The Philosophy of the Flesh - Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt on Being Human, by Joseph Belbruno

7/29/2019 The Philosophy of the Flesh - Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt on Being Human, by Joseph Belbruno

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The Philosophy of the Flesh:Toward an ImmanentistOntology of Perception

The notions of Nature and Reason, far from explaining the metamorphosesfrom perception to the more complex modes of human exchange, make them

incomprehensible. Because by relating them to separate principles, these notionsconceal a constantly experienced moment, the moment when an existencebecomes aware of itself, grasps itself, and expresses its own sense. The study ofperception could teach us a bad ambiguity, a mixture of finitude anduniversality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a good ambiguity in thephenomenon of expression, a spontaneity that accomplishes what appeared tobe impossible when we considered only the separate elements, a spontaneitythat gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, natureand culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysicsitself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics. (Merleau-Ponty Reader,Unpublished Text, p.290)

As is abundantly well known, one of the major weaknesses of theMarxian critique of political economy is its determinism. In seeking todiscover the economic laws of society, Marx ended up reducing allsignificant human activity to the labour that is socially necessary toensure the reproduction of human society. The laws governing thepro-duction of use values and exchange values also govern theirdistribution among social classes and thus form the economic baseupon which all other social structures and institutions from the familyto the state to culture at large are founded and that form thereforean ideal superstructure that serves merely to hide or camouflage therock-solid reality of the basic social relations of production. This is the

forma mentis of traditional Marxism: in this perspective, it is thematerial economic base that determines or drives the ideologicalsuperstructure; and it is the combination of the two that constituteshuman history. This duality of physical realism and of spiritual idealismis yet another manifestation of the separation of Nature and Reason, ofForm and Matter, of Mind and Body, and finally of Subject and Object,that has characterized Western thought from its inception.

Because Marxs thought his realism tended to relegate allphilosophy to the sphere ofmere interpretation, Marxism has alwaysdisplayed a clear aversion to and insufferance for philosophical

speculation and especially theprima philosophia, the theory of thefoundation of reality itself namely, meta-physics and ontology. In thisregard, Marx was replicating for his critique of political economywhat Kant had performed in the Critique of Pure Reason, neatlyseparating the world into mere appearances and things inthemselves, the latter being the ultimately inscrutable cause behindthe former. For human knowledge to be founded on scientific bases,Kant proposed that we acknowledge the strict separation of


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appearances in search of explanation and the ultimate immutablereality of which they were a mere re-presentation (Vor-stellung). Thisis the separation (chorismos) or the separated principles of Natureand Reason to which Merleau-Ponty alluded in the quotation above aseparation or worse still an opposition (Gegen-stand, the German word

for object) that we must transform into a participation (methexis,in the terminology of Nicholas of Cusa) in harmony with our project fora better world.

What we find inspiring in Merleau-Pontys formulation of this separationis the fact that it states the problem in the tersest manner, and thensuggests an answer together with the reason why it is a valid answer.The problem, tersely but improperly stated, is whether metaphysicscan suggest an ethics that is to say, whether an ontology, a theory ofreality, can provide the ground not just for a view of reality butalso for a de-ontology, for a framework or pro-ject of action upon

reality. One of the hardest things to do for people of a radicaldisposition is to provide a foundation for their convictions, for theirintention no longer to interpret the world, but to change it. Yet suchfoundation must be found or at least our inquiry into it (remember thatthe original word for history in Greek was istorein, to inquire) must becommenced somewhere. Marxs Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach betraysmost eloquently his in-sufferance for the task of (philosophical)interpretation of social reality and his urgency for its practicalscientific transformation. Had Nietzsche been aware of this Thesis,he would most probably have retorted that philosophers thus far havepretended to interpretthe world when in reality they were attempting

to change it! For unlike Marx, Nietzsche held no illusions that socialreality could be deterministically reduced to scientific laws or thatsocially necessarylabour time could ever constitute and determinethe laws of motion of human history and societies.

The entire aim of our studies so far has been not merely to attempt tochange the world as it is at present by interpreting it, by under-standing its functioning and mode of operation the more easily tointervene on it or at least to contrast it; but it has been also in largepart to understand the reasons behind our exertions, behind ourradicalism. We may know what to change and how to do it out of what

Daniel Guerin once called a visceral opposition to the status quo, butwe still need to know why we engage in the ruthless criticism of allthat exists if we are going to have any chance of success. Our goalsneed to be clear before we set out to deploy our means. What we areattempting here is a critical re-foundation of an autonomist ontologythat generates its goals not from the positing of extrinsic values butrather from the identification of the most basic human mode of


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perception of reality. (Cf. M-P, end of Unpublished Text synopsis inReader.)

So far we have employed the approach of critique on the road to thisquest because it is often easier to learn from the discoveries as well as

the mistakes of theoreticians and practitioners that have preceded us.But critiques are necessarily negative in character: they are meantto de-struct rather than to con-struct and that is what we have donepredominantly to date, except to the degree that every negationoften involves also the negation of the negation and so, perhaps,some positive affirmation as well. It is obvious that our task cannotbe confined to the ruthless criticism of everything that exists (Marx)because such critique would have no meaning unless it also had apurpose. There where actions have no meaning they can also be saidto lack purpose, and vice versa. What then can be our purpose andon what meaning can it be founded?

This is the area perhaps where the thought of Karl Marx leaves most tobe desired, even in view of its (again) fundamental importance. Themost refined corrections and improvements on Marxist thought in thisarena have probably come from post-Nietzschean elaborations,culminating especially in the Italian left-Heideggerianism that was anoffshoot of the new left move away from the orthodoxy ofCommunist parties of the European post-Stalinist era. Marxism maywell have provided a deontological guide to our opposition to theravages of capitalist industry, morally, ethically and then politicallypredicated on the notion of the theftof labour time. But if labour

time is merely the time that is socially necessary to produce goodsand services for consumption, then it is obvious that Marx hasreduced the entire problem of capitalism to the mere distributionof the social product. Not only does this critique crumble to a meregripe or grudge over distribution, over the share of the spoils; but italso fails to challenge the technical-scientific orientation of capitalism,its technology and science, - thepolitical choice ofwhatit producesand how it produces it. Even if we agree with Marx that a certainquantity of labour-time is (physically!) necessaryfor a human societyto reproduce itself (again, physically), it is still obvious that thisminimum quantity necessary for reproduction may well constitute

a necessary condition but not in the least a sufficientcondition toensure the actual reproduction of a society a process that is asmuch political and cultural as it is narrowly economic!

The Marxian critique also never proffered the ontological ground onwhich any praxis or deontology could be founded and erected. It is fairto say that Marx was too tied to the philosophy of the Enlightenment inits twin excrescences of German Idealism and scientific rationalism to


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be able to escape the fallacies that engulfed them both and that wereexposed so virulently already by the critics of the negatives Denkenfrom Schopenhauer to Nietzsche through to Weber and finallyHeidegger (cf. for all, this last authors Letter on Humanism). Thefundamental error of Western philosophical and scientific thought has

always been to seek to identify objectively the purpose and meaningof action with its object to con-fuse therefore activity with matter,the operari with the opus, the agere with the actus and the facere withthe factum. And this con-fusion of the quest for the meaning ofhuman reality (of its perception) with the certainty andcalculability of it has meant that, in the words of Nietzsche, Westernmetaphysics has always sought the fixity of Being, its essence, andhas neglected its being-as-becoming. As a result, this Western willto truth (Nietzsche) has turned into a maniacal quest for certainty,for the full end (Voll-endung) of history and consequently ofphilosophy itself. This quest, however, could only end in nihilism that

is, in the debunking of all truths and values -, and determine whatHeidegger called the Vollendung at once the ful-filment and com-pletion, and therefore the ex-haustion, of the Western metaphysicaltradition. (Again, the obligatory reference is to Heidegger, Vol.2 of hisNietzsche.) Given that no ultimate values can be fixed withcertainty, given that truth can never be identical with its object,Nietzsche was keen to stress the importance of what happens in life,in that place that lies be-tween the first thing (birth) and the lastthing (death).

The question for us is: if we accept with Nietzsche that there are no

ultimate values or final and definitive truths, that there is no summumbonum, what meaning and purpose can we then bestow upon ourlives that will guide our living activity and that will make our politicalaction worthwhile? It may be said that we are a purpose in search of ameaning, a need in search of a reason. Nietzsches ontology is in-comprehensible (it cannot be grasped practically) without his notion ofthe Eternal Return of the Same which is premised entirely on theinterpretation of historical events as symptoms or signs of eitherthe underlying health or else of the Disgregation of the instincts offreedom (will to power) of human agents. The notion of the EternalReturn is neither cyclical (palingenesis) nor anagogical (as in the

anakyklosis), but refers instead to a novel conception of time asnunc stans the now understood not as a point on a sequence ofpast nows and future nows, but rather as an entirely differentdimension in which time is not spatialised, in which it cannot bemeasured, added to or subtracted from. For Nietzsche, everythinghappens at once; only in this sense does it return eternally and inthis sense must fate be loved (amor fati).


