Addendum to “The Onto-Logic of Non-Duality: Why experience finds itself mirrored in neural processes”

It is a very difficult task to pin down the structure of reality, to give expression to what is there, unfiltered by the interpretive frameworks of our time and culture. It is even impossible, insofar as every attempt to analyze and understand reality departs from our present situation and its historical heritage. The situation is such that the philosophical effort itself is misguided; this immense flux of Being cannot be fixated in any concepts. Every attempt at articulation unravels as a part of its flow. And yet, we can speak about it, about its flow, we can even describe how it slips through our fingers, which validates the underlying creative impetus and bestows upon the philosopher a fundamental mission: to give expression to Being such as it is. If our previous attempts have fallen short because they treated reality as an object that could be described without remainder, if they effaced our inherence in the reality we seek to describe, if, in other words, even our descriptive concepts belong to the reality they seek to express, then this must spark in us the search for a new orientation, a new kind of philosophical dance, which can overcome the past shortcomings and the illusions that sustained them. Instead of trying to fixate reality before the gaze of the analyst, this new approach will open us onto the ongoing blossoming of Being. This is the challenge taken up by non-dual ontology. The present essay is an attempt to sketch out the nature of the world as it appears through the lens of non-dual ontology – specifically, through Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical investigations. I hope to convey an experience of the world and an interpretation of experience that outline the insights of the ontology of the flesh.

As a familiar starting point, and to serve as contrast, it is worth beginning by sketching a widespread paradigm of our time, a worldview which currently has its grip on many minds, especially in scientific and philosophical circles, but also in society at large. This paradigm, which we may broadly term materialism, is a set of assumptions that structures the way that many people of the modern age interpret their experience of the world. The interpretation goes as follows: What I see, what I feel – the hard surface of the table, the blue sky – is my subjective experience. This subjective experience is generated by underlying physical processes happening in my brain. My brain and my body belong to the physical universe, like all things, and function according to the laws of nature. We can gain insight into the workings of the physical universe through the methods of scientific investigation. Science has thus revealed the true constituents of reality: molecules, atoms, quarks, etc. Experience is a kind of inner world generated by the complex organization of material facts which make up the body. The qualities which characterize my experience – such as the meaning of a situation, the value of a person, or the perceptual presence of a thing – belong to my subjective viewpoint, and they do not characterize the factual world. Be that as it may, one may still find purpose in the adventure of living, but it is taken for granted that human experience is a subjective domain of psychological processes, produced by an underlying objective world of physical processes. Such is the materialist perspective, where the world is ruled by matter and all else is, in the final analysis, derived, including our firsthand testimony of reality as what we live. The alternative conception which I will outline next is one where experience is given its due weight as the original opening upon what is real, the original contact with Being, without thereby undermining the discoveries made by the physical sciences. Rather, it will be a matter of rehabilitating the scientific worldview into our experience of the world as its founding source, and of awakening to the deep tissue of life.

Let us carefully draw out this conception using an example. Consider vision: Here in my visual field, there is a glossy white object that I immediately recognize as a teacup. The materialist approach explains the perceptual event as follows: Out there, in the external world, there is a clumping of molecules which reflects beams of light, which are subsequently absorbed by my retina, triggering a cascade of biochemical events that ultimately results in a specific pattern of nervous activity in my brain, which gives rise to my visual experience of the teacup. Despite the naturalistic appeal of this explanation, it obscures our understanding of vision rather than clarifying it. The first thing to note is that all the variables in this explanation of vision – the molecules composing the teacup, the beams of light, the retina, the biochemical processes, the nervous activity – refer back to phenomena first encountered in the perceptual field.^[1]The phenomenological notion of Fundierung (founding) articulates this relationship between perception and knowledge. See for example Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012), p. 414. Of course we do not directly perceive molecules or photons, rather, scientists detect or infer their presence through the aid of measuring devices. But it is the perceptual relief^[2]The notion of “relief” to describe the perceptual world is drawn from a working note from The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968, p. 256). that the scientist subjects to experimentation. In other words, the phenomena in question are situated in the depth of the perceived: the molecules that make up the teacup are found nowhere else than there, in the visible teacup, observed with meticulous precision; and my retina is nowhere else than here, inside my visible eyeball. The materialist approach therefore attempts to explain perception by reference to the perceived, that is, by reconstructing perception out of a chain of events which are made known to us through perception (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 17; hereafter cited as PP). We see here the attitude characteristic of materialism: to treat the perceived (such as the teacup) as objects existing in themselves, independent of perception. Accordingly, it treats the body too – which is also a perceived – as one such object, and it treats perception as emerging from its objective biological processes. In the end, this approach leaves us with an incomprehensible jump from the order of physical (or objective) events to the order of experience (or subjectivity), and we understand neither perception nor the perceived (PP, p. 5). We can get out of this confusion by examining the roots of the mistake. Materialism commits an error, but a “motivated error” (Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p. 216): there is an authentic phenomenon which it expresses confusedly, namely, the happening by which the perceived conveys the presence of a world. Materialism departs from the fact that perception situates us in a field of phenomena that present themselves as pre-existing that perception. This fact is taken as evidence for the existence of an objective world independent of the experiencing subject. This conclusion, however, is too hasty, and plunges us into an incomprehensible dualism of mind and matter. So let us retrace our steps, and investigate this remarkable feat of perception more carefully.

