Glen Mazis

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological articulation of embodiment’s central place in knowing, being-in-the-world and expression resulted in one of the first posthumanist philosophies. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology led him away from several of the Enlightenment’s human-centered tenets to an ontology that altered the status of humans to no longer holding a place of superiority to other beings of the natural world or of being the exclusive communicator to other beings, symbol makers or apprehender of the world’s sense. The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s thought progressed from an emphasis on the body-self as located in a felt dialogue with all surrounding beings within its perceptual perspective as human’s primary access to reality towards an ever widening sense that each moment of perception is a fission into the depths of the world in which humans are decentered into a matrix of experiential fields that was a collaboration of myriad beings. The ontology that he arrived at of “the flesh of the world” means that perception is inseparable from the various crisscrossing modes of the memorial, imaginal, kinetic, intuitive, proprioceptive, and intellectual in a dynamic, ever-transformative coproduction with interrelated beings. This dialogue with the world is prereflective and renders rationality as only possible given a more primordial apprehension of the world shared with many forms of animality. This essay shows how Merleau-Ponty’s ideas displace the human from the center of Being to being a part of a matrix of sense that is posthuman. Merleau-Ponty may have offered the most compelling form of posthumanism in that it is an articulation of an epistemology and ontology of embodiment which re-envisions humanity’s capacities as founded through its animal body and places humans within the depths of the natural world and not as its center.

Earthbodies describes how our bodies are open circuits to a sensual magic and planetary care that when closed off leads to disastrous detours, such as illness, "dis-ease," and toxicity. In doing so, it answers a variety of questions. Can we understand our bodies without understanding how they are part of a rhythmic flow with the rest of the planet? How can we decide how to treat the animals around us when we fail to realize the nature of our kinship with them? Without hearing the voices of the earth, rocks, and ocean waves, how can we dialogue with the planet or understand ourselves? Why are we so fascinated with film versions of nightmarish ghouls and vampires? How can celebrities impact more on our lives than our own families? What kind of human connection can we expect from the Internet? How is it that some of our adolescent boys shoot down their schoolmates? Despite our apparent cynicism, is our culture overly sentimental? What kind of ethics would help us find a moral way to achieve an inclusive global community and cherish the environment?

The point of this Special Issue of _Philosophies_ and of this essay is to look deeply into Merleau-Ponty’s _Phenomenology of Perception_, published in 1945, and to “read backwards” from the later works (whether published, transcripts of the later lectures, or the unpublished notes) in order to find the inchoate ideas that were already present in the _Phenomenology_ that was to be developed into the series of ideas of the later ontology of the flesh of the world. The presence of these inchoate ideas is subtle and not as clearly developed as in the later works, but now we can see them more clearly. The dispersed, decentered, and intermittent sense of self, the circulation of sense into the depth of the world, the radical temporality of institution, the latency of sense, the imaginal lining of all perception and its role in Being, the invisibility of the visible and the poetic flesh ontology will be touched upon in this essay as all of them are developments of the initial move in the _Phenomenology_ to make perception the access to the real. This essay will go further than the many recent interpretations that look at some of these developing ideas to articulate that this is a _necessary trajectory_ from Merleau-Ponty’s starting point in the Phenomenology of Perception and that all these phenomena to which these ideas point _can only come forward in their interrelated interwovenness_. This would mean that all these strands are integral to the chiasmatic nature of the flesh of the world.

Petri Berndtson’s Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing points to the largely unexplored dimension of our being breathing beings. Berndtson draws upon the ontology of the flesh, as well as several comments of Merleau-Ponty about breathing and Being. The primordial perceptual faith in the being of the world as a field of all fields (the “barbaric conviction”) is seen as a primordial sense of breathing in the world (“respiratory faith”). Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Claudel’s call to listen to the ear of Sigé, the Abyss, Berndtson relates silence in the encounter with Being to an encounter with silence of breath and its abyssal or chasmological (“yawning”) quality. He asserts that this level of breathing is a level of being-in-the-world deeper than the primacy of perception. At this point, the review questions the author’s assertion that this dimension is more primordial than perception, that Merleau-Ponty has a positivistic framing of perception, the author’s literal sense of silence and the lack of appreciation of the power of the poetic in flesh ontology, the role of reversibility and the import of the invisible of the visible. Rather than the ontological primacy of breath, the review suggests that breathing is a way of taking in the world and being open to an aerial dimension of inchoate sense that is equiprimordial with the other avenues of perceiving the world.

