Psychology in the Field of Being

Merleau-Ponty, Ontology and Social

Constructionism

Ian Burkitt
University of Bradford

Abstract. In this paper I take up the various ontological positions

forwarded in social constructionism. While acknowledging its advances
over other approaches to psychology, I nevertheless argue that the various
ontological positions create confusion over the nature of human perception
and the sensible realization of a world that does not rest wholly in
language. Using the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I argue for a more
fundamental ontology that grasps the relation of the whole human being to
the world. Essential to this are the metaphors of ‘field of Being’, ‘di-
mensionality’ and ‘transformation’. The field of Being is realized in bodily
perception of the sensible world, which is then articulated and transformed
in linguistic expression. This has to be understood as a naturally embodied
topography as well as a culturally and historically articulated and trans-
formed space. I therefore present these metaphors as an extension of
constructionism, seeing psychological phenomena as existing more broadly
in a field of Being.
Key Words: articulation, dimensionality, field of Being, ontology, social
constructionism, transformation

In setting out alternative philosophical conceptualizations of psychopathol-

ogy, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (2002) has referred to an ontological
approach in psychology that can ‘speak of the way that the whole human
being is related to the world’ (p. 1). Here, I want to extend this project by
reviewing the contribution that the later works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
can make to the development of such an approach. In the works of his later
years, Merleau-Ponty set out a conception of the ‘field of Being’ constituted
by active embodied perception, which contains within it the latent meanings
articulated in language and that constitute reflective thinking or ‘mind’. This
defines an ontological perspective in psychology in the terms Dreyfus
spelled out above, for it seeks to understand the way that the whole human
being is related to the world through embodiment, perception, feeling, social
meaning and mind. It is therefore my view that such an approach can extend

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320 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

some of the insights of social constructionism, which largely seeks a social

ontology for psychology based in the discourse and rhetoric used by human
beings to understand their world. Merleau-Ponty’s work would in no way
deny the valuable contribution social constructionism has made to psycho-
logy; in fact it would be in full support of social constructionism as far as it
goes. But the limits of constructionism are set by its very ontological
position: they are the limits of the social world. To put it crudely, the
position that ‘reality’ is a social construction is open to the charge of
anthropomorphism, that all of what we know of the world is a creation of
humankind. In a more finely detailed analysis, the position in social
constructionism is more complex, as we shall see, but in many ways no less
problematic. However, my differences with social constructionism are in
terms of its ontology, for it is my view that the more detailed aspects of the
constructionist position stand.
What I think that Merleau-Ponty’s ideas can bring to this debate is an
understanding of humans as situated within a wider field of Being in which
meaning and language are a latent possibility. To understand how humans
can interrogate the world and read it like a text we first must know how the
world is organized, or authored, so that it is open to the extraction of
meaning, there to be read and understood like the construction of a
grammatical sentence. But a conscious self-reflective agent does not do this
‘authoring’ of the world, nor do the meanings extracted from it belong
entirely to the cultural world. Instead, human meaning is a ‘dimension’ of
the sensible world that adds to it a depth: an invisible lining to the visible. It
is not so much, then, a question of the social construction of reality, as much
as the social articulation or transformation of reality. This subtly shifts the
emphasis of constructionist psychology and sets it in a broader field where
new metaphors open up new possibilities for analysis and action: metaphors
of ‘dimensions’ and ‘transformation’, rather than of the ‘intra- and extra-
discursive’ and of ‘construction’ itself.
In order to explore this I want to begin with a finer grained analysis of the
issues as they emerge and submerge in some of the main approaches in
social constructionist psychology.

Social Constructionism and the Question of Ontology

Over the years, debate around the issues raised by social constructionism has
tended to focus specifically on questions about the status of the discursive
and non-discursive in constructionist accounts and on the status of the body.
While these debates are now growing tired, seemingly caught in an endless
game of academic ping-pong between realists and relativists, it is interesting
to see how constructionists themselves both raise and deal with such issues.
The central question both raised and effaced is the ontological status of
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 321

embodied being and of the world. Social constructionist psychologists set

the terms and parameters of these debates themselves as they were defining
the new field of psychology. The basic ontological position was set out early
by Harré (1983), who took the array of persons as the primary human reality
and the conversation in which those persons were engaged as ‘completing
the primary structure’ (pp. 64–65). Thus, in the early ontology of social
constructionism, the social conversation was taken as the primary human
reality. After this ‘linguistic turn’, constructionism in all its varieties tended
to some form of discursive analysis. For his part, though, Harré kept to a
realist theory of science when it came to physical reality. For him, there are
two ontological positions ‘that do not mesh’, which map onto ‘two in-
transigent, imperfectly knowable “realities” ’ (Harré, 1990, p. 352). One
reality is that ‘as embodied beings we are located in physical space-time and
have such powers as our material embodiment endows us with’; the second
reality is that ‘as psychological and social beings we are located in another
world’, the world of conversation (p. 352).
However, what Harré cannot tell us is anything about the axis of these two
realities and these two ontological positions, for they appear sealed off from
one another in experience and, in science, they are articulated by two
different grammars: one realist, the other constructionist. In realist mode,
Harré (1998) says ‘there are some conditions that stand outside any
discourse whatever that make discourse possible’ (pp. 18–19). Among the
conditions that stand ‘outside’ discourse he notes the natural expression of
feeling and perceptual point of view. However, the metaphor of conditions
lying ‘outside’ of discourse is not helpful, for it fails to consider how
perception may inform human meaningful activity in the world and vice
versa. Thus, despite Harré’s adoption of a Gibsonian position on perception,
it is never entirely clear how perceptive processes inform the cultural
processes of conversation (Harré, 1990, 1998). Even when Harré adapts von
Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt to designate the space constituted by the
physical embodiment of humans plus their position as persons in conversa-
tion, he never squares this with his underlying position of two ontological
approaches ‘that do not mesh’.
In his more recent work, Harré’s (1998) interest in perception is focused
on how ‘the complex network of “self” and “person” concepts is realized in
reports of what we can see, hear, touch and so on and what we can feel
within the envelope of our own bodies’ (p. 103). Thus the field of perception
is structured around these reports developed in the conversation. However,
the sense of personhood is related not only to conversation, for it also has to
do with manipulative practices mastered in childhood, in which children
learn not only to manipulate things but also to manage indexical expressions.
Hence, ‘one must have a sense of a field of things centred on one’s own
embodied self with which one is in a material relation’ (p. 104). This appears
to be similar to what I will be arguing here using the work of Merleau-Ponty.
322 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

