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June 18, 2025 15 mins
We go deeper into Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insights in The Visible and The Invisible, e.g. The Flesh of the World, the Chiasm, and the Intertwining and what these mean for a meditative experience on the daily. 

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So there's like the opposition between the sensible and the
sentience and also between thing and idea, which I was
just about to answer with saying he starts bringing up
the invisible when he starts bringing up idea, Right, So
the idea is like the flip side of the visible,

(00:21):
and he brings it up after talking about that reversal,
that redoubling, that folding in upon itself, that the visible
folds in upon itself, and then out of that then
we get to this conversation about the invisible as well
as the kind of counterpart of the visible within the
silence of the visible.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Right, he also is reducing a another dualism, and I
can't tell who he's talking about in the text, but
it's either Spinoza or Descartes, because they said the attributes
of stuff are both thought and extension. That's what Spinoza
is famous for. I think Descartes thought that these were

(01:02):
very separate substances, famous famous dualism.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, extended things and just thinking things are kind of
two utterly distinct areas of being, which is like hallmark dualism.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Seems like he's asking what must being be like for
this kind of appearance to be possible, I guess, and
like that's kind of where I think maybe this idea
of flesh comes up as like this what he calls
it an element, right.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, and it's like matter but a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
It's not matter though, and it's reversible.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, it's reversible matter. So it's the matter while being perceived.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
It's still frustrating to me this language, this way of
framing things. But you know, I still but I think
I understand it better.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
You see other people, but you don't see yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
You won't.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
They see a truer image of you than you ever
see of yourself. Right, So there's that again. You know,
with self and other there's a chiasm, right because you
know the other sees you gives you yourself.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
Well, that didn't take long. There, we are already at
the at the Buddhism, the Buddhist principle of mutual arisal
or mutual emergence. So I can exist as an object
for you only because you can exist as an object
for me. And you could just phrase that chiismatically like

(02:31):
the other is in you just as you are in
the other. Yeah, it's like here, how how the peak
of a wave and the trough of a wave. They
are the thing that are the condition of the other
thing existing. You can't have you can't have a peak
without a trough. You can't have a front without a back.
There's these inseparable pairs that are mutually causal. One gives

(02:54):
you the other necessarily, and the same with here self
and other.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Or when he's talking about how you're visions, you know,
when you meet visions, they cross, right, there's a crossing
a chiasm, and at least just helps you see, okay,
well that there's a pattern in what he's doing here,
and it's around this rhetorical conceptual figure of the chiasm.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
The goal here and everything that you just said. The
goal is an anti dualism, and I think wasn't it
in the Phenomenology of Perception where he said the mind
is the image of the body.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
I mean he tries to get rid of the dualism
in the Phenomenology too, and like kind of say it's
all embodiment, that there's no mind in isolation to it that.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Like it not like it's they're separable, but it's just
the flip side. The mind is the other side of
the body.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Oh, the mind is the other side of the yes,
I think so maybe it sounds right.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, all right, we're just gonna go with. We're gonna
go with. It's right. The dualism here is like there
are still two poles. He still talks about extension and thought,
but instead of having two realms that are like utterly distinct,
they're just flip sides of the same coin. That's a
good there's a good one. The mind is one side
of the coin and the body is the other side

(04:07):
of the coin.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
What I was gonna say is the horizon, right, So
the horizon of the visible that phenomenological term horizon.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
He talks about the external horizon and the internal horizon,
and then I think sort of beyond that horizon in
trying to go and the internal horizon. Can you remind
me that's like the inside of objects, right, You can't
see through them. It's kind of like what you were
just saying, like I don't see the image on my eye.

