Continental Philosophy Review 31: 171-193, 1998.

171
© 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

“Solar love”: Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and the fortunes of

perception1

FRED EVANS
Department of Philosophy, Duqnesne University, College Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15282, USA

Abstract.
-
Both Nietzsche and Merleau Ponty repudiate the “mirror” view of perception and embrace
what Nietzsche refers to as “solar love” or creative perception. I argue that Merleau-Ponty
thinks of this type of perception primarily in terms of “convergence,” and Nietzsche in terms
of “divergence.” I then show how, contrary to their own emphases, Merleau -Ponty’s notion of
“flesh” and Nietzsche’s idea of “chaos” suggest that convergence and divergence are abstrac-
tions from an ontologically prior realm of “hybrid perceptions ” In this realm, each perception
is shot through with the others, simultaneously inside and outside one another. The creative
tension among these perceptions continually produces new perspectives or voices, that is, a
realm whose very being is metamorphosis. Moreover, this realm of hybrid perceptions sug -
gests a political principle that might prove attractive for communities in an age of diversity
and cultural hybridity.

1. The “mirror” and the “lamp”

In his classic text on romantic theory and the critical tradition, M.H. Abrams
reveals how the metaphors “mirror” and “lamp” have dominated the literature
on poetry and art. The mirror represents those aesthetic theories that depict
the mind as “a reflector of external objects”; and the lamp represents those
!
! that see the mind “as a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the
objects it perceives” (1953, ii). Similarly, Bruner and Feldman point out that
“reproduction” and “production” are the chief metaphors in psychological
theories of cognition and perception: the reproduction metaphors emphasize
“how the contents of consciousness reflect, distort, or otherwise mirror the
world, however much in a glass darkly;” in contrast, the production metaphors
focus on “how acts of consciousness impose not only structure but direction
on experience” (1990, 231).
Although contemporary theorists of perception tend to favor the lamp or
production metaphor over that of the mirror and reproduction , they differ
on the exact way to construe the creative element in perception. Some theo-
rists think that it consists in the ability of perception to assume many different
forms-as many as there are ways of life; others believe that the creative aspect
of perception is guided by a single norm manifest in all acts of perceiving.
172 -
NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

Nietzsche is the seminal advocate of the first or pluralistic view, and Merleau-
Ponty presents the most compelling version of the second or monistic version.
v
In this paper, I will show that the theories of these two thinkers point beyond
themselves to a realm of “hybrid perceptions” that are ontologically prior to
the opposition between pluralism and monism, divergence and convergence.
I will also argue that the resulting relationship between this realm of hybrid T.
perceptions and the tendency to emphasize either divergence or convergence
is reminiscent of the symbiosis Nietzsche establishes between Dionysus and
Apollo in one of his earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1967b). This rela-
tionship, moreover, suggests a political principle that might prove attractive y
.
r f

to communities in an age of diversity and cultural hybridity.

2. “Solar love” and perception

y -- -
'

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Nietzsche speaks of “solar love.” He begins by

first condemning the hypocrisy of the moon and the “pure perceivers” or
“immaculate perception” that the moon represents. Just as the moon - or, as
-
Nietzsche sometimes says, “the man in the moon” merely passes over the
earth that it wishes to ravish, so the pure perceivers feel ashamed of their lust
for the world. Because their spirit despises what their entrails demand, they
ask nothing more from things than “to be allowed to lie prostrate before them
like a mirror with a hundred eyes” (1968, 234).2 For this reason, they “shall
never give birth, even if [they] lie broad and pregnant on the horizon” (235).3
It is different with the sun. At dawn, the moon is rendered pale in the glow of
the sun’s desire for the earth, in the innocence arid creative longing of her solar
love. The sun’s hot breath draws the sea’s “thousand breasts” toward her, and
she sucks at them and drinks the sea’s depths into her heights. Instead of the
moon’s immaculate and reticent perception, the sun’s perceptive knowledge4
means that “all that is deep shall rise up to [her] heights” (1968, 236; see also
310).
For Nietzsche, this solar love or perceptive knowledge also carries what
seems to be a proto-ethics or proto-politics. His character, Zarathustra, wants
to go under, to die, in the same way that the overrich sun sets: pouring “gold
into the sea out of inexhaustible riches, so that even the poorest fisherman
still rows with golden oars” (1968, 310). Elsewhere he refers to this going
under as a gift-giving virtue which is neither charity nor the sort of exchange
i
that expects something in return ; rather, it is “the forcing of all things into
yourself [so] that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your
love” (1968, 187). Perceptive knowledge, then, is a gift-giving virtue: when
we plunge into the depths of what we perceive, these depths rise to our heights
and, transformed, flow out of us as our creations, as our gifts to the world.5

:&

R
 1

FRED EVANS 173

In this type of perception, the “overman,” the creative community, provides
for itself the transformative love that the pure perceivers secretly want but do
not have the courage to take and to give.
Like Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty also distinguishes between perception as
mirroring and perception as transforming. In Phenomenology of Perception ,
he places his idea of “physiognomic perception” (1962, 132) in opposition to
the view of perception offered by “objective thought” (1962, 71). In objective
thought, perception either mirrors a fully determinate object (empiricism) or
constitutes an object in light of a fully determinate idea (intellecutalism).6 In
contrast to objective thought, Merleau-Ponty believes that his phenomeno-
logical interrogations reveal perception to be a creative dialogue in which the
perceiver draws together the meaning diffused throughout the object while,
simultaneously, the object solicits and unifies the intentions of the subject.
Besides providing both subject and object with a fuller degree of unity and
definition, this physiognomic or meaning-forming perception “ranges round
the subject a world which speaks to him of himself, and gives his own thoughts
their place in the world” (1962, 132). In other words, perception takes place
within a horizon that guarantees the subject-object dialogue a direction and
yet provides the degree of incompleteness necessary for subjects to express
themselves freely and the for the world to harber surprises. Objective thought
is overcome, but direction is preserved along with openess.
Merleau-Ponty ’s notion also professes the same gift-giving virtue and solar
love for the earth as Nietzsche’s perceptive knowledge: when subjects go into
the depths of the world, when their intentions are drawn together by the objects
of perception and they find their place in the world , the world simultaneously
rises to the heights of the subjects, transformed into the objects of perception
that the subjects have been seeking (1962, 408). As a result of this exchange, !
the newly established subjects and objects become gifts, that is, a fresh basis
for the next wave of perception and another installment of the subject-object
dialogue. In his essay “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty even utilizes the sun
metaphor to evoke the generosity of perception: “the eye accomplishes the
-
'

prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul the joyous realm of
things and their god , the sun” (1964, 186).

