self-consciousness, reflection, science, and philosophy. He was no harbinger of the movement toward antiphilosophy. In a working note entitled “Science and philosophy,” in which he attacks modern scientism and the philosophy of Erlebnisse, the philosophy of mere consciousness, he also attacks, significantly enough, that “primitivism” so celebrated by postmodernistic opponents of the scientific ideal. He writes:

Because he had no desire to suppress scientific and philosophical reflection, he had, as well, absolutely no intention of suppressing what he had called “the thought of the subjective.” He had, in other words, no intention of rejecting that subjectivity which was the great discovery of modern philosophy. He was quite clear on this score. In a reference to Heidegger, who, as is well known, castigated “humanism” and wanted to get rid of subjectivity or self-consciousness since, as he thought, it conceals Being from us, Merleau-Ponty insisted, on the contrary: “the thought of the subjective [la pensée du subjectif] is one of these solids that philosophy will have to digest. Or let us say that once ‘infected’ by certain ways of thinking, philosophy can no longer annul them but must cure itself of them by inventing better ones. . . . There are some ideas which make it impossible for us to return to a time prior to their existence, even and especially if we have moved beyond them, and subjectivity is one of them” (S, p. 154). There is no absolutely no trace in Merleau-Ponty of any question as to “the death of man,” and, unlike a number of postmodernistic thinkers, he did not talk about ridding us of self-consciousness.

Indeed, he seems fully to have realized that the malaise of contemporary man is not something for which one can, or should, attempt to find a definitive “cure.” While it is both possible and desirable to undo certain distortions in our self-consciousness, to overcome certain forms of alienation and to render human relations freer and less opaque, it is neither possible nor desirable to overcome alienation as such. To be alienated, separated from oneself, to be, as it were, a stranger to oneself, to be at odds with, indeed, not only ourselves but with nature and and with others as well—this is the very definition of what it means to be human. It could perhaps be said with Hegel that a split consciousness may possibly be said to be an unhappy consciousness and man may be, as Nietzsche said, the “sick animal,” but because animals, while they might in one sense be said to be “conscious,” are nevertheless not self-conscious, i.e., conscious of themselves as something other than the world of which they are a part, are neither happy nor unhappy. They simply are—and are nothing other than what they are. Moreover, they are not conscious of a Welt but exist merely in an Umwelt. If humans did not experience unhappiness—which means, if they were not animated in their being by the realization that it is always possible for them to be more and to be other than whatever they simply happen to be and if they were not conscious of the fact that the world in which they exist could be other than it is—they would not be human. While utopianism is, on the whole, simply the manifestation of a deluded consciousness, the fact remains that only the human being constructs utopias.

Nor would humans be human were they not “rational, ” as the ancients fully realized when they defined the human animal as animal rationale, zoon logon ekon. Since reason is an essential characteristic of human being, it is something which, strictly speaking, has no “essence” but exists only in its interpretation. We all know how modern thought, faithful to its Platonic heritage, interpreted it, and we know now how arbitrary this interpretation was.

Reason, it was generally thought, is that component part of man’s being, that “faculty,” by means of which the solitary, private individual is able to intuit or otherwise discover the true, inner “natures” of things. Reason is that which guarantees that between words and things there exists a strict correlation. Such a view of reason is to be found still in Husserl,²⁴ and it is one which is part and parcel of what Merleau-Ponty called “la pensée objective,” i.e., objectivism, or again: “la pensée de l’absolu,” “la pensée du survol”—or what today we might refer to as the “metaphysics of presence.”

Throughout his entire career Merleau-Ponty waged a ceaseless and uncompromising battle with this form of thought. The question of reason or rationality is thus central to all of his work; what he was seeking to accomplish was, in effect, a refonte of our conception of what it means to be rational. It is, therefore, unfortunate that he never really dealt with the problem in a fully explicit and systematic way. There are, nevertheless, a few texts which reveal rather well the decidedly postmodern conception of reason he was striving to formulate.

