LIFE AND PERCEPTUAL INTENTIONALITY

by

RENAUD BARBARASUniversité de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne

ABSTRACT

Husserl is the � rst philosopher who has managed to account for the speci� city of per-ception, characterized as givenness by sketches (Abschattungen); but neither Husserl norMerleau-Ponty have given a satisfying de� nition of the subject of perception. This arti-cle tries to show that the subject of perception must be conceived as living being andthat, therefore, the phenomenology of perception must lead to a phenomenology oflife. Here, life is approached from an existential point of view, that is to say, as a speci� crelationship to the world. However, life cannot be characterized from human existencein a privative way, as in Heidegger’s philosophy: on the contrary, human existence,and particularly perception itself, must be understood from vital existence, and accord-ingly, an “additive” anthropology must replace the privative zoology. The hypothesisof this article is that it is by characterizing life as desire, we are able to account forperception as givenness by sketches.

Husserl is the � rst philosopher who has managed to account for thespeci� city of perception, characterized as givenness (donation) by sketches(Abschattungen, adumbrations). On the one hand, the sketch discloses orshows the thing; it erases itself in favor of the object; it is self exceeding,as Patocka writes. But, on the other hand, if it is true that the objectappears “in person,” it cannot appear exhaustively just as it really is.The sketch masks or covers the object that it shows insofar as it rep-resents its own appearance as being the object, thus giving the impressionthat the object is no diVerent from its appearance. In this way, theobject is given through new appearances and in fact is considered to benothing more than the law of the development of these appearances.If we take into account the fact that this is an eidetical characteriza-tion, which means that even God could not reach the thing exhaus-tively but would also perceive it by sketches, then we must concludethat every perception involves a dimension of distance or transcen-dence. This distance is not the consequence of a human limitation butis in fact the very determination of that which appears, whatever it is.

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It is exactly this relationship between appearance and distance, prox-imity and withdrawal, that Merleau-Ponty tried to de� ne in his the-ory of the invisible, that is to say, through the idea of an invisibilityconstitutive of the visible perceptual object. As a matter of fact, thisis rather obvious, for if a perceptual object is really transcendent, thatis to say, diVerent from me, it cannot be known exhaustively since itremains out of reach. If it were not out of reach, it would be con-sidered a lived content (Erlebnis). But here the diYculty is that the twodeterminations of distance and proximity do not refer to two diVerentdimensions or faculties, as they do in a classical approach where dis-tance comes from the sensible appearance and proximity from under-standing or thought; rather, these two determinations are two abstractsides of the same situation. It is only as a thing is considered as visi-ble that the thing is invisible, and by the same token, the invisibilityof a thing as such necessarily involves a visibility. As Merleau-Pontywrites in The Visible and the Invisible, “to see is always to see more thanone sees.”1 There is no doubt that Husserl neither manages to accountfor this situation nor respects these conditions, and therefore he remainswithin the classical approach. Indeed, in accordance with the phe-nomenology of reason, he has to identify the existence of the thingwith its complete determinability. Thus the sketches become imperfectdeterminations of the object; the appearing sketch itself becomes anappearance—something which is not the object itself. To be neces-sarily means to be known; therefore the invisibility of the perceivedthing is no longer thought of as a condition of visibility but as a nega-tion of it. Anyway, this is inevitable as long as the sketch is deter-mined as an immanent datum, that is to say, as a sensation in theempirical sense of the term. From this standpoint, the sketch is nec-essarily diVerent from the object, and therefore, the object necessarilydiVerent from the sketch, such that the sketches appear as imperfectand gradual determinations of the same object.