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Arendts profound incomprehension of Nietzsches transvaluation of allvalues is due in large part to her inability to penetrate Nietzschesentirely novel interpretation of place (Ort) as different from time andspace! Which is strange, because Heidegger (whom Arendt knewintimately, to be scabrous) elaborated it at great length though

incompletely or incorrectly in his thorough critique of the Kantiannotion of intuition in his Kantbuch, which he meant as the second partofBeing and Time. Arendt also and rightly begins her peripateticassessment ofthe life of the mind with a critique of Kantsepistemology (a cours forceit seems for most modern thinkers), whichin turn she interprets as a response to the solipsism of the Cartesiancogito. We agree with Arendt that the mind has a life not merelymetaphorically but in the full sense of the word, materially, becausewe do not accept as valid the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter adualism that degenerates inevitably into solipsism given that thecogito admits and conceives of ec-sistence exclusively as a mental

thing the res cogitans as opposed to the res extensa -, and that theres cogitans must constitute an indivisible unity (in Leibnitzs powerfulphrase, a being must be a being). The mind has a life because it ispart of life, it is within life and the world: that is its materiality. Amind without life and the world is unimaginable because for the mindto ec-sist it needs a life and a world in which to be situ-ated, loc-ated,that is, it needs a site and a locus, a place that is categoricallydistinct from our conventional notions called time and space.Similarly, life has a mind to the extent that we cannot conceive of lifewithout an organ capable of conceiving life the mind, whose locus isnot necessarily the brain or the heart but again a place, a dimension

categorically distinct from any body organs or functions.

[Cassirer, Individuo y Cosmos, fn.57 Nietzsche and inter-pretation,no thing to be interpreted. Being-as-becoming, place and not timeand space.]

Pero la grandezadel Cusano en este aspecto y su significacin histrica estriban en el hecho de que en l,lejos de cumplirse este proceso en oposicin al pensamiento religioso de la Edad Media,se lleva a cabo precisamente dentro de la rbita de ese pensamiento mismo. Desde el

propio centro de lo religioso realiza el descubrimiento de la naturaleza y del hombreque intenta afianzar y fijar en ese centro. El mstico y el telogo que hay en Nicols [56]de Cusa se sienten a la altura del mundo y de la naturaleza, a la altura de la historia y dela nueva cultura secular y humana. No se aparta de ellas ni las rechaza sino que, comocada vez se entrega ms y ms a su crculo, va incluyndolas al mismo tiempo en supropia esfera de pensamientos. Aun desde los primeros tratados del Cusano es posibleseguir este proceso; y si en ellos prevalece el motivo platnico del chorismos49, en lasobras posteriores gana la primaca el motivo de la methexis50.En sus ltimas obras se


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manifiesta como cumbre de la teora la conviccin de que la verdad, que al principiohaba buscado en la oscuridad de la mstica y que haba determinado como oposicin atoda multiplicidad y mudanza, se revela sin embargo precisamente en medio del reinode la multiplicidad emprica misma, la conviccin de que la verdad clama por lascalles51. Cada vez con mayor fuerza se da en Nicols de Cusa ese sentimiento del

mundo y, con l, ese su caracterstico optimismo religioso. El vocablo pantesmo no esadecuado para designar acabadamente ese nuevo sentimiento del mundo, pues no sedesvanece aqu la oposicin entre el ser de Dios y el ser del mundo, sino que por elcontrario se mantiene inclume en toda su plenitud. Pero como lo ensea el tratadoDevisione Dei, si la verdad de lo universal y lo particular de lo individual secompenetran mutuamente en forma tal que el ser de Dios slo puede sercomprendido y visto en la infinita multiplicidad de los puntos de vista individuales,del mismo modo podemos descubrir tambin el ser que est ms all de todalimitacin, de toda contraccin, solo y precisamente en esa limitacin. De modo queel ideal hacia el cual debe tender nuestroconocimiento no consiste en desconocer ni en

desechar lo particular, [57] sino ms bienen comprender el pleno despliegue de toda su

riqueza, pues slo la totalidaddel rostronos proporciona la visin una de lo divino.

We can see here, in Cassirers account of the thought of Nicholas ofCusa, which in many ways pre-announces that of Hegel (cf. at par.60),how the notion of totality subsists even as Nicholas elevates theparticipation (methexis) of the particular as an a-spect, a view ofthe whole. Similarly, in the erroneous exegesis of Nietzschesthought (in Jaspers as in Foucault), the primacy of interpretation issupposed to refer to the im-possibility of encompassing this totality.But this is far from Nietzsches meaning! The notion of inter-

pretation always implies a mediation between the interpreter andthe interpretandum that which is inter-preted, a mediationbetween the thing and the knowledge of the thing on the part ofan inter-preter. But this is exactly what Nietzsche denies the ec-sistence of a thing whose totality or truth we cannot com-prehend or en-compass. Far from ec-sisting independently of theknower or interpreter (whose ineluctable task it is to be con-fined toinfinite interpretations -, for Nietzsche neither the thing nor itstruth have a totality that can re-fer (bring back) to an under-lying,sub-stantial re-ality (thing-iness or what-ness). This is the consistentmeaning of esse est percipi that eluded both Berkeley and

Schopenhauer because both thought that being was a function ofper-ception, so that it is the perceiver that bestows being to theperceived which is the true meaning of idealism as againstrealism. In effect, both Berkeley and Schopenhauer conceive of theworld as representation or Idea in a neoplatonic sense that opposesIdeas to the world of appearances. But Nietzsche and Nicholas ofCusa are speaking the language, not of pantheism but ofimmanence, like Spinoza: they are saying that being ec-sists only


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as appearance, as per-ception; for them, the apparent world hasdisappeared together with the real or true world. The opposition ofreal and apparent worlds or being is the ineluctable outcome of thetranscendental attitude that opposes (this is the meaning of thePlatonic chorismos, of thephilosophia perennis) particular beings to

the Being of beings the particular to the totality, the part to thewhole. Note that Heidegger (cited by Arendt in LotM, p.11) claims thatwith this phrase Nietzsche has eliminated the difference between thesensible and supra-sensory worlds and in this he is clearly wrongbecause Nietzsche never wished to refute the difference betweenthe two worlds: he wished instead to make a dif-ference by exposingthe meaninglessness of their opposition! Of course, Heidegger hadevery interest in relegating Nietzsche to the nihilism (incomplete orcomplete) that he had denounced and sought to overcome!This is thepoint that Arendt herself misses completely:

What is dead is not only the localization of such eternal truths, butalso the distinction itself (p.10).

And this is the meaning of nihilism for Arendt. Yet she also is wrong:nihilism for Nietzsche does not consist in the elimination of thedistinction or difference between true and apparent worlds. Nihilism isthe very factthat belief in the suprasensory world leads to theannihilation of the sensible world. The seed of nihilism is contained inthe very thought of trans-scendence and this is a fallacy to whichArendt clearly and genially points, but ultimately does not elude (seePreface, p.11). The overcoming of nihilism, however, starts precisely

with the overcoming, not of the distinction or difference between thetwo worlds, but with the real source of this distinction or opposition,which is the forma mentis that generates this distinction, with thetranscendental attitude that forms the substratum of this philosophiaperennis. This is the com-pletion and exhaustion [Voll-endung] ofmetaphysics for Nietzsche. What Nietzsche certifies is the end oftranscendental metaphysics in a practical, even political, sense. Butthat is not to say that a metaphysics of immanence is no longerpossible: on the contrary, it becomes necessary. Because, as Arendtinsists, as do Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, meaning and truth-as-certainty are not the same thing! (Preface to LotM.)

[Refer to discussion of Nicholas of Cusa.]

The entire aim of Kants critique of metaphysics his enquiry into thepossibility of any future metaphysics able to call itself science was to avoid the Cartesian dualism by relegating the subiectum ofreality to the inscrutable status of the thing in itself, which allowed


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the hiatus between this last and human knowledge to be bridged ormediated by the human faculties of intuition, the intellect (theunderstanding), and finally pure reason, in a series of mediationsthat moved from mere appearances to the laws of nature andthose of logico-mathematics as governed by the rule of pure reason.

Kant accepted the skepticism of both Leibnitz and Hume over theexistence of a subject as the author or agent of the thinkingprocess. Descartes had committed the fallacy of presupposing anagent behind every action and therefore he presumed that theact of thinking necessarily presupposed the existence of a thinker.Both Leibnitz and Hume, and most emphatically Nietzsche, showedthat this was a non sequitur. Leibnitz, in particular, postulated thatreality could not be divided into noumena and phenomena for thesufficient reason that everything that exists, including phenomena ormere appearances (Kants blosse Erscheinungen), has a greater rightto exist than what does not: - and that is a sufficient reason for its

being.