In the following text, for instance, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “universality of knowledge” and in effect says that what makes a thought rational is that it can be universalized. It is clear, however, that he is effecting a decisive break with the traditional way of conceiving of the “principle of universalizability” (which itself is synonymous with “rationality”) when he writes:

When Merleau-Ponty says that it is in dialogue that the germ of universality is to be found, he is rejecting the modern rationalist idea that an idea is rational only if it can be generalized without limit and possesses a uniform (univocal) value in all situations, thereby making contact with some kind of objective absolute (the idea of universal commensuration, as Richard Rorty has more recently called it). For Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, human beings are rational, not because what they say and do has a transcendent guarantee in things, but simply because of the fact that, despite all the differences which set them apart, they can still, if they make the effort, communicate with and understand one another. Rationality has no other foundation than the uncertain communication among people whereby they succeed in working out mutual agreements:

On the same page Merleau-Ponty speaks in one and the same breath of “rationality or communication” and, as he goes on to say, the foundation of truth or rationality is this “progressive experience,” this “experience of agreement with myself and others.” The universality of thought, as he says elsewhere, is always “presumptive.” It is “never the universality of a pure concept which would be identical for every mind. It is rather the call which a situated thought addresses to other thoughts, equally situated, and each one responds to the call with its own resources.”²⁵

It could thus be said that for Merleau-Ponty rationality is a matter of “taking the risk of communicating” (PriP, p. 9). It has absolutely no guarantee in being and depends solely on the good will of men. Reason is a power not of discovering the “truth” but of “going further” in what is called the search for truth, which means: the search for mutual agreement and understanding. It is what maintains that great, always interrupted and always rebegun conversation that we call Culture. It is also what thereby makes it be that there is “a history of humanity or, more simply, a humanity. In other words, granting all the periods of stagnation and retreat, human relations are able to grow, to change their avatars into lessons, to pick out the truth of their past in the present, to eliminate certain mysteries which render them opaque and thereby make themselves more transparent” (PriP, p. 9). For Merleau-Ponty, “Our life is essentially universal,” although he rightly insists that “this methodological rationalism is not to be confused with a dogmatic rationalism which eliminates historical contingency in advance by supposing a ‘World Spirit’ (Hegel) behind the course of events” (PriP, p. 10).

What is interesting from our present-day point of view is that this properly postmodern conception of reason has nothing postmodernistic about it, by which I mean that it in no way involves a rejection of reason or a disavowal of the overriding importance that the Western tradition has always placed on reason. Merleau-Ponty never suggested that “reason” is nothing more than the idea-product of one particular historical tradition, merely a cultural bias of Western man. He was most definitely not opposed to the traditional and, in particular, Enlightenment stress on rationality. He wanted neither to reject rationality nor, like Heidegger, to transcend it, as the latter said in his Zur Seinsfrage, toward a “Λόγος, whose essence logic and dialectics, which stem from metaphysics, are never able to experience.” Certainly, the effect of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical endeavors was to subvert the traditional modern conception of reason described above. But this subversion is to be understood not as an abandonment of reason or rationality but as an attempt to work out a new conception of reason, to arrive at “an enlarged reason.”

By “rationality” Merleau-Ponty understood basically what might be called “reasonableness”: the attempt to reach uncoerced agreement with others by means of unrestricted dialogue. This is a conception of reason that, interestingly enough, is remarkably akin to the conception of reason that a thinker such as Jürgen Habermas has in recent years diligently labored to articulate and which he refers to as “communicative rationality.” It is a properly hermeneutical conception of reason.

