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Book : the World of perception

We are continually
obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we
have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal
what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Pg. 87
ROUTLEGE
Merleau Ponty’s view of our place in nature and the
ontology of body and world. For by the late 1950s he was appar
ently dissatisfied with what he had come to regard as the still too
dualistic framework of Phenomenology of Perception. In its place he now
insisted more emphatically that body and world must be seen as
overlapping sinews in a common “flesh” (chair), related not as situation and reaction (let alone stimulus
and response), but as a
kind of “chiasm,” an “interweaving” or “interlacing” (entrelacs) of
threads in a single fabric. Pg. 80
Perception, I said, is the ground of both the
subjectivity and the objectivity of experience, of its inner feel and
its intentional grip on the world. Furthermore, perception is not a
mental phenomenon, if by “mental” we mean something in contrast
to material or physical. Rather, perception is a bodily phenomenon,
which is to say that we experience our own sensory states not as
mere states of mind, but as states of our bodies. PG 80
The structure of perception, we might say, just is the
structure of the body. As Merleau Ponty says, my body “is my point
of view on the world” pg. 81
As Merleau Ponty says, “I can understand
the function of the living body only by enacting it myself, and
insofar as I am a body that rises toward the world” (PP 90/75/87).
We must return to our pretheoretical understanding of the body
not as an object or a machine, but as our embeddedness in and
direction toward the world. Pg. 93
The body schema thus constitutes our precognitive familiarity impt.
with ourselves and the world we inhabit: “I am aware of my body
via the world,” Merleau Ponty says, just as “I am aware of the worldthrough the medium of my body” pg.
106
The body is not an
object of which I have an internal image or internal representation,
rather “it is polarized by its tasks, it exists toward them, it gathers
itself up to reach its goal, and ‘body schema’ is in the end a way of
expressing that my body is in the world” pg 107
Again, Merleau Ponty’s point is not
that movement and perception are very closely linked causally, but
that they are two sides of the same coin. So too, my body and the
world itself are essentially intermingled: this body is my body only
because I find myself oriented in an environment, just as the world
confronts me only relative to the hinge or “pivot” that is my body pg. 109 impt.

Although chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible is called “The

Intertwining—The Chiasm,” it is in the working notes at the end
of the volume that we find Merleau Ponty taking full advantage of
those terms as he presumably would have had he lived to finish the
book. The metaphor is clear enough: a chiasm or chiasma is an x shape
or crisscross pattern; in grammar, a chiasmus is an inversion of par
allel phrases, such as When the going gets tough, the tough get going, or
Working hard or hardly working? And so it is, Merleau Ponty believes,
with body and world: they are not two distinct things, but sinews
of a common flesh, threads in the same fabric, related to one
another not as situation and reaction (not to mention stimulus and
response), but as a single woven texture, like the overlapping and
interlocking lizards and birds in an Escher drawing. Pg. 124

Unlike his concept of the flesh, however, which it is precisely

meant to incorporate and contain, the notion of intertwining or
chiasm is nothing new in Merleau Ponty’s later thought, but an
elaboration of an idea that already figured prominently in Phenom
enology of Perception. For example, he refers to
peculiar relations woven [se tissent] between the parts of the
landscape, or between it and me as incarnate subject … Sense
experience is that vital communication with the world that
renders it present to us as the familiar setting of our life. It is to it
that the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their
thickness. It is the intentional fabric [tissu] that the exercise of
knowledge will try to pull apart. Pg. 125

Finally, he writes of our primitive experience of others, “Inasmuch

as I have been born and have a body and a natural world, I can find
in that world other comportments with which my own are inter
woven [s’entrelace]” (PP 410/357/416), just as “nature penetrates to
the center of my life and is interwoven [s’entrelace] with it”
So too, strictly conditioned impulses and spontaneous
improvisations are always intertwined, so that the distinction
between nature and nurture proves to be a false dichotomy. Gesell’s
“principle of reciprocal intertwining,” “weaving,” and “meeting of
threads” (N 198/149) clearly inspired Merleau Ponty’s elaboration
of the concept of chiasm.
It was always Merleau Ponty’s view that we are, as it were, woven
corporeally both into the material world we perceive and into the pg. 126
My body is the texture common
to all objects”pg. 127
: “Conscious
ness of the world is not based on self consciousness; rather, they are
strictly contemporary: there is a world for me because I am not
ignorant of myself; I am not concealed from myself because I have
a world” pg. 127