Research in Phenomenology 49 (2019) 31–48 Research

in
Phenomenology

brill.com/rp

Body and Time-Space in Heidegger and

Merleau-Ponty

Daniela Vallega-Neu
University of Oregon
dneu@uoregon.edu

Abstract

Comparisons between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the body tend to

focus on the earlier works of these philosophers, i.e. on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology
of Perception, and Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars in the context of Being and Time. This
paper focuses on their later works in order to show how each philosopher respectively
opens venues to think the human body non-subjectively and as emerging from being,
where being includes the being also of other bodies, things, or events. This thinking of
bodies “from being” articulates them in terms of spatio-temporal events. The article
shows that in thinking from being, both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts
harbor a sense of being with a unifying force, which is tied to meaning or sense. The
article ends by questioning the possibility of accounts of bodies as spatio-temporal
events not bound by a unifying force of being, bodies that may carry both sense and
non-sense.

Keywords

Merleau-Ponty – Heidegger – body – being – sense – spatio-temporal events

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Comparisons between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the body

tend to focus on the earlier works of these philosophers.1 This is due to the
fact that in the Zollikon Seminars,2 where Heidegger writes most about the
human body, he takes recourse to the conceptual framework of Being and
Time and thematizes the body mostly in its spatiality, which lends itself to
comparison’s with Merleau-Ponty’s account of the spatiality of the body in the
Phenomenology of Perception. In this paper I will focus on the later works of
both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in order to show how each philosopher
respectively opens venues to think the human body non-subjectively, i.e. with-
out primacy either of an “I think” or an “I can” or an “I am” but rather as emerg-
ing from being, where being includes (in a yet to be determined way) the being
also of other bodies, things, or events. Furthermore, this thinking of bodies
“from being” articulates them in terms of spatializing and temporalizing such
that bodies are understood not as objects with determinate boundaries but

1  See Kevin Aho, “The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the impor-
tance of the Zollikon Seminars,” in Body and Society 11.2 (2005): 1–23. Aho points out similarities
between the account of the body in Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars and in Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception but ultimately wants to claim that for Heidegger the analysis
of the body is regional and “ontic” (2) and that the analytic of Dasein “is more original than
any analytic of the body.” (20) Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, “does not go far enough to
overcome Cartesian subjectivity.” (19) From an early Heideggerian perspective and within the
limits of Merleau-Ponty’s early work, Aho’s theses certainly are defensible. However, since
the thirties, Heidegger abandon’s the notion of the ontological difference and begins to think
how in thinking from being as event, being and beings are transformed into their “simultane-
ity.” In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes: “beyng is not something ‘earlier’—exist-
ing in itself, for itself. Instead, the event is the temporal-spatial simultaneity for beyng and
beings.” (Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,
vol. 65 of the Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994], 65 [hereafter
cited as GA, followed by volume and page number]; translated by Richard Rojcewicz and
Daniela Vallega-Neu as Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) [Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2012]). As I show in The Bodily Dimension in Thinking, this complicates the
assumption that an investigation into the body is simply a matter of “regional ontology.” (See
Daniela Vallega-Neu, The Bodily Dimension in Thinking [Albany: suny Press, 2005], Chapter
Five). Furthermore, the argument that Merleau-Ponty does not go far enough to overcome
Cartesian subjectivity is harder to defend when looking at Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and
the Invisible and Aho omits discussing in detail this last unfinished work by the French
philosopher.
2  Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. by Medard Boss
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1987); translated by Franz Mayr and
Richard Askay as Zollikon Seminars (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001) (here-
after cited as ZS followed by the German pagination that appears as well at the margins of the
English translation).

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rather in their spatio-temporal happening that is originally relational and an

exposed being with … that intertwines with other things or events.
To understand bodies non-subjectively and as fundamentally relational
spatio-temporal events opens venues for thinking ontologies beyond tradi-
tional metaphysics that operates in binary frameworks such as subject-object,
active-passive, inside-outside. Coming from Modernity, which is marked by
the primacy of human subjectivity in the guise of consciousness, rethinking
the bodies through which we exist as ecstatic and relational opens venues
to escape the trap of consciousness posed by the organizing power of the “I
think.” Understanding who we are on the basis of an originary dispossession
rather than a reflexive self-possession opens our sense of being in way that
allows us to question what exceeds perception and understanding and is nev-
ertheless part of our lives.
In my paper I will not only show how this happens in different and also sim-
ilar ways in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as they begin to think bodies from
being but I also will contend that in thinking from being, both their accounts
harbor a sense of being with a unifying force. Heidegger’s notion of “the truth
of beyng”3 has a unifying force not only in virtue of his account of the history
of beyng in the 30s and 40s but also—perhaps in more subtle ways—through
the notion of the “gathering of the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and humans”
in later essays. This unifying force is tied to what Heidegger addressed in Being
and Time as originary temporality (Temporalität) and later rethought in terms
of the event (Ereignis). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of truth finds a unifying force
in the notion of the flesh of the world. I will argue that in both Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty this unifying force is tied to meaning or sense; in Heidegger this
sense arises through the notion of the silent call of being which relates to the
dimension of the divine, to the beckoning of the gods; in Merleau-Ponty this
sense is found in the notion of the invisible, in a latent sense, hiding in depth,
that, as flesh, is as well an element of communion, an incarnate principle bind-
ing beings together, and binding most notably “my” flesh to the flesh of the
world.
I will not so much focus on the relation between Merleau-Ponty and
Heidegger. My aim is neither to claim that Merleau-Ponty does not reach
as far as Heidegger (as Aho, Askay, and Haar contend),4 nor to claim that