In his relentless struggle to overcome modernism, Merleau-Ponty remains for us, today still, a source of continuing inspiration. He has indeed become what he himself would have called a “classic.”²⁶

In the first part of this paper, I mentioned that in political matters postmodernistic thought readily allies itself with radicalism or revolutionism and that it is characterized by antinomianism and anti-institutionalism, by a belief in utopia and anarchy. The position that the later Merleau-Ponty came to adopt in political matters should serve to confirm the fact that—while he is indeed postmodern—he is not to be counted among the ranks of the postmodernistic thinkers. For at the end of his life, more so than ever before, he absolutely did not subscribe to utopianism and had abandoned whatever belief he might have had in the possibility of some kind of definitive resolution of the differences and conflicts that separate people, and this, of course, is why he clearly took up his distance from Marxism.

In The Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty decisively rejected revolutionary ideology and affirmed his solidarity with the liberal tradition of the West. In this work he said that “the revolution which would recreate history is infinitely distant,”²⁷ and he characterized as “fictions” the idea of proletarian power, direct democracy, and the withering away of the State (AD, p. 222).

Far from being anti-institutionalist (“antiestablishment”), Merleau-Ponty, exactly like Camus before him, insisted that without liberal institutions there can be no real freedom, and that without freedom, no acceptable solution to the human and social problem. If the problems which disturb us today have a solution, he said, “it is a liberal one” (S, p. 348). The important thing in his eyes was that we should discover “institutions which implant this practice of freedom in our customs” (S, p. 349). For, as he said, “ . . . freedom requires something substantial; it requires a State, which bears it and which it gives life to” (S, p. 349). As is clear from the text, when Merleau-Ponty speaks of “institutions” he means liberal institutions. In his political thought Merleau-Ponty in the end adhered steadfastly to the essentials of the traditional liberalism of our Western democracies, based as it is on the idea of the autonomous and responsible Individual, the importance of limits and forms (the prime targets of antinomian revolutionism and of utopian believers in direct democracy). His hope, as he expressed it in the very last lines of the The Adventures of the Dialectic, was to “inspire a few—or many—to bear their freedom, not to exchange it at a loss; for it is not only their own thing, their secret, their pleasure, their salvation—it involves everyone else” (AD, p. 233).

A rejection of Utopia of this sort amounts to a reaffirmation of history, that same history that postmodernistic writers, advocates of revolutionism and the psychoanalysis of coincidence or of polymorphous perversity, would like to do away with. It was no praise of primitivism or of the “natural” that Merleau-Ponty made when, having recently returned from a stay in Madagascar in 1957, he responded to the questions put to him by a journalist. At the end of the interview, the journalist said to him: “You seem to believe that our values, the values of Western civilizations, are superior to those of the underdeveloped countries.” Merleau-Ponty replied with the following remarks, which merit being quoted at length, since they are largely ignored today, a result no doubt of the postmodernistic, guilt-ridden fascination with the “Third World”:

Merleau-Ponty most assuredly did not believe that Western civilization and its traditional values was something that had to be deconstructed. He adhered instead to the spirit of enlightened, modern, critical liberalism. We are all underway [embarqués] together and have no other option than to continue with the game [partie], improving on it wherever possible. For the name of the game is that without which the human being would not be human: Liberty.

4

To affirm history in this way amounts to a recognition that there is no definitive solution to human problems. It amounts therefore to a rejection of the utopian belief in some kind of trans- or metahistorical salvation, the desire, avowed or unavowed, on the part of much of postmodernity for a saving god, for the overcoming of all alienation. The conclusion of a reflection on history, Merleau-Ponty said, “does not lie in rebellion, but in unremitting virtù.” (S, p. 35). The conclusion is a prudent and reasonable belief in the possibility of a certain progress. The conclusion, as he stated in a superb text which we have already had the occasion to quote, is to believe that, “granting all the periods of stagnation and retreat, human relations are able to grow, to change their avatars into lessons, to pick out the truth of their past in the present, to eliminate certain mysteries which render them opaque and thereby make themselves more transparent” (S, p. 9).