However, what I hope to demonstrate is that we can develop a notion of

‘field being’ without splitting the world into two intransigent realties, each
with a different ontology. I also hope to show that perception is about more
than conversational reports that realize ‘self’ and ‘person’ concepts. Rather,
working from an ontology that views the way in which the whole human
being is related to the world, concepts of self and person are not necessary in
the first instance in any notion of perception, nor is the centrepiece of the
ontology the idea of persons in conversation.
Apart from Greenwood (1991), who advocates a realist methodology,
most social constructionists reject the realist theory of science and do not
follow Harré’s dual-ontology approach. In their different ways they do not
want to grant the world an existence independent of humans, as realists do,
or to elevate the text to a singular existence as somehow more real than any
other thing or artefact. Instead, the world itself is like text: ‘it all has to be
represented and interpreted’ (Edwards, Ashmore, & Potter, 1995, p. 32).
So, for example, John Shotter (1993, p. 2) argues for a social ontology
constituted by the flux of ongoing conversation in which we select from our
material surroundings what is meaningful or significant for us to act on
(1993: 2). It is as if we are commanded in our attention to certain features of
the world by the voice of another, even though this ‘other’ is nothing more
than the collective product of the social dialogue. So, out of the background
of the disorderly conversations (the self–other relationships) that form our
social life in its making, we also unknowingly construct between ourselves
the orderly forms of intra-linguistic relations that are person–world relations.
These constitute ‘a whole taken-for-granted vocabulary of things and
processes we talk of being the “basic” nature of both ourselves and the world
in which we live’ (p. 35). Thus, what seems to be given to us as
incontrovertible reality by some external agency outside the forms of our
talk is actually itself a product of conversation.
This position forms a critique of realism with its ideas of an intransitive
non-human reality existing independently of the social world (Shotter, 1993,
Ch. 4). For Shotter, because self–world relations are constituted in the self–
other relations of conversation, the issue of what is ‘real’ should never be
fixed ahead of time, for it is constantly open to remaking in public
conversation. Instead of a ‘things’ ontology in which the nature of things
that exist independent of humans can be foreclosed by scientific theory,
Shotter works for ‘an ontology of contested conversational events’ (p. 77).
Out of this conversation are fashioned the most important and contested
‘objects’, the notions of ‘self’, ‘world’ and ‘society’.
However, although Shotter admits that there is an inflow to the social
world from an already partially structured dynamic environment, ‘which
they [the social group] must interpret hermeneutically to grasp the nature of
the situation in which they are placed’ (p. 72), he never outlines how we
come to realize this partial structure that is not of our making, which calls
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 323

for interpretation. Although he writes about ‘knowing of the third kind’,

which is a sensuous form of knowing that embodied agents are aware of
before they can articulate it consciously and linguistically, this is mainly
applied to people’s sense of meaning as it emerges from the disordered
hurly-burly of everyday conversation. But what about our embodied percep-
tion of a partially structured world that is yet to be given a hermeneutic
interpretation? To understand something of this would require an ontology
that extended beyond the realms of the social world.
Perhaps this is why many constructionists are sceptical of offering any
ontological statements or positions at all. For Kenneth Gergen (1994), while
social constructionism makes no denial of the ‘world out there’, neither does
it make any affirmation.
Constructionism is ontologically mute. Whatever is, simply is. There is no
foundational description to be made about a world ‘out there’ as opposed to
‘in here’, about experience or material. Once we attempt to articulate ‘what
there is’, however, we enter the world of discourse. At that moment the
processes of construction commences, and this effort is inextricably woven
into processes of social interchange and into history and culture. (p. 72)1