3  Heidegger begins to write beyng (Seyn) with a “y” in order to mark how being is, though in its
originary historical eventuation. Note that I don’t write either being (Sein) or beyng (Seyn)
with capital letters, in order to mitigate interpretations that end up representing being as
some “thing” or ultimate concept.
4  Kevin Aho, “The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the Importance
of the Zollikon Seminars” (see citation in footnote 1); Richard R. Askay, “Heidegger, the Body,

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Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body is more valuable than Heidegger’s. I do ac-

knowledge, however, that Merleau-Ponty was influenced more by Heidegger5
than vice versa. That Heidegger did have some notion of Merleau-Ponty
(Merleau-Ponty died eight days before a trip he intended to take to Freiburg!)
is evident from a letter Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt dated February 15,
1972. Here Heidegger writes that he did not know Merleau-Ponty’s works suf-
ficiently well but that he thought that “Merleau-Ponty was on the way from
Husserl to Heidegger,”6 something Taminiaux rightly contests since Merleau-
Ponty clearly remained an independent thinker for whom also Husserl re-
mained an important influence to the end. My article will place Merleau-Ponty
and Heidegger into proximity rather than distance, as I am interested in think-
ing bodies “from being,” i.e. not as objectified entities but in the way they “take
place” spatio-temporally.
In what follows, I will begin with an account of how there is a turn in
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that leads us to think bodies as spatio-temporal
events emerging from being and then question the unifying operation of mean-
ing in their accounts of being. This will lead me to investigate the possibility
of accounts of bodies as spatio-temporal events not bound by a unifying force
of being, bodies that may carry both sense and non-sense, bodies that may be
both connected and indifferent, bodies that may also occur spatio-temporally
in distinct and perhaps untranslatable ways.

and the French Philosophers,” Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 29–35; Michel Haar,
“Proximity and Distance with regard to Heidegger in the later Merleau-Ponty,” Merleau-
Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition, ed. Bernard Flynn et al.
(Albany: suny Press, 2009), 165–182.
5  For the general reception of Heidegger in France, see Dominique Janiquaud, Heidegger in
France, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2015). Merleau-Ponty’s Heidegger lectures of 1959 (which have not yet been translated into
English) focus on the later Heidegger, especially on the relation between Dasein and truth,
as well as on language and history. They shed light on how the later Heidegger influenced
Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Course:
1959–1961; Paris: Editions de Gallimard, 1996. For a commented summary in English see Wayne
Fromann, “Merleau-Ponty’s Heidegger Lectures: The Task of Thinking and the Possibility of
Philosophy Today,” in French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception, ed. David
Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul (Albany: suny Press, 2008), 89–101.
6  See Jaques Taminiaux, “Was Merleau-Ponty on the Way from Husserl to Heidegger?” Chiasmi
International 11 (2009): 21–30.

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2 Heidegger

I should begin by noting that, in distinction to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger in

a certain sense thinks from being already in his early work Being and Time.
The relation to this or that entity (and we will have to add here as well the
human body) already presupposes the prior clearing of being as such. Even if
in the project of Being and Time, Heidegger takes a transcendental-horizonal
approach to being by interrogating human being or Dasein (which suggests a
certain primacy of the human in the question of being) Dasein is understood
as always already transcending innerworldy beings into the horizon of being
from which they are discovered. This prior disclosure of the being of beings as
a whole occurs through Dasein’s understanding of being. Dasein’s understand-
ing of being (Seinsverständnis) is not a cognitive act carried out by a human
subject we call Dasein but a disclosive projection as which Dasein (human
being) occurs and in which a world and things and events we encounter in
the world are opened up in such a way that we always-already relate to them
meaningfully (with sense) even before we become explicitly aware of them
as things (beings) we can objectify. (Heidegger shows this in his analysis of
everyday being-in-the-world.) We find ourselves always already projected onto
possibilities of being that are opened up for us and into which we are at the
same time thrown. With this thrown projection onto possibilities of being the
being of other Dasein and of innerworldy beings is disclosed. The disclosure of
being makes possible and thus “precedes,” so to speak, any account of beings,
of things and events we may objectify. This includes our own bodies.
In the Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger speaks of our bodies not as corporeal
entities (Körper) but in their being, i.e. in how they exist or occur; he speaks
of human bodies in their temporalizing and spatializing, which he addresses
as Leiben, as “bodying” or “bodying-forth.” The temporalizing and spatializing
of the existing body exceeds qualitatively what we come to understand as the
limit of our bodies understood as corporeal entities. Heidegger’s analysis here
parallels the analysis of spatiality of being-in-the-world in Being and Time,
where he discusses the spatiality of Dasein in terms of the de-distancing and
directionality that orients our being spatially not only with respect to what
lies in our immediate reach but also with respect to what, in terms of objec-
tive space-measurements, is far away. In the Zollikon Seminars he gives the ex-
ample of being at the train station while sitting in the seminar room. When
making present the train station as we prepare to drive there, for example, we
are oriented spatially in relation to the train station in such a way that we make
it present. This making-present is not a representation of the train station in
our heads but is a “being at” (sein bei) the train station while we are at the same

