When one is not being Philosophical; Part 4 of "The Visible and the Invisible"

In the last post the rigor in which Merleau-Ponty and us addressed the coming-to-the-scene of the other was done from a Phenomenological instinct of faithfulness to the present; specifically to the present that is always ahead of itself and certainly always inside of myself. The idea of "the myth of empathy" was not a conclusion drawn from some "existential crisis" or a negation of a teleological presupposition, but working phenomenology which can almost be seen as a hyper-empiricism, or if you would like, idealist realism. Empirical solipsism is an interesting phrase we could use to describe this but Phenomenology would be the discipline that envelopes what we and Merleau-Ponty were after in distinguishing ourselves absolutely from the other. That the "structural" consequences of such a thinking are important goes without saying, but as was stated in the last post, we are always limiting ourselves to phenomenologists; beings on the brink of just making sense. The rigor of phenomenology is all pervading. As Merleau-Ponty continues on in the text he comes up against the dialectic as first addressed by Hegel, but seen as being more appropriate in it's faithfulness to Sartre's negative dialectic. Just as Sartre speaks of a someone being in "bad faith", Merleau-Ponty speaks of someone practicing a "bad dialectic". This is a topic I want to address most closely in a later post after the reading of the whole text is finished. For now though, when one is left to oneself and one understands how rigorously they are applied to themselves, there isn't really room for an intersubjectivity that would like to operate under "common ground". This synthesis model though is something that is always practiced by everyone, philosophical or not, when on the scene with the other. And just as obvious as this synthesis model is, there is an antithesis model that is just as obvious, meaning the antithesis of a synthesis in a dialectical model. If one stays in this negation of positivity, essentially, doubt, this for Merleau-Ponty is bad philosophy. It's one not being philosophical when finding a home in a negation, existentially speaking, in being negative. One is essentially not being philosophical when the dialectic could ever come to an end in one negation. There is a style to coming to an end in one negation, existentially speaking, there is a style in doubt. Merleau-Ponty addresses this "bad faith" of the dialectician, or Phenomenologist, or Philosopher when addressing the practice of the dialectic, which for sum or difference, is philosophy (Philosophy is an infinite negation never possible of being a style because of never having the chance to settle anywhere for too prolonged a period of time). Merleau-Ponty states "If, in it's name, we make speculative doubt the equivalent of a condemnation, it is because, as passive beings, we feel ourselves caught up in a mass of Being that escapes us, and we oppose to this adversity the desire for an absolute evidence, delivered from all facticity. Thus the methodic doubt, that which is carried out within the voluntary zone of ourselves, refers to Being, since is resists a factual evidence, represses an involuntary truth which it acknowledges to be already there and which inspires the very project of seeking an evidence that would be absolute". So far, the negative dialetic is in "good faith". So far, we are doubting in order to grasp being because we are overwhelmed by what being could be, and so seek out an absolute evidence that could possibly confirm this absolute by not referencing factual evidence, but by negating factual evidence, and when in the process of this negation, they are then in being; a place where something is not this or that, our basic fundamental state of nothingness that eventually comes into being. When I positively affirm something I have a grasp of it. When I negate the existence of something I have nothing left afterwords. This nothing left afterwords is a "spot of being", "where" being is when it's not making predicative statements, where being is before it's being. It's in "nothing-spots". It's still in something for sure, but this something is passive. A passive something and nothingness are analogical here. But, one can be thrown back into existence and end in this one negation of something, where one is being a bad dialectician, and bad philosopher. "If it remains a doubt, it can do so only by reviving the equivocations of skepticism, by omitting to mention the borrowings it makes from Being, or by evoking a falsity of Being itself, a Great Deceiver, a Being that actively conceals itself and pushes before itself the screen of our thought and of its evidences, as if this elusive being were nothing". The reason why one would want to revive skepticism (not knowing the equivocations of it) is a because of a settled style. If one doesn't admit that one is borrowing all the basic evidence of Being when making their statements of skepticism, one could say that they are home in their style, or simply being bad philosophers, or bad thinkers. Essentially, being home in a style is being a bad thinker. As we should know, when I say "this doesn't exist", I am borrowing the basic facts of being to postulate a "skeptical" statement. I am borrowing being to state nothingness and we see how being and nothingness permeate each other here. What am I borrowing? I am borrowing a "This" from being, I am borrowing an "existence" from being, and I'm borrowing an action from being in the negative verb "doesn't". Nothingness truly is Being. Merleau-Ponty takes this bad faith a step further when one could possibly evoke a Great Deceiver, or a "devil" that somewhere exists to consciously try to fool me that everything in front of me doesn't exist. Even of this were the case, this Great Deceiver is still a being, and everything that he would postulate as ostensibly "nothing" or fake is still a being. I still have a view, a tyrannical view of vision if you will, over something outside. It's thrown, it's "postulated", it's a being. If one sees this as an over-elaboration or a simple redundancy of Cartesianism, one wouldn't be mistaken.