Only in this limited sense, the certainty of per-ception the fact thatthere is something instead of nothing was the Cartesian cogitocertain. And in this sense Nietzsche was right to replace theCartesian cogito ergo sum with his vivoergo cogito. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us in the quotation below regarding the cogito: Savrit logique est que pour penser il faut tre. It is not the actofthinking that comes first; rather, it is the ineluctable reality of livingor perception that precedes thinking-as-reflection or consciousnessand, much farther down the track, that of the thinking subject, of the

I. This conceptual chain, what Nietzsche calls the ontogeny ofthought, and the evermore strict con-nection between perceptions,then reflection, and then the extrapolation to a conceptually orlogically necessary chorismos (Plato) or separation between theperceiver and the perceived (of ideas and things, says Merleau-Pontybelow) was to become the fateful problematic for Western thought.Had Descartes been more careful in his formulation of the cogito, asNietzsche and Arendt suggested, he would have expressed it ascogito me cogitare, ergo sum (p.20, LotM). But in that case it wouldhave become obvious to him that the first cogito, the one thatperceives that I think, begs the question of whether the thinking

is done by a thinker, by an I which, as Nietzsche showed beyondquestion, leads to a circulus vitiosus (each fresh statement pre-supposes a previous thinking subject or I); or to a non sequitur(because thinking can occur withouta thinking subject or I). This isthe fundamentality of thought, its abyss or, with Nietzsche, itsBeing-as-becoming:


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Quant la source mme des penses, nous savons maintenant que, pour la trouver, il nousfaut chercher sous les noncs, et [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 27] notamment sousl'nonc fameux de Descartes [that is, the cogito]. Sa vrit logique - qui est que pourpenser il faut tre -, sa signification d'nonc le trahissent par principe, puisqu'elles serapportent un objet de pense au moment o il faut trouver accs vers celui qui pense etvers sa cohsion native, dont l'tre des choses et celui des ides sont la rplique. La parole deDescartes est le geste qui montre en chacun de nous cette pense pensante dcouvrir, le Ssame ouvre-toi de la pense fondamentale. Fondamentale parce qu'elle n'est vhiculepar rien. Mais non pas fondamentale comme si, avec elle, on touchait un fond o il faudraits'tablir et demeurer. Elle est par principe sans fond et si l'on veut abme; cela veut direqu'elle n'est jamais avec elle-mme, que nous la trouvons auprs ou partir des chosespenses, qu'elle est ouverture, l'autre extrmit invisible de l'axe qui nous fixe aux choses etaux ides. (Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p.27.)

This fundamentality of thought is why for Kant, contrary toDescartes, the question of the Ich-heitor Ego-ity (the thinking subject),

could not be settled by rational means: the I was a concept thatbelonged to the transcendental dialectic in that its existence could notbe proven by scientific or logical means. Arendt (in the preface toLotM, pp13ff) rightly laments the distinction Kant made betweenReason and Intellect and the relegation of the former to the task ofcognition rather than thought, of truth rather than meaning, -something that he ought to have left to the Intellect instead, asSchopenhauer rightly insisted (see discussion in section below). Butneither Kant nor Schopenhauer nor even Arendt ever question thenexus rerum constituted by the physical laws of cause and effect; andthis failure is what prevents them from posing correctly,

meaningfully, the question of transcendence, of the separationof the suprasensible and the sensible worlds. Though he questionedthe possibility of meta-physics, Kants philosophical efforts weredirected at showing how scientific laws were possible: how it ispossible for human beings to discover invariant relations betweenphysical events with the predictable precision or certainty of logico-mathematics that justified their description as natural laws onaccount of the causally necessary link otherwise known as nexusrerum - that permitted the ontological and epistemological ordo etconnexio rerum et idearum (order and connection of things and ideas).Kant reasoned that we need to go beyond the Leibnitzian Principle of

Sufficient Reason because that principle cannot account for themathematical regularity of scientific observations: - as he revealinglyput it, Reason had to give backto Nature the order that the latterhad supplied with its regularity. Although reason is inconceivablewithout human intuition to provide it with the material content of itsconceptual categories, this human intuition in turn could not becomeaware of its content (it could not con-ceive or com-prehend or grasp


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it) without the mediation of the Schematismus of the intellect and, inturn, of the logico-mathematical rules of Pure Reason.

Kant regresses back into Cartesian dualism by simplypositing thefinitude of the per-cipient subject and the noumenality, the incom-

prehensibility of the per-ceived Object, of Being in its totality. This isthe kernel of what we may call (with Merleau-Ponty) thetranscendental attitude. Kant distinguishes two moments(momenta) of experience, one being the constitutive (perception)and the other the regulative (concepts or theory). This separation(or chorismos) of perception and the perceived, of thepercipi and theesse, already pre-supposes a dualism of perceiving Subject andperceived Object. The act of perception is founded on the logicalpresupposition that there is a thing that is to be perceived theObject. And the logical requirement of the act of perceiving is thatthere be an entity, a Subject, that does the perceiving. Whereas

Descartes had placed the Ego or the Soul at the summit of philosophy,Kant preferred to appoint the logico-mathematical powers of humanthought. It is the very ec-sistence of logico-mathematical id-entitiesthat are within life and the world, within experience, and yet areindependent of experience for their truth or validity it is this apriori ec-sistence of logico-mathematical rules or laws that confirmsthe ec-sistence of two separate yet inextricable aspects of humanexistence: the constitutive principle of experience and the regulativeprinciple of theory, the awareness or intuition of the res or thingsandthe cognitive ability to link these things according to cognitive rules.There exists therefore both a faculty that links or con-nects ideas

between themselves, and a faculty that links or connects these ideaswith things, and an entity that pro-duces these ideas (the Sub-ject)as well as the things (that are ordered and connected) inthemselves! Here Being is seen as pre-sence, as a fixed entity: whatis forgotten is that the only fixity is that of the degree zero ofbeing, which is its being-for-others, its perceptibility and not somekind of nothing-ness (Heidegger), as even Merleau-Ponty ends upmistaking it:

Les choses et le monde visibles, d'ailleurs, sont-ils autrement faits? Ils sont toujoursderrire ce que j'en vois, en horizon, et ce qu'on appelle visibilit est cette transcendance

mme. Nulle chose, nul ct de la chose ne se montre qu'en cachant activement lesautres, en les dnonant dans l'acte de les masquer. Voir, c'est par principe voir plusqu'on ne voit, c'est accder un tre de latence. L'invisible est le relief et la profondeur duvisible, et pas plus que lui le visible ne comporte de positivit pure. (Signes, p26, myemphases.)

Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger and Husserl and Hegel before them,continues to approach the question of being in its verticality, its


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transcendence and so betrays his own enterprise. (Arendt speaks ofdepth [or true being] and surfaces [or mere appearances] todistinguish between transcendence and immanence [see LotM, p26and p30 on the value of the surface]. Negri adopts this term, too inhis writings on Spinoza.) Had he turned to the immanentists, he would

have understood more fully what he himself sustains below when hesubstitutes visible et invisible for etre et neant the impossibilityof Being ec-sisting in its totality, as pre-sence that would renderthepre-sent(the nunc stans) meaningless, as un etre sansrestriction; - and therefore the futility or irrelevance oftranscendentalism:

Dimensionnalit, ouverture n'auraient plus de sens. Labsolument ouvert s'appliqueraitcompltement sur un tre sans restriction, et, faute d'une autre dimension dont elle ait sedistinguer, ce que nous appelions la verticalit , - le prsent - ne voudrait plus rien dire.Plutt que de l'tre et du nant, il vaudrait mieux parler du visible et de l'invisible, en

rptant qu'ils ne sont pas contradictoires. On dit invisible comme on dit immobile: nonpour ce qui est tranger au mouvement, mais pour ce qui s'y maintient fixe. C'est le point oule degr zro de visibilit, l'ouverture d'une dimension du visible. Un zro tous gards,un tre sans restriction ne sont pas considrer. Quand je parle du nant, il y a dj deltre, ce nant ne nantise donc pas pour de bon, et cet tre n'est pas identique soi,sans question. (Signes, p27.)

The limit of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception can besensed in his failure to appreciate how the notion of becoming inNietzsches version of the concept does not leave the sensible, timeand history untouched but trans-values them quite radically:

La philosophie qui dvoile ce chiasma du visible et de l'invisible est tout le contraired'un survol. Elle s'enfonce dans le sensible, dans le temps, dans l'histoire, vers leursjointures, elle ne les dpasse pas par des forces qu'elle aurait en propre, elle ne lesdpasse que dans leur sens. On rappelait rcemment le mot de Montaigne toutmouvement nous dcouvre. et l'on en tirait avec raison que l'homme n'est qu'enmouvement 6. De mme le monde ne tient, l'tre ne tient qu'en mouvement, c'est ainsiseulement que toutes choses peuvent tre ensemble. La philosophie est la remmoration[anamnesis] de cet tre-l, dont la science ne s'occupe pas, parce qu'elle conoit lesrapports de l'tre et de la connaissance comme ceux du gomtral et de ses projections, etqu'elle oublie l'tre d'enveloppement, ce qu'on [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 28]pourrait appeler la topologie de l'tre.