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time with things in so called physical proximity. More than a decade earlier, in
Building, Dwelling, Thinking Heidegger makes a similar case when he writes:
“Only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very essence
are they able to go through spaces … we always go through spaces in such a
way that we already sustain them by staying constantly with near and remote
locales and things.… I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I
am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I
go through it.” 7 This pervading of space is what in the Zollikon Seminars he will
attribute to Leiben, bodying.
Yet even if in the Seminars Heidegger understands the existing body, our
bodying, as an ecstatic spatio-temporal event, he points out that it does not ex-
haust our being: “Being-in-the-world is not reducible to bodying forth [Leiben].
To being-in-the-world belongs understanding of being.” (ZS, 244) The under-
standing of being both exceeds and determines our bodying forth. When I am
on my way to the train station, for instance, the significance or meaning of the
train-station is not given by my bodying-forth but by “my” understanding of
being that determines my bodying forth.
Comprehending what is at stake in the primacy of the understanding of
being is crucial in order to see that, even if Heidegger’s descriptions of the spa-
tiality of Dasein in Being and Time or the bodying forth in the Zollikon Seminars
may at times suggest a human point of view, they presuppose the prior disclo-
sure of being. In the language of Being and Time this can be found in the no-
tion of the understanding of being. But Heidegger will begin to rethink this
notion in the thirties (following the so called “turning” in his thinking) in terms
of Inständigkeit, i.e. of “standing in” the clearing of being.8 Thus he writes in
Contributions to Philosophy: “The understanding of being does not turn beyng
into something ‘subjective’ … but overcomes all ‘subjectivity’ and dislodges hu-
mans into the openness of being, posits them as those who are exposed [liter-
ally set out] to beings (and prior to that to the truth of beyng).” (GA 65: 303)
This means that, rather than a possession of a subject, the understanding of
being ought to be understood in terms of a dis-possession. The emphasis in
thinking understanding as a thrown projection is now on the “being thrown.”
In section 122 of Contributions, Heidegger clarifies this when he writes:

7  Martin Heidegger, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, by Friedrich-Wilhelm

von Herrmann, vol. 7 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
2000), 159 (hereafter cited as GA 7 followed by the page number); trans. and ed. David Farrell
Krell as “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1992), 359.
8  Heidegger explains that the understanding of being is “the ecstatic-projecting standing
[erwerfendes Innestehen] in the clearing of the ‘there’ [the Da- of Da-sein].” (ZS, 236)

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The opening [of being] accomplished by the projection is an opening

only if it occurs as an experience of thrownness and thus of belonging to
being. […] The opening up of the essential occurrence of beyng manifests
that Da-sein does not accomplish anything, except for catching on to the
oscillation of appropriation […].
GA 65: 239

Heidegger describes the relation between being and Dasein as a turning rela-
tion: one is not without the other. No being eventuates without Dasein and no
Dasein occurs without being. But still there is a primacy of thrownness that re-
lates to what Heidegger calls the throw or call of being to which human being
finds itself responding.
Thus in the thirties, beginning with Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger
starts to think more radically from being (understood as event). He also begins
to think less and less with respect to human being either as the one who is
questioned or as the one who is primarily addressed by being. This goes along
with a shift in the meaning of Da-sein (that he begins to write with a hyphen)
that no longer designates primarily human being but the “there-being” under-
stood as the clearing of a time-space, a concrete site of being in which truth
occurs as a disclosure with beings.9
In Contributions, Heidegger fluctuates between different ways of thinking
Da-sein. On the one hand, he thinks Da-sein (with the emphasis on the -sein,
-being) in relation to human being in terms of Inständigkeit, the standing in
the clearing of truth, that is, as being there, in the openness of a world. On the
other hand, he thinks Da-sein as the concrete site of the truth of beyng, that is,
as the openness (the Da- or “there”) as which the truth of beyng occurs through
its being “sheltered” in things and event (in words above all, but also in works
of art, or deeds). This means that truth happens when Da-sein happens, and
Da-sein happens when truth, an unconcealing-concealing of being, occurs, for
instance in words or in a work of art but it could also happen in a deed or in
relation to everyday things.