If it is likewise possible to speak of progress in philosophy, it is not in the sense in which philosophy might one day discover the answers to the questions it raised at its beginning, such that it could, as Hegel said, “ihren Nahmen der Liebe zum Wissen ablegen zu können und wirkliches Wissen zu seyn”²⁸ If there is any progress in philosophy, it is rather in the sense that it sometimes succeeds in better formulating its questions, in better understanding the real meaning of its questions, and in eliminating a certain number of false questions, such that it is no longer obliged to continue repeating them or dealing with them in the way in which it did in the past. The progress of philosophy consists, precisely, as Merleau-Ponty would say, in occasionally being able to turn its avatars into lessons.

This applies in particular to the very old problem of the union of body and mind. Modern philosophy’s failure to solve this problem is such as to teach us that it was a false problem from the start or, at least, a problem which was posed in the wrong way. What we have learned from the failure of modern philosophy is that it was a mistake even to speak in terms of mind or soul and body, as if these were two things whose existence was self-evident. As a matter of fact, as we know now, these notions correspond to nothing absolute or self-evident, certainly to nothing in our actual experience—Husserl already taught us as much.

Can one, however, say the same for the modern notions of subjectivity and consciousness? Are these nothing more than purely arbitrary inventions of the modern epistemē which today conceal Being from us and are therefore to be deconstructed? Is there no truth in these notions of the past which cannot be gathered up in the present? Are they but names for problems that need to be not so much taken up in an Aufhebung as deconstructed in a Niediergang?

If the latter were the case and if the great discoveries of modern philosophy—subjectivity, consciousness—were, like Nietzsche’s “last man,” abandoned and left behind, philosophy would have made so much “progress” that it would actually have ceased to exist. The result would be the deconstruction of philosophy itself. And, indeed, we hear every day more and more references to the “end of philosophy.”

That philosophy, like “man” himself, finds itself today in a state of crisis is not to be doubted. Indeed, already in 1959 Merleau-Ponty wrote in the first of his working notes included in The Visible and the Invisible: “Our state of non-philosophy—Never has the crisis been so radical—” “End of philosophy or rebirth?” he asked. The Visible and the Invisible was itself the response to his conclusion that what is needed is “a return to ontology” (VI p. 165).²⁹

The dissolution of subjectivity and the “death of man” would spell the end of philosophy, for, ever since Socrates, the chief object of philosophy has been man himself. “The philosopher,” Merleau-Ponty said, “is the man who wakes up and speaks.”³⁰ Philosophy is the reflective interrogation that that man who has woken up to the fact of his existence pursues. Philosophy springs up at that moment when a subject becomes conscious of himself as a subject and discovers in front of him as his counterpart (Gegen-stand) an opaque world which, like a clouded mirror, sends back to him a confused reflection which is the enigma of his own existence. We ourselves are, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, “one sole continued question, a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions” (VI, p. 103).

This last remark of Merleau-Ponty’s points to a most interesting characteristic of human understanding. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of “a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings on the constellations of the world, and of taking the bearings of the things on our dimensions, ” what he is describing is nothing other than metaphor. For the essence of the metaphorical process is that it enables us to understand one thing better by likening it to something it is not. As Bruno Snell pointed out in his now classic study, The Discovery of the Mind, one object is capable of casting fresh light upon another in the form of a metaphor only because we read into the object the very qualities which it in turn illustrates. Snell observed how it is a peculiar characteristic of all Homeric similes and, indeed, of all genuine metaphors that they illuminate human behavior only by referring to something else, such as a boulder in the pounding surf, which is in turn explained by analogy with human behavior. It is only in this way, by listening to an echo of ourselves in the world, that we are able to know ourselves.³¹

As Snell’s work itself suggests, what we have learned to call the “self” may itself be the product of a certain creative, metaphorical use of language. The unconscious may, as Lacan insists, be structured like a language; consciousness, in any event, is language (it is, as everyone will admit, inconceivable apart from language, which amounts, once more, pragmatically speaking, to saying that it is language). Thus, as something linguistic in its very essence, the “self” is, as well, something whose existence can be assigned historical dates. As Merleau-Ponty himself remarked: “Man is a historical idea and not a natural species” (PhP, p. 170).