But Merleau-Pontys interesting notion of invisibility as the degreezero of visibility leads us back to the discussion over Schmittsexception and Hobbess hypothesis and Nietzsches Invariance allof which are border or liminal concepts, as it were, and offerrevealing radiographies of the bourgeois transcendental andontogenetic understanding ofhuman being. Having just stated thatquand je parle du nant, il y a dj de ltre,Merleau-Ponty remains


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locked in the transcendental attitude that he attempts to supersedebecause he remains tied to the Heideggerian phenomenological notionof nothing-ness: if being is in motion, if it is a be-coming, thenthere must also be a non-being that pre-supposes being, which is thespace left empty by thepre-sentbeing understood as a fixity.

Similarly, in-visibility has meaning or sense only in the light ofvisibility(la lueure de letre [p21], an echo of Heideggers Lichtung).Merleau-Ponty has a vice of falling into these delusional dualisms aswhen he speaks of silence enveloping words, for meaning orsens as letre denveloppement and the Platonic anamnesis (cf.his expressions above, at p.28 of Signes).

It is interesting also that Foucault and then Agamben (Homo Sacer)mistake this degree zero for some puerile pre-political state ofinnocence that has been tainted by statality, by civil society asbourgeois society, as a degeneration or de-secration from zoe to

bios. In effect, Agamben et alii erect a naked life as a bulwarkagainst the fiction ofcitizenship that de-fines the border betweenthe state of legality and that of exception.

E em referencia a esta definicao que Foucault, ao final daVontade de saber, resume o processo atraves do qual, noslimiares da Idade Moderna, a vida natural comep, par suavez, a ser incluida nos mecanismos enos calculos do poderestatal, e a politica se transforma em biopolitica: "Par milenios,o homem permaneceu o que era para Aristoteles: um animalvivente e, alem disso, capaz de existencia politica; o homem

moderno e um animal em cuja politica esta em questao a suavida de ser vivente." (Foucault, 1976, p. 127) (See pp.3-4 of Eng. Edtn.)

Despite his appeals to the authorialityof Hannah Arendt (for he is amaster at seeking out associations with authors such as Heideggerand Deleuze), Agamben neglects the cardinal importance that Arendtgave precisely to the concept of citizenship, not as a mark ofbiopolitical repression, but indeed as the only realistic and realprotection of a human being by a human community! There is noreference in Arendt to this primacy of natural life to which Agambenrefers (p.4). Little wonder that he should complain (same page) that

Arendt establishes no connection between the analyses in HC andin OT! The Nazi concentration camps operated not on the basis thatcitizenship was denied to the Jews, as Agamben foolishly believes,but precisely on the Nietzschean and later Schmittian notion thatsociety and its ontogeny of thought are fictitious masks that serveto dissemble the nakedness of life as exploitation! Though thisdebacle may have begun with the progressive emargination of socialgroups from the protection of citizenship, as Arendt genially showed,


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the Nazis never saw Jews as people deprived of citizenship andthey never meant thereby to exclude them from any kind ofbiopolitical statality or statal power. The Nazis quite simply ob-literated the very notion of citizenship altogether! In such a waythat the Jews became in their eyes the innocent (Unschuldig!)

victims of the struggle for life, the war of all against all, - the state ofnature that is exactly what Agambens notion of nuda vita andFoucaults earlier Aristotelian one of zoe ineluctably revive! In theNazi ideology, Jews were merely the representatives of a losing slavemorality that were to be dominated by the homologously ir-responsible or un-accountable (un-ver-antwort-lich) Nazi Arianbearers of the master morality! To lump together political systemsthat retain the notion of citizenship with systems like the Nazi statethat abolished citizenship completely is to commit a politicalmisjudgement of the worst possible kind! The puerility of Agambenslate-romantic Rousseauean reveries is of an almost unbearable

naivete something that Nietzsche exposed and ridiculed with theontogeny of thought which shows, in a manner later rejuvenated byArendt, the (sit venia verbo!) nakedness (allusion to Agambensnuda vita or naked life) of the violence that the bourgeoistranscendental attitude and ontogeny unleashes on beings humanbecause of its equally naked denigration and denial of anyphylogenetic inter esse, let alone citizenship! Nietzsche falselybelieved to be able to overcome the nihilism of Western thought byexposing its Invariance: in reality, however, he only ended upidentifying the ineluctability of exploitation and of the pathos ofdistance, as well as the instrumentality of the capitalist logico-

mathematical and scientific order. (Esposito, incidentally, has soughtto redefine inter esse as comunitas, with the emphasis on the munerewhich preserves the social individuality of the esse and shifts thepolitical emphasis from the inter.)

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Or, si nous chassons de notre esprit l'ide d'un texte originaldont notre langage serait latraduction ou la version chiffre, nous verrons que l'ide d'une expression complte fait non-sens, que tout langage est indirect ou allusif, est, si l'on veut, silence. (Signes, p45)

Again, the totality of being, just like the complete expression is anon-sense, says Merleau-Ponty. The parallelism of word and object,of thought and word is therefore also a nonsense:

Il n'est pas davantage de pense qui soit compltement pense et qui ne demande des motsle moyen d'tre prsente elle-mme. Pense et parole s'escomptent l'une l'autre. Elles sesubstituent continuellement l'une l'autre. Elles sont relais, stimulus l'une pour l'autre. Toute


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pense vient des paroles et y retourne, toute parole est ne dans les penses et finit en elles. Ily a entre les hommes et en chacun une incroyable vgtation de paroles dont les penses sont la nervure. - On dira - mais enfin, si la parole est autre chose que bruit ou son, c'est quela pense y dpose une charge de sens -, et le sens lexical ou grammatical d'abord - de sortequ'il n'y a jamais contact que de la pense avec la pense -. Bien sr, des sons ne sont parlantsque pour une pense, cela ne veut pas dire que la parole soit drive ou seconde. Bien sr, lesystme mme du langage a sa structure pensable. Mais, quand nous parlons, nous ne lapensons pas comme la pense le linguiste, nous n'y pensons pas mme, nous pensons ce quenous disons. Ce n'est pas seulement que nous ne puissions penser deux choses la fois : ondirait que, pour avoir devant nous un signifi, que ce soit [26] l'mission ou la rception,ilfautque nous cessions de nous reprsenter le code et mme le message, que nous nousfassions purs oprateurs de la parole. La parole oprante fait penser et la pense vive trouvemagiquement ses mots. Il n'y a pas la pense et le langage, chacun des deux ordres l'examense ddouble et envoie un rameau dans l'autre. (Signes, p24)

In fact here even the la of la pensee ought to be in cursive because if languages interpenetrate thoughts, then it is foolhardy to

postulate the existence of one thought: there are as manythoughts as there are words to articulate and express them.Merleau-Ponty obliquely argues as much when he rightly observes thatthere cannot be any plausible analytical distinction betweensynchronic parole and diachronic langue a la Saussure. (Seegenerally Le Phenomene du Langage in Signes, p.85:

L'exprience de la parole n'aurait alors rien nous enseigner sur ltre du langage, ellen'aurait pas de porte ontologique.

C'est ce qui est impossible. Ds qu'on distingue, ct de la science objective du langage,une phnomnologie de la parole, on met en route une dialectique par laquelle les deux

disciplines entrent en communication.D'abord le point de vue subjectif enveloppe le point de vue objectif ; la

synchronie enveloppe la diachronie. Le pass du langage a commenc par tre [ MauriceMerleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 86] prsent, la srie des faits linguistiques fortuits que laperspective objective met en vidence s'est incorpore un langage qui, chaque moment,tait un systme dou d'une logique interne.

Here once again Merleau-Ponty seems unable to distinguish betweenhuman ana-lysis literally, the retrovisual categorization of reality thatends up in theprima philosophia (ontology) and the reality that isthe fundament or even the abyss of thought and language andaction, in short, of what may be called the point of intuition, the realityof perception.

