The Visible and the Invisible

1. Introduction

The Visible and the Invisible is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late, unfinished treatise in which he reorients phenomenology around a new ontology of flesh. Written between 1959 and 1961 and published posthumously in 1964, the work attempts to rethink the relation between subject and object, perception and being, in a way that neither reduces the world to the mind nor the mind to the world.

The title names a central tension: the visible world of perceptible things, and an invisible dimension of sense, structure, and depth that is never simply “behind” appearances, yet is not itself directly given as an object. Merleau-Ponty treats this tension not as a problem to be eliminated but as the very clue to the nature of reality. Perception, language, and reflection are analyzed to show that the seer is always also “of the seen,” that the body is both sensing and sensible, and that visibility is threaded through with an invisible logic of style, horizon, and institution.

Because the treatise breaks off and is accompanied by extensive working notes, it is read both as a major systematic statement and as a project in formation. Commentators therefore treat it as a decisive transformation of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier Phenomenology of Perception and, at the same time, as an open set of paths—toward an ontology of nature, of intersubjectivity, of language, and of history—that he did not live to complete.

The entry’s subsequent sections examine this work’s historical setting, composition, internal structure, conceptual innovations, methodological claims, and later reception, with particular attention to how the visible/invisible distinction is recast through the notions of flesh, chiasm, and interworld.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

2.1 Postwar French Philosophy

The Visible and the Invisible emerges from the highly dynamic scene of postwar French thought. In the 1940s–50s, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and renewed engagements with Hegel and Marx were reshaping philosophical debate.

2.2 Merleau-Ponty’s Own Trajectory

By 1959 Merleau-Ponty had:

• Critiqued empiricism and intellectualism in Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
• Become a prominent public intellectual, writing on politics, Marxism, and history.
• Turned increasingly to ontology, art, and nature (e.g., essays on painting, lectures on institution and passivity).

Many scholars argue that The Visible and the Invisible crystallizes this trajectory: it extends phenomenology into a generalized ontology while responding to debates with Sartre, Husserlian orthodoxy, and emerging structuralist approaches to language and culture.

2.3 Scientific and Cultural Background

The period was marked by developments in:

• Gestalt psychology and early cognitive science, challenging atomistic models of sensation.
• Biology and ethology, emphasizing organism–environment relations.
• New art and literary movements (abstract painting, the nouveau roman) that foregrounded perception, style, and ambiguity.

Proponents of contextual readings maintain that Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on form, field, and intertwining reflects this broader shift away from mechanistic and individualistic models toward relational and field-theoretic ones.

3. Author, Composition, and Posthumous Publication

3.1 Merleau-Ponty in the Late 1950s

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), by then chair of philosophy at the Collège de France, had distanced himself from both orthodox Marxism and classical existentialism. He was engaged in lectures on nature, institution, and passivity and was preparing what he envisioned as a major systematic work revising phenomenology “from within.”

3.2 Composition and Manuscript Stages

The Visible and the Invisible was drafted mainly between 1959 and Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961. The surviving materials include:

Editorial reconstructions suggest that Merleau-Ponty repeatedly re-ordered parts and reconsidered how to present the new ontology, which contributes to the work’s unevenness and open-ended character.

3.3 Lefort’s Editorial Role and 1964 Publication

After Merleau-Ponty’s death, Claude Lefort, his former student and collaborator, was entrusted with the manuscripts. The 1964 Gallimard edition, Le Visible et l’Invisible, suivi de Notes de travail, reflects Lefort’s decisions:

• To group four main parts from more polished manuscripts.
• To append the working notes, arranged chronologically, as a fourth part.
• To provide an extensive editorial introduction explaining the reconstruction.

Some commentators praise Lefort for preserving the experimental nature of the project; others suggest that any ordering inevitably imposes a degree of coherence not entirely warranted by the drafts. Alternative editorial arrangements have been proposed in scholarship but have not replaced the canonical Lefort edition.

