‘Things Seen and Unseen’ The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Flesh ORION EDGAR Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy DECEMBER 2012 Abstract My thesis here is that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh, in its development, suggests a logic of incarnation which carries philosophical ontology beyond entrenched dualisms, and offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight. I set out first to develop Merleau-Ponty’s fleshly ontology by tracing its roots in his early thought on the reversibility of perception, which installs the perceiver at the heart of a world with which he is engaged and on which he depends; this relationship is grounded in the elemental faith of perception. I develop this perceptual understanding with reference to eating as a mode of perception; hunger joins our biological needs to their imaginative develop- ment, and Man, the hungry animal, transforms his desire, and thus his world. I show how dualistic ontologies are grounded in a geometrical conception of nature which founds a notion of God as removed from the world in the absolute distance of the geometer from geometry, and argue that this mathematisation of nature is hypostasised in the modern understanding of vision. I develop a counter-understanding which liberates the seer from his incarceration in immobility, emphasising that sight depends on movement and on its imbrication with the other senses, involving us in a world of existential significance, and suggesting a partial recovery of the extramission and species theories of sight. I then argue that nature must be understood in terms of place, rather than as a spatiotemporal container. There is a fundamental man-nature chiasm which precedes analysis. Incarnation is not an insertion into nature but a flowering within it of a fundamental logos. This grounds metaphysics in the perceived world, affirming meaning within contingency. For a Christian theology rooted in such a notion of incarnation, God is revealed in the depths of nature and history. Acknowledgements It is a central thread of this thesis that thought is essentially embodied: it belongs not to the inner workings of an individual mind but to a bodily person located in a complex web of relations, to other people, to a world, and to the fundamental logos of that world. To compose a list of persons without whom my work could not be what it is would be an unending task; but I would like to thank a few of whose influence I have been most keenly aware. My greatest debt is to my wife, Sharon, whose support for me has been unfailing. You have shared the discipline and the suffering of this project and have borne much of its strain on our life together. You deserve its rewards and the joy of its completion as much as I do. Thankyou. The prudence and generosity of Andrew and Elaine Phipps gave us both the freedom to spend several years in study, for which I am deeply grateful. I am indebted to my friend Ben Pollard, with whom I have shared the de- light of intellectual sparring in both serious and silly modes for many years, and who has long appreciated and encouraged my philosophical instincts. Many other friends have held me up and been a source of comfort and levity in times when I have been most deeply lost in my work: Sam and Ronnie McDermid, Peter and Nancy Crooks, Laurie and Ann-Marie Ison, Max and Beth Edgar, Graeme and Tracy Guthrie, Lionel and Rachel Miller and Phil and Anna Ashford are among them. Without the detailed and focused conversation I have had the pleasure of sharing with Jennifer Pollard, I could not have learnt as much as I have about many things, not least about vision. I wish to thank my teacher and friend Philip Goodchild, from whom I have learnt so much, and who has patiently and persistently listened to me and questioned me, even when I have been a more-than-averagely frustrating student. I also owe a great deal to my student colleagues, especially to An- thony Paul Smith, who has, with great generosity, tried to help me see what is of value in even my worst ideas, to Alex Andrews, who has continued to bring to my attention thoughts and perspectives I could not otherwise have en- countered, and to Stuart Jesson, whose careful questioning of philosophical and theological ideas has often given me both pleasure and encouragement. Aaron Riches encouraged me at a crucial time near the beginning of this project, and first brought some of its central theological sources to my attention. Komarine Romdenh-Romluc was instrumental in introducing me to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and has continued to help me to think ii through it in productive ways, as has Conor Cunningham, under whose guidance my search for the theological significance of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has been profoundly shaped. David Rowe and Rich Johnson provided invaluable feedback as readers of early drafts of the text. I consider it a privilege to have been examined by Professors Graham Ward and John Milbank, who engaged seriously with the work I have done here and have guided me towards the intellectual challenges presented by its further devel- opment. I also owe a great deal to the communities of faith who have nourished me for the past sixteen years. To Tim and Anna Hewitt, Marc James, Simon Jones, Sam Lane, Jo Morris, Graham Ord, and many others from my days at St. Albans Vineyard, I owe a great deal, for nurturing me and making room for difficult questions in my earliest steps of faith. To Nick and Cathy Gret- ton, Lizzie and John Lacey, Jonny Norridge, Jamie Plumb, Jim and Anna Robinson, and to Libby Woodward, as well as many others from my time at Trent Vineyard, I am indebted. To the people and priests of St. Catherine’s, Arthog, and St. Cynon’s, Fairbourne, my thanks go for your love during our time living in the most beautiful place I have known. I have been amazed and humbled by the support shown to me by new friends at All Saints Worcester, and especially to Rich Johnson and Eoghan Heaslip, both of whom have been loving leaders and good friends to me in the short time I have known them, and whose appreciation of the value of clear thinking in the life of the king- dom has been an enormous encouragement. My thanks go also to Peter Davies, to the community of Worcester Cathedral with whom I have wor- shiped during the last year of writing this thesis, and to the monks and nuns of Mucknell Abbey, whose quiet peace was succour to me at a crucial point in its development. iii iv Contents Introduction 1 Part One: Perception 1: Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Philosophy 14 2: ‘Taste and See…’: Eating as Perception 48 Middle Part: The Crossing 3: The Old Ontology 78 Part Two: Ontology 4: ‘Restoring Sight to the Blind’: Towards a Renewed 104 Understanding of Visual Perception 5: Institution and Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty’s 158 Ontology Conclusion 240 Bibliography 245 v INTRODUCTION The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology y aim in this thesis is to bring to expression the ontology which Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing throughout his work, M and whose final and most complete expression comes to us in the unfinished work published as The Visible and the Invisible. I will argue that the progression of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is not well characterised by a turn from an early phenomenological philosophy of consciousness to a later, more consistent ontological philosophy of flesh. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s thought follows a trajectory (within each text and in his whole corpus) to- wards an incarnational understanding which is never brought to completion but which is continually reworked and refined, each time bringing to clearer expression something of the fundamental insight which is present from the beginning. My conviction is that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology participates in a radical movement of thought which seeks to liberate the thinker from dissipative dualisms by identifying the common source of their elements in an ‘inter- twining,’ that is, in a chiasmatically structured prior whole from which we make analytic abstractions. In modernity these abstractions remain determi- native for thought; they impair a synthetic, intuitive understanding of struc- tured wholes in the very same moment that they enable an analytic, atomic understanding of the elements of the experienced world. The analytic func- tion well established, we are left with a glut of problems of integration which characterise the weakness of modern thought: the problems of mind and body, form and matter, ideal and real, thought and things, freedom and causation, instinct and desire, animal and environment, body and world, telos and genesis, man and nature, and so on. Merleau-Ponty’s logic is ‘incarnational’ in the sense that it takes as its icon the flesh, a supposed ‘union of opposites’ which, inasmuch as it succeeds in uniting them, announces their originary indivision and the possibility of their transformation. This ontological story scandalises our already-existing stories and our established categories, and this should come as no surprise; the clear separation of things, the making of these distinctions, initiated a great advance in human understanding of which it remains the fundamental basis. The search for knowledge depends on taking things apart to understand them. But if knowledge is not to supplant wisdom, if scientia is not to spurn its ancient concern with life and living, with integrating such knowledge into the world of thought, of values and of relationships, it must learn to put things back together.