9  That Heidegger continues to rethink Da-sein, the time-space of being, or rather, the tempor-
alizing-spatializing of being, less and less with a primary view on human being becomes evi-
dent already in a foreword to The Event, in which Heidegger will even criticize Contributions
to Philosophy for thinking Da-sein (albeit from the event) “too unilaterally in relation to the
human” (Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, vol. 71 of
the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009) (hereafter cited as GA
71, followed by the page number); translated by Richard Rojcewicz as The Event (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013).

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Heidegger describes the relation between the truth of beyng and Da-sein as
a turning relation, i.e. there is not truth of beyng unless it occurs in Da-sein and
there is no Da-sein unless Da-sein is appropriated in the event of beyng. Since
Da-sein, i.e. a concrete site of being, occurs only with things, Heidegger speaks
of the “simultaneity” of being and beings (GA 65: 13).10 One may understand
the further development of Heidegger’s thinking in the mid-forties and fifties
(when he thinks the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals) as a fur-
ther radicalizing of what he came to designate as this simultaneity of being and
beings in the happening of Da-sein. Finally, one may say, Heidegger can think
being and beings together when he thinks of things (a jug, a bridge) as dy-
namic spatio-temporal sites that gather earth and sky, mortals and divinities.11
It seems to me, however, that even in the thinking of the fourfold, even in
thinking how things gather a world such that the world occurs as event in the
mirror-play of the four regions of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, there
remains a certain priority of being over beings or things, since these things
need to be first understood or experienced out of the event (from being) in
their meaningful occurrences. Furthermore, to understand or sense how a
bridge or a jug can gather earth and sky, gods and humans, requires a listening
to language. Thinking things (and we will have to include human bodies) from
being has all to do with how Heidegger thinks being to occur through language;
and just as Heidegger thinks Da-sein less and less in relation to humans and
more and more out of the event of being, he thinks language less and less in
relation to humans and more and more out of the truth of beyng understood
as event. While in Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger meditates on Sage,
on saying as the saying of the thinker, in the later work The Event, Sage is ad-
dressed as the saying of beyng, as the silent call of beyng out of which human
speaking finds itself to be appropriated.12

10  The question of the simultaneity of being and beings is complicated in Contributions,
since according to Heidegger grounding and sheltering of truth in beings—and thus true
Da-sein—can “only” be prepared since historically speaking, beings remain abandoned
by being (truth is not coming into the open) because of the dominion of machination.
11  Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding,” in Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger, vol. 70 of
the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994) (hereafter cited as
GA 79 followed by the page number), 5–23; trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, Bremen and Freiburg
Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2012).
12  For a further discussion of how Heidegger begins to think Sage (saying) as the saying (not
of the thinker but) of beyng, see Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From
Contributions to Philosophy to The Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018),
159–162.

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Being eventuates meaningfully; it has something to say. This conception of

language Heidegger has, as well as his thinking of the truth of being in terms of
event, remains very much in the background in the Zollikon Seminars, where
Heidegger—for didactic reasons—takes recourse to the conceptuality of his
earlier work Being and Time. But in the Zollikon Seminars he does hint at the
question of language, together with considerations of the relation between
bodying and language. He says, for instance, in a conversation with Medard
Boss: “With this constricted concept of language in the sense of verbal articu-
lation [Verlautbarung] I cannot understand anything at all” (ZS, 248f). Instead
we should understand language “as ‘saying’ in the sense of the letting-be-shown
of something,” such that hearing-perceiving [Vernehmen] and with it our body-
ing, always occurs through language. We can perceive something only because
we are addressed by what we come to see or hear or feel such that what is
commonly understood as sense-perception, in Heidegger’s understanding, is
always already determined by language; it is not only sensed; it makes sense.
In a later conversation with Medard Boss, Heidegger restates these matters in
the following way:

We would not be bodily [leiblich] in a the way we are unless our being-
in-the-world always already fundamentally consisted of a receptive/per-
ceptive relatedness to something which addresses us from out of the
openness of our world, from out of that openness as which we exist.
Thereby, in this address, we are always already directed toward things
disclosing themselves to us.
ZS, 232

For Heidegger, then, the way our bodies happen, the way they temporalize and
spatialize in a way that orients us in relation to things and events, is deter-
mined out of a disclosure of being that is in itself a meaningful event. It is
thus that if our bodies are receptive for the happening of a moment of truth,
we may experience how a thing may happen meaningfully as the gathering of
earth and sky, divinities and mortals.
Much more would need to be developed here, but in light of the guiding
questions of this essay, let me summarize some main points prior to proceed-
ing with Merleau-Ponty:
1. Heidegger’s account of Dasein in Being and Time may be supplemented
with Heidegger’s reflections on the body in the Zollikon Seminar such
that human being always also occurs bodily yet in such a way that the
understanding of being exceeds our Leiben (bodying forth).