If one stops at this skepticism posing as a stable negation, "The philosophical interrogations therefore would not go all the way through with itself if it limited itself to generalizing the doubt, the common question to extending them to the world or to Being, and would define itself as doubt, non-knowing or non-belief. Things are not so simple". Philosophy doing philosophy (incessant interrogation) can't stop at a stable negativity. The Negation of the dialectic is essentially being generalized as doubt. When one is badly practicing philosophy or the dialectic, they are generalizing the process overarchingly as "doubt". This manifests itself in language when the sense of doubt becomes defined as doubt itself, or non-knowing, or non-belief. Essentially if you were to ask me "What is the Dialectic?", you would be asking a question as a bad philosopher and if I answered the questions with something like "It is doubt", I would be a bad philosopher. By you thinking that the dialectic could ever come to a simple summarization or a synthesis, and by myself thinking that I can provide you with an abstract direct object to signify this synthesis, we are being bad philosophers. Nothing is continuing on and moving, but stopping and settling down. There is a being for this, the human being. But unfortunately (or fortunately for the phenomenologist), if we are to follow the phenomena of consciousness through faithfully, then the answer is not so simple.
"In being extended to everything, the common question changes its meaning. Philosophy elects certain beings-'sensations,' 'representations,' 'thought,' 'consciousness,' or even a deceiving being- in order to separate itself from all being. Precisely in order to accomplish its will for radicalism, it would have to take as its theme the umbilical bond that binds it always to being, the inalienable horizon with which it is already and henceforth circumvented, the primary initiation which it tries in vain to go back on. It would have to no longer deny, no longer even doubt; it would have to step back only in order to see the world and Being, or simply put them between quotations marks as one does with the remarks of another, to let them speak, to listen in...". Beings aren't just Dasein being. They are not just others and/or myself. They are anything outside of itself. These beings such as "thought" or "sensation" which try to elicit an impression of the invisible, or nothingness are always binded to being. When I describe passive activity, in the Husserlian sense, I'm relying on a world, or something, already thrown to me. I certainly entertain myself by describing what nothing is by describing it. To think what's it's like to not recognize oneself in the process of grasping something for one time only (before it became Ideal by repetitive "perfectings") is to be in being. To think is to be in being, even if the thinking is an attempt at non-being. I can't evade the fact that I have to borrow being to try to get to nothingness. By realizing that this attempt at the a priori/nothingness/invisible description is "in vain", one would have to no longer deny or doubt being. This is where the equivocations of skepticism comes in. If I take myself seriously as a philosopher, I can't doubt my doubt (doubt then is a being). Again, this is a reference to what Descartes already discovered. By being faithful to myself and not doubting my doubt, I in turn negate my negation. I am no longer skeptical of what is outside of me, but step back and listen to what's in front of me; the being that came from the nothingness, the nothingness that I could not faithfully stay put in from the perennial movement of the dialectic. But, the perennial movement of the dialectic always moves;
"At the same time that the doubt is renounced, one renounces the affirmation of an absolute exterior, of a world or a Being that would be a massive individual; one turns toward that Being that doubles our thoughts along their whole extension, since they are thoughts of something and since they themselves are not nothing-a Being therefore that is meaning, and meaning of meaning. Not only that meaning that is attached to words and belongs to the order of statements and of things said, to a circumscribed region of the world, to a certain type of Being- but universal meaning, which would be capable of sustaining logical operations and language and the unfolding of the world as well. " The perennial movement of the dialectic sees it's "growth" (We are almost reaching a metaphysical Aristotelian concept of "growth" here) in constant negations, not just one negation, but ad infinitum negations. Once the negation of the world is renounced and we "step back and see the world" as what is exactly in front of us, thoughts come to the Dasein, and in a gesture that is faithful to Husserl and the original project of Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty states that this not only means "words and statements", as if words and statements are tantamount to the sense of thought (This topic was addressed with Derrida's encounter with Husserl), but to Being that is meaning, a sense of being. But even this sense, this thinking, that would be manifested in words and statements for the Dasein, that would be renounced after the negation of this same exact sense, this sense as a "Transcendental Logic" (or "universal meaning" if you will, what Merleau-Ponty names it) would be negated, essentially the stepping back and "seeing the world for what it is" that tends to spawn a certain amount of fast-food holistic and spiritual "experiences". The positing of these experiences with a style and attitude is bad philosophy just as skepticism pivoting off the first negation is bad philosophy. In existential terms, both the believer and non-believer are bad philosophers. Always settled in a style, never moving in the infinite dialectic. That thought always comes to oneself (the Dasein) is the case, that one can always doubt the thought that comes to oneself is also the case, that both can possibly happen is also the case. That one then negates the negation of thought into a "stepping back and listening to the world" is the case. That thought comes thrusting in with a sense of "enlightenment" over this awe of the world is the case (thereby describing it). That this sense-of-enlightenment is negated by the fact that what's it's trying to describe "in awe" is not the case of what's happening when one is in this mode of "stepping back", is the case, ad infinitum. The end of that last sentence is the case, the final Latin phrase of ad infinitum, is the case. The final words of that sentence and this post is the case, and the semblance of ad infinitum as the "settled notion" of philosophy and the dialectic, is bad philosophy.

The Myth of Empathy; Part 3 of "The Visible and The Invisible"

Merleau-Ponty extends his description of intersubjectivity to it's limits where "the invisible" becomes intersubjectivity, or lack there of. This task of intuitively explaining the impossibility of encountering the other in any other way than my own is something I have felt should be the a final extension of phenomenology. The limits of phenomenology for me have always instinctively been an existential question of empathy, or lack there of, never to go beyond the consequences of what would manifest from this lack (or Derrida's discussion of narcissistic reappropriation in The Ear of the Other). One of course can layout exactly what the consequences are, but then they are not within the field of phenomenology, and it's original task, it's faithful task; to explain the appearance of anything to consciousness. There's a dominant reason why Husserl wrote The Crises of the European Sciences, and it's precisely to extirpate any "existential questions", the very questions that had led science away from the task of thinking into disparate disciplines that didn't operate without a sense of needing to be grounded, but a sense of having to provide something to someone. This surplus attitude is not the attitude of the Phenomenologist, and one is struck with the sense that Husserl thought that people couldn't understand phenomenology because science's dispersion into it's multiplicity, to eventually lose it's own sense, this sense that was to be rediscovered by Phenomenology. With this said, when Phenomenology broaches an "Existential Question", in this case, being on a scene with an other, it would have to require an original faithfulness to Phenomenology so that it appeared that the writer who broached this topic had no opinion of what they were considering, and were simply, and solipsitically explaining an experience. Derrida, Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy would all be influenced by phenomenology eventually to form status's of the other as a focal concern of their work. After all, after Phenomenology, once is thrown back into the world where existence holds sway again. An elaboration of the other within Phenomenology would always have to come to grips with the idea of empathy, since it is what fundamentally grounds any social structure at all. But the phenomenologist never has to be faithful to a social structure because they've given themselves over to phenomenology where things happen regardless of Being, and always because of the a priori, or nothingness. Certainly when confronted afterwards as human beings, they won't take for granted the social structure that opens up for a description of a logic that is always and already happening, but when in the work itself, the phenomenologist is in complete ignorance of any social surrounding. They are in a world, but the idea of a world is in suspense, being described, always deffered, a