A look at the ecological imagination in the work of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2022
Merleau-Ponty the existential-phenomenological philosopher, and imagination. What have the two to do with each other?
My dissertation will highlight the long “silver chain” of a tradition spanning millennia: the use of imagination, especially in the West, as a form of Earth-honoring wisdom and revelatory knowledge. In service to that topic, this paper will examine Merleau-Ponty’s changing take on imagination and where that aligns with his philosophy of the flesh of the world.
Every human achievement relies on imagination: not merely a knack, but an active power primary in scope and function (Freud 1989) and central to the use of other key human capacities (Jung 1981). What has humanity ever achieved that did not begin as a fantasy?
The Hermetic path of knowing through imagining traced in this study begins in Alexandria, where Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Persian, and other cultural influences blended. One result of this rich mixture was Gnosticism, an esoteric spiritual path whose storytellers reinterpreted biblical tales. For this, for their emphasis on direct knowledge of the Divine, for criticizing literal-minded interpretation of wisdom tales (Barnstone 2003), and for allowing women to lead prayer circles, among other transgressions of authority-driven religion, they were branded as heretics (Irenaeus 2014; DeConick, 2019). Later, their imaginative writings were banned by the early Christian Church. One Gnostic tale, the Gospel of Mary, seems to anticipate this by showing Peter and Andrew arguing with Mary Magdalene over whether Jesus had trusted her with the visions she shared (Marvin 2009; King 2003).
Hermeticism sprang forth around the same time as Gnosticism and shared much of its cosmology, although Hermetic practices and themes reached back to ancient Egyptian religion, and Hermetic tales differed from Gnostic in format, characters, and mood. Hans Jonas has referred to Gnosticism as existentially flavored (2001); Hermeticism is more pronoiac, with planetary archons cast as helpful guides exerting influence across a benevolent cosmos. Mervat Nasser offers a definition:
Hermeticism is a philosophical system based on the study of the Hermetica [the Hermetic literature] as a way of helping the soul (psyche) to develop a reasonable mind (nous), reasonable speech (logos), and self-knowledge (gnosis), so we may begin to understand the world and our place in it (2019, 70).
Although scholars distinguish between pre-1463/71 “Hermetism” and later “Hermeticism,” this distinction is largely arbitrary (and will be ignored in this study). It is based on the idea that the magically imaginative Hermetic worldview did not show up until the Renaissance, where it fed interest in natural magic, the kind that worked with nature directly instead of invoking the supernatural. However, the Corpus Hermeticum contains many references to the importance of imagination, which it holds as a sacred power capable of visualizing the nature of both God and the universe (Mead 2016).
Hermeticism eventually grew an alchemical branch that emerged from Egyptian sacred chemistry: specifically, artisanal crafts to prepare ornate statuary for the Opening of the Mouth influx of the presence of the gods (Grimes 2018). Sacred texts in temples whose imagery revered Hathor provided another source of alchemy (Roberts 2019). The play of imagination in alchemical texts and art has stretched over millennia to inspire wonder, raise questions about the human relationship to the things of the world, and suggest an intimacy between the elements and the psyche (Jung 1983).
The Hermetic gnosis of imagination spread to the Islamic world and was taken up by Sufi and pre-Sufi gnostics like Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi, whose fabled realm of images was named “mundus imaginalis” by Henry Corbin (1998, xi). Ibn ‘Arabi offered a hermeticism centered on the heart as a chamber of images and abode of spirit (2012).
Romanticism as it arose in several areas of endeavor in Germany and England brought knowledge through imagination into the foreground once again (Abrams 1971). An early Romantic, William Blake, went so far as to invent his own imaginative cosmology (1994). Coleridge distinguished between fancy and higher kinds of imagination (2004), a distinction echoed in Blake, and Novalis made the link between imagination and rising mythic presences widely ignored but still active (1996), a link acknowledged later by Owen Barfield (2011) in his study of materialist idolatry: experiencing things as completely independent from human consciousness. Keats participated in esoteric societies and maintained deeper links to Hermeticism than is commonly known (Wunder 2016). In the United States, Emerson and the Transcendentalists wielded imaginative interpretations of symbols they found in nature (1968).
