The Sensible Ideas between Life and Philosophy (proofs)

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 30, Number 1, 2009 The Sensible Ideas between Life and Philosophy Mauro Carbone In his last article on the philosophy of painting, “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty confesses that modern painting gives him the impression that in our age the relationship of humans to themselves, to others, to things, and to the world—that knot of relations that constitutes for him what we call Being—is not manifest in the same way as in the past (EM 139; OE 63). Why does Merleau-Ponty claim this while referring to painting? Because painting in the twentieth century has openly rejected all mimetic hypotheses, as if illustrating by example Paul Klee’s famous declaration that “art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.”1 To reject all mimetic hypotheses means in turn to reject the ideas that the world is a spectacle that unfurls itself before my eyes and that painting would be called upon to represent it on a canvas conceived as a window or a mirror. Consequently, rejecting mimetic hypotheses implicitly means once again calling into question those concepts traditionally describing our relation to Being, such as the opposition between subject and object, which is supposed to designate what is held in front of us. According to this idea, the world appears as the “great object” in which I am not myself involved, and instead constitutes the spectacle that I am supposed to represent either pictorially on the canvas or conceptually in thought. This is why Merleau-Ponty writes in “Eye and Mind” that every theory of painting is a metaphysics (EM 132; OE 42), meaning that every theory of painting implies the idea of a certain relationship to Being. But for Merleau-Ponty, the reference to painting is not the only one that testifies to the transformation at work in the relations of humans and Being: in those same years, he explains not only how science, or rather the sciences of the twentieth century, have modified our conception of nature, but also claims that this change in the scientific concept is in turn the sign of an ontological mutation of the whole, which must be absolutely encouraged because it is absolutely necessary (N 204; N 1 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL 265). For him, it [this mutation] is a matter of an on-going process which must also be brought up to date. Merleau-Ponty thus sees this process of transformation at work in very different domains—painting, and the physical and biological sciences, for example—but in nevertheless convergent directions, which leads him to speak of a “fundamental thought” (NC 163), which he says has not yet found the means to realize itself as an explicit philosophy— that is, it has not yet found the attitude and language to express itself in what the western tradition specifically calls “philosophy.” We see then that the direction and goal of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought oblige us to pose the very questions to which I have just alluded: If—from the natural sciences and pictorial experience, but also literary and musical experience—a new pattern of relations between humans and Being emerges, will the idea of philosophy formulated by the western tradition still be in a position to take up the attitude and the language to speak of this transformation? Or will it instead be necessary to rethink the very idea of philosophy? And if this is the case, then what mutations in the idea of philosophy will be necessary to speak of the transformation of the relations between man and Being? And are these indispensable mutations in the idea of philosophy even possible? That is, even if we should succeed in imprinting these changes in our thought, will they still allow us to speak of philosophy as we have until now? To answer these questions, Merleau-Ponty, in his last course at the Collège de France, interrogated, on the one hand, a certain philosophical tradition, one to which he felt he belonged, one that could not avoid taking the thought of Descartes as a problematically fundamental point of reference and that had as other, no less fundamental points of reference the most important thinkers of the phenomenological movement, namely, Husserl and Heidegger. But Merleau-Ponty also began, on the other hand, to look for other references to confront; in other words, he questioned what he called by this singular expression: the “history of aphilosophy” (PnP 12; NC 278). With this expression, Merleau-Ponty wanted to point to a lineage— begun, according to him, by Hegel and continued by Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, then by Husserl and Heidegger—whose different attempts at thought wanted, each in its own way, to go beyond simply being different theoretical options and instead take sides with those areas of experience that philosophy, as traditionally constituted, forced out of its field of research—attempts at thought that have in short taken sides with “non-philosophy.” To advocate appearing rather than being, as Hegel did with the fundamental principles of his phenomenology of spirit, to advocate experience against abstract 2 CARBONE/SENSIBLE IDEAS thought, or the demands of life rather than theory (as, for example, in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “I beseech you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth”2), to advocate ‘this side’ of things rather than the metaphysical beyond—these are all, thinks Merleau-Ponty, the many attempts to defend non-philosophy against the traditional identity that philosophy had provided. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of “a-philosophy,” he wants to refer to a thought that knows how to make the reasons of the non-philosophical its own, and thanks to this is able to radically transform the identity of the philosophical. We can here cite a passage found in the early notes of his course entitled “Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Hegel,” to which I am referring: philosophy seems to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy . . . [which] has access to the absolute, not as ‘beyond,’ as a positive second-order, but as another order which must be on this side, the double-inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy, since it is a-philosophical. (PnP 9; NC 275)3 These words reveal the full scope of the task in which Merleau-Ponty took himself to be involved. But his sudden death at the age of fiftythree interrupted his research; we are left only with some elements that are absolutely insufficient to restore unequivocally the signs of a thought equal to the stakes it set for itself. They are instead the elements in which thought seeks itself by confronting the twentieth-century sciences of nature, contemporary pictorial, literary, or musical experience, and certain currents of the philosophical tradition. So, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in referring to Husserl, it is a thought that circumscribes “a domain yet to be thought,” a domain defined by questions or interrogations to which we can remain faithful and that we can find again “only by thinking once again” (S 160; S 202). Several cultural symptoms thus converge, according to MerleauPonty, on the expression of a new relationship between humans and Being, and in his opinion, Marcel Proust and his In Search of Lost Time occupy a central place in this panorama, as he describes in The Visible and Invisible: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth” (VI 149; VI 195). This quote thus reveals why Merleau-Ponty considered Proust a crucial reference during the last years of his life, characterized by the research to which I am referring. In other words, he emphasizes that a philosophical formulation that at the level of [à la hauteur de] our new relationship to Being passes through a new description of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible—namely, it passes 3 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL through a non-Platonic theory of ideas to which, according to MerleauPonty, Proust more than anyone comes closest.4 In certain pages of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, to which Merleau-Ponty returned many times, Proust writes that the protagonist of this volume, Swann, had ended up taking “musical motifs as actual ideas,”5 starting at the moment a particular conception of love and happiness appeared to him as inseparable from listening to a certain melody: the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata. We have here a sensible event, the hearing of a musical phrase which carries with it a particular idea, a specific conception of love and happiness. This idea is thus not given if there is no encounter with its sensible manifestation: the hearing of the “little phrase.” In this sense, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “sensible ideas.”6 It is clear that a theory of ideas can only imply a theory of their genesis, or a theory of ideation, which in turn is indissociable from a new conception of the relation between activity and passivity, the distinction of which traditionally characterizes the “place” where we usually say ideas happen: this place that we call “subject.” But here I am obliged to base my claim only on bits of reflections passed down by Merleau-Ponty and I must therefore assume responsibility for the thought advanced here.7 With that said, in order to understand what theory of ideation, of the genesis of ideas, may arise from the non-Platonic intent that Merleau-Ponty locates in Proust, I propose to begin with a sentence from Merleau-Ponty himself and to try to understand what consequences we can draw from it. Here is the sentence: “[w]hen we invent a melody, the melody sings in us more than we sing it: it goes down into the throat of the singer, as Proust says . . . the body is suspended in what it sings: the melody is incarnated and finds in the body a type of servant” (N 174; N 228). Is it possible to say that we are faced here with a description of the genesis of an idea? I would say yes. We find description of the genesis of a musical idea known as “melody.” Now as we have understood, when we invent the melody, it “sings in us more than we sing it.” Ideation thus consists of an attitude, which elsewhere Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, spoke about in terms of a “letting be” (sein lassen): If it is true that when we invent a melody, it “sings in us much more than we sing it,” then we can say that inventing is a letting-be, which in turn consists—as Merleau-Ponty suggested at the same time—in giving the world and things “the resonance they demand” (VI 101; VI 138; my emphasis). Let’s return now to the preceding citation: “When we invent a melody, the melody sings in us more than we sing it: it goes down into the throat of the singer.” We could say that this “inventing” understood 4 CARBONE/SENSIBLE IDEAS as “letting-be” consists, in other words, of a welcoming that is an according oneself with the encounter of the world, in a triple manner which nonetheless has an intimately unitary meaning: to let the encounter with the world be by letting oneself be in the encounter, in the entry into resonance with it. This is in fact how the singer welcomes in his throat the melody that descends into and is sung in him. But if this is all true, how can we who characterize ourselves as inventing a melody by welcoming