This essay seeks to supplement Arnie Naess’s avowed project of replacing the often cited model of “humans and environment,” which retains a dualistic and anthropocentric connotation, with the articulation of a “relational total-field image” of human being’s insertion in the planetary field of energy and becoming. In response to the interview “Here I Stand” in which Naess rejects Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, this essay details the ways in which Merleau-Ponty provides the kind of ontology that Naess requires for his deep ecology. Naess’s use of Hindu terms and metaphysics is shown to be at odds with his descriptions of human’s relations with the world. Much of the essay critiques as well Naess’s rejection of poetic language as inadequate to the philosophical task of articulating the human-world intertwining. Using Merleau-Ponty’s work, the need for the poetic as uniquely articulating “the flesh of the world” and “reversibility” is described, hopefully showing that deep ecology’s goal of making people feel their insertion in the world’s field of becoming can only occur through inaugurating poetic uses of language.

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas.

The phenomenology of home requires a differing notion of embodiment, perception, space/time, imagination, and animality. Home is in lived space, a deep psychic structure, and a dialogue with built structures and the natural world. Home requires cultivation that can increase our sense of belonging, shelter, direction and purpose. Home shows us trajectories of the back and forth dialogue with the inanimate world, deep past, ancestors, qualities of the things, animals and the natural world. Home is key to dwelling in space in a centered way and appropriating the deep past. The meaning of home can lead to social efforts at providing homes and deepening ecological and historical awareness.

ABSTRACT Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual ontologies” lead to other notions of self, spirituality, and faith, bringing out the distinctive and comparable religious paths of Buddhism and embodied phenomenology entered by deepening the prereflective openness to the world’s “voices of silence.” Loughnane’s study highlights how Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s turn towards a series of artists in their respective cultural contexts brings out the particular groundedness in the materiality of the beings of the world in this “mutual interexpressivity” or “reversibility.” Faith is revisioned as the dropping of egoistic control to allow perception to be carried into the depths of the world of spiritual hearkening.