3.4 Translation History

The standard English translation by Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1968) made the work accessible to a wider readership. Later printings introduced minor corrections. Discussion continues about how best to render key terms such as chair (flesh) and chiasme (chiasm), given their technical and metaphorical roles.

4. Structure and Organization of the Work

Because the book is unfinished, its structure reflects both Merleau-Ponty’s plan and Lefort’s editorial reconstruction. The published French edition comprises an editorial foreword followed by four parts.

4.1 Internal Organization of the Main Parts

Part I poses the central philosophical problem in a relatively programmatic way. It revisits themes from earlier writings but now explicitly in terms of visible and invisible dimensions, preparing the need for a transformed ontology.

Part II elaborates a new method of interrogation, distinguishing it from classical reflection and from naïve empiricism. It explores how “intuition” of being might be achieved without positing an absolute subject.

Part III turns to more directly ontological descriptions—of body, world, and their intertwining—through concepts like flesh, interworld, and chiasm. Famous analyses (such as the touching hands) occur here.

4.2 Role of the Working Notes

Part IV, the working notes, is not a continuation of Part III but a heterogeneous set of dated entries. They:

• Indicate projected chapters and themes not developed in the main text (e.g., nature, history, others, language).
• Offer more schematic definitions of central notions.
• Reveal hesitations, alternative formulations, and cross‑references.

Scholars differ on how strictly to separate “doctrinal” content in Parts I–III from the experimental reflections of Part IV; many treat the notes as indispensable for understanding the incomplete architecture of the whole.

5. From Phenomenology of Perception to Ontology of Flesh

5.1 Continuity with Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception had already emphasized:

• The lived body (corps propre) as the site of perception and action.
• The pre-reflective lifeworld over against both empiricist sensation and intellectualist representation.
• The idea that consciousness is always “in the world” rather than detached from it.

Many interpreters view The Visible and the Invisible as deepening these insights rather than abandoning them. The later text presupposes the earlier analyses of embodiment while attempting to articulate the ontological implications they contain.

5.2 Self‑Critique and “Beyond” Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty explicitly criticizes some of his earlier positions. He suggests that Phenomenology of Perception still relied too heavily on:

• A subject–object schema, even as it tried to destabilize it.
• The language of “consciousness,” which risks reintroducing idealism.
• A residual philosophy of reflection, where the subject appears as the origin of sense.

In the new work, he aims to move from a phenomenology of perception to an ontology of the perceived—or more precisely, an ontology of the flesh that makes both perceiver and perceived possible.

5.3 The Turn to Ontology

The concept of ontology here does not mean a return to classical metaphysics. Instead, it names an attempt to describe the element or dimension—called flesh—in which all appearing occurs. Proponents argue that this move:

• Generalizes the body–world relation to a structure of Being itself.
• Displaces the primacy of the constituting subject in favor of a chiasmic intertwining.
• Reframes phenomenological description as uncovering the texture of the world rather than the operations of consciousness.

Some commentators maintain that this “ontological turn” remains faithful to phenomenology, while others contend that Merleau-Ponty crosses into a more speculative, quasi-Heideggerian discourse. The question of how strictly “phenomenological” the ontology of flesh is has become a central issue in the secondary literature.

6. The Visible and the Invisible: Central Problematic

6.1 The Visible

Merleau-Ponty understands the visible as the field of sensible appearing: colors, shapes, movements, spatial configurations as they are experienced by an embodied perceiver. Visibility is not a sum of atomic sensations but an articulated style or configuration in which things stand out against horizons. The visible always presents more than is strictly given at a moment—profiles, anticipations, and latent sides are implied.

6.2 The Invisible

The invisible does not denote a hidden realm of noumena or spiritual substances behind appearances. Instead, it names:

• The non-thematic structures (horizons, depth, temporal spread) that make the visible coherent.
• The sense or meaning that is expressed in, but not reducible to, any particular visible configuration.
• The “other side” of perception—e.g., the seer’s own body as seen, the absent profile of an object, the implicit logic of a style.