While Gergen is absolutely right to call into question notions of a world

‘out there’ beyond discourse, as opposed to an ‘in here’ world of the purely
human or discursive, there are other interesting features of his position. Note
from the above statement that there is a faith that ‘whatever is, simply is’,
and that as soon as we begin to articulate ‘what there is’ we enter the world
of discourse. Here, I will not attempt to refute any of these positions in my
development of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, for such insights are central to
this project. However, what is of heightened interest is how we perceive
‘what there is’ or what ‘simply is’ and, from this position, begin the work of
articulation and re-articulation. For a psychology that takes an ontological
position, the articulation of what there is will be a central aspect of concern
rather than a point of little interest.
This is for the very reason that, for the world to call out for interpretation
or articulation, we must perceive that there is something there that is not
simply what it is, but rather is open to interpretation. As Edwards et al.
(1995) said, the world is like text: it all has to be represented and interpreted.
But a text, of course, can be interpreted because it is meaningful: it is
constructed according to grammatical rules through which it has to make
some sense and, thus, be available for various interpretations. For the world
to be text it too must have structures available to perception or else it would
not be open to representation or interpretation. If we reply that the world has
meaning only because it is bestowed upon it by social meaning (whether
conversation, discourse or text), then the argument becomes a tautology.
Edwards et al. answer this problem in two ways, which I will come to in a
324 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

moment. First, though, their overall position is similar to Gergen’s: that

there is no ‘out there’ that can form a foundational description of the world.
Once we start to speak or engage in rhetoric, we engage in the use of
language and, thus, are in the world of the discourse analyst. The outraged
realist who, in the face of constructionist arguments, thumps the table with
his fist and asks his opponents to deny that this is indeed a real table
unwittingly demonstrates this. That is because the table now functions as a
rhetorical statement in a debate rather than, say, as a table to be eaten off. So
what an object is, what it means or what it functions as depends on its place
in discourse and rhetoric instead of any inherent material properties. For
example, a physicist could claim that the table has no solidity at all because,
at the subatomic level, it is made of strings of particles that have no fixed or
solid appearance. However, the question can then be raised about how it is
that, as everyday actors, we believe ourselves to be in a world of solid and
stable things as well as in a world composed of contested discourses. This is
where the two answers to the problem of tautology come into play.
The first answer is that the idea of a taken-for-granted reality is also a
product of discourse and rhetoric. The table that serves as a solid object
under the fist of the realist in the above example does so only because that is
how it figures in his rhetoric, whereas in the discourse of the physicist it may
not figure as a solid object at all. Thus, what is real is what is described as
real in the discourse being employed. Yet this hardly diffuses the whiff of
tautology. The second answer goes like this:
Its [the table’s] solidity, then, is ineluctably a perceptual category: a matter
of what tables seem to be like to us, in the scale of human perception and
bodily action. Reality takes on an intrinsically human dimension, and the
most that can be claimed for it is an ‘experiential realism’ (Lakoff, 1987).
(Edwards et al., 1995, p. 29)

However, George Lakoff, quoted above, and Mark Johnson, both together
and separately, give a more convincing answer to the question of the
production of meaning and the presence of the world than do Edwards et al.
or any of the constructionists (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). This involves taking into account the scale of human
perception and bodily action in the production of meaning, rather than
summarily dismissing it, as Edwards et al. do above with their comment that
‘the most that can be claimed for it’ is experiential realism. Much more can
be said about it than that, because if Lakoff and Johnson are right and human
perception and bodily action provide for the very possibility of meaning,
then this dimension is at the basis of everything that any of us can
meaningfully say. For Lakoff (1987), experientialists see reason as made
possible by the body: it grows out of the nature of the organism and all that
contributes to its individual and collective experience. Because of our
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 325

embodiment in the world, neither the world nor meaning is external to us:
which is to say that meaning is not created from the abstract manipulation of
symbols, then matched against an equally external world to judge in some
objective way the precise fit between the meaningful categories and ob-
jective things. Meaning is derived not from its correlation with things but
from the embodied experience of humans in the world. According to Lakoff,
all human thought has as one of its elements ‘ecological structure’ (p. xiv),
by which I take him to mean that it contains within its articulation in
discourse some aspect of the embodied sense of being-in-the-world. Thus,
conceptual structure takes its form, in part, from pre-conceptual embodied
structure. For Lakoff, the latter has two elements to it: first, a basic level
structure, composed of gestalt perception, body movement and rich mental
imagery; second, a kinaesthetic image-schematic structure, which gives rise
to an embodied sense of, for example, balance in one’s body movements.
From this there are two ways in which conceptual structure is formed from
basic-level and image-schematic structure: first, by metaphorical projection
and, second, by projection from basic-level categories to superordinate and
subordinate categories (pp. 267–268). So, for example, a kinaesthetic
embodied sense of balance can be metaphorically projected to give meaning
to, say, the idea of balance in conceptual notions of justice (Johnson, 1987).
We know what it means to balance and weigh evidence and arguments in a
legal case, because we kinaesthetically know what it feels like in our own
bodies to be balanced in space and to weigh different objects by holding and
manipulating them. In this way, human understanding of the world can exist
at many different levels or in different senses, and we are remarkably adept
at switching between these different senses.
To return to the example of the table given by Edwards et al., the position
above can explain why people accept intellectually that physicists have
demonstrated how, at the subatomic level, a table has no real solid structure,
yet in their everyday, practical, embodied activities they are still happy to
rest papers, or their lunch, on the table, or thump it in a rhetorical gesture.
They still remain confident that the table can support all these activities.
Also, the very concepts of solidity and fluidity used in the different
conceptions of the table are themselves drawn from a bodily sense of being-
in-the-world, of knowing what stable and fluid forms—or solid surfaces and
particles—actually feel like. These are metaphors we regularly employ in
both scientific and everyday discourse.
However, while the work of Lakoff and Johnson allows us some way out
of the social constructionist dilemmas, their experiential realism does not
extend to a fully formed ontological position for psychology. It shows the
different levels of meaning and understanding generated by the fact that we
are embodied minds, yet it does not go far enough in exploring the more
primal ties of humans and world.
326 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