Merleau-Ponty characterizes the poetic or literary use of language as bringing forth of sense as if it is a being that is an interlocutor with its readers. Sense will be explored as interwoven with a deeper imagination that works within the temporality of institution to become more fully manifest. Throughout the essay will be seen the overlap with Claudel’s ontology as expressed in L’Art poetique and Claudel’s approach to language. Why Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of embodiment and perception must culminate in the poetic expression of the flesh ontology will be seen in: 1) how the phenomenology of sense leads to the flesh ontology as closely tied to the literary dimension of language, 2) that the analysis of sense leads to the vital importance of the physiognomic or vertical imagination as opening the latent depths of perception by its expression within poetic language, and also tracing the link between metaphor and the flesh ontology, and that 3) the expression of the latent sense of perception as the interplay of lateral relations as access to Being is the reversibility of the flesh, also articulated by Claudel as co-naissance, and calls for an “interrogative knowing,” a “question-savior.” The articulation of the texture of Being is an overlapping endeavor with Claudel as the poetic articulation of a stream of sense below our reflective life.Merleau-Ponty caractérise l’usage poétique ou littéraire du langage, en tant que producteur de sens, comme s’il s’agissait d’un être qui est un interlocuteur pour ses lecteurs. Le sens sera exploré comme entrelacé à une imagination plus profonde qui opère dans la temporalité de l’institution pour devenir pleinement manifeste. Dans cet article nous étudierons l’empiètement avec l’ontologie de Claudel telle qu’elle est exprimée dans l’Art poétique et avec l’approche de Claudel au langage. Les raisons pour lesquelles l’articulation merleau-pontienne de l’incorporation et de la perception doit aboutir à l’expression poétique de l’ontologie de la chair seront alors recherchées : 1) dans la manière dont la phénoménologie du sens conduit à une ontologie de la chair si étroitement liée à la dimension littéraire du langage ; 2) dans le fait que l’analyse du sens conduit à l’importance vitale d’une imagination physionomique ou verticale qui ouvrirait les profondeurs latentes de la perception par son expression dans le langage poétique, et aussi en traçant le lien entre la métaphore et l’ontologie de la chair, et 3) dans le fait que l’expression du sens latent de la perception, tout comme l’interaction des relations latérales et comme l’accès à l’Être, consiste dans la réversibilité de la chair, aussi décrite par Claudel comme co-naissance, et qui invite à une « connaissance interrogative », à une « question-savoir ». Ainsi, la tentative d’articuler la texture de l’Être s’entrecroise avec les réflexions de Claudel, comme l’articulation poétique d’un flux de sens au-dessous de nos vies réflexives.Merleau-Ponty caratterizza la poetica o l’uso letterario del linguaggio come portatore di senso, come se si trattasse di un essere che interloquisce con i suoi lettori. Il senso verrà esplorato come intrecciato con un’immaginazione più profonda che opera nella temporalità dell’istituzione per diventare pienamente manifesta. In questo articolo si esaminerà la sovrapposizione tra l’ontologia di Claudel, espressa nell’Arte poetica, e il suo approccio al linguaggio. Al fine di evidenziare i motivi che portano l’articolazione merleau-pontiana dell’essere incarnato e della percezione a culminare nell’espressione poetica dell’ontologia della carne si vedrà: 1) come la fenomenologia del senso conduca all’ontologia della carne in quanto strettamente legata alla dimensione letteraria del linguaggio ; 2) che le analisi del senso conducono all’importanza vitale della fisiognomica o dell’immaginazione verticale in quanto schiudenti le profondità nascoste della percezione, attraverso la sua espressione all’interno del linguaggio poetico e rintracciando, altresì, il legame tra la metafora e l’ontologia della carne; 3) che l’espressione del senso latente della percezione, sia come intreccio di relazioni laterali sia come accesso all’Essere, è la reversibilità della carne, che Claudel articola attraverso la nozione di co-naissance, ed esige un “sapere interrogativo”, un “sapere domandante”. Così il tentativo di articolare la trama dell’Essere si sovrappone all’articolazione poetica in Claudel di un flusso di senso che sottende la nostra vita riflessiva.