This connection between imagination and the reading of nature for symbols returned in psychological form: sporadically in Jung, minimally in ecopsychology, and much more clearly in the work of Laura Mitchell, for whom imagination serves as the experiential texture—the “flesh” in Merleau-Ponty’s terms (1968)—we share with the natural world (2004). Terrapsychology developed this symbol hermeneutic while extending it to urban settings and even personal possessions, evolving over the years into an Earth-honoring research methodology (Chalquist 2020). An outgrowth of terrapsychology is terragnosis: a spiritual wisdom path to update Hermeticism’s images and language while keeping its ancient reverence for Earth and cosmos.
To explore how Merleau-Ponty’s work fits within a schema of imaginal gnosis, we will focus on two key works, The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, including other sources as needed.
In the first, Merleau-Ponty brings in imagination early by noting that Kant showed a unity between imagination and understanding, “and a unity of subjects prior to the object”:
…If the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination must condition the categorical activity; it is no longer merely aesthetic judgment that rests upon this hidden art, but also knowedge, and this art also grounds the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses (1962, lxxiv).
Even when we attempt to understand a shape or movement without inductive thought, we clarify it only by varying it in imagination as a mental experiment (64). Husserl and other phenomenologists would build on this idea later.
Later, Merleau-Ponty ties imagining to the gestural body: when we imagine a person, we are not conscious of an image distinct from him; rather, the image “aims” at the person as a kind of persistence of the world: “Just as imagined Pierre is only one of the modalities of my being in the world, the verbal image too is only one of the modalities of my phonetic gesticulation, given with many others in the overall consciousness of my body” (186). Later, he claims that even if he were to imagine the floor plan of an apartment, he could not grasp its unity without the mediation of bodily experience (209).
Even the dreaming and the hallucinating believe their imaginings to be part of the world thanks to “our vertiginous proximity to all of being in syncretic experience” (359). The triangle as an imaginary shape is based on what we draw, not on an eternal idea of triangles (406). “If I attempt to imagine Martians, angels, or a divine thought whose logic would not be the same as my own, this Martian, angelic, or divine thought must appear within my universe and must not make it explode” (419). Uexkuell makes a similar point by suggesting a nature walk through a variety of animals’ perceptual worlds as seen through “the eye of spirit” (1967, 6): in other words, imagination. “The Umwelt of any animal that we wish to investigate is only a section carved out of the environment which we see spread around it—and this environment is nothing but our own human world” (14). Abram adds that by defining another being as passive or inert (in other words, committing a failure of imagination), we block our perceptual reciprocity (Merleau Ponty’s term) with that being (1996, 21).
Merleau-Ponty grounds imagination by showing its necessary embodiment. From the Hermetics down through Ibn ‘Arabi, Blake, Paracelsus, Coleridge, and Jung, false imagination is distinguished from true by operating mainly on the mental plane: thetically, as Merleau-Ponty might say. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein foreshadows the terror of what primarily intellectual imagination can create.
However, Merleau-Ponty verges in this book on a sort of somatic reductionism. As a character in a novel, for example, Pierre would never agree that his existence depends on a real Pierre occupying part of his imaginer’s world. He remains an artifact. C. G. Jung received a painful lesson in the outspokenness of supposed artifacts when chastised by imaginal figures in dreams and active imagination for trying to make them think his way and serve his dayworld goals. Although Merleau-Ponty partially recognizes the importance and influence of imagination, he is not yet ready to acknowledge its autonomy.
In his late unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, The Merleau-Ponty touches on imagination in several places. The first, in “Reflection and Interrogation,” criticizes the usual dreams (or delusions) vs reality argument by observing how it tacitly assumes a real world out there, and by doing so casts us back into interiority and disqualifies our perceptions (1968, 5). Because no absolute distinction separates dream from perception, both show up as our experience (6).
In the same section, Merleau-Ponty examines imagination via hallucination and concludes that an appearance deemed false breaks up not to disclose a hard reality, but to make way for a new appearance (40).