description deffered. This faithfulness that the phenomenologist would have to remind themselves of would create some incredible work at it's limits, describing the confrontation of the other, because the other is then truly and appropriately a nominal "X", a variable, within my thinking. Merleau-Ponty exemplifies this faithfulness of seeing an other as a variable by his luminous description of himself in the encounter with an other. How then, does Merleau-Ponty encounter this something (from nothing), that is an other? "If the other also is pure vision, how would we see his vision? One would have to be him. The other can enter into the universe of the seer only by assault, as a pain and catastrophe; he will rise up not before the seer, in the spectacle, but laterally, as a radical casting into question of the seer. Since he is only pure vision, the seer cannot encounter an other, who thereby would be a thing seen; if he leaves himself, it will only be by a turning back of the vision upon himself; if he finds an other, it will only be as his own being seen". Merleau-Ponty limits himself to his being able to see (which we will see in a later post, he describes vision as being the sense that constitutes the world, and not smelling or hearing). If one could possibly have an encounter with an other, it would not be something of my personal experience, as if they experienced the same thing as I had, but something that calls me into question. Something in experience that calls me into question is not an experience of the other as other, but a lateral appearance in me. Merleau-Ponty continues "If there is an other, by definition I cannot install myself in him, coincide with him, live his very life: I live only my own. If there is an other, he is never in my eyes a For Itself, in the precise and given sense that I am, for myself. Even if our relationship leads me to admit or even to experience that "he too" thinks, that "he too" has a private landscape, I am not that thought as I am my own, I do not have that private landscape as I have my own". This is penetrating phenomenology being done by Merleau-Ponty here. At one point, he even allows a space for the other that is basically identical to himself, but at another point, states the fact that his own private landscape is absolute alterity, or otherness. What does it mean when he says that the other can never be For Itself? He states that a For Itself is always a For Myself. In other words, I can't live for the other, the way I live for myself. Literally, I wake up every day and go about my business. I don't wake up and come to immediate cognition of an other and how they are going about their business. Even if I were to make a habit out of waking up and immediately thinking about an other, phenomenologically speaking, it's never immediate, the way I am for myself, how I am always immediate for myself. I would have to negate my invisibility (negate the fact that I'm a always and already a being inside of myself without recognition of things I eventually have to do), but as Mealeau-Ponty states throughout the text with his faithfulness to Sartrean negation, the negation of my invisibility is a positivity, or a proposition. In other words, I become visible, and aware when trying to enter into the other, and so make the very other I want to empathize with something that is other than myself, something that is invisible, thereby losing the For Itself that envelops myself. I cannot postulate an other and think to myself "We are really the same", without being utterly unfaithful to myself and the invisible experience I have every moment of time. In every moment of time, "What I say of it is always derived from what I know of myself by myself: I concede that if I inhabited that body I should have another solitude, comparable to that which I have, and always divergent prospectively from it. But the 'if I inhabited' is not a hypothesis; it is a fiction or a myth". I can concede the fact of some sort of sameness with an other, but this is always a fiction, because it's a negation of my invisibility, it's a postulate of something that never needs to be postulated as something to first come to the scene. This concession then that Mearleau-Ponty makes is negated right after he makes it. The minute I try to enter the other, I'm negated back to myself, in a private landscape where I make up fictions and myths about the other possibly having the same experience as me, even though he is exactly outside of me, and even forms me as the sole function of alterity. If they form me, and are always and already outside of me, they are not me, and they are not for myself, as I am for myself. They are then, something else. Being something else, they are a difference from me, and are different from me, however much I conjecture that they constitute me, and mythologize on how I constitute them.