3. “Solar love” and the body

Both of these solar lovers, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty, anchor perception

i
and its creativity in the body. In accord with his preference for active over
passive ideas about perception, Nietzsche castigates those who despise the
body and do not see that it, rather than the senses or the spirit , is the source
of our desire to “create beyond [ourselves]” (1968, 147). This carnal type

i i
174 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

of creation, moreover, is the result of a largely unconscious struggle among

our instincts (1974, 261, 263-266, 297-300). Nietzsche even suggests at one
place that knowledge is the result of a rapproachment, a “contract,” among
the one-sided and opposed desires to laugh, lament, and curse (1974, 261).
We are conscious only of the final outcome of this process and not of the
struggle that precedes it. Because creative perception is a species of this
knowledge, it too is the result of the will to be ourselves, to be our bodies, our
instincts, and hence to always go beyond ourselves (1974, 266). In contrast,
immaculate perception issues from the same source that Nietzsche attributes
to what he feels is Socrates’ tyrannical form of rationality: an inability to trust
the instincts and their solar love (1968a, 477^479).
For Merleau -Ponty, perception is also inseparable from a body that can be
itself only by going beyond itself. The body is not first a unified group of
organs that then confront the things around them; rather, the body is an integral
part of the subject-object dialogue, that is, an openness onto things that allows
them to come into fuller presence at the same time that they call upon the body
to become more completely the, “hold” it already has on them (1962, 408). In
this dialogue, the organs and parts of the body are drawn together, unified, in
the activity of determining the latent meaning of the surrounding objects, that
is, in responding to the question that these things have already posed to the
body (1962, 99, 101). Once this meaning is determined, once the operative
stage of perception or intentionality has passed into the more definite acts that
we too quickly identify with the whole of perception and expression, the body
acquires new resources and the world is clothed in new sediments of meaning
(1962, xviii, 418, 429). On the basis of these acquisitions, the body, or “body-
subject,” is called upon once more to go beyond itself, to “transcend” itself
(1962, 169), by fulfilling the possibilities of its new horizon and determining
the meaning of its new situation (1962, 130).
Despite this initial accord between Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche on the
creativity and bodily roots of perception, their fuller accounts of sentient life
threaten to convert their fraternity into a solar rivalry. In Merleau-Ponty’s
major complete work, Phenomenology of Perception (1962), his portrayal of
perception involves three steps: the identification of the body with perception,
indeed, conscious perception,7 the declaration of the primacy of perception,8
and the imputation of convergence as the natural goal of perception. In the
first step, Merleau-Ponty equates the body and perception, identifying them
both with our initial opening onto things or, alternatively, with the background
against which things emerge for us (1962, xi and 101). In the second step,
the primacy of perception, Merleau-Ponty makes use of the Husserlian notion
of “ Fundierung .”9 According to Merleau-Ponty’s version of this notion, the
opening of our bodies onto their surroundings, their initial hold on and per-
 FRED EVANS 175
ception of the world, provides the foundation for the specific and personalized
acts that refine our more amorphous grasp of objects. Thus the Fundierung
relation is a form of “asymmetrical reciprocity” 10: on the one hand, the sec
ondary activities of the body-subject follow the lead provided by the founding
-
activity or “operative intentionality” of perception; on the other, perception
would not be an opening onto the world, and the body-subject would not be
a continuous movement of acquisition and transcendence, if perception and
the body were not already becoming the more specific, “secondary,” acts that
complete this initial movement of transcendence.
Because he assigns priority to perception, Merleau-Ponty explains the
prevalence of pure perceivers and immaculate perception in terms very dif-
ferent from those of his solar rival, Nietzsche. Whereas Nietzsche condemns
the moon and the pure perceivers for being ashamed of their entrails’ desire
for the earth and for a creative relation with objects, Merleau-Ponty portrays
their superficiality as the result of an intellectual error: perception ends in
objects, and so, once constituted , these objects , and not the body’s move-
ment of transcendence, appear “as the reason for all the experience of [them]
which we have or could have” (1962, 67; 70, 71). Thus Merleau-Ponty does
not follow Nietzsche in appealing to anxiety and denial as an explanation of
the prevalence of pure perceivers.
Nor does Merleau-Ponty accept Nietzsche’s view of the body as the site of
conflicting, often unconscious, instincts. For example, Merleau-Ponty claims
that sexuality is coextensive with conscious perception and that we perceive
another person’s body as a schema of erogenous zones. But he does not view
this sexuality as an instinct whose repression by other forces in the body
leads to the sudden disappearance of memories or to the occurrence of other
psychological anomalies. In explaining why a man has lost the memory of a
book given to him by his estranged wife, and why that memory returns when
the man and his wife are reconciled, Merleau-Ponty eschews any reference to
unconscious denial on the part of the man. He claims, instead, that the man’s
conscious rejection of all thought about his wife carries with it the specific
objects implicit in the horizon surrounding her presence; when he and his wife
are reconciled , that horizon and its implicit objects are once again available
to him, and so he can now recall the book and the drawer in which he had
originally placed it (1962, 162). Conscious perception, therefore, remains
Merleau-Ponty’s style of solar love, even where others would see more occult
forces at play and would dismiss phenomenological description in favor of
the hermeneutics of suspicion suggested by Nietzsche’s insight into the bad
-
conscience of moon struck lovers.
176 -
NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

. -
4 Solar rivalry: Merleau Ponty and convergence

Merleau-Ponty’s reason for rejecting Nietzsche’s affirmation of unconscious

instinctual forces is not just his attachment to conscious perception. He wants
to maintain that convergence is a natural trajectoiy of perception in order to
ensure that diversity, which he also prizes, does not undermine the possibility
of a common world and a human community. He therefore describes the aim
of perception and the subject-object dialogue in terms of an optimal balance
between the maximum richness and maximum clarity of what is presented in
perception.11 Because he believes that all modes of human activity are based
on, and complete, perception, he also affirms that this ideal of perception, the
optimal balance between maximum clarity and maximum richness, regulates
the entire field of human activity and constitutes the stability of our relation
to the world. He therefore states that this ideal “points clearly to a perceptual
ground , a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist
with the world” (1962, 250).
Consistent with this perceptual ground, Merleau-Ponty claims that the con-
stancy of objects and the world - their objectivity and presumptive unity
(1962, 330; 219) - is founded upon the aim for balance between clarity and
richness that these objects and the world solicit from body-subjects:

We can no more construct perception of the thing and of the world from
discrete aspects, than we can make up the binocular vision of an object
from two monocular images. My experiences of the world are integrated
into one single world as the double image merges into the one thing, when
my finger stops pressing upon my eyeball. I do not have one perspective,
then another, and between them a link brought about by the understanding,
buteach perspective merges into the other and, in so far as it is still possible
to speak of a synthesis, we are concerned with a “transition-synthesis.”
(1962, 329; 265)

Not only does Merleau-Ponty attribute the unity of the world to the latter’s
demand for optimal balance; he finds this same demand to be the source
of the rationality that he believes to be immanent in the world and history.
For example, he declares that “[t]o say that there exists rationality is to say
that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges”
(1962, xix). Indeed, the world and its rationality are identical; each is “the
sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect,
and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other
like gears” (xx). This same movement toward unity and univocal meaning is
also manifest in the temporal dimension of the world, in its often hesitant and
 ~l

