Distance and proximity

In his essay on “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” published in The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty argues that the correlation of proximity and distance in the act of perception shows that world is designed to be seen by bodies:

“We understand then why we see the things themselves, intheir places, where they are, according to their being which isindeed more than their being-perceivedand why at the sametime we are separated from them by all the thickness of the lookand of the body; it is that this distance is not the contrary of thisproximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous withit. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thingis constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of hiscorporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their meansof communication. It is for the same reason that I am at theheart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it hasthickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body” (135).

But to see this we have to change our picture of the relation between the “seer” and the seen. He says, in a typically dense and difficult passage:

“We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put thebody in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, theworld and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to putthe limit between the body and the world, since the world isflesh? Where in the body are we to put the seer, since evidentlythere is in the body only ‘shadows stuffed with organs,’ that is,more of the visible? The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and mybody is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to aflesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. Aparticipation in and kinship with the visible, the vision neitherenvelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively. The superficialpellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. Butthe depth beneath this surface contains my body and hencecontains my vision. My body as a visible thing is containedwithin the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visiblebody, and all the visibles with it. There is reciprocal insertionand intertwining of one in the other. Or rather, if, as once againwe must, we eschew the thinking by planes and erspectives,there are two circles, or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentricwhen I live navely, and as soon as I question myself, the oneslightly decentered with respect to the other” (142).

What this seems to mean is a) that the notion that there’s a perceptive person within the body, and that the body is in the world as in a box, is wrong; b) that it is wrong because the the body is just another of the visible things, since it is stuff with organs; and c) it is wrong because what perceives is not someone in the body but the body itself.

Once that position is in place, we can return to his earlier insight: It is the fact of the body, its thickness that creates distance from the thing seen, that is the condition of the possibility of perception. Only bodies, he seems to be arguing, could see, given the world we have. A ghost in a box could not perceive at all.