Towards an Ontological Psychology

For Hubert Dreyfus, an ontological basis for psychology can be found in the
works of both Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As I have
already indicated, for Dreyfus the ontological view is concerned with the
way that the whole human being is related to the world.
Indeed, even ‘relation’ is misleading, since it suggests the coming together
of two separate entities—human being and world—so these recent philoso-
phers are finally driven to replace the epistemological relation of subject
and object with a way of being they call ‘being-in-the-world’. (Dreyfus,
2002, p. 1)
While I believe this to be entirely correct, nevertheless I also feel it is true to
say that Merleau-Ponty went much further than this in his later works. As I
will outline, his ontology became rooted less in a sense of ‘being-in-the-
world’ and more in the context of a ‘field of Being’. We will come to this in
the next section. For now, Dreyfus identifies the ontological approach as one
in which it is not denied that human beings have mental states by which their
minds are directed to objects, but that these mental states presuppose a
context in which objects show up and make sense. For Heidegger, this
context in which objects show up is provided by social practices. As Dreyfus
says:
The shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background
understanding of what counts as objects, what counts as human beings and
ultimately what counts as real, on the basis of which we can direct our
minds towards things and people. Heidegger calls this background under-
standing of what it means to be, which is embodied in the tools and
institutions of a society and in each person growing up in that society but
not represented in his/her mind, the understanding of Being. According to
Heidegger it is this understanding of Being which creates what he calls a
clearing (Lichtung) in which entities can show up for us. The clearing is
neither on the side of the subject nor the object—it is not a belief system
nor a set of facts—rather it contains both and makes their relation possible.
(pp. 1–2)
Dreyfus goes on to say that Merleau-Ponty compares this clearing to the
illumination in a room which makes directedness towards objects possible
but is not itself an object towards which the eye can be directed. For
Merleau-Ponty, the clearing, or, as he calls it, ‘the field’, correlates not only
with social practices but also with the body skills humans develop and, thus,
‘with the stance we take towards people and things’ (Dreyfus, 2002, p. 2).
Each person has his or her own embodied understanding of what is real,
which is not private but a variation on the shared public world.
Thus, the ontological view is concerned less with ways of representing the
world in cognition and is focused more on embodied social practices that
constitute a clearing, or field, in which certain objects are foregrounded and
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 327

count as meaningful. This is done not only in conversation, as the con-

structionists would have it, but in all forms of social practice, both practical
and expressive, which transform the world. Dreyfus points to Heidegger’s
example of the construction of the Greek temple, which opens up and
organizes a multidimensional world of social relations, practices and critical
issues that then become the locus of conflicts of interpretation (p. 4). The
temple opens up a new cultural world, or at least a new dimension of it.
Thus, institutional and social spaces transform the field of existence and also
create ‘spaces for knowledge’ (Foucault, 1972), for transformed discourses
on what it is to be human. However, for Merleau-Ponty, the field of Being is
not just composed of social practices, objects and discourses; it is also a
perceptual field in which history emerges from and is always embedded in
the sensible world.

The Field of Being

What I want to explore here are the central ideas from Merleau-Ponty’s later
works, which I think have far-reaching implications for an ontological
approach to psychology, particularly the metaphors of ‘field of Being’,
‘dimensionality’ and ‘structuration’. For Merleau-Ponty, in its primordial
sense the field of Being is not centred on humans: it includes us, but the
human world is only a dimension or a moment of the field of Being, not its
origin. This insight reconnects us to our primal ties with the world, which
forms a brute Being or wild ontology (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). It is due to this
primal ontology that it is possible for humans to have a brute or wild
perception of the world and also to be perceived. So, although this wild
perception opens up a field of vision—a topography of lines, lighting,
colours, reliefs and masses—it does so only because the perceiving body
. . . is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover
that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it,
encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world . . . This means a sort
of reflectedness, it thereby constitutes itself in itself—In a parallel way: it
touches itself, sees itself. And consequently it is capable of touching or
seeing something, that is, of being open to the things in which it reads its
own modifications. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 248–249)
Thus, the field of Being is not a given, an ‘in itself’, that we realize as an
opposition. We can only perceive because we ourselves are of the sensible:
when we touch something or see something we are not only aware that
something is there, we also become present as something that can be touched
or seen. However, humans are sensible and visible in a special way, for we
touch and see the world not as a spectator constructing a picture or a
representation; instead, the sensible and the visible constitute a dimension-
ality that we are an element of, something that we are located in. The field of
328 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