Yet Merleau-Pontys conception of thought remains tied to the intra-mundane notion of time:


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Il n'y aurait rien s'il n'y avait cet abme du soi. Seulement un abme n'est pas rien, il a sesbords, ses entours. On pense toujours quelque chose, sur, selon, d'aprs quelque chose, l'endroit, l'encontre de quelque chose. Mme l'action de penser est prise dans la pousse deltre. Je ne peux pas penser identiquement la mme chose plus d'un instant. L'ouverture parprincipe est aussitt comble, comme si la pense ne vivait qu' l'tat naissant. Si elle semaintient, c'est travers - c'est par le glissement qui la jette l'inactuel. Car il y a l'inactuelde l'oubli, mais aussi celui de l'acquis. C'est par le temps que mes penses datent, c'est par luiaussi quelles font date, qu'elles ouvrent un avenir de pense, un cycle, un [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 21] champ, qu'elles font corps ensemble, qu'elles sont une seule pense,qu'elles sont moi. La pense ne troue pas le temps, elle continue le sillage des prcdentespenses, sans mme exercer le pouvoir, qu'elle prsume, de le tracer nouveau, comme nouspourrions, si nous voulions, revoir l'autre versant de la colline : mais quoi bon, puisque lacolline est l ? quoi bon m'assurer que ma pense du jour recouvre ma pense d'hier : je lesais bien puisque aujourd'hui je vois plus loin.Si je pense, ce n'est pas que je saute hors dutemps dans un monde intelligible, ni que je recre chaque fois la signification partir de

rien, c'est que la flche du temps tire tout avec elle, fait que mes penses successives

soient, dans un sens second, simultanes, ou du moins qu'elles empitent lgitimement

l'une sur l'autre.Je fonctionne ainsi par construction. Je suis install sur une pyramide detemps qui a t moi. Je prends du champ, je m'invente, mais non sans mon quipementtemporel, comme je me dplace dans le monde, mais non sans la masse, inconnue de moncorps. Le temps est ce corps de l'esprit dont parlait Valry. Temps et pense sontenchevtrs l'un dans l'autre. La nuit de la pense est habite par une lueur de l'Etre.(Signes, pp20-1)

This is a spatial con-ception of being and time - there cannot beempty space because even emptiness pre-supposes space! Andindeed even intra-mundane time is spatialised because it isconceived as a now-sequence of equal intervals unfolding from past

to future (cf. Heideggers early essay on time). I do not jump out oftime when I think betrays Merleau-Pontys nunc fluens conception oftime, as a flowing river in which all being floats. So does hisreference to the arrow of time and to time is the body of the spirit in other words, for the spirit, time is its embodiment or corpo-reality. Yet we know, first, that time is a meaningless conceptoutside of human intuition (spirit here), and second, that if time iswhat gives body to the spirit, then it comes into opposition withspace: in other words, we still do not know where this spirit is! Itis this invisibility of spirit and this spirituality or corporeality oftime that relegates us to the illusory dualism of Body and Spirit, of

Idea and Thing. These are transcendental notions because theyconceive of being as something that can be located in a spatio-temporal continuum. Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges as muchwhen he meekly suggests that l'tre et [le] nant, il vaudrait mieuxparler du visible et de l'invisible, ne sont pas contradictoires. Yet theyare! Nothing-ness does not admit of being, unless being isunderstood transcendentally, in terms of the philosophia perennis, asthe suprasensible world of which nothing-ness is only the kingdom of


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shadows, of appearances, the negative or reverse of being; or elseas possibility or contingency (Heidegger, Sartre), which is certainlynot nothing-ness but being in gestation, potentiality or Aristoteliandynamis all of which poses an antinomic dualism that Merleau-Pontywas desperately trying to eschew from the inception. In this antinomic

world, nothing-ness also has its being, and Heideggers sophistriescome to resemble closely Hegels dialectical teleology (see hisdiscussion of Aristotle in Vol.1 ofNietzsche).

It is instructive that Merleau-Pontys ultimate lunge to evade thislinguistic trap is to prefer the phrase topology of being which iscloser to our notion of place (Ort) and the nunc stans to re-place (!)the old intra-mundane notions of space and time. Thefundamentality that Merleau-Ponty is chasing is the materiality orimmanence of being.

Dans le texte tardif que nous citions en commenant, Husserl crit que la parole ralise une localisation et une temporalisation d'un sens idal qui, selon son sens d'tre n'est nilocal ni temporel, - et il ajoute plus loin que la parole encore objective et ouvre la pluralitdes sujets, titre de concept ou de proposition, ce qui n'tait auparavant qu'une formationintrieure un sujet. Il y aurait donc un mouvement par lequel l'existence idale descend dansla localit et la temporalit, - et un mouvement inverse par lequel l'acte de parole ici etmaintenant fonde l'idalit du vrai. Ces deux mouvements seraient contradictoires s'ilsavaient lieu entre les mmes termes extrmes, et il nous semble ncessaire de concevoir iciun circuit de la rflexion : elle reconnat en premire [121] approxi-mation l'existence idalecomme ni locale, ni temporelle, - puis elle s'avise d'une localit et d'une temporalit de laparole que l'on ne peut driver de celles du monde objectif, ni d'ailleurs suspendre unmonde des ides, et finalement fait reposer sur la parole le mode d'tre des formations

idales. L'existence idale est fonde sur le document, non sans doute comme objet physique,non pas mme comme porteur des significations une une que lui assignent les conventionsde la langue dans laquelle il est crit, mais sur lui en tant que, par une transgressionintentionnelle encore, il sollicite et fait converger toutes les vies connaissantes et ce titreinstaure et restaure un Logos du monde culturel.Le propre d'une philosophie phnomnologique nous parait donc tre de s'tablir titredfinitif dans l'ordre de la spontanit enseignante qui est inaccessible au psychologisme et l'historicisme, non moins qu'aux mtaphysiques dogmati-ques. Cet ordre, la phnomnologiede la parole est entre toutes apte nous le rvler. Quand je parle ou quand je comprends,j'exprimente la prsence d'autrui en moi ou de moi en autrui, qui est la pierre d'achoppementde la thorie de l'intersubjectivit, la prsence du reprsent qui est la pierre d'achoppement

de la thorie du temps, et je comprends enfin ce que veut dire l'nigmatique proposition deHusserl : La subjectivit transcendantale est intersubjectivit. Dans la mesure o ce que jedis a sens, je suis pour moi-mme, quand je parle, un autre autre , et, dans la mesure o jecomprends, je ne sais plus qui parle et qui coute. La dernire dmarche philosophique est dereconnatre ce que Kant appelle [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 96] l' affinittranscendantale des moments du temps et des temporalits. C'est sans doute ce que Husserlcherche faire quand il reprend le vocabulaire finaliste des mtaphysiques, parlant de monades , entlchies , tlologie . Mais, ces mots sont mis souvent entre guillemetspour signifier qu'il n'entend pas introduire avec eux quelque agent qui de l'extrieur assurerait


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la connexion des termes mis en rapport. La finalit au sens dogmatique serait un compromis:elle laisserait face face les termes lier et le principe liant. [122] Or c'est au coeur de monprsent que je trouve le sens de ceux qui l'ont prcd, que je trouve de quoi comprendre laprsence d'autrui au mme monde, et c'est dans l'exercice mme de la parole que j'apprends comprendre. Il ny a finalit qu'au sens o Heidegger la dfinissait lorsqu'il disait peu prsqu'elle est le tremblement d'une unit expose la contingence et qui se recreinfatigablement. Et c'est la mme spontanit, non-dlibre, inpuisable, que Sartre faisaitallusion quand il disait que nous sommes condamns la libert .

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Merleau-Ponty, to my knowledge the only philosopher who not only tried to give an account ofthe organic structure of human existence but also tried in all earnest to embark upon aphilosophy of the flesh, was still misled by the old identification of mind and soul when hedefined the mind as the other side of the body since there is a body of the mind and a mind ofthe body and a chiasm between them. Precisely the lack of such chiasmata or crossings over isthe crux of mental phenomena and Merleau-Ponty himself, in a different context, recognized thelack with great clarity. Thought, he writes, is fundamental because it is not borne by anything,but not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneselfand stay. As matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss.But what is true of the mind is not true of the soul and vice versa. The soul, though perhaps muchdarker than the mind will ever manage to be, is not bottomless; it does indeed overflow intothe body; it encroaches upon it, is hidden in it and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, isanchoredin it (LotM, p33, this last quotation is from Augustine,De Civitate Dei).

This is not the first time that we pick on Arendt for her stubbornattachment to this distinction between mindand soul. There isindeed a distinction to be made between emotional thought and

abstract thought but both modes of thinking are just aspects ofmental life that are different only in their content, not in theirfundamentality or their ontological status. And this is what Merleau-Ponty is saying but Arendt cannot comprehend because of herattachment, again, to the distinction between cognitive thoughtwhich is oriented to truth-as-certainty (logico-mathematics andscientific regularities) and thinking proper, which for her includesmeaning but which in effect ends up referring to logico-deductiveand formal-rational, in short, abstract thought. Only in this regarddoes her own thought differ from Kants basic distinction between thethinking ego, whose eminent faculties are the understanding and

reason, and the soul or the self. Kant ends up reducing all thinking tocognitive thought or thought directed at certainty and truth.Arendt instead categorises this as only a branch of abstract thought, ofwhich meaning forms the greater part. But as we will see, Arendtbases her entire argument on the otherness of thinking its beingin the world and yet apart from it precisely and ontologically on thetruth-status of logico-mathematical abstract thinking or reasoning on Kants notions of intellect and reason. Although she agrees that


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thought is an abyss, it is fundamental, because it is only throughthought that we are able to pose the most fundamental questions ofexistence and reality, she fails to understand thereby that from theontological standpoint even abstract thought still constitutes anemotional aspect of the life of the mind - however cool or

impassive or dis-interested it may appear - of which itsintellectuality is only a part or subset thereof. Mental activity,whether intellectual or emotional, is one and the same: the problem isthat too often we con-fuse, as clearly does Arendt, the focus ormode of thought with its real referent, with its object (which, aswe will see in our critique of Heideggers Kantbuch, is no ob-ject atall) as if emotive thought dealt with the soul and intellectualthought dealt instead with the mind as pure activity, and thensplit itself again into rational and meaningful activities. Contrary towhat Arendt believes, both intellectual and emotive thought haverepercussions on the body and to this extent Merleau-Ponty is quite

right to insist on the mind of the body and vice versa, rather thanjust the soul of the body and vice versa, and their chiasmata, theircrossings-over.