Mauro Carbone’s The Flesh of Imagesexplores the status of images as the precession of the invisible and the visible in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “sensible ideas” ideas, but is at the same time a concise, original, and illuminating exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the flesh and his later philosophy, as well as speculating on an important historical shift in the sense of Being. Carbone articulates the flesh as the traversal, by Visibility, of the seer as Being, where the invisible is shown forth indirectly by the visible and is ultimately the activity of visible Being that manifests a sort of desire to see itself through enveloping the visible beings that are seers. Carbone utilizes the notion of “voyance” as a seeing further into what had not been present before as the opening of a latency that is carried forth as the invisible’s pregnancy within the visible that ultimately brings into undecidability the primacy of perception and that of imagination,as well as being a retrograde movement within time that allows access to a mythical time and renders a differing, an immemorial time that has never been—the time in which Proust’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “sensible ideas” live. Carbone details Merleau-Ponty’s“ontological rehabilitation of the surface” in which the surface like the film screen is no longer a veil as constituting an obstacle, but rather is the surface of manifestation of Being, expressing the modern mutation in the relation to Being.Dans The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone explore le statut des images en tant que précession du visible et de l’invisible à partir de la notion d’« idées sensibles », mais il offre en même temps une étude à la fois synthétique, originale et éclairante du sens de la chair et de la pensée du dernier Merleau-Ponty, ainsi qu’une réflexion théorique sur un tournant historique fondamental dans le sens de l’Être. Carbone articule une pensée de la chair comme ce qui est transversal – par la Visibilité – au voyant en tant qu’Être, où l’invisible se donne à voir de manière indirecte à même le visible et est ultimement l’activité de l’Être visible qui vient manifester une sorte de désir de se voir par le fait même d’envelopper les êtres visibles qui sont voyants. Carbone se sert ainsi de la notion de « voyance » en tant que voir plus ou plus loin ce qui ne s’est pas encore présentifié comme l’ouverture d’une latence qui est portée en tant que prégnance invisible au sein du visible, ce qui fait que le primat entre perception et imaginaire devient indécidable, se construisant comme un mouvement temporel rétrograde, qui donne accès à un temps mythique et réalise un temps différé et immémorial qui n’a jamais été présent – le temps des idées sensibles de Proust et de Merleau-Ponty. Carbone expose la « réhabilitation ontologique de la surface » opérée par Merleau-Ponty en ce que la surface de l’écran cinématographique ne fonctionne plus comme un voile, c’est-à-dire ne constitue plus un obstacle, mais est plutôt la surface sur laquelle l’Être se manifeste, en exprimant la mutation contemporaine de notre relation à l’Être. The Flesh of Images di Mauro Carbone esplora lo statuto delle immagini come precessione di visibile e invisibile, secondo la nozione merleau-pontiana di “idee sensibili”, ma allo stesso tempo costituisce un’indagine concisa, originale e illuminante del concetto di carne e del pensiero dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty. Il volume riflette inoltre su un importante slittamento storico nella concezione dell’Essere. Carbone articola il concetto di carne come ciò che è trasversale, attraverso la Visibilità, al vedente in quanto Essere, in cui l’invisibile appare indirettamente attraverso il visibile e in cui, in ultima analisi, è l’attività dell’Essere visibile che manifesta una sorta di desiderio di vedere se stesso rivestendo quegli esseri visibili che sono i vedenti. Carbone impiega la nozione di “voyance” per indicare un vedere oltre che coglie ciò che non si è ancora reso presente. Si tratta dell’apertura di una latenza che emerge come pregnanza dell’invisibile all’interno del visibile. Tale dinamica conduce a un’indecidibilità del primato della percezione e dell’immaginazione, costituendo al contempo un movimento temporale retrogrado che permette di accedere a un tempo mitico e che realizza un tempo differito e immemoriale che non è mai stato presente – il tempo delle “idee sensibili” di Proust e di Merleau-Ponty. Carbone espone la “riabilitazione ontologica della superficie” condotta da Merleau-Ponty, secondo cui la superficie dello schermo cinematografico non è più un velo che ostacola, ma piuttosto una superficie su cui l’Essere si manifesta, che esprime la trasformazione contemporanea della nostra relazione all’Essere.

This essay discusses how our traditional ethics may harbor assumptions that place humans in a position in which overt violence towards animals is an almost inevitable outcome since their formulation involves violence towards ourselves and our animal fellows in our cutting our embodied ties with them. The essay explores Derrida’s Animal that Therefore, I Am, in its detailing of the two discourses within European intellectual history of those who felt they were “above” animals and were not addressed by them versus those who could acknowledge that animals do address us. Derrida also cites the “lyconomy” of this tradition that brandishes the image of the “wolf” within us as a streak of rapacious violence that we can only fight with violence, thus projecting onto the wolf a false identity to justify our own demons of violence. Merleau-Ponty’s notions of embodiment further this idea that we are enmeshed with animals in a basic affective, perceptual and visceral way and that to ignore this interweaving of lives is to do violence to ourselves as well as violence towards them. I then cite ethologists for evidence that wolves are one of the most social, non-violent animals on the planet and detail how two million were slaughtered in the name of eradicating an “evil” being. Such behavior on our part I call “speciocide,” as heinous as genocide. Finally, phenomenology, as one particular philosophical approach, may have a critical edge in helping us to see our animal fellows more clearly, to understand them better, and discern our truer moral obligations to them