Being is present to us because as bodies we can move through all the

dimensions of the visible and touch it and we can also be seen and touched
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 124).
The visual, spatial world I perceive, then, is not a given, something
outside me, for I am part of it and my perception of it is constituted as my
body moves through it, seeing, touching and hearing. In this way, we author
space with our bodies. This is how the world can be read like a text: it is not
that the world is given or is simply there, a chaos or partial structure to be
ordered only through social meaning; it is ‘authored’ by my sensible,
moving body within its field. Thus, because I am a seeing and visible
moving body, ‘I do not look at a chaos, but at things—so that finally one
cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command’ (Merleau-
Ponty, 1968, p. 133). It is not that the sensible world has a meaningful
content, but that it is open to meaning; it invites interpretation just as the
visible invites the look. ‘With the first vision, the first contact, the first
pleasure, there is initiation, that is, not the positing of a content, but the
opening of a dimension’ which is ‘the invisible of this world’ (p. 151). Thus,
because what we perceive does not have a content, a given meaning, but
invites interpretation, an invisible world opens up as another dimension of
the visible. We sense the visible world has an invisible lining or meaning
calling for articulation.
This is important in terms of the highly academic realist versus relativist
debate we considered earlier, for Merleau-Ponty side-steps the entire terms
of that debate. It is not the case that meaning is possible only through
language, as the constructionists would have it, or that the world has
invisible structural form independent of humans and language, as in the
generative mechanisms of the realists. Rather, a meaningful structure of the
world emerges in sensible perception, through what Johnson and Lakoff
would call the image-schematic structures, which allow for the possibility of
meaning. This is what Merleau-Ponty (1968) is getting at when he says that
thought appears directly in the infrastructure of vision (p. 145), or that vision
and thought are structured like a language (p. 126). He means that the very
possibility of meaning that is linguistically articulated by social groups must
already be present in the more archaic image-schematic structures of
corporeal perception. Here, ‘the flesh (of the world or my own) is not
contingency, chaos, but a texture’ in which is latent the forms of meaning
and the possibility of language (p. 146). Once these latent, possible
meanings become articulated in language, fully completing the human
potential for reflective thought, then the whole nature of the way we
understand the world becomes restructured. We are able to transcend the
sensible structures that gave birth to meaning.
Yet the very possibility of this transcendence is also due to the human
body, which is ‘a very remarkable variant’ of the sensible, for it is a
‘sensible sentient’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 136). The human body is the
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 329

sensible become reflexive, the flesh folding back on itself: the visible that
sees and sees itself, the tangible that touches and can touch itself, and the
audible that can hear and hear itself. Merleau-Ponty goes on to stress that
this chiasm or reversibility of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the
touched, is always imminent and never fully realized. ‘My left hand is
always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I
never reach coincidence’ (pp. 147–148). Instead, one of two things occurs:
my right hand becomes the touched, at which point its touching of the world
is interrupted; or it remains touching the world but is not touched by the left
hand. This reflexivity is the root of subjectivity and conscious reflection on
existence, for in this chiasm a hollow appears in the midst of the sensible for
subjectivity to appear. It is not so much a separation of subject and object;
more a question of reversibility between the seer and the visible, for both
remain aspects of the visible. This also illustrates how the whole of Being is
composed of time, of the alternating moments between subject and object
positions and, as we shall see, in the structuration between mute being and
its articulation in speech.
Yet there is no rigid separation between subject and object, or subject and
subject, because ‘between my body looked at and my body looking, my
body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment,
so we must say that the things pass into us as well as we pass into the things’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 123). In the field of Being, things are not what they
are in themselves but encroach upon one another, animating the whole field
with their being. This is how Merleau-Ponty (1962, Part 1, Ch. 5) takes up
Freud’s idea of sexuality, not as a basic instinct that drives human action,
but as an aspect of our being that infuses all our perceptions. Objects can be
invested with sexual energy in perception so that not only other people but
also things can become objects of sexual attention, as in phallic objects or
symbols. In addition, non-human things can colour the world with their
being. For example, when I am sitting by water, I do not sense the water as
existing simply in the pool.
If I raise my eyes towards the screen of cypresses where the web of
reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too,
or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence. (Merleau-
Ponty, 1968, p. xlviii)

The water also sends something of its being into me, sitting by the pool,
so that I perceive its presence in the trees and in me: I can feel its presence,
say, as a calming element. This is what it means to be a field being: that
things do not exist ‘in themselves’, but transcend their immediate location in
time and space to exist across the field, investing their being in other things.
What emerges from the chiasm or reversibility of the flesh that opens in
human perception is a field of dimensions and depth that we are drawn into
330 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

and which presents us with the sense of an invisible, meaningful lining to the
world that calls for articulation.
Thus, a primary element of human being is ‘perceptual faith’ in the field,
which is not a certainty or knowledge about the world, but more of a naı̈ve
belief that ‘there is a world, there is something . . . there is cohesion, there is
meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 88). What is primary is
. . . a field of appearances, each of which, taken separately, will perhaps
subsequently break up or be crossed out . . . but of which I only know that
it will be replaced by another which will be the truth of the first, because
there is a world. (p. 88)
What is meant here is that perception is a gestalt, it is perception of a whole
world, a field, so that if individual perceptions fail, we believe that at the
next moment they will be replaced by truer perception. Thus, driving down
the motorway when tired we may feel that we see a building or structure
blocking the road, only to realize a second later, and as we get nearer the
object, that it is a bridge. So, although individual perceptions such as this
may fail, we never lose the overall faith that our perception will clarify and
is good enough to orient us in the field.
Here, Merleau-Ponty’s argument is clearly directed against the Cartesian
position of radical doubt, which states that because our senses can be fooled
and because we can call everything into doubt intellectually, then the only
thing we can be certain of is the ‘I think’. Instead, for Merleau-Ponty, this
position is reversed. The perceptual faith is strong in practice but weak in
thesis. We act perfectly well in the world when guided by perceptual faith,
but we come to question and doubt it in reflective thought. This is why
perception does not reveal to us a chaos but an order of things, as though the
look ‘were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it
knew them before knowing them’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 133). The fact of
the perceptual faith being strong in practice but weak in thesis is also
demonstrated in the example of the realist, the relativist and the table. When
the realist hits the table he is really saying, ‘Look I believe this table is solid
before I speak of it as such. I have absolute faith that my fist will hit the
solid surface and not disappear into it despite what you may say about it.’
However, faith can easily be shown as naı̈ve in an academic debate, even
though in practice the perceptual faith is something we all know. Once
translated into a thesis, the case for perceptual faith becomes weak because
it is one rhetorical position among others and—as relativists are quick to
do—can be shown to be such.
But both realists and relativists miss the point somewhat. It is not that
there is simply ‘something there’ either to be endlessly asserted or dis-
missed. Perceptual faith is more than simple and naı̈ve certainty; it leads to
curiosity and questioning in reflective thought: ‘what is there?’ and even
‘what is the there is?’ Perceptual faith is not just the assertion of belief; it is
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 331