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2. Although already in Being and Time Heidegger prioritizes the disclosure

of being over beings, the point of departure of the questioning of being
through an analysis of Dasein grants a certain priority to human being in
the question of being as such.
3. Since the thirties Heidegger will think more radically from being under-
stood as event. At first, he articulates the event (in transition from Being
and Time) as the turning relation between being and Dasein, between the
throw of being and the thrown projection of thinking. As he departs more
radically from thinking in a primary relation to human being, he begins
to rethink Da-sein as the temporalizing-spatializing through which being
occurs in a concrete site. Furthermore, this temporalizing-spatializing
occurs only through a being (a thing, word, gesture, work of art—and
one should add: a body).
4. At the same time Heidegger radicalizes his thinking of language such that
what we understand as human speech is already a response to the silent
call of beyng out of which things address us and determine our bodies in
meaningful ways.
5. We thus can come to think bodies as meaningful spatio-temporal events
that are always already responsive to and determined by being.

3 Merleau-Ponty

Looking at the difference between The Phenomenology of Perception13 and The

Visible and the Invisible,14 we can find as well in Merleau-Ponty a turn to think
bodies more from being. The earlier work thinks the human body clearly from
the experience of perception, however in such a way that perception is under-
stood not as residing within a self-enclosed subject but as a communion with
the sensible.
Similarly to Heidegger, in The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty
understands the body not as an object in three-dimensional space but as in-
habiting space and time: “I am not in space and time, nor do I think space and
time; rather, I am of space and time; my body fits itself to them and embraces
them.” (PP 141) Perception reveals that lived bodies are anchored in the objects

13  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New
York: Routledge, 2013) (hereafter cited as PP followed by the page number).
14  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968) (hereafter cited as vi followed by the page number).

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BODY AND TIME-SPACE IN HEIDEGGER AND MERLEAU-PONTY 41

they reach for even before touching them since our body structures or body
schemas dynamically sketch out space in correlation to the task they perform,
i.e. they are configured in relation to what they come to perceive. Furthermore,
any objective conception of space or imagining of space is rooted in the prior
spatiality of the body that Merleau-Ponty addresses as well as “primordial
spatiality” (PP 149). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the spatiality of the lived body
is sense-giving. The body, in a certain sense, “understands” as it responds and
corresponds to what is perceived.
Merleau-Ponty strengthens this conception of a body that “understands” by
examining habit formation. For example, when we learn to drive a car, with-
out an explicit cognitive act, we understand that there is space for us to pass
into a lane; or a blind person learns to use a cane through which they know
the distance or location of an object without objective calculations. Just like
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty finds in our everyday activities a “pre-cognitive” un-
derstanding at play. However, in distinction to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty does
not conceive of this understanding as exceeding our bodying forth and of a
disclosure of world that is “prior” to bodies, but rather as residing in the very
motility of the body.
Even if the spatializing and temporalizing of the body adapts itself to what
comes to be perceived, in The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty still
works with the notion of intentionality (an intentionality no longer situated
in consciousness but in an “I can”) and speaks of how the body is “toward”
the world and signifies beyond itself (PP 221). This suggests a certain primacy
of subjectivity in his accounts. As many scholars have noted, the language of
the Phenomenology of Perception still borrows from a body-world distinction.
However, as has also been pointed out by many scholars, in the chapter on
“Sensing,” Merleau-Ponty comes close to undermining a dualistic approach
and opens venues to thinking from being, a way of thinking that becomes more
fully articulated in the later work The Visible and the Invisible.
In the famous example of seeing the color blue, Merleau-Ponty begins to
address and originary differencing of sensing and sensed. Before blue is prop-
erly seen as blue, it “is foreshadowed by the experience of a certain bodily at-
titude that alone fits with it and determines it.” (218) This bodily attitude, in
turn, is vaguely solicited by the yet to be seen blue. There occurs, then, a mu-
tual synchronizing or an “exchange” between sensible and sensed in which, as
Merleau-Ponty writes, “it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers
the action, nor that one gives sense to the other” (PP 222). This exchange re-
minds very much of the turning relation between being and Dasein of which