FRED EVANS 177

equivocal unfolding.12 And it further signifies for Merleau-Ponty that body-

subjects converge toward the same meaning or in the same direction (“sens”13)
traced out by the world in which they find themselves already engaged.
He therefore concludes that “[t]he idea of a single history or of a logic of
history is, in a sense, implied in the least human exchange, in the least social
perception” (1964b, 10).
In Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and some of his later articles,
especially “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1964c), Merleau-
Ponty fills out his view of history and society by contrasting philosophy
and art. Whereas philosophy and speech seek to obtain a final and univocal
truth, to bring history and society to its completion, the arts are concerned
only to multiply worlds of intimate and self-enclosed significance (1962, 190;
1964c, 79-81; 1964, 161). In both cases, however, perception is limited by the
very Gestalt configuration or sens that Merleau-Ponty accepts as the basis of
sentient activity.14 Although this Gestalt is never fully complete, each object
of perception is limited to those of its aspects that are congruent with the
direction set down by the level or horizon - the Gestalt configuration - in
which the object appears to the body-subject. The novelty associated with
perception is therefore constrained by the subject-object dialogue or Gestalt
of which perception is a founding part.
In his later, incomplete and posthumously published The Visible and the
Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty seems to endorse a view of perception that
embodies the spirit more typical of his artists than of his philosophers. He
says that he has overcome his earlier allegiance to the consciousness-object
schema of thought (1968, 200; see also 1963, 54), and he replaces his pre-
vious, teleologically driven, dialectic with a “hyperdialectic” that appears
more devoted to respecting than enclosing plural worlds (1968, 94). More
importantly, he merges perception with “flesh,” that which has “no name in
traditional philosophy to designate it” (139). He substitutes this new notion
for the earlier relationship between consciousness and the world, and char-
acterizes it in terms of “chiasm” or “reversibility,” that is, an unattainable
15

but always “imminent” coincidence or completed unity between, for exam -

ple, the seeing and the visible, the touching and the touched (1968, 147;
see 122-123, 139). Flesh turns back upon itself , sees and touches itself, by
dividing itself into the “flesh of the world” and the “flesh of the body,” into
the “sensible” and the “self-sensing” or “sentient” (250). Because it accom -
plishes this seeing or touching of itself only by separating itself into these
two parts - because it is this “dehiscence” - it cannot see itself seeing, touch
itself touching. Yet this coincidence between the flesh of the world and the
flesh of the body is always imminent. Thus we, at once visible and sentient,
16

often feel the “eyes” of trees and rocks upon us just before we transform
 178 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

them into a spectacle (139).17 The seer and the seen form “a Visibility, a
Tangible in itself,” and “ we no longer know which sees and which is seen”
(Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139).18
The “imminent coincidence” that haunts the chiasms of the flesh is less
restrictive than the teleological form of convergence; it acknowledges only
that flesh tends (though without success) to rejoin itself and does not specify
more particular horizons that must be fulfilled. But imminent coincidence
still serves to ensure stability and the community suggested by the idea
of a common flesh. In the “working notes” to The Visible and the Invisible ,
Merleau -Ponty says that the multiple reversibilities of the flesh are one , though
as mutual “encroachments” or intersections rather than as an “originally
synthetic unity ” (261).19 He also retains the notion of a Gestalt, equating
it with a “principle of distribution, the pivot of a system of equivalences”
(205; see also, 208-209 and 261), and, using an equivalent notion, says
that vision itself is a “level” in terms of which “every other experience will
20
henceforth be situated” (151; see also, 189). Thus the instability and the
possibility of novelty, introduced by the absence of complete coincidence, are
still limited by their inherence in a structure or Gestalt that places restrictions
on divergence from the start: “The flesh (of the world or my own) is not
contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself ’
(1968, 146).
1 Merleau-Ponty’s affirmation of the primacy of perception also ties lan -
guage to the fortunes of perception, that is, either to the earlier optimal
balance between maximum clarity and maximum richness or to the later
imminent coincidence of flesh with itself. In Phenomenolony of Perception ,
Merleau-Ponty depicts language as the necessary completion of our thoughts,
of thoughts that would die away, that would never fully exist, without verbal
expression (1962, 177). He also argues that language originally symbol-
izes, indeed , “extracts” or “sings,” the “emotional essence” of the world that
solicits these thoughts and their expression in the first place (1962, 187). In
performing this extraction of emotional essences, creative speech or “parole
parlante” (1962, 197) breaks the “primordial silence” lying beneath the chat-
ter or “parole parlee” of our more routine modes of articulation (1962, 184). • f
This silence is not that of a mute or meaningless world , but “the core of
meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape” (1962,
xv ; see also 389 and 403). This core of meaning, in turn, is the presence
of things to our bodies and the “pre-predicative life of consciousness” (xv;
translation slightly modified), that is, the significance or presence that things
have just prior to their articulation in language. Because this significance is
that of perception, it follows that its expression in speech must also obey the
maxim of the optimal balance of clarity and richness.
 FRED EVANS 179
Even when Merleau-Ponty later incorporates Saussure’s structuralist lin-
guistics into his view of language, and speech becomes “a fold in the immense
fabric of language” (1964c, 42), this new being or “synchronic parole”21 con-
tinually throws itself out of focus toward the new meaning that is already
hinted at within the diacritical structure of language and the world caught
up in its net (1964c, 44). Merleau-Ponty refers to the obtainment of this new
meaning as the achievement of a temporary “equilibrium,” a “state of per-
fection which has no model” (1964c, 43). Because this equilibrium has to
do with the obtainment of the meaning toward which language finds itself
already thrown, Merleau-Ponty is still employing the Gestalt notions that
have consistently, though with added nuances, guided his thought. Thus the
creativity of language, even in this relatively late version of it, is limited by
the convergence that Merleau-Ponty thinks is inherent to all creativity.
In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), the reversibility characteristic of
the flesh includes the relation between language and perception. Merleau-
Ponty describes ideality as the emigration of the sensible world’s visibility
into a “less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh,
abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be
emancipated but not freed from every condition” (1968, 153). He seems to
equate this “condition” with perception - diereby continuing his primacy of
perception thesis - when he adds that “the structure of [the human body’s]
mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it”
(1968, 155). Yet a few lines later he completes this thought with a statement
that suggests he is ready to replace his thesis of the primacy of perception
with a purely reciprocal relationship between language and perception:

And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an

invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes. . .
[W]hat we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from
one of these views [perception and speech] to the other; we do not have to
reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility
which is the ultimate truth. (1968, 155)