The stumbling block for Arendt is a distinction that she makes and thatMerleau-Ponty does not tackle whilst Nietzsche certainly did and, by sodoing, made one of his greatest discoveries, what we have calledNietzsches Invariance, which is that cognitive thought (logico-mathematics) and reflective thought, both of which make up abstractor intellectual thought, are not separate from other modes ofthinking and that indeed thought and body cannot be separated

the way Arendt earnestly wishes they could! The mind has a life alsoin this sense or meaning, what Arendt calls the sixth sense(pp49-50): - that it cannot be separated from life, even in its mostabysmal or fundamental intuitive or rational cognitive or abstractfunctions. Arendt clearly mistakes what Merleau-Ponty means byfundamental: thought is not borne by any thing not because it isin opposition to or contrast with the world of things because, asArendt herself points out, thinking beings are not just in the world butalso ofthe world. Rather, thought is fundamental because it is onlythrough thought that we can intuit the nature of reality. But thisintuition tells us precisely what Arendt (and Heidegger, then Kant, as

we are about to see) refuses to acknowledge: - that thought isimmanentin life and the world, that it cannot abstract from thelatter, even in its most intellectual modes and functions andoperations. This is what Nietzsche, first among philosophers,discovered. And here we come to self-evident truths.

Arendts The Life of the Mind is quite evidently hinged on themisconception that Kant operated a dichotomy or an opposition a


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Platonic chorismos between things in themselves (the Ideas) andmere appearances, between the (true) world and its effects. Yetthis is not correct because Kant emphatically elevates those mereappearances to ineluctable a-spects of the thing in itself so that noreal ultimate opposition exists between the two which is what

Arendt herself is advancing here. Where the opposition relevant toArendts criticism of Kant arises is not between appearances andthings in themselves but rather between pure intuition and thing,between perception and reflection, between perception andknowledge, between knowledge and reason, between idea and object whence transcendental idealism -, and finally between Subject andObject. This is why Schopenhauer could celebrate in the distinctionbetween appearance and thing in itself.Kants greatest discovery because he could see immediately that in fact there cannot be anydualism between perception and knowledge and that therefore thereal dichotomy was to be located between the Understanding or

Intellect and its representations on one side and the Will, the truething in itself, on the other with the two making up the world:hence, the world as will and representation (or Idea).

Heidegger has enucleated and illustrated, with characteristic didacticand analytical brilliance, this important aspect of Kantian meta-physics: for Kant there is no opposition whatsoever between thingsin themselves and appearances nor are the latter caused by theformer; rather, for the Koenigsberger, appearances are the necessarymanifestation of things as beings-in-the-world open to perceptionby the thinking ego of human beings (Heidegger calls them things for

us in What is a thing? At about p5) who then (and here comescausality) orders them into concepts or constructions from whichdeductions (synthetic a priori statements) can be made by purereason. It is not the case that for Kant appearances are mere andtherefore false events (Geschehen) that need to be interpreted in thelight of the things that cause them. Arendts miscomprehension canbe gleaned when she summarises Kants position as follows:

His notion of a thing in itself, something which is but does not appear although it causesappearances, can beexplained on the grounds of the theological tradition, (LotM, p40).Kant was carried away by his great desire tomake it overwhelmingly plausible that there

undoubtedly is something distinct from the world which contains the ground for the order of theworld, and therefore is itself of a higher order, (p42).

Yet Kant says precisely what Arendt seems to be saying: - that thething in itself does appear; in fact, it can do nothing else but appearto human beings who can never com-prehend it fully.Arendt herselfcomes close to grasping Kants admittedly intricate ontologico-epistemological position when she observes: -


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The theological bias [in Kant] enters here in the word mere representations, as if he hadforgottenhis own central thesis: We assert that the conditions ofthe possibility of experience ingeneral are likewise conditions ofthe possibility of the experience of the objects of experience, andthat for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori statement. (LotM, p.41)

In fact, Kant has not forgotten his own central thesis and, for him,both the possibility of experience and that of the experience of theobjects of experience actually coincide because things inthemselves that become objects of experience are known to us that is, are things in themselves for us when they are not things inthemselves of a higher order whose ec-sistence (they are notnothing) is required by Pure Reason.What is of a higher order forKant is not at all the thing in itself but rather the Pure Reasonwhich contains the ground [not the cause!] for the orderof the world.The difference between the thinking ego and other things inthemselves is that the former is the faculty that can give order [Sinn-

gebende] to the worldmade up of other things in themselves, whichare named so because they are not knowable in themselves and notbecause they do not appear!Unlike Plato or Mach, Kant does notsanctify the lofty philosopher or scientist who rises above the apparentworld. Quite to the contrary, and this is a point that Arendt keenlyappreciates (p41), Kant bases himself precisely on this world ofappearances from which that of noumena can be deduced thanks tothe intellect and reason. Perception is the construction from whichreason can derive its synthetic deductions.

By failing to understand this subtle yet essential point of the Kantiancritique, Arendt cannot undo and re-erect her own phenomenology ofthe flesh on proper ontological foundations; for the simple reason thatherprivileging of appearances or phenomena over things inthemselves or noumena or qualitates occultae remains firmly bound tothe transcendental attitude, just as Merleau-Pontys exaltation orelevation of perception from secondary (the effect of things orobjects) to primary (the dis-closure of the object thatpresupposes its partial invisibility or nothing-ness) is tightlychained to this philosophical framework. Arendt amply demonstratesand corroborates this conclusion when describing her ownunderstanding of the difference between thinking ego and the self:

The thinking ego is indeed Kants thing in itself: it does not appear to others and unlike the selfof self-awareness it does not appear to itself, and yet it is not nothing. The thinking ego issheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities and without a life storyFor thethinking ego is not the self (pp42-3).

And here is the crux. The crucial characteristic of the transcendentalattitude rests not on the distinction between the true world and the


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apparent world, but rather on the conception of human intuition asordering the world, on the separation between the intuitive and theconceptual tasks of the mind. This is what Merleau-Ponty wasattempting to circumvent with the topology of being, yet failed toachieve because of that and yet it is not nothing! Heideggers

explication of this Kantian expression in What is a Thing? (atp5)genially and instructively distinguishes between two kinds of things inthemselves: - those that appear to us [things for us] and those thatdo not, such as God and the thinking ego. Arendt fails to make thisdistinction and so believes that all Kantian things in themselves are thesame and that her distinction of Being and Appearance applies to Kantand that Kant reduced the thinking ego and all thinking to purereason ! So long as chiasmata are possible between body and soul,immanence is assured. But it is when the mind comes into play assheer activity, when the ageless, sexless, thinking ego withoutqualities fails to appear, and yet it is not nothing and like God it is

not a thing for us - when this fundament or abyss is consideredmystically, then we have trans-scendence, the op-position of Subjetand Object a theo-logy. This is the underpinning of Schopenhauers(then Nietzsches) devastating critique of Kants transcendentalism.

Arendt speaks of

the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, isin possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the worldwithout ever being able to leave it or transcend it, (LotM, p43).

Yet so long as Arendt keeps speaking of the world of appearances,she will be stuck with this paradoxical condition for the simplereason that she exalts, like Kant and even Heidegger, the primacy orprimordiality or purity, the sheer activity the transcendence!- of thought and intuition over their materiality or sensuousness orimmanence. For to say that thought can withdraw from the worldbecause of its abstract and inescapable (a reference again tologico-mathematical thought) character or quality is effectivelyequivalent to saying that thought trans-scends life and the world!The life of the mind then becomes an impossible chiasmus, indeedan oxymoron. An illustration of this misconception can be gleaned from

Arendts critical comments on P.F. Strawsons presumption,characteristic of the Oxford analytical school, in a passage she quotesfrom one of his essays on Kant:

It is indeed an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtlessit has its ground in the fact thatwe grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. Butone [who]grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless, (Strawson quoted on p45).