And this is why the very fragility of a perception, attested by its breakup and by the substitution of another perception, far from authorizing us to efface the index of “reality” from them all, obliges us to concede it to all of them, to recognize all of them to be variants of the same world, and finally to consider them not as all false but as “all true”… (41).
In “Working Notes,” Merleau-Ponty repeats and rephrases a point made earlier: that the invisible parts of something (e.g., the back of the body) are not an absence, as in Sartre, but retain a “halo of visibility”: “a presence of the immanent, the latent, or the hidden” (245).
In the same section, Merleau-Ponty briefly describes the dream body as an imaginal double akin to what Freud referred to in comparing dreams to nightly theater. This next is remarkable:
Understand the imaginary sphere through the imaginary sphere of the body—And hence not as a nihilation that counts as observation but as the true Stiftung [foundation] of Being of which the observation and the articulated body are special variants (262).
Is he saying that the imaginal is the foundation of our sense of being? The notes here are fragmentary. Asking what remains in the dream of the chiasm (perceiving via difference, like two eyes giving binocular vision) characterizing so much human perception, he observes: “…the dream is inside in the sense that the internal double of the external sensible is inside” (262). Dream body and physical body live together, not as separate entities. As Abram reminds us, “Perception, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, is precisely this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that surround it.”
Later, Merleau-Ponty writes that whereas being and the imaginary are “objects” for Sartre,
…For me, they are “elements” (in Bachelard’s sense), that is, not objects, but fields, subdued being, non-thetic being, being before being—and moreover involving their auto-inscription their “subjective correlate” is a part of them. The Rotempfindung is part of the Rotempfundene—this is not a coincidence, but a dehiscence that knows itself as such… (267).
Gaston Bachelard wrote of the elements as engagements with the creative imagination. He treats them somewhat like Jung treated archetypes: as psychic structures which organize perception (Kaplan 1972). As such they pre-exist being itself, surpass theorizing, and encompass their felt sense rather than splitting into subject and object. The subjective sense of redness, then, is part of redness itself, not as a coincidence of inner and outer, but as a conscious bursting open, as when fruit sheds a seed. (We might glimpse here the influence of Whitehead, for whom reality was composed of “actual occasions”: events with an alternating subjective and objective pole, with the two not split but transposing in time as each event unfolds (1979, 21).)
Merleau-Ponty extends his appreciation of imagination as bundled in with our perceptual capacities, grounded in the body as a power in its own right, at least by implication. All variants of our imaginings possess some truth. From the other side of the self-world chiasm, he affirms more than once Bachelard’s take on the elements of the natural world as possessing an imaginal presence or body. Although few fiction writers would agree with him that imaginary story material always points to something in the world (an underestimation of the creative imagination!), he does seem to flirt with the notion of imagination as foundational to how we dwell in the lifeworld.
Merleau-Ponty’s expressions of imagination as a power of intimate Earth involvement remain implicit in his core ideas.
Nature is composed of gestalts that are in turn parts of relational, interdependent wholes—and not products of consciousness (Toadvine 2009, 22). This idea exerted a lasting influence on Deep Ecology. What this means is that our perception of light is not ours alone, but an expression or sense of total system involving light (26). In fact, as Morris explains, Merleau-Pointy’s “great discovery in The Structure of Behaviour is first of all that there is such a phenomenon of sense, a meaning manifest within sensible beings, in the way they themselves fit together in advance of our philosophical and reflective ideas,” a discovery developed in later work (2018, 9).
We are not determined by the facts of things around us: we use these “significations” derived of lived experience (not the reverse) to improvise imaginatively, like a musician playing a melody (36). Consciousness is not just subjective, but more like a call-and-response between self and world. Notice the emphasis on time rather than space.
The rhythm of the heart and the breath indicate the musicality of matter and life from which the mind emerges, and the relation of the lived melody to its virtual score may yet figure the relation between life and mind in an entirely new register, the register of expression… (Toadvine 2009, 49).
“Intercorporeality” is a term introduced in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” to argue, “Each one of us [is] pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body” (1964, 181). Opening one’s mouth to playfully bite a baby’s finger prompts the baby to open its mouth in empathy. In Phenomenology of Perception he expands this observation into how our body remains in ongoing dialogue with the world as body and world express themselves continually. “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1962, 13). This would be impossible without empathic imagination.