In this usage, invisibility is intrinsic to visibility, not its negation.

6.3 Their Correlative Structure

Merleau-Ponty’s central problematic is to describe how visible and invisible are correlative and reversible:

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The visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible.

— Paraphrasing The Visible and the Invisible, Part I

He rejects two opposed positions:

The task is to articulate an element—later named flesh—in which visible and invisible are two inseparable dimensions. The work’s arguments repeatedly return to concrete cases (perception of depth, the body, art, language) to display this intertwining.

7. Key Concepts: Flesh, Chiasm, and Interworld

7.1 Flesh (la chair)

Flesh is Merleau-Ponty’s central ontological term. It designates neither physical matter nor mental substance but a common element shared by perceiver and perceived. Flesh is:

• The medium in which bodies and things are mutually sensible.
• A structure of reversibility: what senses can be sensed, what touches can be touched.
• An “element” comparable (by analogy) to water or air, but not material in a traditional sense.

Proponents emphasize that flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to speak of the world’s own visibility and sensibility, without positing a separate, constituting subject. Critics argue that the term risks obscurity: it oscillates between phenomenological description and quasi-metaphysical substance.

7.2 Chiasm (le chiasme)

The chiasm is the pattern of crossing or intertwining by which seer and seen, toucher and touched, fold into one another. It expresses:

• The mutual encroachment of subject and object.
• The possibility of reversibility of roles without full coincidence (the one who sees is also visible, but never from exactly the same point of view).
• The structural “crossing” that underlies perception, intersubjectivity, and language.

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“There is a sort of reflection of the world upon my body and of my body upon the world.”

— Paraphrasing The Visible and the Invisible, Part III

Interpretations diverge on whether the chiasm is primarily:

• A descriptive figure for bodily perception, or
• A fully ontological principle applicable to all relations within Being.

7.3 Interworld (l’intermonde)

The interworld is the shared, intermediate domain in which multiple embodied subjects and things coexist. It is:

• Neither purely subjective nor purely objective.
• The “between” where perspectives overlap and meanings are instituted.
• Closely related to the Husserlian lifeworld, but now conceived as a field of flesh.

The interworld accounts for how different viewpoints can refer to “the same” world, and how language and culture sediment common meanings. Some scholars stress its role in grounding intersubjectivity and sociality; others note that in the extant text it remains less developed than flesh and chiasm, with many of its implications only sketched in the working notes.

8. Phenomenological Method and Indirect Reflection

8.1 Critique of Classical Reflection

Merleau-Ponty argues that traditional reflective methods—whether Cartesian introspection or transcendental reflection—tend to posit a detached subject surveying its experiences. This risks:

• Turning lived experience into an objectified inventory.
• Ignoring the pre-reflective entanglement of self and world.
• Masking the very genesis of sense that phenomenology seeks to uncover.

8.2 Indirect or Lateral Reflection

In response, he proposes indirect reflection (réflexion indirecte, sometimes called “lateral reflection”). Its main features include:

• Remaining within the thickness of lived experience instead of stepping outside it.
• Moving through examples, analogies, and variations rather than direct, apodictic insight.
• Allowing the subject’s own opacity and historicity to appear, rather than presupposing transparency.

This method attempts to “let be seen” the structures of flesh, chiasm, and invisibility by following how they show themselves in perception, language, and art, rather than by deducing them from first principles.

8.3 Interrogation and Intuition

Part II of the work elaborates a method of interrogation and intuition:

• Interrogation: a questioning of experience that lays bare the assumptions of objective thought; it treats phenomena as responses to implicit questions we pose as embodied beings.
• Intuition: not an infallible intellectual vision, but a patient uncovering of the world’s own self-showing.

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“We must interrogate the visible so that it makes present to us the invisible.”