the perpetual beginning of the desire to interrogate and articulate the world,
to give the sensible expression. Gergen is right to say that as soon as we
attempt to articulate what there is we enter the world of discourse, history and
culture, but it is a shame that he feels this renders constructionism onto-
logically mute. This is unfortunate because it is due to our primal bodily tie to
the sensible (the wild ontology) that we are constantly fuelled by the desire to
speak, to articulate what there is. The sensible world is mute and silent, so that
language arises out of the interaction of human groups in order to articulate
this silent sense that something is there. But what is there? This is the question
constantly sought after in language but which can never be fully answered in
language, because it desires an irreducibly complex and mute perceptual
experience of a field of Being. The relationship between language and the
sensible, then, is a constant dialectic with no ending because language can
never capture the mute world of the sensible. We are then left with the
feeling that there is something left to be said; that something of the world
has escaped our attempts at articulation and that there is a need to speak or
write to continue the dialogue. Here we find the crux of the structuration
between perception and articulation, the sensible structure and the structure
of language. In eradicating the sensible and perceptual element of this
dialectic, constructionists present to us only the constant interchange of
language without the silent source of the dialogue; the attempt to articulate
the perceptual faith, the desire to say what there is.
So Merleau-Ponty is showing not only that the human field is composed
of social practices, objects and discourses, but that these exist within a wild
logos in which objects are first illuminated by a ‘natural light’ shone by the
bodily perceptions of a field being. However, this does not make these ideas
asocial. Because humans are always part of the sensible, the objects that are
illuminated for us are not just an array of non-human things, but other
people. Furthermore, we can enter the world of other human beings precisely
because we are all part of the sensible world; a belonging that makes me
believe that what another is seeing is but one more perspective on what I
see—it is a variant of a common world rather than constituting another
private world. Thus, intersubjectivity is possible only because there is
established an intercorporeality within the sensible. Just as there is the
projection of the being of one thing into all the other things in the field, so
Merleau-Ponty (1968) says
. . . that a child perceives before he thinks, that he begins by putting his
dreams in the things, his thoughts in the others, forming with them, as it
were, one block of common life wherein the perspectives of each are not
yet distinguished. (pp. 11–12)
Thus:
It is in the world that we communicate, through what, in our life, is
articulate. It is from this lawn before me that I think I catch sight of the
332 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

impact of the green on the vision of another, it is through the music that I
enter into his musical emotion, it is the thing itself that opens unto me the
access to the private world of another. (p. 11)
Intercorporeality is also another reason why we hold to the perceptual
faith, the belief that we have a world. The perceptual faith is strong in
practice especially where my embodied perception ‘does not notably differ
from that of the others’ (p. 146). This is illustrated by Asch’s experiments
(1951), where naı̈ve participants began to doubt their ordinary everyday
perceptions when confederates of the experimenter challenged these. In
addition to this, intercorporeality is also important with the folding of the
flesh in vision. I am aware of myself as visible because I can be seen in the
eyes of another in the same way that I see the others. As soon as we see
other seers, we no longer have a vague and phantom sense of our own
presence, for ‘through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 143). That we only form in any full sense as a
distinct self through the eyes of another creates in each of us a desire to
constantly radiate in the sight of others. The desire to be seen and desired by
another becomes a fundamental aspect of our relations with others, because
only then are we fully present to ourselves. However, such processes of the
development of self through intersubjectivity are a secondary phenomenon
and rest on the primary ontology of intercorporeality, an experience in which
there is no self. Our worlds are intertwined because we are part of the same
world, the primary experience of which is anonymous. As Merleau-Ponty
says, there is no problem of the alter ego in primal experience for it is not I
who sees nor she who sees, ‘because an anonymous visibility inhabits us
both, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to
the flesh’ (p. 142).
Thus, perception cannot be fully understood in the way that Harré
suggested, based in reports of what one sees and hears in which are realized
the linguistic concepts of ‘self’ and ‘person’. This is because, at root,
perception is non-personal and non-linguistic, involving our intercorporeal
ties to others and to the world. However, this also means that in psychology
we cannot set out two ontological positions reflecting two realities that do
not mesh: one practical, the other expressive; one of physical reality, the
other social. Sociality is rooted in our sensible being, in our primordial ties
to the world and to others. But this also poses a problem for constructionists
like Shotter who admit only of a social ontology, for in this the self–other
relation is primary and the self–world relation secondary to it. In a fully
ontological approach the question of how we are related to each other and to
the world is part of the same problem, which is how we are fully installed in
and come to socially articulate the visible and sensible field.
Instead, by adopting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, we can begin to under-
stand the cultural and historical world in a way that does not separate us
from the sensible. Through this ontology, conversation or discourse does not
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 333