When I look at the teacup, what overtly appears, strictly speaking, is a configuration of hues and contrasts. But in the free exercise of perception, I do not see hues and contrasts; the latter only come into explicit view when I focus on the sensory makeup of what I see, a focus which I may initiate in the context of a philosophical reflection upon the nature of vision, and which resembles the inquisitive gaze of the painter who wishes to reproduce the visible spectacle. On the contrary, in the free exercise of perception, I see a world, I see things, I see a teacup.^[3]This point is worked out in detail in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012), in the subsection titled “The Thing or the Real” (pp. 331-341). I do not see “sensory contents”. I do not even see one profile of the teacup, from which I infer the presence of a complete object. Rather, the visible profile is immediately grasped as one side of a teacup that has other sides too. Vision immediately goes unto the thing itself (PP, p. 338). If we were to interrogate our experience on how this happens, how the partial visible profile is taken up into a complete object, we would find the most truthful description to be that it happens “of itself”, by a sort of tour de force (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 136). Everywhere I look, there is strictly speaking only a certain patchwork of colors and contours, but it is as if this patchwork gives way to the world, hiding itself in order to reveal the depth of what is there. Let us say, for now, that the visible is not a domain that is enclosed on itself, but, like a portal, opens onto the invisible density of the things under view.

Compared to the idea of the objective world, where everything exists all at once, indifferently, the visible is always a partial presentation of the world, and always for someone who sees. The gaze of the seer is the necessary correlate of the visible world, and the two are caught up in an intricate dance.^[4]The fourth chapter of The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968) delves considerably into the dialectic of the gaze and the visible, which has been summarized in this paragraph. For an insightful … Continue reading My gaze shifts around the room, jumping from one point of interest to the next, while the visible things remain in their place – even though their relative position fluctuates with every turn of my gaze. When I move my head to the left, for example, all the visible things ostensibly move to the right, but I do not for a moment attribute this movement to the things themselves, instead grasping this change in the scenery as an effect of my own kinesthetic activity. The window of my gaze thus shifts around, each time bringing a different region of the world into view, and all these different views are automatically woven together into one seamless landscape. Each view opens onto the others, such that my perceptual experience is not confined to what currently lies under the scope of my gaze, but immerses me into the boundless horizon of the world. Even my own body is caught up in this horizon. At the heart of my visual field, my body, which sees, appears itself as a visible being. The visible world thus appears complete in itself, enveloping everything, even the seer. From the outside, another person could track my gaze through the rapid movements of my eyes, and in the mirror it can feel like I catch myself in the act of looking. But ultimately, this outer view never truly coincides with the view I have from within. My gaze itself is not a visible thing; it is the invisible opening through which the things appear, like a sinkhole that draws the entire spectacle into me. We here catch sight of a special dialectic which defines our perceptual relationship with the world. By thinking in terms of the seer and the visible, we arrive at a fundamentally different understanding of perception compared to the traditional analysis into subject and object. The traditional approach has been to separate the one who perceives – the subject – from the thing perceived – the object. The thing is understood as an external object existing beyond experience, and perceptual experience is understood as the internal projections of a subject. However, in all my actual encounters with things, they are what reveal themselves in response to my sensory exploration. Except in the heights of philosophical abstraction, the thing perceived has never been separated from me who perceives: the object is precisely what appears in my perceptual field, open to my gaze and to the touch of my hands. Reciprocally, the perceiver has never been a freely projecting subject, but a body which is caught up in the world perceived, with a gaze that clings onto the contours of the visible. By understanding the subject as seer, and the object as visible, we bring into focus how they are destined to one another, how the definition of each implies the other, such that “what is there” is always their entangled coexistence.