However, even though Merleau-Ponty describes the perceived worldin a very relevant way, I think there is still a problem in the sense ofan inconsistency in his approach. This inconsistency consists in a dis-crepancy between the � nal description of the world in terms of thevisible and invisible (a description which seems to me unquestionable),and the determination of the subject of perception as lived body or� esh. This approach from the lived body serves mainly a negativefunction for Merleau-Ponty. First, it enables Merleau-Ponty to criticizethe Husserlian philosophy of consciousness insofar as it is still within

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the intellectualist framework, a framework that prevents Husserl frompreserving the speci� city of the perceptual level. But also, by showingthat the subject of perception is an embodied subject, he shows thatthe form or the signi� cation is inseparable from the matter, thus reduc-ing the distance between form and matter, meaning and sensible datum.In the end, however, he does not overcome these dualities. In TheVisible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty takes a step in the direction ofovercoming them when he manages to give up the concepts generallyused to describe perception (matter, form, etc.) and de� nes the speci� cityof the meaning of being of the perceived world. Accordingly, he rad-ically criticizes the philosophy of consciousness and recognizes that itis necessary to take another starting point; that is, he recognizes thatone must seriously take into account the fact of embodiment. However,this new starting point still maintains the duality of subject and object,consciousness and material body, because it is described in terms ofthe visibility of the seeing and the unity of touching and touched.

Of course, the diYculty is not due to the fact of starting from thebody, since it is obvious that the body is the subject of perception,and it is also obvious that we perceive in or through our body. Theproblem lies in the fact that Merleau-Ponty does not question themeaning of the being of the body and, consequently, remains depen-dent on the concepts of the philosophy of consciousness. This is thereason why the body is de� ned as touching and touched, seeing andvisible, that is, why it is de� ned in terms of both activity and passiv-ity. However, such a de� nition amounts only to a re-posing of theproblem and not a solving of it. The revised question can be posedas: how can we understand the body as a unity of activity and pas-sivity? Or in what are these two seemingly opposed dimensions founded?To put this yet another way, there is a gap between Merleau-Ponty’svery radical characterization of the being of the perceived world andhis description of the subject of perception, a description that, I mightadd, made no progress beyond what was given in The Phenomenology ofPerception and, because of that, remains dependent on a classical con-ceptuality. Owing to this, I think that the concept of chiasm is veryconfused. According to Merleau-Ponty, since the touching is alsotouched, it is part of the world; and if it is part of the world, thenwe can say that it is the world itself that comes into manifestation.But in fact it is because he took as starting point the duality of pas-sivity and activity, touched and touching that Merleau-Ponty is led toaccount for perceptual intentionality through this intricate relationship,

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this intertwining. This is a duality that comes from the fact that hisaccount of the way of being of the body lacks depth. After all, todescribe the body as touched and touching amounts to saying that itis both sensitive consciousness and an object. In other words, the con-cept of chiasm is used to bridge the gap between the speci� city of per-ception and the use of irrelevant concepts coming from the Husserlianphilosophy of consciousness. So the problem can now be revised toread: allowing for the fact that perception escapes from the classicaldistinctions, how can we de� ne the subject of perception, or more par-ticularly, how can we de� ne the being of the lived body as conditionof the originary unity between visible and invisible?

I am suggesting that the subject of perception must be conceivedas living being and that therefore the phenomenology of perception mustlead to a phenomenology of life. This means that to a certain extentwe must apply the phenomenological reduction to consciousness itselfand approach the body from a neutral standpoint vis-à-vis the diVerencebetween the body as object and the body as lived body. In order toreach the meaning of the being of the body, we must de� ne it as lifein a neutral sense; that is to say, we must de� ne it in terms that areindependent of the diVerence between lived and living, between erlebenand leben. As a matter a fact, to approach the body as lived body, asMerleau-Ponty does, amounts to privileging the consciousness side ofthe equation and prevents him from discovering the genuine meaningof body.

Indeed, the body is alive, and we must raise the question about themeaning of life. But the meaning of life is linked to the possibility ofperception from life; thus the meaning of this life will take shape incontact with perception. These concepts are interdependent; each oneclari� es the status of the other one. To � nd this neutral ground, wemust refuse the objective biological point of view and the vitalist oneas well. The fact is, biology does not work on life itself but on itschemical and physical contents, and this presupposes an ability to rec-ognize living beings; it is vitalism that � lls the de� ciency of this levelof explanation by positing a vital force. But merely positing a vitalforce does not clarify anything; indeed it serves only to highlight theproblem. So, since we reject both the objective determination of lifeas seen in the physico-chemical laws and the internal determinationof life as consciousness, we must strive for a determination of life thatarises neither as a modality of the subject nor as a modality of theobject. We must see life from an existential point of view, as a speci� crelationship to the world; i.e., we must see it as a mode of existing.