Despite this gesture toward reciprocity between perception and language,

it is “visibility,” not language, that is transformed into a “less heavy” and
“more transparent” body, and it is the reversibility between the “sentient”
and the “sensible,” not the reversibility between language and perception,
that Merleau-Ponty privileges when he speaks of flesh.22 In what is perhaps
!
his most complete statement on the reversibility between vision and speech,
moreover, Merleau-Ponty states that vision is converted into speech and the
latter becomes a renewed, albeit “mental,” vision: “When the silent vision falls
180 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field of the nameable
and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth
- in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and "

makes itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis - this is always in virtue of
the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the
mute perception and the speech . . . ” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 154-155). The
equation of speech with a form of vision ( uintuitus mentis” as opposed to, say,
“language games”) reinforces the impression that the primacy of perception
is still at play in this later work.23
Throughout his philosophy, then, Merleau-Ponty espouses a form of solar
love based on the primacy of perception. He sees perception and fife itself
as involving a forever unfinished but persistent movement toward the conver-
gence of perspectives or as shadowed by an imminent coincidence of flesh
with itself. In anticipation of a Nietzschean critique of this emphasis on con-
vergence, we must remember that Merleau-Ponty’s renditions of convergence
do not deny the importance of diversity and that they highlight the need to
affirm some nonarbitrary or ontological basis for community. We may also
note what we will make much of later - that Merleau-Ponty’s depictions
of the mutual encroachments or chiasms of the flesh suggest a relationship
among perceptions or perspectives that is “wilder” than either convergence
or divergence.24

5. Solar rivalry: Nietzsche’s decentering of perception

Despite the admiring glances that Nietzsche might cast toward Merleau-
Ponty’s efforts on behalf of creativity, he would hold that solar love is far
more promiscuous than Merleau-Ponty suggests. In particular, Nietzsche
would deny that perception by itself is the foundation of our engagement with
the world and would repudiate the claim that this engagement is intrinsically
or naturally regulated by the ideal of convergence, including the optimum
balance between clarity and richness and the imminent coincidence of flesh
with itself. He would make these denials because he believes that perception,
language, and any other human activity always are or serve “value-creating
powers,” that is, powers which determine the meaning of what they appropri-
ate in order to enhance their own forms of life.
In accordance with this view, Nietzsche attempts to show that even presum-
ably neutral theories or accepted truths are actually value-creating forces. In
The Genealogy of Morals, for example, he argues that science serves a nihilis-
tic cultural force, the “ascetic ideal” or “will to nothingness” (1967, 153). In
Thus Spoke Zarathustra , he equates the two styles of perception, “immacu-
late perception” and “perceptual knowledge,” with two opposed powers, one
 FRED EVANS 181

represented by the passivity of the moon and the other by the creativity of the
sun (see above). In the same text, he praises “willing” as that which redeems
life (1968, 198-199). And in The Will to Power, he states that “[i]t cannot '

be doubted that all sense perceptions are permeated with value judgments
(useful and harmful - consequently, pleasant and unpleasant)” (1967a, 275).
Everywhere, then, Nietzsche makes it clear that perception and other mental
activities either are or serve value-creating powers.
Besides arguing for the pervasiveness of value-creating powers, Nietzsche
associates these powers with a world that he thinks must be understood in
terms of “chaos” or the “will-to-power.” In The Gay Science , for instance, he
equates the world with chaos and says that the latter cannot be understood in
terms of our usual intellectual categories:

The total character of the world . . . is in all eternity chaos - in the

sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form,
beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic
anthropomorphisms. . . [TJhe whole musical box repeats eternally its tune
which may never be called a melody. . . None of our aesthetic and moral
judgments apply to it. (1974, 168)

In The Will to Power , Nietzsche further describes chaos as the endless becom-
ing of contesting forces - “as force throughout, as a play of forces and wave
of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same
time decreasing there, a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally
changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with
an ebb and a flood of its forms . . . as a becoming that knows no satiety, no
disgust, no weariness” (1967a, 549-550; 1974, 168). He adds specificity to
his description of chaos when he identifies it with his notion of will-to-power
(1966, 48), that is, a hierarchical arrangement of conflicting value-creating
powers or “active” and “reactive forces” (1967, 36^40, 74-79; cf. Deleuze
1983, chapter 2). When reactive forces dominate within a community, when
the values that guide the construction of cultural codes are empty and amount
to mere negations or denials of other forces, Nietzsche says that the will-
to-power within that society is nihilistic; and when active forces are in the
ascendancy, he says that the corresponding will-to-power is life-affirming.
For example, Nietzsche describes a society in which a class of priestly aris-
tocrats invent the code of “good and evil” out of their impotent resentment
against the more powerful knightly aristocrats and the latter’s spontaneous,
life-affirming code of “good and bad ” (1967, 31-34). He suggests that this
nihilistic will-to-power might be reversed when future versions of the knight-
182 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

ly aristocrats, that is, those whose actions are a spontaneous affirmation of

life and its chaos, are once more in the ascendancy.
In this world of contesting value-creating powers, Nietzsche claims that
events do not have essences and that “purposes and utilities are only signs
that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and
imposed upon it the character of a function” (1967, 77). The “entire history
of a ‘thing’, an organ, a custom,” he adds, is “a continuous sign-chain of
ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to
be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases, succeed and
alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion” (1967, 77). In the case
of sensory activities, this means that perceptions are not always converging in
accordance with a logos of the world or with the same horizon of a particular
object. Rather, each sensory activity attempts to establish its own rights for
what it declares perception and its object to be. Thus Nietzsche says that
“[tjhere is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the
more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different
eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’
of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (1967, 119).25 Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s
view of perception holds that objects guide different perspectives toward a
common (although never fully determinate) goal, Nietzsche’s view multiplies
perspectives and, in a strong sense, the objects themselves - seeing is always
“seeing abysses.”26 The “convergence” that can occur here does not come
from any logos of the phenomenal field; it is, according to Nietzsche, imposed
by whatever happens to be the more powerful of the value-creating powers at
play in the realm of chaos.
In order to investigate the history of the “interpretations and adaptations”
that constitute the world of perception and knowledge, Nietzsche chooses
a method, genealogical critique, that acknowledges its own participation in
making history: the goal of this type of critique is not to record but to reverse
the nihilistic tendencies that dominate Western civilization, that is, to over-
come the value hierarchy of good and evil and to convert a nihilistic into
a life-affirming will-to-power. Thus genealogy would reveal the nihilistic
source of the “fable” of a true world that stands in opposition to an apparent
world, of a world that contains God, truth, man and other images of per-
manence and that implicitly counsels us to escape the realm of becoming
in which we reside. In place of this fable and its false promises, genealogy
celebrates the world as “an eternal fleeing and seeking of each other again of
many gods, as the happy controverting of each other, conversing again with
each other, and converging again of many gods . . .” (1968, 309).
If we accept Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world in terms of chaos or
the will-to-power, then Merleau-Ponty’s view of perception, despite its solar
 FRED EVANS 183
credentials, is a candidate for Nietzsche’s geneological critique. From a Niet-
zschean perspective, Merleau-Ponty’s converging perceptions are just one
kind of perception among many, and convergence itself is just one value-
creating power among others. Indeed, one must agree with Nietzsche:.con-
vergence toward the optimal balance between maximum clarity and richness,
or convergence in the form of the flesh’s coincidence with itself, do seem to
be an impostion upon perception - an aesthetic bias or merely one style of
perception - rather then perception’s ineluctable nature or univocal calling.
In some situations, such as those of “normal science” (Kuhn, 1970) and rou-
tine bureaucracy, we might value clarity over richness and adopt a sharply
focussed style of perceiving in relation to that with which we are dealing.
In other contexts, such as that of “revolutionary science” or avant-garde art,
we might prize novelty and difference over transparency and familiarity, and
adopt a more open or possibly erratic style of perception. One recent, friend-
ly critic of Merleau-Ponty has pointed out that the “glance” brings together
diversity in an instant without reducing it to an even relatively open Gestalt
(Casey, forthcoming). Even if we grant that perception typically favors object
and world constancy and the optimal balance that Merleau-Ponty cites, we
might attribute the value of this constancy and balance to the multitude of
different, even disordant, creations that the dissolution of these stablizing
factors does or could produce, and not to the anchor that they provide for con-
verging perceptions and the unity of human experience.27 There is, then, no
phenomenologically neutral grounds for claiming that the world favours the
convergence of perspectives over the divergence or that imminent coincidence
haunts the interplay of seer and seen.28
In more stinging terms, a Nietzschean genealogical critique might point
out that Merleau-Ponty’s passion for convergence implies that whatever is
directed toward the immanent unity of the world is “ true”, and that what-
ever cannot or will not follow this trajectory (as opposed to not yet having
done so) is merely “apparent” (and perhaps impossible on Merleau-Ponty’s
view). In other words, Nietzsche would declare that Merleau-Ponty’s theory
of perception is based on the “distinction between a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’
world - whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the
end, an underhanded Christian),” and is thus only “a suggestion of decadence,
a symptom of a decline of life” (1968a , 484). Or in equally acerbic terms,
“[t]he greater the impulse toward unity, the more firmly one may conclude
that weakness is present; the greater the pulse towards variety, differentiation,
inner decay, the more force is present” (1967a, 346).
184 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

