Onto-theology and the (sexual) incarnation of Being in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

Does Being require embodiment in a being? This seems at first sight ruled out by Heidegger’s ontological distinction, the difference between Being and beings. Being ‘is’ what lets beings be, hence it is not itself a being. Indeed, it is precisely by withdrawing from the ontic order of beings that Being can disclose beings qua beings: by thus withdrawing it forms the receding background of non-being against the backdrop of which beings can appear as beings. In this way, the ontological difference is central to Heidegger’s thought. Forgetting this distinction is precisely what Heidegger reproaches the tradition of Western philosophy with – a forgetting that manifests itself in what he calls “onto-theology”: the conceptualization of Being as a being. In onto-theology, Being is conceived as the highest, best or most basic being that underlies all other beings – such as Plato’s idea of the Good, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, Kant’s transcendental subject, Marx’s matter and Nietzsche’s Will to Power. It is this critique of onto-theology that motivates Heidegger’s rejection of religion: it may be tempting to identify Being – as that which lets everything be – with God, but God (if ‘He’ exists at all) is a being and as such already presupposes Being. Thus Being is more fundamental than God: Being is – so to speak – the ‘non-God’ behind God.

The semi-divine status of mortal man in Being and Time

But doesn’t Heidegger himself relativize the strictness of the ontological difference at various stages of his thinking? And doesn’t he thereby approach a form of onto-theology? For example, in the conceptual framework of Being and Time, Being is made relative to Dasein which from its directedness at death (Sein-zum-Tode) projects the world as the horizon of meaning within which all beings can appear. The anticipated death of Dasein forms the ultimate backdrop of non-being agains with beings can appear as beings. Thus the mortality of man becomes the very condition of possibility of the happening of Being itself, the Lichtung des Seins, the disclosure of beings. It has often been noted that this ontological prioritization of Dasein constitutes a kind of relapse into transcendental subjectivism (see for example William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Campbridge UP, 2005). This problem was probably one of the reasons why the second part of Being and Time remained unpublished and why the human being lost its central place in Heidegger’s later thought. What is rarely noted, however, is that Being and Time, with this ontological prioritization of Dasein, implies a form of onto-theology as well: mortal man, as the ‘place’ where Being happens, becomes a semi-divine being, on which all other beings depend. It is an interesting question whether and to what extent early Heidegger was influenced in this regard by the Christian understanding of human mortality as the key – in the humanity of Christ – to the process of Redemption.

The Greek temple discloses the concealing earth

Heidegger’s later notion earth as the repository of Being

In a later phase of Heidegger’s thought, the question of onto-theology reappears in his notion of “earth” as a the repository of the “mystery” of Being. Thus in The Origin of the Work of Art the ontological distinction – as the difference between Being and beings, between concealment and unconcealment – takes on the form of a “strife” between earth and world. In the concept of world we recognize without much trouble Heidegger’s earlier concept of world as it figured in Being and Time: world as the open horizon of meaning within which beings can appear to humans. The real innovation therefore lies in the notion of the earth as the concretized concealment underlying the unconcealment of the world. The earth “is by nature undisclosable... The earth is essentially self-secluding.” (The Origin of the Work of Art, p.47) For Heidegger, the earth is not primarily a “present-to-hand” mass of matter or the planet as astronomical object. His “earth” designates the dark, unknown and uncontrollable “inside” of nature on the basis of which man lives. Man builds his world on the earth: as such, the earth is “always already” presupposed and remains unthought. The potentials that lie dormant in the earth determine the historical possibilities open to the human world. But it is precisely the concealment of these possibilities that opens up our world in its historical boundaries. The opening of the world takes place against the backdrop of the concealing earth, which as such always threatens to take the world back into itself, to overgrow and erode the world if we do not actively maintain, nurture and protect it. This dialectical interplay between earth and world is conceived by Heidegger as a pre-Socratic strife (polemos):

“The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.” (The Origin of the Work of Art, p.49)

In this struggle, where world and earth hold each other in a tense equilibrium, the earth is nevertheless ontologically primary: the earth, as the concealment that conditions the disclosure of beings, performs the function of Being. In this sense one can say that, just as Being is embodied by mortal man in Being and Time, so this embodiment is accomplished by the concealing earth in Heidegger’s later thought. But doesn’t this again bring Heidegger in the vicinity of onto-theology? Doesn’t the earth as the concealing-unconcealing force constitute a primordial, divine being on which all other beings (including man) depend for their appearance?