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To a certain extent, this starting point is close to a Heideggerianone insofar as Heidegger recognizes that life is a speci� c way of exist-ing and criticizes the biological approach along with the vitalist one.On the other hand, he takes it for granted that the only existence wecan reach is Dasein’s and then claims that life can only be attainedprivatively through human existence. He writes: “Life, in its own right,is a kind of Being; but essentially it is accessible only in Dasein. Theontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative interpretation;it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness [Nur-noch-leben].”2 This assertion, according to which livingexistence is given privatively through human existence, aims at oppos-ing the traditional thesis that human being would be a living beingplus something else, i.e., a rational animal (animal rationale). Thus, unlikesubstantialist approaches, Heidegger acknowledges the speci� city of liv-ing existence, but his desire to protect the speci� city of Dasein and itsdistance in relation to other beings leads him to think life throughDasein and, consequently, to miss life’s speci� city. In fact his startingpoint, the question of Being, leads him to give to human being anexceptional status, a status that is incompatible with the possibility ofaccounting for human existence from vital existence, that is, incom-patible with any form of continuity.

These cursory comments about Heidegger enable us to further re� neour question. In order to account for perception from life it is neces-sary to think life as a singular mode of existing, and we will be ableto understand this mode of existing provided that we do not approachit from human existence in a privative way. Unlike Heidegger, how-ever, who thinks life in terms of existence, I am suggesting that wethink existence in terms of life. It follows that human existence mustbe understood from vital existence; and if it is agreed that humanityis not life plus something but only a new dimension of life, then an“additive” anthropology must replace the privative zoology. In short,I am suggesting that the condition for the possibility of perception liesin the vital mode of existing.

We � nd in Hans Jonas’ philosophy a phenomenology of life thatseems to meet the conditions we have just established. Indeed, ThePhenomenon of Life (1966) starts with the assertion of just those very con-ditions: “this volume oVers an ‘existential’ interpretation of biologicalfacts. Contemporary existentialism, obsessed with man alone, is in thehabit of claiming as its unique privilege and predicament much ofwhat is rooted in organic existence as such; in so doing, it withholdsfrom the organic world the insights to be learned from awareness of

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self.”3 This thinly veiled criticism of Heidegger shows itself when Jonassees continuity between man and animal where Heidegger sees anabyss. Thus, for Jonas, self awareness is already pre-� gured in theorganic world itself. This is the reason why he writes: “A philosophyof life comprises the philosophy of the organism and the philosophyof mind. This is itself a � rst proposition of the philosophy of life. . . . Forthe statement of scope expresses no less than the contention that theorganic even in its lowest forms pre� gures mind, and that mind evenon its highest reaches remains part of the organic.”4 Life is thereforethat mode of existing that includes the possibility of mind, generallyspeaking, and perception in particular.

Jonas refers to this mode of existing as metabolism and means bythis the process through which a form maintains itself as identicalthrough a continuous renewal (replacement) of matter. Thus, at anytwo moments of time suYciently distant from each other, the formcarries none of the material from the � rst moment into the secondmoment, while the organic con� guration and the individuality that isexpressed by this con� guration remains the same. Conversely, shouldwe � nd the same material content at two moments of time suYcientlydistant, we can assert that this organism is dead. In fact, the formonly enjoys independence in relation to matter; thus the only way itcan maintain its own individuality is by continually taking matter inanew. The freedom that the form enjoys in relation to such and sucha state of matter as it expresses itself through the aptitude to transcendthat state and to free itself from it, is at the same time a relation ofdependency on the new material state that will replace the old. Thusmetabolism reveals freedom in necessity or as necessity—a dialecticalfreedom. Jonas says: “denoting, on the side of freedom, a capacity oforganic form, namely to change its matter, metabolism denotes equallythe irremissible necessity for it to do so. Its ‘can’ is a ‘must’, since itsexecution is identical with its being.”5