it define ourselves? We can say that we are the hollow that welcomes the melody and the birth of the idea. Obviously, it would be a mistake to understand our being-hollow in the sense of being a pure and simple “receptacle” of the idea: too often, this word of Plato’s8 has been interpreted through a Platonism that has become our principal “image of thought,” as Deleuze might say, or the principal image of our relationship with Being, to echo Merleau-Ponty. It would be a mistake to understand our being-hollow in the sense of a simple receptacle of the idea for at least two reasons. First, it would imply thinking this hollow as already existing before the idea arises, and thus thinking it precisely as a hollow that is content to shelter such an idea. In other words, it would imply thinking ourselves as a pure passivity. Moreover, to reduce ourselves to a mere receptacle, always ready to shelter any idea that might arise, would suggest that this idea existed as such “elsewhere” and that it would have one day decided to fall into the also already pre-constituted hollow that we are. We have seen that we must instead understand the description of the genesis of the idea, as well as the genesis of the hollow (which we can no longer truly call a “subject”), as the description of two aspects of the same event, which we can characterize as a putting into reciprocal resonance. An event that consists precisely in the simultaneous advent of the idea and of our being-hollow. We do not therefore have to seek to know whether this event occurs within us or exterior to us, since it is both interior and exterior at once, produced in the encounter and as the encounter of interiority and exteriority, an encounter that, as an event, is inevitably clarified by the light of a shock. It is produced as an encounter that traverses the tissue of difference joining us to the world, and as Deleuze argues, it makes this tissue, which Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh,” resonate by the effects of resemblance,9 or even of identity, designated in this case by the name “ideas.” Simultaneously, it produces the “invagination”10—it is interesting that the term is also MerleauPonty’s (VI 152; VI 199)—of a piece of the very fabric of the flesh, folding it into a resonating hollow that welcomes and sediments the idea. Moreover, neither does the hollow exist prior to the idea, nor the idea prior to the hollow; rather both my becoming-hollow where the melody resonates, and the formation of the melody through that reso- 5 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL nance, arise together: to put it in the words of the French poet Paul Claudel, they are “co-born.”11 More exactly, they are born together in an indistinction of activity and passivity. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s sentence that interests us here is like a Möbius strip: there is an active sense that results implicitly in a passive sense that is nonetheless the same. Thus, both senses together speak of a reflexive sense in which activity and passivity appear indistinct, and thereby the distinction between a supposedly acting subject and a supposedly acted-upon object is lost. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty writes: “When we invent a melody” (here, the “we” is subject and the verbal form is active), “the melody is sung in us” (here “we” lose the position of subject and the verbal form simultaneously becomes reflexive). In a working note of The Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty rightly emphasizes this while speaking specifically of the hollow to characterize what I have just described. He writes that thinking is not “an activity of the soul, nor a production of thoughts in the plural, and I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat” (VI 221; VI 275). So, although I am not the author of my thoughts or of this hollow formed in me, something creates itself in the hollow—or better, with it: a melody, for example. It is like saying that a process of creation is triggered in me without me authorizing it. Or that “welcoming”—which is traditionally supposed to signify a passive attitude—and “creating”— which is traditionally supposed to mean an active attitude—are one. And it also means that the idea does not exist prior to its advent, which is another decisively anti-Platonic element. I would like to emphasize how what I have thus far tried to describe shows that an idea thus happens in our encounter with the world and within a wider horizon of relations that we call Being: in this sense, the advent of an idea shows itself from then on as an ontological event rather than as our own private “mental event.” But we must also emphasize how the process I’ve been describing, by which a hollow opens and because of which something is created in that opening [of the] hollow, applies not only to the advent of ideas, but also to the advent of values—for those values that underlie our actions also seem to be formed by virtue of the creative passivity of which I speak.12 Whether it’s a question of ideas or values, we have seen how they are created in our becoming-hollow: in this sense, we are not their authors, because it is not we who shape them, but rather our meeting with the world, which, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in his later lecture notes on nature, leads to their expression in a thought that works “without thinking” (N 283; N 351), that is, in a still blind thought. On 6 CARBONE/SENSIBLE IDEAS the one hand, then, when we open ourselves as a hollow, an indistinction between our active being and passive being appears; on the other hand, what comes to expression in this indistinction is not shaped by ourselves but rather by the very