form a separate reality, for it is the means of articulating a sensible world

that is authored in human perception and is present from our first awareness,
but is not only a social or linguistic construction. It is, then, perhaps more
accurate to say that we transform the world in language, culture and history
rather than constructing it. That is because even though we can be fully in
agreement with constructionism in terms of the importance of language, in
that all we can say about the world is bound to be encapsulated in our
language, this does not mean that we ever entirely transcend the sensible
world. It is because of the silent perception of the sensible that we begin our
questioning of the world, expressing the desire to know ‘what there is’; and
it is the sensible that we articulate when we speak. So, although the highly
academic arguments of relativists can always show the perceptual faith to be
weak in thesis, we are bound to speak of ‘what there is’, even though our
linguistic statements can never reach a world ‘outside’ themselves. But that
is because there is no world ‘outside’ language, for the sensible is another
dimension of the world we speak of, just as language is another dimension
of the sensible, perceptible world. As Merleau-Ponty shows, there can be no
sense of an invisible meaningful dimension of the world, fully articulated in
language, without the primary appearance of a visual field.
Merleau-Ponty (1968, p. 84), then, comes to understand the sensible
world and the historical world as ‘intermundane spaces’ that exist in our
relation to the world and to each other. The structuration of the historical and
the sensible occurs as moments in time, for ‘they are the instances to which
we address ourselves as soon as we live, the registers in which is inscribed
what we see, what we do, to become there thing, world, history’ (p. 84). This
means that ‘our life has, in the astronomical sense of the word, an
atmosphere: it is constantly enshrouded by those mists we call the sensible
world or history, the one of the corporeal life and the one of the human life’
(p. 84). Although Merleau-Ponty speaks of language as a system in itself
(1964b, Part 2, Ch. 1) or a world in itself, it is still ‘a world and a being to
the second power, since it does not speak in a vacuum, since it speaks of
being and of the world and therefore redoubles their enigma instead of
dissipating it’ (1968, p. 96). Here, in the structuration between the perceived
world and language, the sensible and the historical, is a perpetual structura-
tion, a dialectical relation without end, for language can never capture and
encapsulate the silent world of perception. Rather, it redoubles its enigma
rather than dissipating it, which is the problem that all academics—whether
realists or relativists—face in their work.
Within the field of Being, then, the field first appears to us as a perceptible
space in which we move and to which we belong; it is a topography that
guides our vision and movement so that, with our moving, seeing bodies,
there is a natural light that illuminates the things and the others in the field.
The field is an intercorporeal space before it becomes an intersubjective one,
language emerging from the desire of the human group to say what there is
334 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

in the world. With this effort another dimension of the field is created, the
field of language, so that the topography we perceive is now overrun with
language such that it becomes ‘a variant of speech before our eyes’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 155). Here, the importance of the metaphor of
dimensionality is fully realized, for when we see the field of vision we are
moving through, we not only see the topological space and the array of
things in it constituted by our bodies, we also see the landscape around us in
a deeper, invisible dimension of words and word meanings, which is
constituted by our lives together as interdependent individuals within the
field of Being. Looking out of my window now, I see houses, trees, fields, a
school and a deep orange sunset. I don’t think I can see anything I can’t name,
so the things I see are a variant of speech before my eyes. Yet they are not
only that: objects within the field are also illuminated by my bodily presence
and movement among them and in contact with them. In overlapping
dimensions they are illuminated by a natural and a cultural light. Within this
world of dimensions, we are never located in just one dimension. Even the
most abstract systems of signification, such as physics and mathematics, ‘aim
at a universe of brute being and coexistence, toward which we were already
thrown when we spoke and thought’, and which exists on the horizon of the
field of language, ‘latent or dissimulated’ (p. 101). Language cannot take
possession of life and reserve it for itself, for ‘what would there be to say if
there existed nothing but things said?’ (p. 126).
Thus, as a structuration or dimension of the sensible, language does not
completely encapsulate human experience, but rather articulates it. If we
take language to be as natural to human life as all the aspects of perception
itself, then there is a folding over of the visible and the lived experience
upon language, and of language upon the visible and the lived experience.
As we have already said, vision is structured like a language in that it is open
to articulation in words and—as painting, photography and cinema prove in
their different ways—meanings can be communicated visually. It can then
be said of language that ‘it brings to the surface all the deep-rooted relations
of the lived experience wherein it takes form, and which is the language of
life and of action’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 126). Language is the social
medium that brings to full expression the mute intercorporeal perception of
the sensible, and, through this mediation, the two are in a constant structura-
tion within the human experience of the lived world. Between them there is
a constant reversibility and interchange.
In the ontology of Merleau-Ponty, then, the life world of humans is a field
composed of a topography that comes into relief through the natural light
thrown on it by my body, as sensible-sentient, moving through it and
perceiving it in all its depths and dimensions. But this field is also composed
of its articulation in language and of all the other transformations affected on
it in culture and history. As Gary Brent Madison (1981) has put it, for
Merleau-Ponty:
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 335