6. The reconciliation of solar lovers

But even if Nietzschean reflection shows Merleau-Ponty to have imposed

rules of love on his consorts (rather than to have discovered a logos imma-
nent in the world itself ), has not Nietzsche reduced all love to momentary
infatuations? Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception limits divergence to what
is ultimately congruent with an assumed movement toward convergence. In
contrast, Nietzsche’s theory of perception affirms “variety” as stronger than
“unity” and celebrates the multiplication of incommensurable perspectives.
In order to provide this welter of contentious perceptions with a common
direction - especially that necessary for a community (or an individual) to
-
reproduce itself Nietzsche allows only that the more powerful of their
number must dominate the rest.
But Nietzsche’s vision of reality in terms of divergent forces seems no
less arbitrary than Merleau-Ponty’s allegiance to the logos of convergence.
Our experience attests to the entwinement of both tendencies and in no way
unambiguously affirms the primacy of one over the other. Acquaintance with
the world, then, does not provide Nietzsche with a basis for favoring one
value-creating power over another, that is, with grounds for claiming that
“the impulse towards variety, differentiation, inner decay” should rule rather
than the “impulse towards unity.” His preference for divergence, moreover,
would continually undermine the only basis he offers for community, the will
of the stronger - a basis that most of us would find politically unacceptable.
Nietzsche’s glorification of divergence, therefore, renews our appreciation of
Merleau-Ponty’s continual appeal to the optimal balance between clarity and
richness or to the flesh’s imminent coincidence with itself - even though we
can no longer place our faith in either of these alternatives as reflecting the
“logos of the world.”
Nietzsche’s early text, The Birth of Tragedy (1967b), indicates a possi-
ble way beyond the antinomy of convergence and divergence and toward a
reconciliation of the two solar lovers. In that work, Nietzsche distinguishes
between three interconnected worlds, the Dionysian, the Apollinian, and the
Socratic. Of these three worlds, the Dionysian and the Apollinian share a
symbiotic relationship: the Dionysian world is a “truly existent primal unity,
eternally suffering and contradictory,” which needs Apollinian art, or “raptur-
ous vision” and “pleasurable illusion,” for its continuous redemption ; and the
Apollinian needs the Dionysian as the source of its own purpose and being
(45; 81). In Greek tragedy, furthermore, the relationship between these two
worlds consists in “the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything
existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and art
as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury
 FRED EVANS 185
of a restored oneness” (74), a oneness, however, of creative strife rather than
peaceful uniformity.29
In contrast to this redemptive alliance between the Dionysian and Apollini-
an dimensions of our existence, the Socratic world replaces or covers over
the Dionysian with conscious knowledge (86), which Nietzsche says is the
product of a drive for excessive familiarity and the desire to correct existence
(87, 95). Within this overly rationalized, Socratic world, drama is epitomized
by Euripides’ “explanatory prologues,” that is, by “aesthetic Socratism” and
the claim that “[t]o be beautiful, everything must be intelligible” (82-84).
Nietzsche’s Dionysian realm is reminiscent of his later notion of chaos
and of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh. If we put aside Merleau-Ponty’s
penchant for convergence or imminent coincidence and Nietzsche’s glorifi-
cation of divergence and plurality, and if we focus on the relationship among
perceptions rather than that between perception and objects, then the interre-
lationships among the denizens of the Dionysian realm are like those among
Nietzsche’s “controverting gods,” with their constant movement of with-
drawal and return in relation to one another, or like the chiasms and mutual
encroachments among the inhabitants of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh.” Through
their differences from each other, these elements of the Dionysian establish
one another and form a diacritical unity, one that endorses neither an immi-
nent convergence nor a divergent plurality as its intrinsic goal or dominant
character. Because our Apollinian images restrict us to thinking about chaos
in terms of “individuated things,” we find ourselves, like Merleau-Ponty and
Nietzsche, forced to articulate the interplay among the perceptions that occur
in the Dionysian realm - among “perspectives” or “voices” when we con-
sider them in light of Nietzsche’s “value-creating forces” - in terms either I
of convergence or divergence. When we go further and reify these two latter
notions - make them into doctrines or imperatives - we then transform the
Apollinian realm into the Socratic realm.
We can turn the Apollinian away from the Socratic and into a vision of the
Dionysian by paying proper respect to Nietzsche’s and Merleau-Ponty’s cre-
ative use of “controverting gods,” “chiasms,” and similar evocative metaphors.
These terms suggest what our Apollinian word-images cannot capture liter-
ally: that the perspectives or voices in the Dionysian realm are shot through
with one another from the beginning. This means that each is equally inside
and outside the others, equally the other, and the twin, of the rest, that each ,
from the beginning, is always a “hybrid” rather than a pure identity.30 It
means, moreover, that these perspectival seeings or different voices exist in
creative tension with one another: each is the continual formation of itself in
light of the sorts of exchanges it has or anticipates having with the others.31
-
Because each encroaches upon the others because each is a dynamic or
186 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

