two observers traveling over vast astronomical distances at different
speeds – which is a precondition of concluding that time flows at a
different rate for them – is dismissed as “merely psychological”, the
approximation of the entire cosmos qua Object is being dwarfed by a gigantic observer that stands over it as if it were a scale model.22
Losing sight of “that upon which we have an openness” only “that upon which we can operate” is taken to be Real.23 Merleau-Ponty goes on to refer to the “sovereign gaze” that seems to find “the things each in its own time, in its own place, as absolute individuals in a unique local and temporal disposition” as that of a giant or titan that he cal s the kosmotheoros or cosmic theoretical observer.24
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty claims to be
making his way toward “the problem of the world.”25 He elaborates on this by restating it as an attempt to understand how what is not
nature is a “world,” and how a visible and an invisible world can be
formed as well as what the relationship between them may be.26 It is
a question of how we have an openness to the world that does not
preclude occultation, of how occultation can take place amidst the
20 Ibid., 16.
21 Ibid., 17.
22 Ibid., 18.
23 Ibid., 18.
24 Ibid., 113.
25 Ibid., 6.
26 Ibid., 27.
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il umination of the world as such.27 Upon reflection, the perception of things and the phantasms of imagination can be understood as
two modes of “the ideality of the world.”28 A reflection or meditation that understands the “world” as an ideality “liberates us from the
false problems posed by bastard and unthinkable experiences” in
accounting for these phantoms as apparitions of what objectifying
thought marginal y excludes; that which is so excluded haunts what
is taken as ‘objective reality’ by returning from its fringe.29
The imaginary is framed as un-real and as consisting only of
things “half-thought, half-objects, or phantoms… disappearing
before the sun of thought like the mists of dawn” when “the real
becomes the correlative of thought… [and] the narrow circle of
objects of thought…”30 Our “power to re-enter ourselves” and our
“power to leave ourselves” is intrinsic to the possibility of a world of lived experience – a “possibility of a whol y different type” than those framed in advance by objective thought, and one that maintains
“a secret and constant appeal” to what is objectively taken to be
“impossible” but remains integral to the world of lived experience.31
Merleau-Ponty elaborates: “It is not because the world called
‘objective’ has such or such properties that we will be authorized to
consider them established for the life world… And, conversely, it is
not because in the ‘objective’ world such or such a phenomenon is
without visible index that we must forego making it figure in the
life world.”32 This is relevant to all paranormal phenomena, what
Merleau-Ponty refers to as “bastard and unthinkable experiences”
when they happen spontaneously rather than being elicited in a
laboratory where they are liable to pose “false problems.”
27 Ibid., 28.
28 Ibid., 29, 31, 47.
29 Ibid., 31.
30 Ibid., 30.
31 Ibid., 34.
32 Ibid., 157.
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The “seat of truth within us” is this “unjustifiable certitude of
a sensible world common to us…”33 Prior to being convinced by
Descartes that thought is our reality, “our assurance of being in
the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world.”34 Our
experience of “the true” – in distinction to error and falsehood –
is primarily bound up with the tensions between our perspective
on things and those of others.35 The consciousness of “truth” – of
a perspective over something that others ought to be in agreement
with – presupposes an intelligible world of a kind that connects the
perspectives of our private worlds and allows a transition between
them, as in those instances when I enter the perspective of another
to offer him a response to a question that he has not yet voiced or a
rejoinder to a thought to which he has not yet given voice.36
This unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world that we have
in common that is not any of our perceptible worlds and is thus
in a sense an “intelligible” world – but not in an abstract sense –
is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “the perceptual faith”, a faith
which science presupposes but does not elucidate.37 The objectivism
of science excludes just those phenomena that clue us into the
common world that abides as the grounding for all ‘truths.’ Insofar
as the scientist attempts to secure all things – including persons
taken as things – in an “objective” manner, that is, as entities that
are variables with algorithmical y functional relationships to one
another, he strips away as “phantasms” everything about beings as
we encounter them.38
In Merleau-Ponty’s view this objectification of beings involves
a reciprocal subjectification of those phenomena that, from its
perspective, remain invisible as if they were also things hidden
behind certain of the objects and as if one could see through to
33 Ibid., 11.
34 Ibid., 12.
35 Ibid., 12.
36 Ibid., 13.
37 Ibid., 14.
38 Ibid., 14–15.
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them by gaining a certain angle on them.39 These are “psychological”
phenomena when they are framed in terms of objectively conceived
physical phenomena.40
Merleau-Ponty notes that just as in the case of physicists, the
psychologists can only circumscribe the irrational in an eliminative
manner, in other words, limit it.41 They cannot exorcise it, as they wish to. This is because the “irrational” is itself constructed as the excluded remainder of both the objective and subjective modeling
of nature. This normalization defines the “para normal” as such.
