The Unperceived of Perception or On the Unthought of Philosophy: The Ontological Rehabilitation of the Sensible Being in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to delimit the main theoretical contributions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception to the problem of the relationship between perception and philosophy. Our analysis will be structured in two stages. In the first, we will describe his phenomenological conception of perception as it takes shape in the initial phase of his theoretical work, taking as our reference the text The primacy of Perception, which summarizes the theoretical achievements of his first two works, The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. It is within this framework that Merleau-Ponty undertakes his critique of the modern dualism of thought and nature, with the aim of clarifying the philosophical meaning of perception on the basis of perceptual experience as such. Next, we will present the ontological reformulation of this approach, carried out in the posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible. In this later context, perception not only concerns the original mode of being of the corporeal subject described in his earlier writings, but refers, in a more radical sense, to a generalized perceptibility proper to an asubjective being: the Sensible Being as Flesh of the World. Rereading this posthumous work will allow us to highlight the originality of his “new ontology,” within which we are offered a vision of the sensible being as the reversibility of visible–perceived and invisible–unperceived, while at the same time being given an unprecedented perspective from which to interrogate perception as the unthought of philosophy.