-
dialogic hybrid these exchanges are constantly producing new perspectives
or voices, and the Dionysian community, which is the activity of these mutual
exchanges, therefore undergoes continuous metamorphosis.32
If we grant that the Dionysian - Nietzsche’s “chaos” or Merleau-Ponty’s
“flesh” - is an interplay of hybrid voices or perspectives (each voice resound-
ing in the others, each perspective pregnant with the rest), then “convergence”
and “divergence” are derivative from that interplay. Merleau-Ponty was wrong
to make convergence, and Nietzsche divergence, the chief characteristic of the
world. Both principles are Apollinian readings of the Dionysian, and either
tendency, on pain of falling into “Socratism,” must be contextually evaluated
in terms of its intensification of the dynamic hybridity of the Dionysian realm
- in terms of the production of new voices and perspectives (the “gifts” men-
tioned earlier) that allow the Dionysian realm to continue its metamorphosis,
that is, to be even more what it already is, whether we name it flesh or chaos.
We have turned perception away from a characterization in terms of either
convergence and divergence, and returned it to its proper, Dionysian, home.
These “fortunes” of perception also suggest a view of community that affirms
neither convergence nor divergence, neither a univocal voice nor a plurality of
voices, neither a purely Merleau-Pontyian nor a purely Nietzschean polity.33
Instead, this community affirms its dynamic hybridity, its interplay of mutual-
ly encroaching voices. As this affirmation of itself , the community promotes
the equal audibility of its voices and disavows, at least as public policy options,
those discourses that exclude voices on the basis of their enunciators’ race,
gender, sexual orientation or any trait other than the words they utter - for
such discourses, by that very exclusion, do not affirm the interplay (mutu-
al hearing) of voices in which their enunciators and the other interlocutors
of the community participate and achieve their being.34 Because linguistic
communities always carry the threat of Babel, of being overwhelmed by the
contesting discourses within their multi-voiced bodies, Socratic voices will
frequently arise in the name of this threat and attempt to reduce the interplay
of voices to a single “oracle” or discourse. In the communities courageous
enough to refuse this Socratism, there will still be tension between Dionysus
and Apollo, between chaos or flesh and the emphasis on either convergence
or divergence. But this tension will be a creative bond, worthy of the two
solar lovers whose coupling illustrates it best, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty.

Notes
I . I read previous drafts of this paper to a group of graduate students at I Duquesne University,
to members of the philosophy department at the University of Memphis , and to participants
in the 1996 Merleau-Ponty Circle conference. I would like to thank them, as well as David
Alexander, Len Lawlor, Barbara McCloskey, Iris Marion Young, and Richard Rojcewicz ,
 FRED EVANS 187
for very helpful comments. I am especially grateful to the editor of Man and World and
one of the referees assigned to my paper for extensive and insightful criticism.
2. Of the “wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul,” Nietzsche says
that it possesses a “high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around which everything
becomes a mirror” (1968, 302; italics added). The pure perceivers are mirrors of their
surroundings ; the “powerful soul,” in contrast, transforms those surroundings into his or
her own image.
3. Nietzsche indicates the positive nature of “ pregnancy” in the section of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra entitled “Before Sunrise.” He speaks of heaven just before the sun rises
and says that it reveals its wisdom to him silently, but adds that both heaven and he “share
the sun” (1954, 276). He also says that he does not want this “ bright heaven” to be “stained
i by drifting clouds,” that is, by those who are unable to address life with an unequivocal
“Yes” (277). But the “purity” which he also ascribes to this heaven is the “heaven Accident ,
the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, [and] the heaven Prankishness” (278), which is
very close to his description of the sun. Thus when he says that he must part from this bright
heaven because “day is coming,” asks if heaven “bids [him] to go and be silent because the
day is coming now” (278), and declares that heaven is his “happiness before sunrise,” he
suggests that the bright heaven (rather than one stained by clouds) is pregnant with the day
and sun and not, therefore, antithetical to the latter. This is further confirmed when some
thirty pages later he says that for all “sham wisdom” (especially “wisdom that blooms in
-
the dark, a nightshade wisdom, which always sighs: all is vain” 302) the “day is now at
hand, the change, the sword of judgment, the great noon: much shall be revealed there,”
adding “[a]nd whoever proclaims the ego wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed,
verily, he will also tell what he knows, foretelling: ‘Verily, it is at hand, it is near, the great
noon!’ ” (303). In the final pages of the book, moreover, Zarathustra passes through the
midnight and his encounter with the “higher men,” emerging at day break, asking for the
“great noon” to rise, and proclaiming that his rebirth consists in his daytime work rather
than in his midnight pity for the higher men: “Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he left his cave,
glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains” (439).
4. Kaufmann translates “ Erkenntnis” as “perception” in the context of immaculate perception
(“ unbefleckten Erkenntnis” ) and pure perceivers (“ ReinErkennenden” ) , and as “perceptive
knowledge” in the context of the solar form of Erkenntnis. “ Erkenntnis” can mean either
perception or knowledge, and Nietzsche would apply his distinction between the metaphors
of the moon and the sun to both of these notions.
5. In “On the Three Evils,” Nietzsche says that sometimes “the lust to rule” is a matter of
“what is high” rightfully longing “downward for power,” of “lonely heights [that] should
not remain lonely and self-sufficient eternally,” of a mountain that should “descend to the
valley and winds of the height to the low plains” (1954, 302). When the lust to rule is
of this type, he concludes, its rightful name is the “gift-giving virtue.” In contrast to the
quotations I have given in the text, here Nietzsche's emphasis is on a subject who brings
its creative forces to the world rather than on the world soliciting and guiding these forces,
that is, rather than on the world itself being a creative force. Although Nietzsche is never
dismissive of the world’s power over us, we shall see that he grants a stronger role to the
subject’s forces in producing meaning than does Merleau-Ponty.
6. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau Ponty states that Descartes provides “the breviary of a thought
-
that wants no longer to abide in the visible and so decides to construct the visible according
to a certain model-in- thought” (1964, 169). In Phenomenoloqy of Perception , he refers
to the deployment of such models as the “experience error”: the tendency to read into
experience what we think should be there and then to believe that we experience it there
as well (1962, 5).
7. Although Merleau-Ponty equates the body with conscious perception, conscious percep-
tion itself is gradational: in the “operative” mode of perception, objects appear to us
amorphously (though they never appear as completely formless); and in the later stages of
perception, those called “intentionality of act,” the same objects appear to us with more
188 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