Heidegger’s earth and the prehistoric Earth Mother

As has been suggested by the deep ecology movement, Heidegger’s notion of the earth is reminiscent of the prehistoric Earth Goddess, the Earth Mother, worshiped in the many Venus figurines which according to archaeologists were the first religious expressions of prehistoric mankind. This Mother Goddess – who survives in such later goddesses as Astarte, Demeter, Cybele and the Catholic quasi-goddess Mary – stood for the female force in nature, the source of fertility and the periodic regeneration of nature, the eternal cycle of life and death, creation and destruction. This obviously does not mean that Heidegger’s ontological notion of earth was already anticipated by prehistoric man (although one may wonder – if Heidegger can hark back to pre-Socratic thought – whether a recourse to more ancient sources is not possible as well). For one, the prehistoric image of the divine force in nature as specifically feminine seems to have no correlate in Heidegger’s thought, where the earth remains neutral with respect to sexuality. My main point now is merely that this notion of earth – like Heidegger’s earlier focus on mortal man as the place where beings are disclosed – suggests a form of onto-theology which unsettles the rigor of the ontological distinction. Hence my opening question: Does Being require embodiment in a being?

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh

In order to put this question in a somewhat broader frame and achieve a better view on the question of incarnation, it is worthwhile to enter into a brief discussion of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh, which bears a striking resemblance to Heidegger’s earth. Although the body is implicitly addressed in Being and Time in the analysis of the ready-to-hand (zuhandene) tools to which Dasein stands in a bodily-pragmatic relationship, the body itself as the precondition of the intentional relation to the world is not thematized by Heidegger – not in Being and Time and not in his later thought. The phenomenological thematization of the body is, of course, primarily the merit of Merleau-Ponty. He has shown in ample detail how it is always through our bodies that we see, smell, feel, hear, in short, perceive things. “Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body.” (Phenomenology of Perception, p.138) With his notion of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty refers primarily to the concealing or receding character of the body as the medium of intentionality: the flesh is the body insofar as it hides itself in order to let the perceived object come to the fore. The hand – to give an example typical of Merleau-Ponty – that feels an object, is not itself felt. As soon as we try to feel this feeling hand with our other hand, the first hand stops being the medium of intentionality and the second hand becomes that medium, which in its turn remains unfelt. This feeling but unfelt hand is an instance of the flesh.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Flesh as incarnation of Being

By extension, Merleau-Ponty applies this notion of flesh to any medium we use with our bodies to perceive the world. The cane with which a blind man explores his environment – a second example from Merleau-Ponty – fades into the background of attention in order to bring the explored environment to the fore: as such, the cane becomes one with the flesh of the feeling hand. In the same way, according to Merleau-Ponty, every receding background – the entire perceptual field that withdraws from attention in order to present a perceptual Gestalt – is part of the flesh as the medium of intentionality. Body and world melt together in their receding aspects to form the flesh against the backdrop of which objects can appear to our consciousness. As such, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh comes close to Heidegger’s notion of the concealing earth as the precondition of the openness of the human world. With a chiasm typical of the later Merleau-Ponty, one could put this affinity with Heidegger as follows: Human flesh is the earth in our bodies, the earth is the flesh in our world. This relationship with Heidegger is further suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s speaking explicitly of Being in relation to flesh: “that carnal being, as a being of depths [...] and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant”. (The visible and the invisible, p.136) And further on: “[I]t is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.” (Idem, p.151) Although the notion of Being is not central to The visible and the invisible and is not deeply explored there (possibly because of the fact that this book remained unfinished and was only published posthumously), it is nevertheless clear that Merleau-Ponty must have had Heidegger’s ontology in mind when he equated the flesh with the Being of a being (see for example the reference to “Being in Heidegger’s sense” in the Working Notes of that book, p.170). Hence, the flesh is not just the receding background that presents a being as this or that particular being, it is the receding background par excellence in that it presents the being as being. The flesh opens up not merely the what-ness of a being but also its that-ness, i.e. the fact that it exists in the first place. In that sense one can indeed say that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh grasps a certain incarnation of Being (cf. Merleau-Ponty’s phrase “prototype of Being” on p.136).