(04:40):
I don't see the retinal image, but you kind of
know it's there, right, Like you can sit at your desk,
you know there's like substantial things behind you that could
be visible, you know, the dark depths of things. I know,
like there's vision there. I can't see it. It's obscure,
but it's there. I can sort of imagine, make my
mind wander. I can walk away round things in my

(05:01):
head without actually doing it with my body, although my
body is kind of the basis of me wanting to
do that in the first place. But I can do that,
and I know there's visibility there, and because that's all
kind of within the horizon, right, but what's sort of
at the horizon, beyond the horizon is sort of I
think that's partly the answer to where he's seeing. The

(05:24):
invisible is sort of beyond the horizon of and the Yeah,
the internal the external horizon is kind of like the limits,
whereas the internal horizon the internal limit. Yeah, that like
sort of dark interiority of things that you can't see,
but you know, you know, there's visibility that could be

(05:44):
brought there to some degree. And then the things that
are whatever really far away the horizon.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
If I remember this from Hserle, I don't know, it's
all mixed up in my head at this point, but
the horizon part of what it is to have a
horizon means that part of the world is not visible. Yes, Yes,
the horizon means that there's a limit, but also and
you can know intellectually that there's something beyond the limit,

(06:10):
but it's because you can't see certain things that you
can see anything. So we have this kind of relationship
of the foreground to the background. And this is more
in the not in this text. It's more in phenomenology.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
But I think also the horizon is also directly perceived,
so it's not you don't actually need intellectual capacity to
infer that there's more beyond. It's actually like in the
very like when you see a desk, you can just
tell there's another side that you can't see. Right when
you see like a landscape, you can just tell there's
more on your peripheral beyond what you can see. Like that,

(06:46):
like the fact that there's more, that there is a
horizon is directly perceived. And I think that he wants
to say that that's also true in interior, like like
in our thoughts that like there's more to think about,
there's more, there's more or beyond that, and that's a
direct thing, that's not something that we have to be
like hmm, I wonder if there's more that's just like
felt in the limits of the thing that you are

(07:08):
thinking about or seeing or whatever.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
So the possibilities are rather the horizon of the subjective process,
not just the actualities that imply those possibilities, but the possibilities,
the actualizable possibilities themselves.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
So here we get up to this flesh of the
world thing, and we're very close to it. But the
ability to go I don't know if we want to
use the word potential and actual because it's a distinction
that's not made here, but it kind of helps. The
fact that whenever you look, the world will get looked

(07:45):
at is part of this aspect of the flesh. If
I turn around or behind me is invisible to me
right now, but I know that if I turn around,
it will be visible. And the analogy of this kind
of flesh of the world thing that Victor is a
little iffy about. But the analogy is that you're sitting

(08:06):
like listeners sitting you. Guys are sitting you. You can
you have a whole body, right, you got legs, you
got arms, you got a head. You can only really
feel one thing at a time when you move your
focus or your attention around your body. So I can
move it right now to my elbow, or I can
move it to my foot. But this thing with the

(08:28):
with the touching your own hand that he talks about
last time, there's a gap in that you can't use
both hands to be the focus of your attention at
the same time. Similarly, you can't really feel your arm
and your leg at the same time. You have to
go leg arm, leg, arm, leg arm, and the the

(08:49):
the aspect of this, he calls it a hiatus. Right,
there's a there's a little gap that gets crossed when
your attention goes from your arm to your leg. And
this is very physical. But if this has expanded to
the whole world, this thing where there's only one focus
at a time and then there's a little gap that

(09:09):
it crosses, that's what this flesh of the world thing means,
because just like you can move your attention from your
leg to your foot, the flesh of the world can
experience through me, and then through you, and then through
Victor and then through the listener. So it's it's almost

(09:33):
impossible to talk about without getting into woo woo mysticism,
cosmic stuff. But the world feels itself through us the
same way that like I am feeling the floor with
my foot and you can. So consciousness is not like
a mental process. It's this generalizable experience where I know

(09:54):
that someone on the other side of the world, or
you guys are on the other side of the city,
we're all experience in saying the same world at the
same time, and through that the flesh of the world
is feeling itself, the same way that you can feel
your hand when you put your hand on your leg
or whatever.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Whoof Yeah, And I think that that word hiatus is
another one of those like key words that is indicating
that like sort of chiasm, intertwining, reversibility, Like there's a
few of these like key in between is in between
this kinds of words. And I think that hand example,