clarity and distinctness (see below for elaboration and documentation). Rather than con-
scious and unconscious perceptions, then, Merleau-Ponty speaks of both vague or implicit
and clear or explicit holds on objects - but both of the latter, on pain of surrendering his ,
phenomenological approach, are conscious for Merleau-Ponty.
8. “By these words, the ’ primacy of perception’, we mean that the experience of perception
is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that
perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions
of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action” (1964a, 25).
9. ‘The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unre-
flective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship
that phenomenology has called Fundierung : the founding term, or originator - time, the
-
unreflective, the fact, language, perception is primary in the sense that the originated
is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, which prevents the latter
from reabsorbing the former, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense
and the originated is not simply derived from it, since it is through the originated that the
-
originator is made manifest” (Merleau Ponty 1962, 394; see also 127). In “The Philoso-
-
pher and His Shadow,” Merleau Ponty says that neither the “pre-objective order” (“carnal
intersubjectivity” in this context) nor “logical objectivity” is “primary” in relation to the
other although they share the Fundierung relationship. But he then goes on to say that
logical objectivity is “limited to consecrating the labors of the pre-objective layer, existing
only as the outcome of the “logos of the aesthetic world” and having value only under
-
its supervision (1964d, 173). Presumably he means that the pre objective world is “not
primary” only in “the empiricist sense” of that term, that is, where the two elements would
share no internal bond and one produces the other as its effect. For MerleauPonty, then,
perception and the other founding terms are still primary in the sense of being, metaphor -
ically, the center of gravity or the sun around which the other planets evolve but without
which the center or sun could not exist.
10. I have borrowed this term from Iris Marion-Young (1997) , who uses it in a different
context, one concerning political relationships.
11. “I run through appearances and reach the real color or the real shape when my experience
is at its maximum of clarity [a son plus haul degre de nettete ] , in spite of the fact that
Berkeley may retort that a fly would see the same object differently or that a stronger
microscope would transform it: these different appearances are for me appearances of a
certain true spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient degree of
clarity, reaches its maximum richness [ pour une nettete suffiscinte, arrive a son maximum
de richese ] . I have visual objects because I have a visual field in which richness and clarity
are in inverse proportion to each other, and because these two demands, either of which
taken separately might be carried to infinity, when brought together, produce a certain
culmination and optimum balance [ point de maturite et un maximum ] in the perceptual
process” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 318). And , “[M]y body is geared into the world [ est en vise
sur le monde] when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly
articulated [ clairement articule ] as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold,
.
receive the responses they expect from the world This maximum shaipness [ de nettete ]
of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground [ un sot\, a basis of my life,
a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world” (1962, 250; see also 262,
302-303, 452). And, “belief in the thing and the world must entail the presumption of a
completed synthesis [ une synthesis achevee ]” (1962, 330) .
12. “[Tjhere is one single time which is self-confirmatory, which can bring nothing into
existence unless it has already laid that thing’s foundations as present and eventual past,
and which establishes itself at a stroke. .. There is no need for a synthesis externally
binding together the tempora into one single time, because each one of the tempora was
already inclusive, beyond itself , of the whole open series of other tempora, being an
internal communication with them, and because the ‘cohesion of a life’ is given with its
-
ek stase” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 421).
 FRED EVANS 189
13. Kant believed that all human thought was guided by a “regulative idea” of reason, one
that pointed to totality and completion as the proper, but unattainable, goal of thinking;
Merleau-Ponty, like Hegel, inscribes this idea into the world and has it regulate the subject
object dialogue. But whereas Hegel thought that this idea could be fulfilled, Merleau Ponty
-
sees it as always “presumptive,” that is, open-ended and changeable in light of an always
-
deeper significance contained in the womb of our transformative and transformable relation
to the world (1962, 219).
14. Thus Merleau-Ponty says on these same pages that speech “is the presumption to a
total accumulation” (1964c, 81; see also 1962, 190). Although art creates multiply self-
enclosed worlds, Merleau-Ponty says that each act of art itself recapitulates the single
task of expression that confronts all painters, thereby guaranteeing the comparability of
their works (1964c, 60). But that “single task” is imposed on the artists by the world -
the shared horizon and single direction or logic (see above) that it ultimately implies for
Merleau-Ponty; thus the self-enclosed worlds of the artists’ products, if they could speak,
would speak philosophy (and hence would express philosophy’s unobtainable goal), that
is, would join “the presumption to a total accumulation .”
15. Merleau-Ponty uses the French word ‘chiasme’ for the Greek ‘khiasmos,’ which means
“a crosswise arrangement.” There are two meanings for ‘khiasmos’ in both French and
English. In French, the rhetorical meaning of ‘khiasmos’ (for example, “To stop too
fearful, and too faint to go,” where the second phrase inverts the grammatical order of the
first) is designated by ‘chiasme,’ Merleau-Ponty’s choice, and by ‘chiasmus’ (‘chiasmi’ for
the plural, ‘chiastic’ for the adjecdve) in English . The French use the word ‘chiasma’ for
the anatomical meaning of ‘khiasmos’ (the criss-crossing of the optic nerves in the brain);
in English, this meaning is also designated by ‘chiasma’ (‘chiasmata’ in the plural, and
‘chiasmatic’ for the adjective) or simply by ‘chiasm.’ Although Merleau Ponty chooses
-
the French word that corresponds to the rhetorical employment of ‘khiasmos’ - and does
so perhaps because it comes closest to capturing the notion of “reversibility” that is central
-
to his idea of the “flesh” (see below) the convention among his English commentators
has been to assume, evidently, that Merleau-Ponty intended the anatomical rather than
the rhetorical meaning (his *chiasme* ) and to use the English ‘chiasm’ rather than the
English ‘chiasmus’. Because overturning conventions can lead to confusion, I will follow
the standard translation and use ‘chiasm,’ ‘chiasms,’ and ‘chiasmic.’
16. Although Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the flesh of the world (sensible) or
“flesh of being” (1968, 88) - and the flesh of the body (both sensible and sentient, or
-
-
“self sensing”), he says that reversibility or “the dehiscence of the seeing into the visible
and of the visible into the seeing” ( 1968, 153) is best understood in terms of the body’s
relation to itself: “[The body’s flesh] is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body,
of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees
itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible
it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship
and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass”
(1986, 146). He adds later that even this touching of oneself touching, seeing of oneself
seeing, never “entirely succeed[s]” and “does not go beyond a sort of imminence” (249).
What traditional philosophy sees as pairs of opposites - the seer and the seen, speaking
-
and the spoken, self and other, the invisible and the visible Merleau-Ponty recasts into
“reversibilities.”
17. See also Merleau Ponty’s comments on Marchand’s description (after Klee) of the painter
-
in relation to the forest: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who
looked at the forest. Some days I have felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking
to m e. . . I was there, listening. . . I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe
and not want to penetrate i t. . . I expect to be inwardly submerged , buried. Perhaps I paint
to break out” (1964 167).
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NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