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What neither Strawson nor Arendt understand, and this is the reasonwhy they are entangled in this paradoxical condition, is thatmathematical and logical truths are neither true nor timeless!The prism that distorts the entire Western ontological traditions viewof reality is precisely this notion of self-evident truths. This is the

prism, the illusion, that Nietzsches Invariance smashes mercilessly tosmithereens. For a truth to ec-sist it must be com-prehensible(Heidegger uses the term umgreifen early in the Kantbuch) andtherefore, unlike the Kantian and Schopenhauerian thing in itself,within time: it must be intra-temporal and intra-mundane. But then itcannot possibly be time-less! A timeless truth does not ec-sist: it iseither a tautology or else it is a practical tool, an instrument, andas such neither true nor false, just as the world is neither truenor apparent.

Yet so long as Arendt keeps speaking of the world of appearances,

she will be stuck with this paradoxical condition for the simplereason that she exalts, like Kant and even Heidegger, the primacy orprimordiality or purity, the sheer activity the transcendence!- of thought and intuition over their materiality or sensuousness orimmanence. For to say that thought can withdraw from the worldbecause of its abstract and inescapable (a reference again tologico-mathematical thought) character or quality is effectivelyequivalent to saying that thought trans-scends life and the world,however much Arendt may eschew this conclusion! Tertium non datur:unless Arendt can enlighten us about the ontological status of themind, she has no grounds to back the assertion that the mind [can]

withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it ortranscend it. The life of the mind then becomes an impossiblechiasmus, indeed an oxy-moron. An illustration of thismiscomprehension can be gleaned from Arendts critical comments onP.F. Strawsons presumption, characteristic of the Oxford analyticalschool, in a passage she quotes from one of his essays on Kant:

It is indeed an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtlessit has its ground in the fact thatwe grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. Butone [who]grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless, (Strawson quoted on p45).

What neither Strawson nor Arendt understand, and this is the reasonwhy they are entangled in this paradoxical condition, is thatmathematical and logical truths are neither true nor timelessbecause both notions are transcendental and therefore antinomical.It is simply not possible for someone who is not timeless to be ableto grasp timeless truths that are, by definition, out of time unlessone posits the transcendence of reason and its timeless truths!But that would be tantamount to allowing that there ec-sist entities of


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thought or reason that are out of time even though those entities arethoughts originating in the mind of a thinker who is not time-less!

The notions of truth and timelessness require precisely that com-

prehensive being or grasping-from-the-knower [Jasperss Um-greifende or Heideggers Totalitat] or totality or being-in-itself - notfor us, that belongs to what is not and yet it is not nothing (cf.Kantbuch, pp18-22) - that directly contra-dicts both their ec-sistence(either in space-time or in place) and the finitude of the knower!The prism that distorts the entire Western ontological traditions viewof reality is precisely this notion of self-evident truths ascomprehensive being or totality or being-in-itself. This is theprism, the illusion, that Nietzsches Invariance smashes mercilessly tosmithereens. For a truth to ec-sist it must be com-prehensible(Heidegger uses the term umgreifen early in the Kantbuch, at par.5,

p20) and therefore, unlike the Kantian and Schopenhauerian thing initself, within time: it must be intra-temporal and intra-mundane. Butthen it cannot possibly be time-less! A timeless truth does not ec-sist: it is either a tautology or else it is a practical tool, aninstrument, and as such neither true nor false, just as the worldis neither true nor apparent. As Heideggers discussion in par.5 ofthe Kantbuch reveals (at p19 especially), the whole notion ofcomprehensive grasping or totality, indeed the entire Kantianeffort to tie intuition to thinking and then both to knowledge, has to dowith the communicability of intuition.

Knowledge [and therefore thinking] is primarily intuition, i.e., a representing that immediatelyrepresents the being itself. However, if finite intuition is now to be knowledge, then it must be able tomake the being itself as revealed accessible with respect to both what and how it is for everyone at alltimes. Finite, intuiting creatures must be able to share in the specific intuition of beings. First of all,however, finite intuition as intuition always remains bound to the specifically intuited particulars. Theintuited is only a known being if everyone can make it understandable to oneself and to others and canthereby communicate it.

The whole pyramidal structure from perception to conception, fromintuition to the intellect and reason, from conduction to deduction, hasno other aim than to explain how it is possible for human beings toshare perceptions as knowledge! It is this crystallisation of symbolic

interaction, that Nietzsche shattered by exposing its con-ventionality.And it is instructive to see how Benedetto Croce deals with this critiquein the Logica. Having already tersely lampooned the aestheticistcritique of pure concepts which denies their validity and existence infavour of sensuous experience and activity such as the artistic, andthen the mystical critique which, like Wittgenstein, insists that whatis truly worthwhile is what cannot be spoken of, Croce then turns to the


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arbitrary or empiricist critique (which surely must count Nietzscheamong its proponents):

Ce (essi dicono) qualcosa di la dalla mera rappresentazione, e questo qualcosa e un atto divolonta, che soddisfa lesigenza delluniversale con lelaborare le rappresentazioni singole in schemigenerali o simboli, privi di realta ma comodi, finti ma utili, (Logica, p10).

Croce does not accept that concepts are conventions or, as heprefers to call them on behalf of the critics, fictions. As proof of theerroneity of this critique, Croce enlists the tu quoque; in otherwords, this arbitrarist critique of logic and pure concepts is itselfalogical argument based on concepts and therefore it is either equallyfalse like all logic, or else it must claim validity on logical grounds, andthence confirm the validity of its concepts, and therefore the validityof conceptual reality in any case (see Logica, p12). What Croce failsto grasp is that, so far as Nietzsche is concerned, the crystallizationcritique does not deny the reality of concepts; indeed, if anything, ithighlights and warns against their efficacity. But this efficacity ismade possible not by their transcendental or pure status astimeless truths, for instance but rather by their immanent status,by their instrumental character as an act of will. Not theinnateness of these concepts, but their instrumentality is whatmatters not Augustines in interiore homine habitat veritas (citedand discussed by Merleau-Ponty in Phenom.ofPerception, at p.xi) butthe content ofthe act of perception is what constitutes life and theworld for us. Earlier, Croce had emphasized the active side ofconcepts as human representations of intuited reality privileging yetagain the spiritual nature of concepts as dependent on intuitionand experience yet separate from it.

Il soddisfacimento e dato dalla forma non piu meramente rappresentativa ma logica del conoscere, esi effettua in perpetuo, a ogni istante della vita dello spirito, (p13).

Now, again, Croce draws a stark contrast between the two positions,his idealism and what he calls scetticismo logico (p8):

La conoscenza logica e qualcosa di la dalla semplice rappresentazione: questa e individualita emolteplicita, quella luniversalita dellindividualita, lunita della molteplicita; luna intuizione,laltra concetto; conoscere logicamente e conoscere luniversale o concetto. La negazione dellalogicita importa laffermazione che non vi ha altra conoscenza se non quella rappresentativa (osensibile come anche si suole dire), e che la conoscenza universale o concettuale e unillusione: di ladalla semplice rappresentazione non vi sarebbe nulla di conoscibile, (pp7-8).

But this contrast is almost palpably fictitious, opposing high-soundingconcepts in what is almost a play of words, and simply fails to tell uswhy and how concepts and representations differ ontologically. Croceends up rehashing the Kantian Schematismus with the pure concepts


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of beauty, finality, quantity and quality and so forth whose content isfurnished by fictional concepts such as universals (nouns) andabstract concepts like those of mathematics (cf. Logica,ch.2 at p18).But in fact, as we have tried to show here invoking the aid of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception, neither of Croces pre-

suppositions of logical activity, that is, intuition and language (seepp5-6 ofLogica), is such that logical activity can be separated onto-logically from them. Croce insists that a concept must be expressible whence the essentiality of language to it, no less than intuition orrepresentation:

Se questo carattere dellespressivita ecomune al concetto e alla rappresentazione, proprio delconcetto e quello delluniversalita, ossia della trascendenza rispetto alle singole rappresentazioni,onde nessuna.e mai in grado di adeguare il concetto. Tra lindividuale e luniversale non eammissibile nulla di intermedio o di misto: o il singolo o il tutto (Logica, pp.26-7).

We have here once again the Platonic chorismos, the Scholasticadaequatio,the Kantian noumenon, and the Fichtean hiatusirrationalem in other words, that antinomy that requires a leap(trans-scendence) from experience to thought. Except that what Crocebelieves to identify as a particular is already and immanentlyidentical with a universal: not only is a concrete experience already auniversal, but so is a universal abstraction also a concrete experience!Both are representations (cf. Croces contrary argument on pp.28-9).This is the basis of Schopenhauers critique of Kants separation ofintuition from understanding and again from pure reason, in the sensethat the Kantian universal is toto genere different from the particular

and cannot therefore represent it separatelyin an ontological sense!Croces own categorization of these notions is at p.42 of the Logica:

La profonda diversita tra concetti e pseudoconcetti [identified with lidea platonica on p.41]suggeri (nel tempo in cui si solevano rappresentare le forme o gradi dello spirito come facolta) ladistinzione tra due facolta logiche, che si dissero Intelletto (o anche Intelletto astratto) e Ragione: allaprima delle quali si assegno lufficio di elaborare cio che ora chiamiamo pseudoconcetti, e allaseconda i concetti puri.

