Reversibility or the intertwining appears to make the self-other relationship sym-metrical, but this appearance of symmetry, although provocatively instructive, is misleading. It is instructive because it points to novel realizations, perhaps the most jarring (and, when one considers the considerable ubiquity of ‘the evil eye’, ethnographically gravid) of which is that the seen as well as the seer must have the capacity of sight. Of course, when the seen is another person, there is nothing outlandish about this condition. But as soon as ‘other’ is used to include all that is not self, then it must be the case that visible ‘things’ as well as persons can return the seer’s look. Merleau-Ponty takes this claim quite seriously, as in the following example of painters (1964b: 167): “Inevitably the roles between [the painter] and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As André Marchand says, after Klee: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…I was there, listening…I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it.’” I take it that Merleau-Ponty intends, against all logic, that the trees are actually looking at the painter as he is looking at them (pace Dillon 1988: 169). Under our received ontology (on which logic proper rests), this claim must be regarded as perfectly outlandish: trees as such do not possess organs of vision. But under Merleau-Ponty's (1964b: 163) revised ontology, in which the animate body is without organs, that is, does not amount to “the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts,” except in the abstract, the body is at once separate from and participant of the seen. In which case, reasons Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 164): “It is more accurate to say that I see according to [the seen], or with it, than that I see it. ”
Once one takes up the ontological perspective of nondualism, then even if the trees are not seeing in the strict sense, it is sensible to say in earnest that the trees regard the painter. The strict sense is highly abstract, a very useful but readily misleading meaning constructed by setting aside the lived world, the world in which I and the trees participate in each other, such that the trees can see as a function of me and “[t]hings have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 164). In effect, the trees serve as a kind of mirror, and the mirror appears because “my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover…this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world…they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 248).
Nevertheless, the relation between the seer and the perceived, self and other, is definitely not symmetrical. The fact that there is only one flesh hardly means that significant difference is precluded. To the contrary, while reversibility entails commonality, it rests no less inescapably on difference. Hence, Merleau-Ponty tells us that all flesh is not the same (1968: 250): “The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh, nonetheless…in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibles…that it is therefore absolutely not an object, that the blosse Sache [brute fact] mode of being is but a partial and second expression of it…The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, i.e. is a Being that is eminently percipi, and it is by it that we can understand the percipere…there is Being, not Being in itself, identical to itself, in the night, but the Being that also contains its negation, its percipi. ” If the flesh of the world is not sensible in the same way as is my flesh (which is sentient), must we then conclude that Merleau-Ponty does not mean what he says when he describes the trees as returning the painter's look? As long as we bear in mind that self-sensing flesh remains flesh, that it is the issue of the flesh of the world (which equals a “pregnancy of possibles”), then the answer must be no. The flesh of the world really does see, but it sees potentially, a potentiality that is realized in the painter's capacity to see herself according to or with the trees. From this understanding of imminent vision, it is tempting to slip back into thinking that Merleau-Ponty's description of the trees as sighted is merely a figure of speech. But as long we see the painter, ontologically, as continuous with the trees, we must take Merleau-Ponty to mean just what he says.
Nevertheless, it would appear that the difference between the sensible and the sentient does constitute an asymmetry. The painter and the trees both do and do not see in the same way. It is important to recognize that the asymmetry runs deep—much deeper than may seem to be the case at first sight. Despite the fact that the difference provided for in the flesh of the world is a matter of degree, it is also, paradoxically, a question of kind. Since the being constituted by the flesh of the world is, as Merleau-Ponty says, not identical to itself but inclusive of its own negation, it cannot but present an infinite difference. And difference of this kind, unfathomable and irredeemable, cannot help manifesting itself in terms of values, that is, in terms of a difference between good and bad. It cannot because it bears with it the negative, which, when construed as an act rather than a concept, “slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii). And to the degree that these “intentional threads” are slackened, that is, to the extent that we enjoy a relative ‘distance’ or distinction from the world, we are free to determine our own ends. In which case, the world, even as it ever remains our ground, is also, in imperfect but consequential measure, ours to refuse and thus to transcend.
There is value only relative to evaluation, and there is evaluation wherever there is a transcendent end, which is to say, an end that is no less willed than determined in the nature of things. Such an end—a primordial choice, if you like—involving as it does, implicitly or not, evaluation between one thing and another, amounts to a good and therewith implicates the not-good or, at least, the not-so-good.
In view of this argument about the critical role of negation and valuation in the flesh of the world, the asymmetry between the two ways of seeing, the painter's and the tree's, is not simply logical but also, by implication, axiological. The possibility of evaluation rests on the relationship of negation as between sensibility (the way trees see) and sentience (the way we see). With the development of radically sentient beings, beings in whom reflexivity (which Merleau-Ponty identifies as the elemental dynamic of corporeality) has become acute to the point of conspicuous reversal, the will becomes manifest. In effect, where there's the way (of all flesh), there's a will; and where there's a will, there's a transcendent end, which is to say, a synthetic good. Hence, the ontological fact of reversibility becomes also a uniquely human or ethical modality.
By their very nature, such goods are particular and contextual rather than universal. As synthetic, they are products of history, singular courses of events significantly determined by willful acts under conditions of fundamental uncertainty. These acts are performed by reflective but embodied beings and are therefore, like all material processes, subject to contingency. Nevertheless, there is one end that all the others presuppose, for which reason it may be said to enjoy a certain universality. I have in mind the end of having ends. No matter how hard we try, we cannot help but engage the world with a view toward some particular end. In other words, we always take a stand and thus define a good, even when we aim to refrain from doing so. Merleau-Ponty put it this way (1962: xix): “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.” While the relaxation of our ties to the world allows us to give meaning—that is, assign value—to our particular situation, the fact that those ties are slackened but never