being of our encounter with the world; it is this being that is reflected, or to put it another way, that is thought in us. That is why I have said that the ideas that come to light are not mere “mental events,” but rather ontological events. Perhaps we have managed to make a little clearer some aspects of the changing relationship between humans and Being that MerleauPonty saw at work in our age. Obviously this transformation does not consist in inaugurating the production of those dynamics that I have sought to make evident, as if now the ideas are born thus, while they were previously born otherwise. The transformation lies rather in the fact that our age is bringing into expression these experiences in new ways, thus producing what Deleuze defined as the “profound elements for a new image of thought.”13 Thus this age would have brought (or brought back)14 to expression our being-hollow which is neither a void nor a plenitude, even though the philosophical tradition has privileged an idea of the subject according to one or the other of these models— that is, for the tradition, the subject is either a plenitude that gives meaning to the world, or a void that receives meaning from the world. To bring the mutation of the relations between humans and Being to expression therefore means describing our being not as a “subject” that faces an ‘object-world’, as I explained earlier, but rather as the hollow that is a “sounding board” in the sense that we have heard MerleauPonty speak of a melody that is sung in us, provided that we accord to it the resonance it requires. It is actually a hollow in which our encounter with the flesh of the world resonates, where the “echo” is not the mere reproduction of a product elsewhere, but rather—and this is what the sounding board teaches us—it takes on a particular creative value. In the same perspective, perhaps we have not yet sufficiently emphasized that the characterization of our being in terms of “becoming-hollow,” of “invagination,” is completely complementary to the characterization of the being of the idea that Merleau-Ponty draws from what Proust wrote of “musical motifs.” Being, traditionally considered as what endures beyond the deceptive visibility of becoming but which is nevertheless accessible by another mode of vision—precisely, the being of an idea—here shows its ineffaceable sensible rootedness, sensible first thanks to that art which is canonically related to time and thus to becoming, an art that offers itself as a means of encounter—listening—which shields it from the paradigm of the face to face and from representation, an art that is therefore willing to think our being, as 7 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL well as the being of the idea, in non-substantive, even non-identifying terms:15 music, of course. I am approaching the conclusion. I tried to describe a relationship of indivision between activity and passivity, a relation that is one and the same as a creativity that we are, yet without being the authors of. To define such a relation, the most appropriate words seem to me to be those Merleau-Ponty uses to describe one of the central ideas of the last period of his thought: the idea of the chiasm, according to which, he says, “every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of” (VI 266; VI 319). That should suffice to understand the meaning of those attempts at thought that according to Merleau-Ponty have followed from Hegel, and with which it seems obvious to me we are still involved. They are, as I explained at the beginning, attempts that seek to formulate the present transformation of the relations between man and Being in a thought that, in order to be expressed, must in its turn be transformed from philosophy into a-philosophy, at least according to the meaning and intent of that term given it by Merleau-Ponty. He claims elsewhere: “philosophy has never spoken . . . of the passivity of our activity” (VI 221; VI 274). He thus intends to start from the idea of the chiasm precisely in order to elaborate an idea of philosophy that, as he wrote, “cannot be a total and active grasp, intellectual possession, since what there is to be grasped is a dispossession” (VI 266; VI 319). In other words, he confirms that “the hold is held” (ibid.). So as the above excerpt calls to mind, the reconsideration of the face to face of subject and object cannot but implicate the possibility of the subject grasping the object; said otherwise, it implies calling into question the modern notion of “concept,” modeled on the German term that literally means “con-cept,” namely the term Begriff, whose root clearly marks an intention of “grasping” or “taking hold of” [saisissement]. Begriff is derived in fact from the verb greifen, which means precisely “to seize or grasp or take hold of” [saisir]. But if we are not subjects who confront the world, but rather hollows revealed as sounding boards for our encounter with it, it is clear that this intention of “grasping” cannot exist and that it too should be called into question. This implies renouncing the idea of philosophy as an intellectual possession. Indeed, says Merleau-Ponty, philosophy “is not above life, overhanging” (ibid.). It is therefore not in a position to take hold of life in order to have an intellectual possession of it. Since Thalès, however, philosophy has traditionally mistrusted life, it has always remained at a distance from life, and it is precisely in this gesture of remaining at a distance that it has constituted its identity, 8 CARBONE/SENSIBLE IDEAS considering life as “non-philosophy.” Of course I am referring here to the Platonic anecdote of Thalès who, staring at the stars, fell into a pit while a Thracian maid mocked him.16 The idea of philosophy that Merleau-Ponty defines as “a-philosophy” consists in relating itself to non-philosophy (and thus to life understood as one of the names that philosophy itself has attributed to non-philosophy), and thus relating itself to the recognition of the other side of philosophy rather than to the other of itself, and in this idea he recognizes the principle (in the double sense of an initial moment and a fundamental notion) in the Hegelian conception of phenomenology. This is precisely why MerleauPonty writes of “a-philosophy” that according to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomena). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale . . . but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. From a certain point of view, phenomenology is the whole truth. (PnP 9; NC 275) This means that appearing is a decisive and integral aspect of being, even though it traditionally represented only another name attributed by philosophy to non-philosophy. And so we have philosophy and non-philosophy, just like sensible and intelligible, activity and passivity, subject and object. To revoke the intention of opposition by which metaphysics has instituted all these dualisms (which can be summarized by the dualism of the visible and the invisible), in order instead to name their intimate co-belonging, and consequently to transform the attitude and language in a manner corresponding to the current mutation of the relations of humans and Being—such is the task that remains to be accomplished. It cannot be otherwise, since, beyond any singular biographies, it is not the task of a thinker, but of thought itself. Translated by Robin Muller NOTES 1. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Paul Klee, His Life and Work in Documents 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (New York: G. Braziller, 1962); “Schöpferische Konfession,” in Das bildnerische Denken (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1956). 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6. 9 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL 3. I return to this theme in the second chapter of my book, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 14–27. 4. When he refers to Proust’s definition, Merleau-Ponty, in effect, asks,“Isn’t it a general conception of ideas,” and shortly after, “We have said platonism, but these ideas are without intelligible light” (NC 193 and 194, respectively). 5. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 362; Du côté de chez Swann, vol. 1 of À la Recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 343. 6. See VI 151; VI 198. 7. On this topic, allow me to refer to my book Proust et les idées sensibles (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 8. Plato, Timaeus, 50d–e. [By referring to “this word of Plato’s” that has far too often been interpreted through Platonism, Carbone means not only the word “receptacle,” which he here uses, but also the untranslatable khora [GREEK], the word on which Timaeus settles after rejecting others, including “receptacle,” “matrix,” and “nurse of becoming”—trans.] 9. “Resemblance subsists, but it is produced as the exterior effect of a simulacrum, inasmuch as it is built upon divergent series and makes them resonate” (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990] p. 262); Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 303. 10. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 8; Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), p. 12. 11. Paul Claudel, “Discourse on the Affinity with the World and on Oneself,” in Poetic Art, trans. Renee Spodheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 40; “Traité de la co-naissance au monde et de soi-même,” in Art poétique (Paris: Mercure de France 1907), pp. 47. 12. In this sense, it seems to me that we can interpret the commentary of Merleau-Ponty à propos of an observation of Claude Simon: “The decision is not ex nihilo, is not now, always anticipated, because we are everything, everything is complicit in us. We decide to do nothing but rather to let be” (NC 214). 13. Gilles Deleuze, “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Mike Taormina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), p. 139; “Sur Nietzsche et l’image de la pensée,” Les lettres françaises 1223, 1968), p. 7. 14. I am refering to the Latin etymology of the term “concept,” which seems to refer to something concave, having the function of a harvest basin. On this, see Mario Perniola, “Preface” to Baltasar Gracián, L’Acutezza e l’Arte 10 CARBONE/SENSIBLE IDEAS dell’Ingegno, trans. Guilia Poggi, (Palermo: Aesthetica, 1986), p. 19, as well as my book, The Thinking of the Sensible, p. 47. 15. On this point, another reference to Proust’s novel can serve as an example: in the first volume of the series, he describes three executions of the imaginary sonata of Vinteuil, to each of which he connects different historical sources of inspiration. It seems, then, legitimate to ask where its identity resides. On this, I refer the reader to my “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” trans. David Jacobson, Res 48 (Fall 2005). There is an evident convergence between the present reflections and those that Jean-Luc Nancy has developed in À l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 16. For a reflection on the history of the reception of this anecdote and on its relevance, see Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). For other reflections on this point, see also Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio (New York: Routlege, 1995); Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofia antica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990). 11