[w]hat characterizes history is that it represents and is the accumulation of

the transformations man effects on his existential situation: it is like the
sedimentation and gathering together of man’s attempts to understand
himself in his carnal relation to the world and others and to transform into
an open and available meaning the indigenous meaning of his natural
existence. (p. 258)

This makes the field into a thinkable space, opening it up for the possibility
of cognition. As Merleau-Ponty (1968) says, humans cannot but think
‘because a field has been opened in which something or the absence of
something is always inscribed’ (p. 221). This inscription is made through
perception of a luminous field in which its fragments adhere to one another
‘with a cohesion without concept’ (p. 152). However, this perception of a
mute but visible and invisible world is articulated by the social group in
language, creating yet another dimension to the field, a dimension of
signification and meaning that deepens, yet further complexifies, our primal
tie to the sensible. Through the dimension of signification the human field
opens more deeply as one infused with human meaning, open to competing
articulations and concepts. Yet as sensible dimensionality the field also
remains one that is not of human meaning or making, an enigma, a mystery,
a puzzle. On the horizon of the world of human meaning, constantly drawing
us on in our questioning and speaking, is the brute world we are always
aiming at but never capture—the unsolved problems, the unexplained, the
unsaid. We are constantly aware that in our systems of signification, our
constructions, we speak of a world not of our own making and one that we
do not (will never) fully know. Thus,
. . . what is in question is to know how, out of man’s presence to the world,
a truth or a meaning is born which is, by this very fact, inseparable from
man and his presence to the world, but which for all that does not have a
merely ‘anthropological’ significance. (Madison, 1981, p. 237)

The truths we formulate, then, can in some sense be seen as our

‘constructions’, yet not completely so; because they speak of a world not of
our making, but one that we transform in articulation, truths do not have a
purely anthropological significance.
However, in only considering the light thrown upon things in the field by
the body and, in the socio-historical dimension, by language, Merleau-Ponty
is ignoring an important aspect of the social field highlighted by
Heidegger—the human production of tools and objects (of artefacts).
Dreyfus was pointing to this in his comments on Heidegger’s work, that
through social practice humans create the contexts in which objects show up
as significant. The understanding of what it means to be is articulated not
only in language but also in the tools and institutions of a society. Heidegger
(1962) then makes his famous distinction between things that are ‘ready-to-
336 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

hand’ and ‘available-to-hand’. The former are things that are ready for our
use and so have their social meanings engraved in them. Essential here is
equipment or tools, like the hammer, that are ready for a particular use for
those brought up within the culture where the equipment is manufactured
and deployed. Things available-to-hand are there for inspection by the
theoretical and contemplative attitude. It is only with this differentiation of
things that we begin to distinguish between the natural and the artificial, the
things we find and the things we make within human cultures (Heidegger,
1960/1993).
But this only supports rather than weakens my general conclusion here:
that we need to learn from phenomenology that our psychological space, the
way the world becomes meaningful and thinkable for us, is not the ‘inner’
space of the mind. While constructionists would, of course, agree with this,
they would see the aspects of human being that have traditionally interested
psychologists as constructed within a social ontology, one whose primary
subject matter is language. I am suggesting here, using the works of
Merleau-Ponty, that we can extend and change constructionist metaphors to
speak of a field of Being. This would involve adopting an ontological
position the principle of which is ‘being in indivision’ (Merleau-Ponty,
1968, p. 208), the way in which the whole human being is related to the
world before the division of subject and object, before rational, conscious
self-identity, and before language. This ontology involves the metaphor of
the field of Being, constituted for humans by the natural light thrown on it
by our bodies and, in the cultural-historical world, by language and the
production of artefacts which makes the field a meaningful, cognizable
space. This is not a field completely constructed by agents in the full
possession of language, for the socio-historical world is another dimension
of the sensible. It is a field in which the topography is overrun by words and
invisible meanings, but still remains a visible world of objects—socially
created artefacts and ‘natural’ objects—on which is thrown the light from
distinct but interwoven dimensions: the wild and the cultural.

Note

1. While Gergen suggests constructionism is ontologically mute, it could be argued

that his version of constructionism creates its own, silent or implicit ontology.
That is, in his relational constructionism, the text is not seen as primary in the
analysis. Instead it is relationships that form the context in which language is
used and gains its meaning because words are ‘passive and empty’ until they are
‘employed by persons in relationship’ (Gergen, 1994, pp. 46–47). This could be
said to be something of an ontological statement, in which relationships—and,
thus, the social—are the primary context that gives sense and meaning to our
descriptions of the world.
BURKITT: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF BEING 337

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Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the staff and students in the

Department of Social Psychology at the Universitat Autónoma, Barcelona,
where I spent a semester as a visiting professor in 2001. In particular I
would like to thank my friends and colleagues Joan Pujol, who made my
sabbatical possible, and Bruce Bolam. Both made useful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper, as did the students on the doctoral programme
when the paper was presented at a seminar. In addition I would like to
338 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 13(3)

thank two anonymous readers who also made useful comments on the first
draft.

Ian Burkitt is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Psychology at the

University of Bradford. His main research interests are in social and social
psychological theory, the social construction of the self, and the relation
between culture and forms of human embodiment. He is the author of
Social Selves: Theories of the Social Formation of Personality (Sage, 1991)
and Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity (Sage, 1999).
Address: Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of
Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK. [email: i.burkitt@bradford.ac.uk]