This dynamic of identity within difference is for Merleau-Ponty the “ultimate truth” (1968: 155). That is to say, he describes the presuppositional foundation of human existence, not as a foundation in the positivistic sense of the term, a firm and unambiguous edifice, but as (perceptual) movement of the sensible body in the world. Of course, the shibboleth of identity-in-difference recalls Hegel's dialectic. But just as it is the nature of that dialectic to resolve itself, so it is the nature of Merleau-Ponty's never to reach final resolution, never to catch up with itself. For the identity that makes the movement of perception possible also ensures the difference that makes the movement ongoing. This dynamic, a bodily but sensible connectivity, is called by Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 138 and chap. 4) “flesh,” and, in view of the way in which it connects all things to one another in an open whole, a whole that is, paradoxically, less than a totality, he speaks of it as “the flesh of the world” (ibid.: 146).
Holism of this kind bears comparison to Wittgenstein's, wherein together with every proposition one learns, one also ‘swallows down’—which is to say, learns unknowingly—a host of other propositions, for the latter are fundamentally linked to the former, as horizon to theme. Hence, with regard to such attendant propositions, Wittgenstein (1971: 34–35) bids us to “see the connexions,” to show them “in a perspicuous way,” a way that has nothing to do with genetic or explanatory relations but simply allows us to see all at once a meaningful configuration. Both holisms, Merleau-Ponty's and Wittgenstein's, are gestaltist in character, supposing that the meaningful forms of our existence are in a sense always already given, not exactly as ideas, but as lived and affective or ‘bodily’ predications—that is, as synthetic a priori. Although Wittgenstein does not use ‘flesh’ to describe what binds such propositions together, when one considers that the kind of horizon he has in mind is not properly propositional at all but a matter of concrete, everyday practice, Merleau-Ponty's term seems to fit the spirit of Wittgenstein's understanding well enough. Indeed, in light of the fact that Wittgenstein (1971: 41) critically includes in the horizonal context of any perception or understanding the beholder's share (to repeat the quote, with italics added: “the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard”), he approaches the very heart of Merleau-Ponty's holism: that the ultimate context and standpoint of every act of perception—the ineradicable, ‘visually’ enabling blind spot of the mind's eye—is the body-subject.
Of course, we ordinarily think of perception in terms of seeing rather than touching, and the other word Merleau-Ponty uses to speak of the intertwining—“chiasm”—is the physiological term for the crossing of the optic nerves that physically occasions vision. In starting with the example of the hands, Merleau-Ponty wants to show the basically bodily nature of perception, even when it is visual perception in question. As most any account of scientific methodology will exhibit, the dualistic picture of perception as an act of consciousness in relation to the external world is associated especially with our faculty of vision. The distance this faculty affords us from whatever happens to be under observation is so great relative to how our other senses work that it has encouraged us to conclude (mistakenly) that the break between the observer and the observed is clean. In sharp contrast, Merleau-Ponty (1968: 134) argues that we all see, like Lear's blinded Lord Gloucester, ‘feelingly’: “Between the massive sentiment I have of the sack in which I am enclosed, and the control from without that my hand exercises over my hand, there is as much difference as between the movements of my eyes and the changes they produce in the visible. And as, conversely, every experience of the visible has always been given to me within the context of the movements of the look, the visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither more nor less than do the ‘tactile qualities.’” It must follow that visual perception too works as a crossing function (ibid.): “[S]ince vision is a palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at.”
If the seer is thus continuous with the seen, in looking at its other it is also seeing itself. In the visual domain, Merleau-Ponty describes perception along the lines of mirror-imaging, making self and other reverse—and therefore less than absolute—projections of each other. In his phenomenological account of the development of the child's perception of others, Merleau-Ponty (1964b: chap. 4) makes extensive use of the example of how children respond to their own image in the mirror. He finds (on the basis of psychological research) that whereas at first the child tends to see the visual image of its body in the mirror as enjoying a quasi-existence, it gradually learns to displace the image and grasp the mirror's crucial developmental lesson: “[H]e can…be seen by an external witness at the very place at which he feels himself to be” (ibid.: 129). In the following passage, Merleau-Ponty (ibid.) attempts to lend support to the claim of an original and originary consciousness in which differentiation is less than complete:
Many pathological facts bear witness to this kind of external perception of the self…First, it is found in many dreams in which the subject figures as a quasi-visible character. There would also be phenomena of this kind in dying people, in certain hypnotic states, and in drowning people. What reappears in these pathological cases is comparable to the child's original consciousness of his own visible body in the mirror. “Primitive” people are capable of believing that the same person is in several places at the same time. The child knows well that he is there where his introceptive body is, and yet in the depth of the mirror he sees the same being present, in a bizarre way, in a visible appearance.
Granted, his comparison here of “primitive” people with children and pathological cases is anthropologically exceedingly crude and badly dated. But it makes a powerful difference to the anthropological import of the comparison that he aims to disclose by it, rather than (à la Frazer et al.) a mistaken perception of the world, a recognition that opens on the truth or a prioricity of nondualism, and therewith one that betrays the radical reduction carried out by intellectualization. Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 132) relates that Wallon, the psychologist on whose study he draws here, holds that once the child has learned to reduce the mirror image to an ideal space (that is, to intellectualize it), the image has become what it should be in an adult mind: “a simple reflection.” But, says Merleau-Ponty (ibid.), “there are two ways in which we can consider the image—one, a reflective, analytic way according to which the image is nothing but an appearance in a visible world and has nothing to do with me; the other, a global and indirect one, of the kind which we use in immediate life when we do not reflect and which gives us the image as something which solicits our belief.” In other words, he is suggesting that in fact the child's relatively undifferentiated perception has something fundamentally right about it (ibid.): “[T]he image in the mirror, even for the adult, when considered in direct unreflective experience, is not simply a physical phenomenon: it is mysteriously inhabited by me; it is something of myself.” As Wittgenstein would say, it is not a mistake.
If Merleau-Ponty is correct, then the lesson to be learned when the child comes to better differentiate his mirror image from himself, such that he learns to take that image as an external perspective on himself and thence to see himself in terms of how he may appear to the other, is that, far from being perfectly separate and distinct from his other, in some concrete (but, crucially, always imperfect) way he is his other. Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 135ff.) goes on to cite Lacan's famous psychoanalytic study of the role of the “mirror stage” in the development of the self, to the effect that the child's eventual assumption of the viewpoint taken on by him, as this viewpoint is given in the mirror image, is what makes the self possible. For it is only by assuming an ‘outside’ perspective, that is, the perspective of the other, that a self can appear at all to what is otherwise a mere “lived me” (ibid.: 136). “To use Dr. Lacan's terms,” writes Merleau-Ponty (ibid.), “I am ‘captured, caught up’ by my spatial image…The specular image is the ‘symbolic matrix…where the I springs up in primordial form before objectifying itself