(10:32):
that my right hand touching my my other hand whatever,
while that hand is touching something. Yeah, that hiatus between
my right hand touched and my right hand touching. So
this this is actually a great he takes us from HUSSERL.
This is this hand example is from Husserol, but he's
using it here, I think to make a pretty precise

(10:53):
is it.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, it comes from HUSSERL, but he's using it here,
I think to make a pretty sise like locate this
chiasm pretty precisely at least between touching and being touched. Right, So,
you know, you can touch your right hand with your
left hand, say, and you can feel your hand and

(11:17):
with that same hand that you're touching, that same right
hand that your left hand is touching, that right hand
could also be touching something else, like an object in
front of you. And there's the flip. Right, You can
only either sort of feel your right hand touching that object,
in which case your left hand is just kind of
touching an empty shell that's not where your attention kind

(11:38):
of is. Or you can sort of ignore that object
that your right hand is touching and touch your right
hand with your left hand, and then it's like a
different kind of you know, it's like a different kind
of touching, Like the right hand is going from being
touched to touching. But we can never he uses this
word superpose, like, we can never superpose those two moments

(12:03):
onto each other. Right, So you can either sort of
touch or be touched. And there are two sides of
the same coin, but you can only be on one
side of that coin at one time. That's why he's
saying other things like you can only be on this
side of your body, Like, what the hell does that mean.
It's because there's like a chiasmus between body and world

(12:24):
as well.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
It's kind of like the duck rabbit. You can only
see one at a time. You can't see both at
the same time.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
That popped into my head definitely while I was reading
this too.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
This one thing at a time. It also applies to
your vision. You can only focus on about a dime
a dime sized spot in your vision and the rest
is out of focus.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
The duck rabbit thing is a really good example too,
because you can you show somebody or even you know
and your kid, and you show someone that other picture
of it looks like either two people having sex or
a dolphin, I think, and then yeah, you see here
and they go, I see two people having sex, and
you go, haha, you have a dirty mind.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
But kids can only see the dolphin.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
But the point is, you know you can do that,
and then you can break the illusion, right, You can
force yourself to see one or the other, the duck
or the rabbit, the dolphin or the people, the figure
or the ground, whatever, But you can't really sort of
have them both in mind at any one time. You
can switch between them until the illusion is completely exhausted.

(13:30):
But those stairs are either coming out of the picture
or going into the picture in that staircase illusion. It
can't be going both ways at the same time. And
there's like a kind of visual chiasmus right there in
a way. And I guess you know that's those were
like the grist of Geshtalt philosophy exam or psychology examples too,

(13:51):
which is one of the major traditions that are informing
Ponte here.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Because like, you can't transcend everything in a way, there's
there's always limitations, and part of it is like the
limitation of only being able to focus on one thing
at a time.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
I think, yeah, and this is this is like there's
implications for philosophy too, write because philosophers are some of them,
you know. But rationalism assumes that the whole world is
like fully transparent all at the same time. And if
you start philosophy with the body, then you know it's
much more about you know, you create the forms with

(14:28):
your with your vision, but then when you close your eyes,
the forms disappear. This is kind of what Plato got wrong.
Now the forms are always there, which is the equivalent
of having your eyes open and never blinking for eternity,
which is the opposite of this finitude. But you can
think of just meditative practices. Meditative practices are like trying

(14:51):
to keep hold of your attention, your attention that can
only be on one thing at one time, and being
able to just do one thing at once time. You
feel your you feel your hands, you feel your breath,
you feel the air going in, and then you're able
to focus on one thing at one time. They they
stress this as a good thing to do to acknowledge
this finitude, and it's supposed to bring you like inner

(15:14):
peace and focus and self help all that stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
I like that.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
That makes me very oceanic and functuy. Thank you.
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