"The other's life, such as he lives it, is not for me who speaks an eventual experience or a possible: it is a prohibited experience, it is an impossible, and this is as it must be if the other is really the other. If the other is really the other, that is a For Itself in the strong sense that I am for myself, he must never be so before my eyes; it is necessary that this other For Itself never fall under my look, it is necessary that there be no perception of an other, it is necessary that the other be my negation or my destruction". If the other was the same as me then, there would be no other, there would be no thought of the other, there would be no idea of the other. That something outside of myself exists precisely in the fact that it is not me and can never be me. Merleau-Ponty stresses that "He must never be so before my eyes". We can theoretically fictionalize and contextualize on the other being (verb form of being) like me, because it is a For Itself, and within this context, this context of postulated and positive thought, but it can never be so before my eyes, in other words, as myself, first and foremost always invisible. I cannot live 2 invisible lives. I can have my life which is invisible, negate it by thought, and postulate the possibilities of the others life. I cannot always and already be waking up operating as 2 beings at one time. I would have to physically split myself without thinking it. That the Husserlian idea of the Transcendental Ego comes to the forefront here is a possibility, but it's always postulated as "transcendental", meaning happening for all. As we said before, any concession we make about the other being like me is always and already negated by the fact that a concession was needed in the first place to bring together something that was always and already apart. This apartness, this shearing of being, this alterity forms me. Without this alterity I am no longer For Myself, no longer a self, and in essence, no longer alive. The In Itself For Itself distinction that Sartre made is no longer available. The In Itself distinction isn't even available if I, who am For Myself, am not available to make the distinction. I, who am making the distinction between The In Itself, essentially For Myself, is doing so while encountering an other who may or may not be making these distinctions. I have no idea. This though, is what I'm certain of, that I have no idea, and that is it. When thrown into being-with-others, I negate myself by thinking of ideas that attempt to systematize and solidify my existence with everything else, like this exact post that I'm writing. The dialectic of negation runs ramped. I am invisible, I negate my invisibility by the compulsion to speak about what is other than me making the other visible, then I negate this negation by accepting the fact that speaking about the other is not being the other, I am then an operation of negations which no longer realizes any history in it's process. I am always and already not simply me and not the other, but an attempt to bring together this otherness, which always and already knows that this bringing together of the other is in the most abstract form, something to do, to finally accept my absolute private owness, my solus ipse, my solipsism, and finally make the "existential conclusion" of not simply my lack of empathy, my myth of empathy, but, that I was on my way towards an attempt at empathization, in order to find it impossible in me. This operation, this process is but being itself, specifically, being there. As a phenomenologist, the question of the other and empathy is "concluded". I am then able to enter back into the world and the social structures that I can't take for granted by exactly mythologizing everything that is other to me. How I live is founded precisely on a myth, and more logically speaking, on a context. What I accept as what I have to do, is something that I never have to do if I choose not to, but being there has a sway over me that is more powerful than my phenomenological instincts. I have to do all things that I always and already am mythologizing, because the context, the myth, is what constitutes being there. My invisibility, for a time, is always negated by my visibility, the very fact that I can see, literally and figuratively. Being and Nothingness, Seeing and Invisibility.

Merleau-Ponty's Intersubjectivity; Part 2 of "The Visible and the Invisible"

In the last post we confronted Merleau-Ponty's Hegelian instincts and his stress of a philosophy of negation for understanding The Invisible. Merleau-Ponty has taken Sartre's lessons of negation for understanding the a-priori to it's limits in this text and it brings out some strong insights. In the last post we ended off with the fact that Merleau-Ponty would have to throw himself into a solipsistic state where we happen to understand him to justify his flesh-invisible experience that he want's us to understand independent of the prior phenomenological attempts by Husserl and Kant. While he addresses himself in the negation, in essence that he is not anything that he can possibly affirm (lessons from Sartre he inherited that I wish I could elaborate more on with time) he takes a quick turn to the objects outside of him that are nonetheless his own, and along with the turn is the fact that there is an other present having a type of experience somewhat the same and somewhat different than him. His elaboration on this inter-subjectivity I think it's an expansion of Husserl's in the phenomenological sense because I think Merleau-Ponty has a style to his writing