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Heidegger speaks in Contributions.15 And just as Heidegger in the end priori-

tizes the throw of being (i.e. what gives it self to be thought in the thrown
projection), Merleau-Ponty prioritizes the yet to be sensed sensible when he
writes “My attitude is never sufficient to make me truly see blue…. The sensible
gives back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it from the sensible in the
first place.” (PP 222) That Merleau-Ponty uses the notion “I” here, is not quite
adequate since as sensing comes to occur, there is no self-awareness but rather
an “anonymous generality.” Thus he later in the text rectifies his account by say-
ing “if I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have
to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.” (PP 223) Indeed, “each
time that I experience a sensation, I experience that it does not concern my
own being—the one for which I am responsible and upon which I decide—
but rather another self that has already sided with the world, that is already
open to certain of its aspects and synchronized with them.” (PP 224)
In The Visible and the Invisible the experience of this anonymous generality
from which I may find both myself and the sensed to emerge, will be called
“flesh,” “carnal being” (VI 136). The anonymous self “I” experience, which has
always already sided with the world, is “my” flesh emerging from the flesh of
the world. (I am placing “I” and “my” in quotation marks, since at the level of
the anonymous generality, there is not sense of “I” or “mineness.”) Merleau-
Ponty now conceives the temporalizing and spatializing of the body more
radically from being understood as flesh, as “a spatial-temporal pulp where the
individuals [and this includes what I will come to call my body] are formed by
differentiation” (VI 114). “Time and space extend beyond the visible,” he writes
“they are behind it, in depth, in hiding.” (VI 113) This depth, and what comes
to be experienced as the thickness or texture of the sensible, as flesh, is ex-
perienced by virtue not only of how one experiences ones body as being also
sensible. Both, the thickness of the sensible and the belonging to it, are expe-
rienced by virtue of how one finds oneself emerging from the sensible, by this
movement of dehiscence Merleau-Ponty describes as well as a “coiling up or
redoubling” (VI 114). Although in his descriptions he often uses language that
appears subject centered, as when he says that in emerging from the sensible
I experience the space and time of things as “shreds” of myself, he then turns
the way he phrases the experience around by saying (in this case) “I experience
[the solidity of things] from within insofar as I am among them and insofar as

15  David Morris addresses the affiliation between Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility
and Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis. (David Morris, “Reversibility and Ereignis: Being as
Kantian Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 52 (supplement
2008), Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy: 135–143.)

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they communicate through me as a sentient thing.” (VI 114) The time-space

of the sensible, its temporalizing and spatializing, can no longer be attributed
either to the sensible or to the sentient because any spatio-temporal individual
thing or body arises from and remains tied to the generality of flesh by virtue
of a dehiscence and an encroachment. (Merleau-Ponty later develops this rela-
tion along the famous model of the touching-touched hands that exemplifies
how my body is both, sentient and sensible; a model that in the end, should
be seen as “a variant” of flesh understood as “a prototype of Being” [VI 136]).
Thus, Merleau-Ponty can write: “There is no emplacement of space and time
that would not be a variant of the others, as they are of it….” (VI 114); and then
again: that our experiences and thoughts have about themselves a time and a
space that exists by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscu-
ity….” (VI 115); and again: “space and time are not the sum of local and temporal
individuals, but the presence and latency behind each of all the others, and
behind those of still others” (VI 117).16 Merleau-Ponty’s account of this “spatio-
temporal pulp” constituting flesh or carnal Being, necessarily remains vague; it
is both multiple and one. Flesh is both multiple and one.
If we now take again a moment to compare Heidegger’s later account of
space-time with Merleau-Ponty’s, we find both similarities and differences. In
both accounts space-time emerges from being, but whereas, in Contributions,
Heidegger speaks of time-space in the singular in order to mark the singular
happening of being, Merleau-Ponty’s account of spatializing and temporaliz-
ing has recourse to an implicitly multiple generality. And still, Merleau-Ponty,
too, retains a sense of unity in thinking Being which he writes with a capital
“B” (or “E” in the case of Être). His sense of multiplicity never fractures into a
multiplicity without unity, without encroachment or overlapping. Although I
sympathize with readings of Merleau-Ponty that emphasize diacritics (dehis-
cence, non-coincidence) in his thinking, this diacritics is never radical in a way
that fractures a sense of Being (with capital B).
I announced at the beginning of this paper that I suspect that a sense of
unity of being I find both in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty relates to how sense
(meaning) is operative in their thinking. Although it would require more space
to make this case properly, I believe that a sense of the unity of being is tied as
well to how negativity operates in their thinking. In order to begin to make this

16  In the second Nature lecture course, Merleau-Ponty speaks of how the unfurling of life is
trans-spatial and trans-temporal. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the
Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003) hereafter cited as N followed by
the page number.

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point I first need to consider how flesh implies sense and implicitly relates to
language.
Merleau-Ponty writes:

“The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance” but an element
“in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal in-
dividual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of
being wherever there is a fragment of being.” (139)

At an earlier point, he explains that “ideas are the texture of experience, its
style, first mute, then uttered…. They are elaborated within the thickness of
being.” (VI 119) As thinkers seek to speak of being, they search for what is to
be said in the first mute experience of Being given in flesh, in the invisible
depth constitutive of the flesh. At the same time, there is no direct saying of
Being since perceiving and perceived never simply coincide but open up from
a “negativity” or what Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls a “zero of being” in their
dehiscence. He writes: “He who thinks, perceives, etc. is this negativity as open-
ness, by the body, to the world.” (VI 246; French 299)
Merleau-Ponty seems again close to Heidegger who has also been search-
ing to articulate how language originates in being. Both experience language
as originating in silence, in a certain nothingness; but whereas for Heidegger
this nothingness transcends or is more originary than beings and the body, for
Merleau-Ponty the nothingness is a point of articulation that belongs to flesh
and thus to the body. It opens up in the fullness or thickness of being as a point
of articulation of body and world.17