Chiasm has multiple meanings, among which are when perceiving becomes perceived and vice versa (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 130), as when hands touch (one becomes toucher, the other touched) or when I see you seeing me and vice versa. Chiasm replaces the subject-object split with difference without contradiction, a unity in diversity in which things and creatures stand forth in their particularity but remain related to each other. More widely, chiasm is where the becoming-nature of humans and becoming-human of nature cross each other, with self, culture, and nature intertwining. Neither side of the chiasm is reducible to the other; because you are not me, we can remain in conversation instead of succumbing to either solipsism (narcissism) or schizoid estrangement. Being is not self-identical, but others itself into a blossoming (dehiscence) of differences (écart is usually translated “divergence”) that culminate in reflection, enjoyment, and reciprocity….none of which would be possible without imagination.
Reflection for Merleau-Ponty is no Cartesian split between reflector and reflected-upon. Whether discussing “radical reflection” (1962, 53) or “hyper-reflection” (1968, 38), we turn our (imaginative!) attention to the pre-reflective unity of body and world. Imaginative by necessity because we sense a natural self—our bodily link to nature—as a past never present and never able to be. We can radically reflect only expressively, as creative act. This kind of reflection “is deeply radicalized and revealed as an operation in and of being, as older than ourselves and our philosophical traditions” (Morris 2018, 5). Mythical thinking is an example of our mutual kinship with animals (Toadvine 2009, 92).
Turning to Husserl’s notion of eidetic reduction (Ideas 2017, 175), whereby the phenomenologist imagines what aspects this tree (for example) might lack and still be a tree, Merleau-Ponty moves hyper-reflection beyond the search for essences (1068, 46); reflection is itself eidetic, not confined to the what, but making evident the divergence between eidetic invariants while inviting us to bring forth the experience out of silence (46).
According to Toadvine, the idea of chiasm, of the intertwining of sense and sensible, is key not only to Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, but to his view of the relation between humans and nature (2009, 20).
To be a part of nature as chiasmic intertwining is never to find oneself at home, therefore, but always to be rent by the play of an inside that opens onto an outside, an outside that expresses itself within. Nature and humanity are precisely the duplicity of this circling, the ever-renewed reversal of immanence and transcendence, and the advent of discovering oneself only by leaving oneself behind (135).
“The concept of the negative-in-being is, in effect, the concept of being as always being off balance, never at one with itself” (Morris 2018, 52). This is a kind of wrinkle that allows becoming without recourse to an elan vital. “Merleau-Ponty’s ontological formula for structure: ‘the joining of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible.’ Idea and existence, meaning and matter, are not related via an immediate identity, or a duality…Idea and existence are related via a disparity, a process in which they engender their connection and their difference” (77). (We might think here of nonlinear dynamics and its emphasis on dissipative structures.)
Merleau-Ponty’s late term “flesh” refers to how a body is made of the world as perceived, and how flesh is shared by the world which reflects it (1968, 248). “It is through the world first that I am seen and thought” (274). “Nature as the other side of man (as flesh—nowise as “matter”)” (274). Flesh has to do with the incarnated relations between the things of the world; our and the world’s capacity for perception, self-expression, and embodiment. “The Flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived…It is the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient…” (Abram 1996, 39). “…The body is neither reducible to a purely material object, nor inflatable to an ideal or purely psychological subject, but is rather the locus of our being in the world that arises out of pre-personal habits, is fundamentally caught up in movement—and is fundamentally expressive” (Morris 2018, 91). Beyond subject and object is presence: flesh.
Flesh is the world’s elemental thickness, its perceptibility, its quality of incarnate being. What exists are not things but relations that differentiate, integrate, disintegrate, reorganize. Flesh is knowing all this through motion, with touch a “palpation in depth” (128).
As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue such as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it “thinks itself within me,” I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 249-49).
Were he to have left no other key observation, with this explication of flesh, the weave of experience we share with all beings and even with Earth itself, Merleau-Ponty would have given us the foundation for a gnosis of ecological imagination.
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