Since, in the realm of human understanding, that which understands and that which is understood are inseparable, are in fact one and the same, it makes perfectly good sense to say that the “self” which we interrogate in order better to understand it is itself a product of this interrogation, of what Merleau-Ponty referred to as “the occult traffic of metaphor.” As he himself observed: “ . . . there is no experience without speech, as the purely lived-through has no part in the discursive life of man” (PhP, p. 337). And again: “ . . . speech itself brings about that concordance between me and myself, and between myself and others, on which an attempt is made to base thought” (PhP, p. 392).

Does this mean that the “self” is a mere “fiction,” having no genuine ontological reality or significance, the illusion of a particular culture or epistemē? This is no doubt what a number of postmodernistic writers would conclude. And yet such a conclusion is not warranted. In fact, a relativistic, nihilistic conclusion of such a sort seems only to be the reverse, indeed the perverse counterpart, of modern objectivism. If “self-consciousness”—thus the very notion of the self—has any meaning, it is the reflective presence of the self to itself. The notion of absolute presence may be, as Derrida has insinuated, meaningless, but that of presence itself is not—so long as we recognize that the presence of the self to itself is a mediated presence, mediated by language, precisely. As Merleau-Ponty remarked: “it is true that the subject as an absolute presence to itself is something we cannot circumvent. . . . It is also true that it provides itself with symbols of itself in both succession and multiplicity, and that these symbols are it, since without them it would, like an inarticulate cry, fail to achieve self-consciousness” (PhP, pp. 426-27). Speaking of MerleauPonty, Cornelius Castoriadis says that the subject is “a being who can become what he will have been only in speaking of it.”³²

That all genuine understanding is linguistic through and through, as Merleau-Ponty always insisted, and is, moreover, the consequence of a certain creative, metaphorical use of language does not, of itself, mean that all understanding is illusory. Rather, if it is indeed the case that, as post—Merleau-Pontyian, hermeneutical phenomenology has taught us, to understand something is not to form a representation of it but creatively to transform it, this should serve to indicate that we need to conceive of human understanding—of that which we ourselves are—in terms which effect a decisive break with modern objectivism. It does not seem that many postmoder nistic thinkers have yet made such a break.

When all is said and done, what, really, is man in nature, as Pascal asked? What precisely is that being which, as he observed, is everything in regard to nothing, a nothing in regard to the all, a mean between everything and nothing? What is it to be an object which is at the same time a subject, a subject which is simultaneously an object, a thing visible which is also seeing (un visible qui est aussi voyant), a seer (voyant) which is also visible, neither a mere part of the (in itself) world nor a pure (for itself) gaze on the world, but the two at once, since it could not see were it not also visible? What is that strange intertwining (entrelas) or chiasm between the sensing (le sentant) and the sensible in the flesh of the world that is the human individual? As Merleau-Ponty said of the perceiving subject whose body is a spontaneous power of expression: “There is no doubt that this marvel, whose strangeness the word man should not hide from us, is a very great one” (S, p. 66).

All of the questions of science or of mere curiosity are internally animated, Merleau-Ponty says, by “the fundamental interrogation which appears naked in philosophy” (VI, p. 103). Man is for himself a question and “Who am I?”—“What is man’s place in nature?”—is the central question of philosophy. Philosophy is the answer, sometimes triumphant and confident, sometimes hesitant and cautious, that throughout the ages man has formulated in response to the clear consciousness he has of his obscure existence. The question that, at bottom, the individual raises—above all in exceptional moments of his life, that the sick person raises (but in a sense is not man himself, as we have seen Nietzsche say, the sick animal?)—is, as Merleau-Ponty formulated it: “ . . . why am I myself? How old am I really? Am I really alone in being me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?” “Every question,” he said, “even that of simple cognition is part of the central question that is ourselves. . . . ” (VI, p. 104). The question of personal identity is indeed the central question of philosophy.