The task is not to affirm experiences of the irrational that
break through this framing or “escape” it as another anti-scientific
“psychical” order of facts in the manner that Spiritualism does when
it opposes itself to the materialism that has become prevalent in the
wake of Descartes.42 Rather, one must deconstruct the “objective”
and the “subjective” idealizations together by demonstrating the
manner in which they are constructed – rather than given – from out of the “life world.”43 This “life world” is that lived experience
that we have through our field of embodiment – but not our bodies conceived of as “objects” that house “subjects.”44 The biologists are
now more materialist than the physicists, who for their part have
had to come to terms with the psychological dimensions of their
work.45
The basic concepts at work in Psychology remain essential y as
mythical as the governing ideas of archaic societies.46 In their quest to grasp laws of subjecti
ve experience or the function of mental
acts in terms analogous to physical laws, psychologists not only
39 Ibid., 19.
40 Ibid., 19–20.
41 Ibid., 25.
42 Ibid., 22.
43 Ibid., 18, 26.
44 Ibid., 18, 27.
45 Ibid., 26.
46 Ibid., 18.
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fail to recognize the mythic or totemic structures enduring in their
methodology, they also render themselves incapable of forwarding
an adequate social psychology of archaic cultures.47 Laboring under
the assumption that the “magical” experiences of primitive peoples
or their account of a primordial temporality very different from our
own chronological projection of time are merely “subjective” and a
function of relative ignorance is going to foreclose an understanding
of those cultures. It also precludes an insight into the way that magic and mythical time are still at work, albeit in an occulted fashion, in contemporary modes of thinking, above all in Science.48
So it is fair to say that Hegel views psychic phenomena and
uncanny abilities as a holdover from pre-rational, and predominately
unconscious, human cognitive functioning. In fact, he sees an
inverse relationship between psychic ability and the analytical
intellect. Adept psychics are atavisms and their abilities should in
no way be seen as an alternative to much more reliable modern
scientific or technological means of acquiring the same information
or accomplishing the same aims with which such individuals
were once tasked. Nevertheless, pretending that such paranormal
phenomena are merely hal ucinations or delusions is unscientific
and, in Hegel’s view, the progressive and phased evolution of human
understanding toward the perfection of Science qua “Absolute
Knowing” with its attendant utopian socio-political implications,
cannot come about until and unless there is a scientific recognition
and contextualization of these increasingly anomalous phenomena.
By contrast with this progressive exorcism of the paranormal by
Science on the part of an arch-rationalist, Merleau-Ponty looks at
scientific research against the backdrop of an inherently irrational
life-world that is “wild” in nature before being tamed by any
cultural y and historical y conditioned system of belief and practice.
Paranormal phenomena, or what Merleau-Ponty cal s “bastard and
untameable experiences”, can never be objectively comprehended
by scientific theorization. Consequently, Science does not afford
47 Ibid., 23–24.
48 Ibid., 24, 26.
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us a mirror of objectively existent structures in Nature. In fact, the form of subjectivity characteristic of the theoretical observer of the cosmos is itself a god-like archetypal projection, similar to the gods of less sophisticated tribal societies but infinitely more powerful in its world-conquering and world-forming capacity. The kosmotheoros
is a gigantic modern totem.
While this seems terribly abstract, Merleau-Ponty attempts to
elucidate this idea with reference to the experience of artists. This
is not only helpful in itself, it also affords us an opportunity to draw a sharper contrast with Hegel’s paranormal phenomenology by
comparing Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of art to Hegel’s theory
concerning the epochal evolution of consciousness and the end of
art.