that isn't as teleological as Husserl when addressing the other. For Husserl, the other was a matter of a getting together in order to perfect, it was a world of geometers who were operating under praxis. Husserl never elaborated on the depths of logic of social experience, or rather the phenomenology of social experience. Merleau-Ponty's honest and open style leads to a very lucid understanding of how a confronting happens in the first place, all in the service of understanding the fact that a subject can't get outside of themselves when being in the world. On the other hand, because of his self-negation philosophy, he allows himself to not own the world. What must be established is something not being mine, and the de facto situation of not being able to escape myself ubiquitously. Merleau-Ponty states "What I see is not mine in the sense of being a private world. Hence-forth the table is the table; even the perspective views which I have of it and which are bound to the position of my body are part of being and not of myself...what is mine in my perception are lucunae". Lucuna are empty spaces. What Merleau-Ponty is trying to say here is that something is something regardless of my perspective of it. He's making a phenomenological/ontological division here. As a being, what is there is "in front of him". But what is his (mineness, owness) is an empty space. For being that is not mine (we gain a closer sense of what transcendental being is here), there is a boudness to a horizon. For myself, there is nothing. So me being myself, I am in nothing. For me, who is first a being, I am in a horizon, a private world where nothing has yet to be accomplished (allowing ourselves the Husserlian logic found in his Experience and Judgment). He says that finally there needs to be a "subjective face" to perception, which for our understanding is Husserlian ideality, also nominated by phenomenology as the eidetic. This movement is a doubling in which the as it is gains a such which makes a such as it is. The invisible being has no such. What "is", is being, and then being becomes mine when it is no longer (negation) as it is, but as such, meaning it's purely differentiated into many different things; representation, language, active perception, present awareness, ect. (the ect. here is inappropriate but we will move on).

It's here where Merleau-Ponty takes his sharp turn into inter-subjectivity by asking a simple question to himself and the reader. "Suppose now that there is another man before me who 'looks at' what I call 'the table'...a relationship is established". He later states "For the other's gaze on it is not a nothing for me, its exterior witness; whatever it may be in the last analysis, it is not nothing as I am nothing for myself, it does not have the power I have to push the things unto their truth or their meaning and to grasp them 'such as they are'". Nothing takes on somewhat of a contorted meaning here which an elaboration of Sartre's negativity would really help to understand. What Merleau-Ponty is stating here is the fact that whatever happens "outside of myself" is not nothing for me. It is happening to me for sure. But, the others gaze doesn't have the power of what I have in my nothingness. I, in my nothingness, can make things into meaning which we described before as the difference/doubling of the such in the such as it is. The other can't push truth into me. I can only do that because I come from a place of nothing which eventually gets doubled (a double negation...the position of the mineness; or being to mine.) So hopefully we can understand that Sartre's and Merleau-Ponty's nothingness is surely not a pure nothingness but is pushing it's way towards a doubling where an other exists for myself. The key for Sartre and Merleau-Ponty though is to incessantly describe all these events as taking place in being as nothingness. I think Derrida improves what they are both trying to get at along with Husserl's bracketing method in the same instance when his concept of sous rature, which we discussed in his interpretation of Husserl. To describe it again, it's to cross out a word that can't be used for this place of nothingness where something is trying to happen that we can't describe, and allowing ourselves to use the words we want to for nothingness, while at the same time knowing we can't use them. By allowing ourselves a perennial negotiation between nothingness and our impulse to describe nothingness (phenomenologically, the a priori), we gain a sense of the being into it's own. Hopefully with this also, Sartre's negative philosophy will come to light. Merleau-Ponty continues on with himself standing with someone else looking at something in his nothingness. he states "The perception of the world by the other cannot enter into competition with my own perception of it, for my position is not comparable to theirs; I live my perception from within, and from within, it has an incomparable of ontogenesis". This strikes at a recent lecture given by Judith Butler on Whitehead regarding forms of recognition and specifically for Butler, dominant forms of recognition. As a subtle recognition of the possibility of altering one's recognition towards the other, this is not the case for the phenomenological perspective, and here Merleau-Ponty states it precisely. It's impossible for an other to enter into my own perception of the world. For my position is not comparable to theirs. When Merleau-Ponty states that "I live my perception from within" we can take his negation philosophy and apply to that statement to mean "the other