— Paraphrasing The Visible and the Invisible, Part II

Commentators debate how far this methodological reorientation remains within Husserlian phenomenology. Some underscore continuities with Husserl’s “radicalization” of reflection; others see in indirect reflection a decisive break with the ideal of full self-clarity and a move toward a more hermeneutic or ontological approach.

9. Critique of Objective Thought and Classical Metaphysics

9.1 Objective Thought (pensée objective)

Merleau-Ponty uses objective thought to name a stance epitomized by modern natural science and much of classical metaphysics. This stance:

• Treats the world as a set of fully determinate objects located in homogeneous space and time.
• Presupposes a spectator subject who observes from nowhere.
• Reduces qualitative, perspectival, and temporal aspects of experience to measurable parameters.

He argues that this model abstracts from the lived world in which such objectifications become meaningful.

9.2 Classical Metaphysical Dualisms

The work also targets longstanding dualisms:

Merleau-Ponty claims that these oppositions are products of second-order reflection and do not do justice to the intertwined character of lived experience.

9.3 Alternative Descriptions

By analyzing depth, perspective, and the body’s doubleness (seeing/seen), he aims to show that:

• Objects are never given as absolutely closed entities; they are always enveloped in horizons.
• The subject is not a pure interiority but exposed and visible in the world.
• Scientific and metaphysical descriptions are valid within limits but rest on an unthematized field of flesh.

Critics sympathetic to science sometimes argue that Merleau-Ponty underestimates the self-correcting capacities of objective inquiry. Others respond that his aim is not to discredit science but to uncover its experiential and ontological conditions of possibility.

10. Embodiment, Perception, and Reversibility

10.1 The Lived Body Revisited

Continuing themes from his earlier work, Merleau-Ponty treats the body not as an object among others nor as a mere vehicle for consciousness, but as:

• The pivot of perception, from which orientations and values emerge.
• Both subjective (I perceive through it) and objective (it can be seen, touched, measured).
• A site of opacity: I never completely objectify my own body, yet it is never wholly transparent to me.

In The Visible and the Invisible, this doubleness is radicalized into a broader ontological structure.

10.2 Reversibility of Sensing and Being‑Sensed

The notion of reversibility expresses that the sensing body is itself sensible. Merleau-Ponty explores this via tactile and visual examples:

• One hand touches the other, which becomes at once touched and touching.
• The eye that sees is itself visible, exposed to others’ gazes.

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“The body is caught up in a circuit of seeing-seen, touching-touched.”

— Paraphrasing The Visible and the Invisible, Part III

Reversibility does not mean identity: the positions of seer and seen, toucher and touched can exchange but never coincide perfectly. This gap within unity is crucial to his concept of flesh.

10.3 Perception as Chiasmic

Perception is thus conceived as a chiasm or crossing:

• The world “envelops” the body, which is of the same flesh as what it perceives.
• The body “opens” onto the world, articulating it through movement and attention.

Proponents argue that this view avoids both:

• A purely constructivist picture of perception (the mind building the world), and
• A purely receptive picture (the mind passively recording inputs).

Instead, perception is a mutual encroachment of self and world.

Some critics question whether the metaphor of reversibility can account for asymmetrical relations (e.g., power, social difference). Supporters respond that while not explicit in the main text, the structure of reversibility could be extended to such domains, a possibility explored by later phenomenologists.

11. Language, Expression, and the Institution of Meaning

11.1 Expression Beyond Representation

Merleau-Ponty treats language and expression as central to the emergence of meaning. He rejects the idea that speech merely represents pre‑formed thoughts. Instead, speaking is an event in which new meanings are constituted:

• Words are not neutral labels; they organize and transform experience.
• Expression is rooted in gesture and bodily comportment.

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“It is in speaking that the thought comes to us.”

— Paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty’s view as reflected in the late work

11.2 Institution (institution, Einsetzung)

The notion of institution designates the process by which a new meaning, practice, or style is initiated and then sedimented historically. Applied to language:

• A novel turn of phrase, metaphor, or style can inaugurate new possibilities of sense.
• Over time, these become part of a shared linguistic and cultural heritage.

In The Visible and the Invisible, institution is tied to the ontology of flesh: language is one way the flesh of the world inscribes itself, leaving visible traces of an invisible logic.

11.3 The Invisible of Language

Language manifests a particular interplay of visible and invisible:

Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that meaning is never fully present or exhaustively sayable. Each utterance alludes to a depth of sense that cannot be brought entirely to explicit expression.

Interpretive debates concern how tightly this late account of language connects to structural linguistics and whether it offers a genuine alternative to both Saussurean structuralism and purely mentalist theories of meaning. Some read Merleau-Ponty as an ally of structuralism with an added emphasis on embodiment; others highlight the ways in which the notion of flesh complicates any rigid system of signs.

12. Famous Passages: The Touching Hands and the Flesh of the World

12.1 The Touching–Touched Hands

One of the most cited passages describes a person whose right hand touches their left hand, and then reverses roles:

• Initially, the right hand is the toucher, the left an object touched.
• By a slight shift, the left becomes the toucher and the right the touched.

Merleau-Ponty uses this to show:

• A reversibility of roles within one and the same body.
• An internal divide within embodiment: I am both subject and object, but never in the same respect at the same time.
• The idea that touching is not a relation between two inert objects but within a single field of flesh.

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“In this exchange, we do not have two facts but one sole movement with two phases.”

— Paraphrasing The Visible and the Invisible, Part III

Interpreters variously see this as:

• A phenomenological demonstration of the chiasm.
• An allegory of all subject–object relations.
• A limited model that must be supplemented to handle intersubjective and social difference.

12.2 The Flesh of the World

Another often‑quoted set of passages introduces the “flesh of the world”:

• The world is said to be of the same flesh as the body.
• Flesh is an element in which all sensibles participate, like a texture or fabric.
• Vision is described as a “palpation with the look,” suggesting continuity between seeing and touching.

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“The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.”

— Paraphrasing a key paradox in The Visible and the Invisible

These passages convey the idea that:

• The body is not in front of the world as a pure subject facing an object but in the world as a fold of its flesh.
• The visible field always indicates an invisible depth—of other perspectives, hidden sides, temporal horizons—within the same flesh.

Some commentators celebrate the poetic power of these descriptions as capturing an otherwise inexpressible ontological insight. Others worry that the imagery of “flesh of the world” risks blurring distinctions between phenomenological description and speculative cosmology.

13. The Working Notes and the Unfinished Project

13.1 Nature and Content of the Working Notes

The Notes de travail (Working Notes) consist of short, often cryptic entries dated mainly between 1959 and 1960. They include:

• Project outlines for unwritten chapters (e.g., on nature, others, history).
• Definitions and redefinitions of key terms such as flesh, institution, wild Being.
• Comments on other philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Hegel).
• Reading lists and reminders.

These notes were not intended as polished text; they record Merleau-Ponty’s ongoing experimentation.

13.2 Indications of the Unfinished Architecture

The notes provide crucial clues to the projected scope of the work. They suggest plans for:

• A more extensive treatment of nature as the primordial manifestation of flesh.
• Detailed analyses of history, intersubjectivity, and politics within the new ontology.
• A systematic confrontation with Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts and Heidegger’s Being and Time.

13.3 Interpretive Uses of the Notes

Scholars rely heavily on the working notes to:

• Clarify ambiguous concepts (e.g., distinguishing flesh from substance).
• Track Merleau-Ponty’s shifting terminology.
• Reconstruct the direction of arguments that break off in the main chapters.

However, there is disagreement about their weight:

• Some treat them as authoritative indicators of the late philosophy’s intended system.
• Others caution that notes record possibilities under consideration, not settled doctrines, and that the main text should retain priority.