In other words, the organic freedom accomplishes itself as need. Itfollows that the living being has to get that which will permit thisrenewal from outside itself. This means that the renewal of the vitalsubstance requires the form to have an original relationship with matter,as Jonas himself has noted: “in order to change matter, the living formmust have matter at its disposal and it � nds it outside itself, in theforeign ‘world’. Thereby life is turned outward and toward the worldin a peculiar relatedness of dependence and possibility. Its wants goout to where its means of satisfaction lie; its self-concern, active in the

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acquisition of new matter, is essential openness for the encounter ofouter being.”6 What Jonas has told us here is that the transcendenceof form in relation to matter, insofar as it requires a renewal of matter,implies an active transcendence toward the world. The temporal dimen-sion of self-perpetuation founds the spatial dimension of exteriority. Itfollows that the self-concern, which de� nes the organism, requires asensibility, however primitive it is, to that which is not the living being.Jonas marks this need when he writes that “there is inwardness orsubjectivity involved in this transcendence, imbuing all the encountersoccasioned in its horizon with the quality of felt selfhood, howeverfaint its voice. It must be there for satisfaction or frustration to makea diVerence.”7 Thus Hans Jonas manages to reveal a structure of vitalexistence that he calls metabolism that makes it possible to accountfor the intentional relationship with exteriority, which relationship, inturn, is the condition for the possibility of perception. While Heideggerclaimed to explain what must be the case if there can be anythinglike mere-aliveness, Hans Jonas explains what life must be like if thereis to be anything like intentionality. By understanding the living beingas “dynamical exceeding” in relation to its own matter, Jonas man-ages to provide the foundation for the self-exceeding of the living beingon which the possibility of perception is grounded. He provides uswith the � rst theoretical example of a phenomenology of life as thefoundation for a phenomenology of perception.

However, even if it is methodologically relevant, this position is notcompletely satisfying. The way in which Jonas understands life doesnot enable him to account for perception. Because it is based on therenewal of the vital matter, the orientation towards exteriority is pre-viously determined by the vital needs in such a way that it does notdisclose a genuine transcendence but only a vital environment. Thatis, it is related with the objects of the need and not with the objectas such. Therefore, it remains to be shown how this description of lifeaccounts for the structure of manifestation—for the appearing of some-thing apart from needs. Or, in Jonas’ terms, what we need is anaccount of how the mind is “pre� gured” in the organism.

It seems to me that this diYculty to account for intentionality stemsfrom the de� nition of living being in terms such as “self-concern,” “inview of itself,” and “self-aYrmation against the threat of death.” Toput the matter another way, Jonas never calls into question the tra-ditional de� nition of living being as a self-centered individuality whoseaim is its own perpetuation, i.e., its own survival. In fact, for a living

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individual subject already separated from the world, life can only beself-conservation and, therefore, satisfaction of needs. But, if we basethe living intentionality on need, we will be unable to explain the per-ception of some neutral thing that is not bound to the living inten-tionality by the relationship of need, since it will be existing in itselfand not as a possible future part of the organism. By the same token,if we are to account for perception from life, then we must do it on thecondition that we give up this de� nition of life as self-perpetuation orself-concern, i.e., as need, since such a de� nition requires us to treatthe living being as an already constituted individuality—a self.

