Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Intertwining and Objectification

In chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, titled “The Intertwining -- The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between the body as sensible, which is to say “objective,” and the body as sentient, that is, as “phenomenal” body. He makes this inquiry in the context of interrogating the access of such a sensible-sentient or objective-phenomenal body to Being. “Objectivity” and the objective body, as Merleau-Ponty defines it in the Phenomenology of Perception, are to be determined in relation to experience. Objectivity requires knowing how it is possible for determinate shapes to be available for experience at all. But the possibility of determinate shapes is also called into question by Merleau-Ponty insofar as the body is experienced as a point of view on things; thus every body would experience a different point of view, even though things are given as abstract elements of one total world. Since the two elements form a system, an intertwining, in which each moment (that of a body with a particular point of view and that of things in the totality of their world) is immediately expressive of each other, objectivity would seem to be hard to achieve. The relationship between body and things, point of view and world, if the relata continually express one another, would appear to be anything but determinate and the question of how objectivity is possible remains unanswered. This essay will explore this question in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s (mis-) reading of Henri Bergson and from the point of view of Sartre’s original expression of the relation of intertwining.