If Merleau-Ponty contributed something to the thought of our epoch and made some contribution to the progress of philosophy, it is, I suggest, in regard to this question, this problem of personal identity. To be sure, he did not bequeath us a solution to the problem of subjectivity and the relation between the psychic and the corporeal, but at least he did not simply skirt the issue by boldly proclaiming the dissolution of all dualities. The problem of subjectivity may be a kind of Gordian knot, but if it can be “solved” at all, it is only by a painstaking attempt to unravel it; it cannot simply be cut in one fell swoop, as many a postmodernistic pseudo-Alexander might attempt. This is something that Merleau-Ponty realized full well. The important thing for him was not to dissolve subjectivity but to conceive of it afresh, in a less metaphysical way than philosophy had done in the past. If this concern on his part for “man” could be labeled “humanistic,” then Merleau-Ponty was undeniably a “humanist.” Had he not died such an untimely death, there is every likelihood that in this postmodern era that is dawning he would have been a staunch anti-antihumanist.

In the last analysis, what Merleau-Ponty succeeded perhaps in doing is to have turned the failure of the modern problem of the union of body and mind into a lesson. Husserl had already exposed the artificiality of conceiving of the relation between the psychic and the corporeal as a relation between two worlds, but Merleau-Ponty, who always attempted to remain faithful to Husserl, even when he subjected Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness to a pitiless critique, contributed to the advancement of phenomenology by frankly rejecting all “egology” and the Husserlian notion of a “sphere of ownness.” What he did thereby was to rid us of all the bric-a-brac, as he put it, of psychological or even transcendental reflection: the states of consciousness, acts of consciousness, noeses, noemas, images, hyletic data, and all those other cherished relics of the metaphysics of presence with which even Husserl had attempted to construct—or as he would have said, constitute—the world.

By attempting not to deconstruct the subject but to eliminate a certain way of formulating the problem of personal identity or subjectivity whose effect has been to make us obscure to ourselves, Merleau-Ponty has enabled us to raise anew the question of subjectivity in a way which might enable us to preserve, in a less speculative and metaphysical understanding, the truth of our past.

Above all, Merleau-Ponty has helped us to liberate ourselves from the idea that philosophy, conceived of as a reflection on subjectivity, can or should compete with the physical sciences. He contributed in a direct way to the demise of the modern, metaphysical idea that philosophy must, or even can, be a science, the superscience that Husserl continually sought—which only serves to show that despite the philosophical “radicalism” he espoused, Husserl remained to the bitter end a prisoner of modern rationalism, of metaphysics.³³ If the vocation of philosophical reflection is to become a rigorous science, then, in Husserl’s own words, the dream has been dreamed out and is indeed over, and philosophy has reached its end. However, there is no reason why the abandonment of philosophy conceived of as rigorous science should spell the end of philosophy conceived of as a form of rigorous and methodical interrogation—and it is indeed this historical vocation of philosophy that MerleauPonty reclaimed and defended. He wanted not to deconstruct philosophy but to lead it back to “its vital sources” (TFL, p. 100). As he said toward the end of his life, in pursuing his own archaeological endeavors: “It is the aim of an inquiry such as we have pursued here on the ontology of Nature to sustain through contact with beings and the exploration of the regions of Being the same attention to the fundamental that remains the privilege and the task of philosophy” (TFL, p. 112).

In battling mercilessly with the conceptual and metaphysical avatars of our past, Merleau-Ponty may well have contributed to our being in a better position in this new postmodern period to tame the sphinx and to respond, with less indirection and deviousness than philosophy traditionally has done, to the enigma she confronts us with, which is that of our own being in the world.