4 The Unity of Being and the Plurality of Bodies in Heidegger and

Merleau-Ponty

Neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty think of being as a unity in terms of a

unique substance or a representable totality. Both find difference or dehis-
cence at the core of being. Both experience thinking and bodies as emerging
from being and as carrying sense; as being oriented by being, in being. I would

17  Consider the following quotation in this regard, in which Merleau-Ponty speaks of clear-
ings opening in flesh: “My flesh and that of the world therefore involve clear zones, clear-
ings, about which pivot their opaque zones, and the primary visibility, that of the quale
and of the things, does not come without a second visibility, that of the lines of force and
dimensions, the massive flesh without a rarefied flesh, the momentary body without a
glorified body.” (VI 148)

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contend that both also seek to think being as (to use a somewhat inadequate
expression) “incarnate” being. At first, the latter point might be more obvi-
ous in the case of Merleau-Ponty. Flesh means incarnate being. In the case of
Heidegger, this is less obvious.
One may contest that Heidegger thinks something like “incarnate being”
because he always thinks in terms of a difference between being and beings
in which being maintains a certain priority over beings and bodies. According
to what he writes in the Zollikon Seminars, the understanding of being tran-
scends the body. Meaning is not given with the temporalizing-spatializing as
which our bodies occur although it determines and directs our bodies. But if
we look at the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking, it becomes apparent that al-
though he always thinks the difference between being and beings, he sought to
think them together such that beings, experienced from being, harbor being.
The whole project of what many call his second major work, Contributions
to Philosophy was to prepare Da-sein as the spatio-temporal site that would
ground the truth of being in beings. And Heidegger’s later work on the four-
fold, in which he describes how things gather a world, a world that occurs in
the event of the mirror-play of earth and sky, mortals and divinities—this hap-
pening of the fourfold may be understood as an event of the “incarnation” of
being in things that gather the fourfold.
However, in my reading of Heidegger, this “incarnation” of being, the event
of the truth of beyng as an actual historical occurrence, is something that
Heidegger did not see happening around him because he experienced being
to occur in our Western epoch as withdrawal, as lack. Beings as he found them
to occur historically don’t harbor truth but remain abandoned by being. In the
appendix to the essay “The Thing,” from 1949, in which Heidegger thinks the
fourfold as being gathered by a jug, he writes: “the thing does not thing [gather];
the thing does not essentially occur as thing. […] Thing / World does not occur
as world; the event refuses itself.” (GA 79: 23) At the same time, attending to
the refusal of being is what allows Heidegger to think an originary opening of
being in its concealment. It is in relation to non-being that Heidegger finds lan-
guage to occur as the silent call of being that attunes the thinker such that the
thinker may speak of the event of being. The opening or clearing of non-being
does not arise in the fullness of being but addresses a radical finitude that ac-
cording to Heidegger needs to be sustained in order to nurture an authentic
relation to being. Non-being, which in Heidegger is also a source of language
and sense and relates to what he sometimes addresses as the beckoning of
the gods—this non-being operates like a concentric force by virtue of which
Heidegger would always resist a thinking of a plurality of being. He could never
think Da-sein, i.e. time-space, in plural.

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Does Merleau-Ponty allow us to think more the singularity of things and

bodies in their temporal-spatial happening? Does he open thinking to think-
ing a plurality of being? On the one hand, yes; for example when he writes that
“our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant [of Being], but
whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible” (VI 136). One could
also take into account his Nature lecture courses where Merleau-Ponty con-
siders both human and animal lives in relation to their different surrounding
worlds. At the same time, even if the starting point of his analyses are often
singular acts of perception, especially “first person” events of perception, these
so called “first person” events of sensing are experienced as emerging from a
generality of being to which I both find my body belonging; an anonymous
generality of being that transcends what I come to conceive as my body such
that my body in its temporalizing and spatializing encroaches upon other bod-
ies or things in their spatializing and temporalizing. The dehiscence that opens
my body into sensing and sensed becomes an opening to experience the flesh
of the world as an inter-corporeal world:

There is here no problem of the alter ego because it is not I who sees, not
he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vi-
sion in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the
flesh, being here and now, or radiating everywhere and forever, being an
individual, of being also a dimension and a universal.
VI 142

By virtue of the dehiscence in my body, out of this zero of being that divides
my body into sensing and sensed, I find myself in the midst of an intercorpo-
real being, both singular and plural, both individual and universal.