Merleau-Ponty compares the spectrality of the kind of idea he
is attempting to evoke to musical ideas that we do not possess but
that possess us in the way that the virtuoso musician experiences
possession when he “is no longer producing or reproducing the
sonata: he feels himself, and the others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata sings through him or cries out so suddenly
that he must ‘dash on his bow’ to follow it.”49 The cohesion of the
idea is “a cohesion without concept” of the kind that we find in “the
moments of the sonata.”50 This is also the nature of the cohesion of
my body with the world. It is “an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions.”51 This element brings a
“style” of being with it that makes facts have a meaning and be ‘true’
about something in a certain way. He also evocatively describes it
as a “rarefied flesh” and a “glorified body” that come together with
“the massive flesh” and the “momentary body” that we ordinarily
experience.52
The “primordial property” that belongs to the flesh “of radiating
everywhere and forever,” which effects “the reversibility of the visible 49 Ibid., 151.
50 Ibid., 152.
51 Ibid., 152.
52 Ibid., 148.
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and the tangible” is also what allows me to have a relationship to the other as if he were my alter ego because “it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us…
which extends further than the things I touch and see at present.”53
It is what makes it possible for us “to be open to visions other than
our own.”54 This reversibility is also that of “sound and meaning,”
or “speech and what it means to say”, so that if I am close enough
to the other I can hear his meaning even if he has not spoken it in
words and the “sayable” has metamorphosed into “a gaze of the
mind, intuitus mentis.”55 Even the possibility of psychokinesis seems to be implied by this understanding of worldly embodiment as “the
flesh”, when Merleau-Ponty adds that: “there is even an inscription
of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible [that]
founds transitivity from one body to another.”56 Final y, recognizing
the folding of the “actual, empirical ontic visible” back on itself into an invisible that is not its shadow but what principal y renders it
possible, takes us beyond the duality of thought and extension just
as it deconstructs the dualist distinction between the visible and the invisible, revealing them to be the obverse of one another.57
Merleau-Ponty observes that when I think of a certain place
unreflectively and in an absorbed manner, I am not in my thoughts but at the place even if my body is sitting at this table and my
gaze ought to terminate at the density of its surface.58 The horizon
of all such “visions or quasi-visions”, among which clairvoyance
or “remote viewing” ought to be counted, is still the natural and
historical world that I inhabit.59 That the observable world can
withdraw in visions that allow us to be present at places other than
those wherein a scientist would locate our measurable bodies, so
53 Ibid., 142–143.
54 Ibid., 143.
55 Ibid., 144–145, 154–155.
56 Ibid., 143.
57 Ibid., 152.
58 Ibid., 5.
59 Ibid., 5.
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that we lose our spatiotemporal reference markers in such a way as
to wonder whether we have ever real y had them in the sense that
we thought we did, brings us to ask whether any sharp distinction
ought to be legitimately drawn b
etween the world of perception and
the fabric of dreams.60 Even dreams have a certain logic, or at least a finite and bounded structure.
The purest ideality is still not free from horizon structures: “It
is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to
emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning
the flesh of the body for a new flesh – that of language, and thereby
would be emancipated and longer-lived, but not freed from every
condition.”61 Merleau-Ponty recognizes that “there is no essence
( wesen), no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography.”62 This does not mean that ideas so situated are therefore
inaccessible to those in other domains than the ones relevant for
these essences, but that in view of the fact that “the space or time of culture is not surveyable from above,” any more than that of “nature”
is, it remains the case that “communication from one constituted
culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they all
have originated.”63 This wilderness is the preserve of artists, not the domain of allegedly ‘objective’ or object ifying scientists who tacitly presuppose a materialist ontology.
My relationship with the world is not a relationship with
an object. It involves, as an ever-present possibility, “a sort of
dehiscence” that “opens my body in two” so that it becomes not only
my body looking and touching, but my body looked at and my body
touched. In this intuitive “reflection” there is a leaving oneself and retiring into oneself, a kind of lived distance with respect to oneself.64
The body sentient and body sensed are two phases of a single
60 Ibid., 6.
61 Ibid., 153.
62 Ibid., 115.
63 Ibid., 115.
64 Ibid., 124.
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movement that incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible, in
other words the “flesh of the world.”65 My body is no more an object
than the world is.66 Merleau-Ponty notes how painters sometimes
remark on the way in which they feel looked at by the things that
they observe so intently as if to capture their essence.67
One group of artists that would certainly have been familiar with
this uncanny experience are the Surrealists. The origins of Surrealism in Paris are as dingy as the story of any occult movement could ever
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