To demonstrate the implications of this entanglement, consider again the perception of the teacup. There it appears, at the center of my gaze, at a certain distance from my own body, which is faintly visible in my lower periphery. Immediately, I recognize its form as a vessel to drink from, and this functional signification remains glued to its appearance. Its glossy white surface and rigid structure tell me that it is probably made of porcelain. I reach out to grab it, and as my fingers embrace its cold hard matter, I notice a writing etched on the side: “Rover’s Teahouse”. In a flash, a swathe of memories overcome me: jumbled and vague images of a cozy teahouse, hanging carpets, turquoise wallpaper – I can’t quite place the memory, but enjoy its sudden influx. I proceed to take a sip, and feel the hot liquid flowing from the cup down my throat and into my belly…The entanglement of subject and object blends together the density of the things perceived with my own density as perceiver. That is, the perceptual phenomenon expresses in a single stroke both the deep structure of things – their material constitution and physical relations – and my own inner depth – my embodiment, my history, my memories, associations, etc. Because of this mutual gearing-into-each-other^[5]The metaphor of “gearing into each other” to describe the relationship between subject and world is used extensively throughout Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012). of perceiver and perceived, I can take hold of the things and they can take hold of me: my goals and intentions can highlight things in my environment, which can thereby become poles toward which my actions are oriented; and reciprocally, the things can affect me, hurt me, seduce me, surprise me. For the same reason, I am susceptible to illusions, but illusions are also susceptible to correction.^[6]The phenomena of illusion and dis-illusion are a recurring theme in The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968). See for example pp. 40-41. My initial impression of the teacup is that it is made of porcelain, but I might be wrong: a closer examination might reveal it to be made of bone china. In that case, the initial impression is “crossed out”^[7]Merleau-Ponty repeatedly borrows Husserl’s expression of “crossed out” to describe the phenomenon of disillusion in The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968). and replaced by the new insight. The perceptual world is this strange domain, neither internal nor external, where my life and the world flow into each other, where I am in contact with real things that transcend me, that have their own internal structure, and that are clothed by my flesh, charged by my values.

How does the materialistic approach differ from what we have just said? Where is the novelty of our current conception? According to the materialistic interpretation, there is a complex chain of physical relations by which the teacup is sensed by my body, and which, culminating in a certain pattern of nervous activity, gives rise to the perceptual experience. To begin, we are eschewing the divide between the physical and the experiential. The entities unravelling reality are not underlying physical processes, but are the perceptual phenomena themselves. These perceptual phenomena, as articulated by my gaze, belong to the life of my body, and as articulating the visible things, belong to the being of the world. To tell the truth, we cannot even say that my gaze articulates the visible things, since it is just as much guided and led by them.^[8]To better describe how activity and passivity are interwoven in perception, we may say instead, following Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968, p. 255), that the world “feels itself in me”. This indivision of the inner and the outer, manifest in perceptual life, tells us that the perceiving body forms an inextricable system with the world. If we were to adopt the “view from without”, we can visualize this entanglement as one circuit connecting the organism and its nervous system with the environment, so that perception is a function of this totality. But, as stated earlier, this outer view makes reference to variables (i.e., physical things, sensory organs, biological mechanisms, etc.) drawn from perceptual experience. The latter comes first: the entanglement of body and world is a relation that is first and foremost lived, weaving our experience from within. On the basis of this relation, and through the circularity that is inherent to it – what we have elsewhere called the onto-logic of non-duality – we can discover in the visible body the biological machinery which realizes this relation.^[9]This point is worked out in detail in the main text to which this addendum is attached.

Thus, to the question “What is there?”, we must not say: a physical world and a mind which apprehends it, but rather: this world and this body, that is, this soft and vulnerable flesh with which I feel the world and also feel myself, a world which runs through beneath my feet, which surrounds me, and which, like my body, is composed of colors and tactile surfaces – not an objective world, therefore, but a field of sensible beings appearing in relation to my own body, which is one of them, and is at the same time the central “pivot” (PP, p. 84) of all of them. The world is what opens forth from my viewpoint, and at the same time what envelops my viewpoint, so that I truly find myself in the world, amongst things, with other perceivers. The dualistic philosophy of our era has conditioned us to suppress this original experience, to dilute it with the presupposition of being secondary, fabricated by matter. It is time to shed this modern mythology. Reality is not an object to be grasped in conceptual abstraction; it is the concrete field of our lives. The entities in this field – the sensible beings which populate the perceptual world – are ongoing structurations of Being. Their ambiguous commixture of the inner and the outer teaches us that the real is channeled through embodiment. The body is the enigmatic point of passage^[10]The description of the body as a “point of passage” is borrowed from Barbaras (2004, p. 42): “The body is not the subject of sensible receptivity but the ‘trace of an existence’: a point of … Continue reading through which the world becomes flesh. There is no sharp divide between the two: vision reveals my body and my surroundings in one sweeping glance, and my touch can smoothly transition from feeling my arm to feeling the table. The sensible world, which extends onto all that is, is coiled^[11]The image of the sensible “coiling” around the sensing body is borrowed from The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968). See for example p. 114. around the body as its central pillar. Therefore, wherever there is a perceiving body, there is an openness that bears the world – a single world, a common world, with as many points of entry as there are eyes to see. Even though the perspectives upon it diverge, all these divergent viewpoints are caught up in one another, communicate with each other, across the gap which separates each life from the next, the gap where they meet: neither inner nor outer, but the interworld. This world, which confines me to my viewpoint and you to yours, also incorporates us both into the same visibility. It is not our task to determine an absolute ground which would anchor all perspectives, which would synthesize them into one tissue. This tissue is what we live – we, who embody the world.

References

Barbaras, R. (2004). The being of the phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s ontology (T. Toadvine & L. Lawlor, Trans.; originally published 1991). Indiana University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior (F. L. Alden, Trans.; originally published 1942). Beacon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes (C. Lefort, Ed.; A. Lingis, Trans.; originally published 1964). Northwestern Univ. Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.; originally published 1945). Routledge.