5 Conclusion: Non-sense at the Edge of Sense

There would be room, coming from Merleau-Ponty, to let go of the notion of

Being with a capital Being, to let go of the notion of flesh as an element out of
which I am united to other spatio-temporal events. But Merleau-Ponty does
not let go of it, which has to do, I believe, with how he interrogates being, with
how he seeks in the mute experience of flesh an expressive language, a sense
of sense that unites my body with a world, i.e. that allows for a communion
with the flesh of Being with which I at the same time will never by able to
coincide because of the dehiscence, the fission that articulates my being into
sensing-sensed. I don’t want to deny that there is meaning or sense beyond the

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human (to which Merleau-Ponty’s thinking provides an opening),18 but I find

a universalizing draw in meaning, in the search to make sense of the relational
happening of things and events.
Merleau-Ponty thinks difference or diversion always in relation to encroach-
ment, communion. It did not belong to his path of thinking to question a de-
hiscence without encroachment, i.e. the temporalizing-spatializing of bodies,
of things and events that escape the “circle of the touched and the touching”
(VI 142). One may think, for instance, of the expiring of life or discharges of
energy without return; one may think of things and events that “I” will never
encroach upon; one may think of senses of being in principle closed off to me
or other life forms, events that are not simply mute but that will never speak to
some or most beings, beings and events that never encroach upon each other.
The opening I nevertheless find in Merleau-Ponty to begin to think plurality
without unity has to do with his acknowledgment of an anonymous aspect of
what we come to call our bodies where they “side with the world,” where they
are visible things escaping a sense of “I” or “mine.” Charles Scott’s notion of
indifference has been helpful for me to reflect on aspects of bodies and being
that articulate their happening beyond sense and without depth. 19 There are
aspects of what we may come to call our “own” bodies that remain strange to
us, non-appropriable, not even “other.” Aspects in which our bodies are not
different from any other body but just as little simply like every other body, as
when we look at “our” visible hands and they appear to us as strange “things”
without depth, simply there without similarity or difference, indifferent to our
wishes and desires. It is not by accident that when Merleau-Ponty writes how
“my” body sides with the world, he highlights the body as perceived (VI, 248),
i.e. not the perceiving body in so far as I feel and move through it. It is in this
respect that he reflects on the body being “Nullpunkt [point zero] of all the
dimensions of the world” (VI 249). Similarly, in a working note from June 1960,
when Merleau-Ponty reflects on philosophy as interrogation, he speaks of “a
zero of being which is not nothingness.” (VI 260) It is here, “on the edge of
being” that thinking ought to install itself, “neither in the for Itself, nor in the
in Itself, at the joints, where multiple entries of the world cross.” (VI 260) What

18  A number of Merleau-Ponty scholars (for example David Morris and Ted Toadvine) have
worked on showing how sense happens in nature, highlighting how we are variants of
sense making in nature, radicalizing the move away from subjectivity in Merleau-Pontian
thinking.
19  See Charles Scott, Living with Indifference (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2007). I elaborated on the relation between indifference and Merleau-
Ponty’s notion of a “zero of being” and “negative body” in “Bodily Being and Indifference,”
Epoché 17.1 (2012): 111–122.

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if at this point, we struck the word “the world.” What if, when earlier Merleau-
Ponty speaks of “my” body as “point zero of all the dimension of the world” we
struck the words “my” and “all” and “of the world,” as well as the phrase “it is the
measurant (mesurant) of all” (VI 249)?
I am suggesting that we may find in the indifferent hollowness of what we
come to conceive as our perceived body, a strangely intimate exposure to the
indifferent happening of things, a sense of what escapes sense, of what we can-
not encroach upon, cannot touch. This sense of indifference (not differencing,
not diacritical encroachment) appears to me necessary in order to begin to
think plurality without unity.
Also coming from Heidegger, there would be room to let go of the unify-
ing force of the withdrawal of being and to begin to think Da-sein in terms
of temporal-spatial events without overarching unity. In some way, Heidegger
has always been a thinker of radical finitude, of a nothingness that is not the
nothingness of something.20 The possibility of impossibility has always been
constitutive of his thinking and yet he, too, looked for sense at the edge of non-
sense, indeed for the possibility of an event of being that would allow things
to be more fully.
Perhaps we philosophers are bound to look for sense at the edge of non-
sense, to attempt to unify “incompossibles.” And yet, precisely as we begin to
think globally, irreconcilable differences emerge, pluralities of human and
non-human lives exiled, excluded or destroyed precisely by attempts to “unify,”
to incorporate. It is thus that we find ourselves challenged to acknowledge and
think plurality without overarching principles or common grounds. Rethinking
the bodies we call ours as spatio-temporal events with and beyond Merleau-
Ponty and Heidegger, is one way to begin to think such plurality.

20  Amongst the most radical notions of nothingness I find in Heidegger is the notion of the
“nothingless” or “beingless” he introduces in Über den Anfang (On Inception). See Martin
Heidegger, Über den Anfang, ed. Paula Ludovika Coriando, vol. 70 of the Gesamtausgabe
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), 11–12, 121.

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