-
18. Merleau Ponty, more than he indicates, had already approximated his philosophy of the
flesh in Phenomenology of Perception - “Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself * (1962, 407; see 214).
19. Merleau-Ponty speaks of this oneness in several related ways: as an “antecedent unity n\e-
world, world and its parts, parts of my body, a unity before segregation, before the multiple
dimensions - and so also the unity of time,” as an “underlying bond by non-difference”
-
(1968, 261), and as a more exact version of “the pre established harmony,” one that holds
-
between “local individuated facts,” simultaneously unified in advance and in process of
differentiation (262; see 133).
20. For other references to the notion of Gestalt in The Visible and the Invisible (1968), see 195,
-
204-206, 208-209, and 261. In another part of the same text, Merleau Ponty identifies
at least one form of “difference” with the figure-ground distinction (197). In all these
-
passages, Merleau Ponty indicates that he still thinks of the human setting (and not just
what appears in front of us) in Gestalt terms; now, however, he fills in the notion of Gestalt
further via Saussure’s notion of a diacritical system of differences (each item is established
through its differences from the other items in the same system) (1968, 213) and his own
(Merleau-Ponty’s) more dynamic notion of flesh (the reversibility of its aspects, such as
the visible and the seer). I am contending that his later comments on the notion of Gestalt
indicate that he still sees it as the stabilizing structure of our relationship to objects and to
others - that it continues his emphasis on the importance of convergence as the “logos of
the world” while still respecting (and placing limits on) divergence.
-
21. See Schmidt (1985, 133) for the application of this term to Merleau Ponty’s incorporation
of the Saussurian diacritical model of language within a phenomenologically based theory
of speech.
22. This continued favoritism toward the sensible and perception is also indicated when he
states: “The sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without it having
to be posited; the sensible is Being’s unique way of manifesting itself without becoming
positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent” (1968, 214). On the same
page, he also says that “the positivity of the invisible rests [upon]” the “relative positivity
of the perceived”: “There is no intelligible world, there is the sensible world” (214). And
in the “working notes” to this same text he states that “[t]he 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” (250).
23. In order not to interrupt the flow of thought in this paragraph, I omitted the last phrase of
the passage I just quoted: . . and which manifests itself by an almost carnal existence
-
of the idea, as well as by a sublimation of the flesh” (Merleau Ponty 1968, 154 155). -
By “carnal existence of the idea,” Merleau-Ponty means “speech inscribed in the field
of vision;” and by “sublimation of the flesh” he means “flesh [clearly equated with the
‘visible’ here] metamorphosed into the mental vision of speech.”
24. Before moving on to Nietzsche’s treatment of perception in terms of “value-creating pow-
ers,” we should note a parallel between what he says about language and Merleau-Ponty’s
distinction between parole parlee and parole parlante. Nietzsche sometimes deprecates
-
language (1974, 299 300; 1968a, 483, 530; 1967, 45) and sometimes praises its power
(1967, 26; 1968, 329). In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , however, Nietzeche
characterizes “truths” as metaphors that have become fixed to the point that people have
forgotten that they were metaphors (1979, 88-89). On the basis of this pejorative charac -
terization of truth, we might say that Nietzache’s equivalent for Merleau-Ponty’s parole
parlee are terms that have become merely functional, “fixed,” and that his equivalent for
parole parlante are metaphors that still allow for the exploitation of their ambiguity, that
is, still allow for their creative use in providing things with new meanings. When it is
of the latter sort, moreover, Nietzsche understands language as a positive value-creating
power and, in the case of his equivalent to parole parlee, as a negative or merely reactive
value-creating power (see below).
 FRED EVANS 191
25. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche says we must “shudder” over what seems to him to be the
case: that “[the world] may include infinite interpretations” (1974, 336).
26. “Courage also slays dizziness at the edge of abysses: and where does man not stand at the
edge of abysses? Is not seeing always - seeing abysses” (Nietzsche 1968, 269). Besides
a “plurality of incommensurable visions,” it is difficult to decipher what Nietzsche has
in mind by “seeing abysses,” though he makes clear in the context of his discussion
with the dwarf that he does not mean a “circle” (even one that is only “imminent”) or
other self -enclosed form of exchange. For an interesting discussion of this passage and its
context, see Shapiro (1993). Apart from his treatment of Nietzsche’s notion of “abyssal
seeing,” Shapiro thinks that Nietzsche valorizes “twilight” as a metaphor for sight and, by
implication, that Nietzsche does not place the emphasis that I claim he does upon “solar
love,” “noon ,” and the “dawn.” In footnote #3 above, I draw on a number of passages
from Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to justify my claim that Nietzsche sees twilight and
midnight as propaedeutic in relation to the dawn and daylight.
27. Jay mentions that philosophers such as Lyotard, Irigaray, and Foucault, and painters such
-
as the Surrealist Magritte, came to criticize Merleau Ponty for his ocularcentrism and for
imposing, through it, “order where disorder reigns” (1993, 176-177).
28. For a similar criticism, though one directed against a masculinist bias in Merleau-Ponty’s
construal of the body’s sexuality, see Butler (1989).
29. I qualify this “restored oneness” in terms of “creative strife” because of the quotation
from Nietzsche I provided in the previous sentence, “truly existent primal unity, eternally
suffering and contradictory,” and because the notion of a purely homogeneous oneness
is anathema to Nietzsche’s way of thinking (as indicated by everything he says about
“chaos,” although this term is from a later period in his work) .
30. If it seems odd to speak of these elements of the Dionysian as simultaneously “inside and
outside one another,” we should remember that it is no more strange than talk in quantum
physics about entities that are simultaneously ‘waves” and “particles,” or in chaos theory
about geometrical objects with less than three but more than two dimensions. Whereas
these disciplines can use mathematics in order to skate over the paradoxes they generate,
philosophers must resort to the metaphorical and evocative resources of language in order
to engage as best they can the paradoxes that their efforts generate.
31. Although he does work out its full meaning, Merleau-Ponty suggests something like this
formulation when he says in his “working notes,” “Chiasm, instead of the For the Other:
-
that means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co functioning. We function as
one unique body” (1968, 215).
32. In Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty sometimes depicts the world of percep-
tion as if it contained a Dionysian dimension. For example, he describes the phenomenal
field as one in which initially “contradictory notions jostle each other” (1962, 6), in which
vague objects rival one another for attention (1964c, 49-50), and produce “not only the
intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which
is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us” (1962, 254). If
we omit that Merleau-Ponty preordains the transformation of this “horror” into convergent
order, and recall the mutual encroachment or overlapping of the “parts” of the flesh, then
we approach the realm of Dionysus, of constant mutual encroachment, or of chaos before
Nietzsche reduces it to mere divergence and moments of temporary domination.
33. I wish only to suggest, not justify, the social-political implications I draw from this view
of the Dionysian. I must also let pass without sufficient comment what I think Merleau
Ponty’s and Nietzsche’s polities would be (see Evans, forthcoming, for my more extensive
-
remarks on Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy). Although the basis for my idea of
polity differs from Merleau Ponty’s, it endorses the value he attributes to solidarity (more
attenuated in his later than in his early political works). It also endorses Nietzsche’s
emphasis on the variety of voices but contradicts his frequent elitist inclination to favor
.
“great” over “ordinary” interlocutors The interplay of voices in the Dionysian realm
produces new voices regardless of the status particular communities might assign to the
192 NIETZSCHE, MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE FORTUNES OF PERCEPTION

different participants in this interplay; for example, the explicit or implicit exchanges
between “high” and “low” art - or simply different art forms - adds to the richness of a
culture. Elitism might overlook this fact, might abhor the “din ” of a culture that freely
mixes and caters equally to ’“high” and “low ” but it thereby denies the basic hybridity of
culture and puts in peril the vitality of the culture of which it is a part.
34. This radically democratic society would also preclude economic and social systems that
permit one group to own or otherwise control the means of production and communication
and thereby diminish the equal audibility of the voices in the community.

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