Evident is Croces obstinacy in seeking to differentiate, however vainly,thought from perception or representation or intuition: - an

effort that must remain vain because no onto-logical priority can begiven to thought over matter and because indeed no thought ispossible without perception and vice versa. A world without thoughtwould be a world without life, and a world without life would not be aworld at all! That is not to say that thought takes precedenceontologically over the world because it is essential to the world; thetwo are co-naturate, Deus sive Natura. For universals andparticulars, for abstract thought and concrete intuition, to be able to


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enter into a practical real relation with each other, they mustparticipate (Nicholas of Cusas methexis) in the same immanentreality! Indeed, it seems obvious to us that perception and thought areimmanently connected: methexis replaces chorismos. Here is Merleau-Ponty:

The true Cogito does not define the subjects existence in terms of the thought he has of existingand furthermore does not convert the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does itreplace the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes my thought itself as aninalienable fact, and does away with any kind of idealism in revealing me as 'being-in-the-world'.(PoP, p.xiii).

To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined asaccess to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to basethis defacto self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absoluteself-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughtshave for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodiedforth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through,

I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world,and should be looking for what makes that experience possibleinstead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought orapodeictic self-evidence. The world is not what I think but what I live through [m.e.]. I am opento the world, I have nodoubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it;it isinexhaustible. 'There is a world', or rather: 'There is the world';I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertionin my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes theWeltlichkeit der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just asthe facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but ratherwhat assures me of my existence, (PoP, pp.xvi-xvii).

Merleau-Ponty reiterates here the Nietzschean vivo ergo cogito, withthe peccadillos that he refers to the self-evident truth of perception(what is truth if, as he immediately yet unwittingly corrects himself, itis not backed by some absolute self-evident truth?) and then theobvious reference to the I, the Husserlian transcendental ego orsubject.

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FLESH: Hannah Arendt and

Nietzsches Invariance

Reality in a world of appearances is first of all characterized by standing still and remaining thesame long enough to become an objectfor acknowledgement and recognition by asubject. Husserlsbasic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts ofconsciousness (Life of the Mind, p46).


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As we have seen, Arendts critique of the Cartesian cogito movescorrectly from the observation that thinking shows merely thatthere are thoughts (p49). But from this conclusion Arendt does not,unlike Nietzsche (again, p49), proceed as she must to question theentire notion of a subject, of a thinking ego, and therefore also of

Husserls transcendental ego and its intentionality. For what can itmean to say that reality is characterised by standing still andremaining the same long enough to become and object for asubject? No matter how hard it may try, thought will never be ableto stand still and remain the same long enough (!) to be able toidentify an object and a subject, but only to perceive or intuitthat there is a thereness, an ever-present or present-ment(pressentimentor sixth sense or Aquinass sensus communis) ofreality. This is so for the devastatingly simple reason that all thatthought can ever be conscious or aware ofis the pre-sent, which isneither the past, because even memories are present, nor quite

evidently the future which is a present pro-jection. Instead,Arendt stops at the conclusion that thinking con-firms the existenceof a reality, of a world from which even the most meditative orabstract thought can withdraw and yet one that it can never quiteleave. Presumably, one ought to infer from this withdrawing withoutleaving that Arendt has relinquished the notion of thetranscendence of thought but in fact she has not, as she herselfdemonstrates with the following observation:

Whatever thinking can reach and whatever it may achieve, it is precisely reality as given to commonsense, in its sheer thereness, that remains forever beyond its grasp.Thought processes, unlike

common sense, can be physically located in the brain, but nevertheless transcendall biologicaldata, be they functional or morphological(LotM, pp51-2).

Yet again, in her preoccupation or haste to offer thinking a privilegedplace in ontology, Arendt forgets that common sense and thinkingare one and the same thing, that they are located neither in thebrain nor in any other organ (cf. Arendts objection to the earlyWittgensteinian notion of language is part of our organism at p52) asevery philosopher from Hegel to Merleau-Ponty (in Signes or theReader) whom Arendt expressly acknowledges and agrees withcontra Kant (pp48-9) would tell her. On this specific point, Arendt

misconstrues Merleau-Pontys charge against Descartes of seeking todistill and then isolate thought from perception for the simplereason that for Merleau-Ponty perception and thought justlike perception and language cannot be separated as Arendtattempts to do here by elevating thought (though strangelynot language) to a higher transcendental level from (mere?)biological data be they functional or morphological!


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The reason why Arendt is so persistent, even obdurate, in thistranscendental attitude is that she thoroughly misconceives theentire nature or ontological status of abstract thought that is, ofthought that pretends or presumes to ab-stract from and therefore totranscend the world, as Descartess meditations or Husserls

epoche (suspension) were meant to do, albeit in different ways.

Kants famous distinction between Vernunftand Verstand, between a faculty of speculative thoughtand the ability to know arising out of sense experience,. has consequences more far-reaching.thanhe himself recognized.Although he insisted on the inability of reason to arrive at knowledge,especially with respect to God, Freedom, and Immortality to him the highest objects of thought hecould not part altogether with the conviction that the final aim of thinking, as of knowledge, is truthand cognition; he thus uses, throughout the Critiques, the term Vernunftererkenntnis, knowledgearising out of pure reason, a construction that ought to have been a contradiction in terms for him,(LotM, pp62-3).

Reprising Heideggers (and even earlier, Nietzsches) critique of theexhaustion of Western philosophy in the erroneous identification oftruth with certainty or cognition or knowledge, Arendtdemonstrates incontrovertibly just how little she has grasped the realproblematic of Western philosophy and of the Kantial critique inparticular. Arendt cannot understand that if indeed Kant had chosen tocon-fine pure reason to the sphere of sheer activity, that is to say ofpure thought, of pure concepts (Croce), he would then have had toconcede the sheer conventionality of pure reason and its abstractthought its naked instrumentality and cognitive emptiness(intuition without concepts is blind; concepts without intuition are

empty). Arendt seeks here to elide and elude and avoid the entireproblem of the ordo et connexio rerum idearumque! A pure reasonthat remains sheer activity, abstract thought with no empiricalnexus to reality, perception and intuition such a pure reason wouldend up being a mere ghost and, in its formal logico-mathematicalaspect, a welter of total, complete and abject tautologies. Arendtherself intelligently identifies this Kantian quandary when she quoteshim writing that

[for the sake of mere speculative reason alone] we should hardly have undertaken the labor oftranscendental investigations.since whatever discoveries might be made in regard to these matters,

we should not be able to make use of them in any helpful mannerin concreto (p65).

The problem for Kant as for all Western philosophy has been always,and quite justifiably, to discover the nexus rerum, thepurposiveunity of things, the link between objective reality and subjectiveknowledge of that reality. To negate or deny that such a link ec-sistsmeans effectively that one must then either discard the content ofabstract thought or else to jettison the scientificity of all knowledge!


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Arendt has simply failed to comprehend this crucial predicament thathas been the bane of Western metaphysics and science. Instead, shecuriously and naively believes that Kant could easily have abandonedthe confusion involved in reconciling thought and experience.

But Kant does not insist on this side of the matter [the irrelevance of reason to cognition andknowledge], because he is afraid that his ideas might then turn out to be empty thought-things (leereGedankendinge) It is perhaps for the same reason that he equates what we have here called meaningwith Purpose and even Intention (ZweckandAbsicht): The highest formal unity which rests solely onconcepts of reason, is thepurposive unity of things. Thespeculative interest of reason makes itnecessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the [intention] of a supremereason, (LotM, pp64-5).

Right in the midst of the passages quoted above occurs the sentence that stands in the greatest possiblecontrast to his own equation of reason with Purpose: Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing butitself. It can have no other vocation, (LotM, p65).

What Arendt fails to understand is something that Kant knew all toowell, and that is that unless the truths of pure reason can beintimately con-nected to the regularities found in nature, then theycan lay no claim to truth at all and, worst of all, neither can thescientific truths or verities that Arendt espouses, because therewould then be nothing at all in those empirical regularities thatcould lend them the status of scientific truths. Science would then beexposed for what it is: - sheer instrumentality. Arendt is aware of thisdifficulty, which is why, on one hand, she attempts to preserve theword truth for scientific discoveries of a finite and paradigmatic(she cites Kuhn) nature; whilst on the other hand she seeks to avoidthe word truth, preferring meaning, for the sheer activity ofabstract thought, preserving thus its formal and non-purposivequality. Weber does the same with his Zweck-rationalitat, which is infact non-purposive in the sense that it is instrumental and notteleological, and yet Weber, unlike Arendt, intelligently andperspicaciously acknowledges the technical-purposiveinstrumentalityof this instrumental reason without dignifying it witha patina of spirituality or transcendence as Arendt does!

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in any scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to

an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decisioncannot be scientific, (LotM, p54).

This is pure We

The Philosophy of the Flesh - Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt on Being Human, by Joseph Belbruno

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