about the fact that I am thinking.
Merleau-Ponty translates the cogito as follows: It is absolutely certain and indubitable that I think because, were I to doubt that I am thinking, I would already be performing the act of thinking and, in so doing, thus proving that I cannot doubt it. What makes it certain is my “doing” the thinking, not my possession of mental contents. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty (PP, 378–82) remarks that I can be sure of my emotions only if my behavior corresponds to the possession of these emotions. For example: It is hard to believe that I am in love with someone, that my being is in the pangs of love, if my behavior remains entirely indifferent toward the object of my affection. Only when my behavior becomes that of a person in love (which does not mean that it needs to conform to the “standard” behavior of someone in love), only when my concrete existence is shaped by my being in love, can I be certain that I am in love. It is by performing the act of being in love, the praxis of being in love, and not by having amorous thoughts, that I am transformed into a person truly in love.
However, Merleau-Ponty differs from Descartes in the way he understands the certainty of the act that grounds the certainty of the cogito. For Descartes, the act of thinking is certain because it is based on a coincidence of subject and object. I am certain that I am thinking because I am the one who creates my mental contents. I cannot doubt the fact that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday, because I am the one who constitutes this idea. Thought, in Descartes, has divine characteristics: It not only precedes what is seen and said; it is, moreover, constitutive of the latter. Hence, nothing exists outside thought. Thought has no outside; it “compresses into itself everything at which it aims” (PP, 372). It is not limited by anything. Descartes (PP, 371) describes thought in a way that makes it completely autarkic and autonomous, and the result is the absolute transparency of the object to the subject.
Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not believe that an act presupposes a coincidence of subject and object. On the contrary, an act is always oriented to an outside. This need not mean that the object is uncertain. Unlike Descartes, who affirms that it is impossible to doubt the act but doubts the object toward which the act is oriented (my belief in the existence of the world could be the effect of a malicious demon), Merleau-Ponty believes that if the act is certain, the object is so too.5 The reason is that it is impossible for the act to be oriented toward something and, at the same time, to deny the existence of this thing. This is not to say that we cannot be oriented toward objects that do not exist in reality, as in the case of hallucinations, but then we do not conceive of them as being unreal in the moment of the performance.
Hence, Merleau-Ponty succeeds where Descartes fails: he is able to affirm the certainty of the world. His grounds for doing so are different from the grounds of Descartes, though, for he does not stop the possibly endless chain of doubt by making subject and object coincide. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty thinks that every thought can be doubled into a thought of a thought (I think, I think that I think, I think that I think that I think, etc.); that there is no “thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it” (PP, 400). This chain of doubt can be stopped only by referring to an existential context, that is, to the fact that in real life, subject and object are always separated but nevertheless connected in certainty. Merleau-Ponty thus inverses Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum: he does not deduce my existence and the existence of the world from the cogito, but grounds the cogito in their existence, in our carnal being-to-the-world. Allow me to illustrate this with the example of geometric thought.
Geometric Thought. Suppose we have the following geometric situation: We have an arbitrary triangle with angles A, B, and C. Through its apex, C, a line is drawn that is parallel to its basis. This line generates two new angles, D and E, each at either side of the angle formed by the apex C of the triangle. How do we understand the geometrical truth that the sum of the three angles, C, D, and E, equals the sum of the three angles, A, B, and C?
Before we are able to understand how the conclusion can be deduced from the premises, we need to be able to understand the premises and the conclusion in themselves. We need to be able to picture the geometrical situation, to understand the configuration of the triangle, that is, to understand, for example, what an “angle” is, what “parallel” indicates, and so on. According to Merleau-Ponty, this understanding is grounded on our living experience, on the fact that our bodies are situated in, and interact with, the world. I can understand what “parallel” is because I am myself vertically positioned with respect to the ground and have to change the direction of my body when I want to go to sleep. I can understand what an angle is because my body itself forms an angle with the things it wants to grab and with the ground upon which it stands. In sum, I understand notions such as “angle” and “parallel” because they suggest to me a field of possible movements (PP, 386). I can grasp the essence of a triangle, not because I know all of its objective features, but because I see it as “the formula of an attitude, a certain modality of my hold on the world” (PP, 386).
However, it is not only the understanding of geometric notions that relies on our lived experience. Notions that do not directly refer to the way our body is oriented in space are likewise understood from our lived body. Merleau-Ponty states, for example, that we learn a new word not by memorizing its semantic meaning, but by adopting the manner in which the body needs to comport itself in order to speak this word. This involves imitating the specific position of the speech organs, as well as the facial expression and the hand movements that accompany it. It involves the global bodily context in which a word is used. In spontaneous language acquisition, it is only after this carnal context has been internalized that the semantic meaning can be isolated. I remember, for example, that as a teenager, I was already using the word hypocrite before I could explain what it actually meant. In sum, understanding concepts, geometrical or other, requires a lived body.
If we return to the geometrical proof above, we notice that something more is happening than simply understanding the geometrical configuration. The proof also asks us to draw a relation between different concepts, to deduce a conclusion from the premises. It is clear that this is not an analytic deduction, for the conclusion is not implied in the definition or eidos of the premises. There is nothing in the idea of these three angles, C, D, and E, that already refers to the sum of A, B, and C. The conclusion does not spell out what is already given in the premises, but, on the contrary, it crystallizes, reorganizes, and synchronizes the premises. The initial confusion of meaning present in the premises, the openness of different possibilities of meaning-directions,6 is now organized according to one meaning and is thus reduced and, more importantly, transformed. The process of geometrical proof is fundamentally creative, or expressive. But how does the geometer do this? What is the origin of the transformation he generates? He can deduce the conclusion from the premises because he has, while picturing the triangle, experienced the possibility of a transition. The specific modality of his hold on the world—the triangle, in this case—is traversed by lines of force that lead him to something new. Merleau-Ponty says the proof is generated from the “dynamic formula of the triangle” (PP, 386), and this, again, is a function of our being situated as a body in the world. Hence, both the picturing of premises and conclusions, as well as the deduction of the latter from the first, rely on existence, or on the general structure of the way we relate as bodies to the world. Geometry, and other expressive operations as well (language and art), is entirely devoid of meaning when separated from this existential ground (PP, 102). The lived body and the way it inhabits the world is their condition of possibility.
But is this idea that thought (along with other expressive operations) is grounded in our bodily being-to-the-world in contradiction with the aforementioned idea that self-consciousness is the condition for perception, speech, and positing thought? What is the condition of all expressive operations, our lived experience of the world, or thought’s immediate contact with itself? As Rudi Visker observes, one of the central preoccupations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is “the metaphysical problem concerning a creation which is not ex subjecto and yet [is] more than a mere reproduction of already pre-existing givens” (1999, 105). As the analysis of geometric thought shows, concepts cannot be considered merely products of the human mind. They are anchored in our carnal being-to-the-world. At the same time, however, the example of geometric proof showed that there is definitely