This tension shapes divergent interpretations of the work’s overall project and of how far the ontology of flesh was meant to extend.

14. Major Interpretive Debates and Criticisms

14.1 Status of the Ontology of Flesh

A central debate concerns how to understand flesh:

• One view treats it as a phenomenological concept, articulating conditions of perception without positing a new kind of substance.
• Another reads it as a more speculative ontological principle, bordering on cosmology or “naturalistic monism.”

Critics of the latter reading worry that Merleau-Ponty abandons phenomenological rigor; defenders argue that phenomenology itself demanded this ontological deepening.

14.2 Relation to Husserl and Heidegger

Interpretations vary on how Merleau-Ponty situates himself between Husserl and Heidegger:

This affects how scholars interpret notions like indirect reflection and wild Being.

14.3 Obscurity and Neologisms

Merleau-Ponty’s late style is widely described as dense and allusive, relying on neologisms and metaphors. Critics contend that:

• Terms like flesh, chiasm, and interworld can appear vague.
• The boundary between descriptive phenomenology and poetic evocation becomes blurred.

Supporters respond that such language is necessary to loosen the grip of entrenched dualisms and to gesture toward phenomena not capturable in traditional conceptual schemes.

14.4 Completeness and Systematicity

Because the work is unfinished, some argue that:

• Key arguments remain undeveloped (e.g., the extension of flesh to history and politics).
• The overall system is incoherent or at least under-determined.

Others maintain that the fragmentary state is philosophically significant: it reflects an ontology of openness and incompleteness consistent with the very ideas of horizon and invisibility that the book advances.

14.5 Social and Political Dimensions

Another line of criticism focuses on the sparse treatment of social, historical, and political structures in the extant text. Some readers claim that the ontology of flesh risks overlooking:

• Power relations and institutional asymmetries.
• Historical contingencies of embodiment and perception.

Subsequent thinkers (including feminist phenomenologists and critical theorists) have attempted to extend or revise Merleau-Ponty’s framework to address these concerns, generating further debate about its adaptability.

15. Legacy, Influence, and Historical Significance

15.1 Place in 20th‑Century Philosophy

Over time, The Visible and the Invisible has come to be regarded as Merleau-Ponty’s most ambitious and innovative work. It played a key role in shifting phenomenology:

• From a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of embodied being.
• From a focus on intentional acts to an ontology of flesh and intertwining.

Many historians of philosophy treat it as a major contribution to non-dualistic ontologies in the 20th century.

15.2 Influence on Later French Thought

The book has influenced a wide range of French philosophers:

Some read these later projects as critical continuations that both draw on and question Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology.

15.3 Impact on Embodiment, Feminist, and Environmental Phenomenology

The concepts of flesh and chiasm have been taken up in:

• Embodiment and cognitive science: used to articulate non-Cartesian models of perception and action, influencing enactivist and ecological approaches.
• Feminist phenomenology: both as a resource for thinking embodied subjectivity and as a target for critique regarding gender, sexuality, and power.
• Environmental and eco-phenomenology: informing accounts of human–nature relations as relations within a shared flesh of the world.

15.4 Aesthetics and Art Theory

Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of vision and painting, developed alongside this work, have significantly influenced aesthetics, art history, and film theory. Commentators draw on the notions of visibility, invisibility, and flesh to interpret:

• The body of the artist and viewer.
• The “flesh” of images and cinematic experience.
• Style as the visible manifestation of an invisible logic.

15.5 Ongoing Relevance

Contemporary scholarship continues to revisit The Visible and the Invisible to address:

• The status of subjectivity in a world of distributed agencies.
• Questions about materiality and new realisms.
• The philosophical implications of intercorporeality and interworlds in an increasingly interconnected, technologically mediated world.

While interpretations diverge, the work remains a touchstone for debates about how to think visibility, embodiment, and being without reverting to classical dualisms.