It is for this reason that I have chosen to characterize life, that is,to de� ne the being of life, as desire. Let me take as a starting pointfor this thesis a very impressive text from Der Aubbau des Organismus (byGoldstein): “every creature, in some sense, simultaneously expresses aperfection and an imperfection. Considered in isolation, it is perfect,structured, and living in itself; with regard to totality, it is imperfectin varying degrees. The particular creature, in relation to the totalityof being, presents the same species of being as is presented by a phe-nomenon isolated from the organism; in relation to the totality of theorganism, it displays imperfection and rigidity, and its only being liesin totality, in being borne [ portée] by totality . . . this imperfection isexpressed by individuality, and stems from the arti� cial separation ofthe individual from the whole.”8

This conclusion is based on a metaphysical principle according towhich the imperfect becomes intelligible as a form of the perfect with-out the converse ever being possible. This assertion poses a lot of prob-lems concerning the status of that totality of which the living being isa part; but it has, without a doubt, an important phenomenologicalmeaning for living being. The assertion shows us that living being isde� ned by a kind of contradiction; it is at once autonomous and depen-dent. On the one hand, it displays autonomy insofar as it constitutesa close entity that is relatively independent from the rest of nature.But, on the other hand, this is contradicted by the fact that the livingbeing always needs an appropriate environment in order to maintainits identity. In this sense, the being of living lies in the environment, andas biologists show, the living being searches for an environment thatwill be in continuity with its own needs and which will correspondwith its own necessities or essentials. Of course, the realization of thisperfect environment is impossible because the environment of livingbeing is nature, and the laws of nature constitute its background. In a

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sense, the living being always tries to re-form the totality it enjoys withthe world; but this is an impossible task because its realization wouldmean a form of negation of the laws of nature, a complete split betweenenvironment and natural world. Moreover, that would mean the dis-appearance of the living being as individual. This is the reason whywe can say that living being falls short of its own being and is con-sequently de� ned by an ontological separation. The essence of the liv-ing being lies outside of itself, and therefore, its life is characterizedby the fact that it always pursues or seeks for its own essence. So Iemploy the term “desire” in a very speci� c sense and as diVerent fromneed. Unlike need, desire cannot be ful� lled; thus the presence of whatis desired does not ful� ll desire but intensi� es it; or better, in desirethere is no diVerence between ful� llment and frustration.

I want to claim that this characterization of the essence of life asdesire arising from an ontological split enables us to account for thestructure of perception. As a matter of fact, to say that that whichful� lls desire frustrates it and therefore intensi� es it, amounts to say-ing that the object of desire does not fall under the principle of iden-tity. Because the desire is intensi� ed, the object is smaller than whatthe intensi� ed desire seems to call for; but as the object of the newand intensi� ed desire, it is larger than itself when taken as the objectpresent. It seems as if the object of desire is not yet itself and fallsshort of itself in such a way that its presence is at the same time itsown absence; the object of desire is present as absent in the sense thatit appears as its own lack.

But this description corresponds exactly to the characterization ofperception discussed above. There it was noted that, in the sketch, thething in question is present by means of the sketch yet absent becauseit is only a sketch and does not exhaustively capture the thing itself.Similarly with perception, the visible thing involves a kind of invisi-bility and to a certain extent is its own invisibility. Therefore, if wede� ne the fabric of intentionality as desire, we are in a position tounderstand this originary unity between visible and invisible. As objectof an essential desire, that which is for a living being always remainsbeyond its own manifestation because the object of desire frustratesthe subject when it ful� lls him by appearing short of itself; the objectof desire appears as its own absence or invisibility.

In conclusion, I think that the only way to account for perceptionis by starting from the living body, which of course distinguishes myposition from a Heideggerian one. In spite of the fact that I think that

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concern (Sorge) reveals something important about the being of life, mysuggestion consists in something of a shift from a Heideggerian account;however, it is also a shift from Merleau-Ponty’s explicitly held posi-tion, because his account of the living body remains dependent onconsciousness. This is the reason why I think that the future of phe-nomenology lies in an ontology of life.

Edited by John Cogan

NOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1968), 247.

2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 75; originally published as Sein und Zeit, 7thed. (Tübingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1956).

3. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harperand Row, 1966; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), IX.

4. Ibid., 1.5. Ibid., 83.6. Ibid., 84.7. Ibid.8. Kurt Goldstein, La Structure de l’organisme, trans. E. Burckardt and J. Kuntz (Paris:

Gallimard, 1983), 402, 443; originally pubished as Der Aufbau des organismus (TheHague: M. NijhoV, 1934).