can't live in me". No one can enter me and I can't enter them, and this is a fundamental ontogenetical premise of existence that I find incredibly insightful on Merleau-Ponty's part. What this means for the socio-ethical concerns of empathy is devastating, of course, and everyone has to confront this absolute and impossible lack of empathy when approaching themselves phenomenologically. Merleau-Ponty stresses this even further when he states that Being is put to the test through the other because it summons the promises that he made to himself when he admitted he was nothing. The gaze over an object is in a relationship with an other but I remain the only witness. It's not as if I had four eyes and two brains where I can see the thing through myself and anything else, in this case, an other. "I remain the sole witness of the ontogenesis, the others can add nothing to the evidence of being for me". The most insightful analysis I find so far in Merleau-Ponty's conception of inter-subjectivity is when he states "One sole condition is laid down for their coming on the scene: that they could present themselves to me as other focuses of negativity". While the other has no place in myself, it does operate as a condition for my negativity, and that negativity is that it can not operate in me. And something is discovered here which is different from the gaze over the table, and it's the implicit logic of the statement itself that one cannot enter into me so that other is a negation for me, and that implicit logic is that Merleau-Ponty considered before the negation that there was something like himself, out there, and gazing at things. It is the case that one can't enter into the other and the other into me, but before this negative conclusion was made, I had a compulsion to realize that it was impossible for an other to enter into me and me into it. In essence, I have a compulsion to realize the other before I was able to negate it as a condition of myself. This is a wonderful analysis on inter-subjectivity, something that Husserl in his work never approached, or simply never got to. That it carries with it enormous ethical concerns is obvious. That we are operating solipsistically here is a testament to Merleau-Ponty's style and thought. He was able to lay out a condition and at the same time negate that other that conditions their existence, in essence leaving himself to himself, solus ipse. Not only that, but he was operating here solus ipse under the condition of the other which at first glance is counter-intuitive to the Phenomenological project operating independent of everything. Merleau-Ponty does operate independent of everything but because of his method of negation, conditions exist that confirm for me that I am nothing before I become the such as it is. To say we gained a sense of the a priori through a confrontation with the other is somewhat astonishing.

After this elaboration of the other in regards to "an object", Merleau-Ponty states "The other is born from my side, by a sort of propagation by cuttings or by subdivision, as the first other". Derrida, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty all take the liberties of describing things as "sort of". This can be confusing, but it must be understood that they can't absolutely define the things that they want to define so rather than just say that the other is born for difference, or the other is born out of a division, the sort of raises the question of whether the next verbs in the proposition can really do justice to the explanation. Thinking of what it is to be a "sort of subdivision" is something that needs to happen when one is reading over these passages. One can't simply read over them once. One has to take account for the fact that subdivision needs it's ambiguity brought to it by the "sort of" in order to clarify the essence of the action, the pure action in nothingness. This way of thinking will be helpful for future and past posts when phenomenologists and post-structuralist philosophers need to make their concepts more open to being a thought that isn't tied to the concept. Finally, Merleau-Ponty states "But how is it conceivable that what is nothing be doubled? How would one discern one "nothing" from another? The question only shows that we have forgotten our principle on the way, that we have come to forget that nothingness is not, that we grasp is by negintution and as the reverse of being. If there can be several beings, there will be as many nothingnesses". Merleau-Ponty stays faithful to his negative philosophy, his apophatic philosophy. He wants to ask how it's possible for doubling or difference to occur but remembers that this wanting has no space available in the negative philosophy of being. As long as one is operating in negintuition, in an intuition that never affirms anything, but says nothing can be the case, one can't ask anything of something when it's always and already nothing, and with this in mind things pop up in experience that we say that we know is not the case, but are conditions that can never envelop me. Merleau-Ponty is faithfully following a negative dialectic here; One that doesn't start from a place in order to come to something other than what it is to affirm this otherness, but descends down to the fact that what appears, can't possibly be anything other than my own nothingness, I.E. Being. Being and Nothingness certainly so far for Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible, in regards to inter-subjectivity in this case. Sartre's theoretical influence on Merleau-Ponty is unquestionable in this text.