The perishability of flesh and its ontological significance

As I said, Merleau-Ponty does not really explore how the flesh performs this ontological function of incarnated Being. But in light of the early Heidegger’s insight into death as the backdrop of non-being against which the being can appear as being, it seems obvious in this context to point out the inherent perishability of all flesh. As it is said in the Christian tradition: the “way of all flesh” leads to death. This tendency toward death is an essential quality of flesh which, however, remains unexplored by Merleau-Ponty. Starting from this perishability of the flesh, its ontological-disclosive function can perhaps be understood somewhat better. The fading into the background of the flesh to make room for what appears, could also be understood as a form of dying, a real disappearance towards the non-being of death, in contrast to which all beings can appear as beings. It is thus, through its inner being-unto-death (Sein-zum-Tode), that the flesh can perform the dual function of disclosing not just the what-ness (identity) of a thing but also its that-ness (existence). In this way, we could also strike a bridge – through the notion of mortal flesh – between the Daseinsanalytik of the early Heidegger and his later notion of the concealing earth. The earth, as the flesh of the world, has a tendency to death in the sense that it constantly threatens to draw the creations of the human world back into its concealment. As such, the earth is also the grave of the dead, the dust to which man returns, the matter that perishes ceaselessly in the sensory flux. Living from the earth, based on the earth as a “grounded” being, man has in his flesh (the earthly part of his body) an orientation towards death, in contrast to which beings are opened up for him as beings.

Further questions: onto-theology, sexual difference, mortality

These notions of mortal man, earth and flesh – as elaborated by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – bring into sharp relief the question whether Being needs to be incarnated in a mortal being and whether this amounts to a rehabilitation of onto-theology and thereby of religion. Concerning the latter, the relationship with Christianity seems especially important here. The conception of God as incarnated in a mortal being whose suffering and death grants the world a new dispensation – this is, after all, Christianity par excellence. Christ is the incarnate Word, “all things have their being in Him” (Epistle to the Colossians 1: 17). On the other hand, as already indicated, the originally prehistoric worship of the earth as Mother Goddess seems relevant here as well. This relationship with femininity as an onto-theological category is also suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh, which shows a clearly feminine connotation. Thus Merleau-Ponty speaks of the flesh as an “invagination” of the world, an infolding retraction of the world which opens up the appearance of beings. And the flesh which folds itself inward in order to make room for the appearance of something else – is this not ideally the womb, the space in which every human being comes into existence? In this regard we could also refer to the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, who interprets Heidegger’s ontological difference in terms of the sexual difference between man and woman. With Irigaray, the “maternal-feminine” becomes the original matrix, the ontological uterus, the material “Source of Being” (L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger, p.17). Starting from a broader cultural stereotype – which calls for caution, since it tends to sexism – we might say that body (as forefronting, erect, phallic) carries a masculine connotation, while the connotation of flesh (as receding, invaginating, receiving) is more feminine.

Baptismal font – Mary's womb?

Given the threat of sexism and phallogocentrism, however, the question is whether the issue of the incarnation of Being should be developed in the gendered terms of sexuality. Is it possible, for example, to understand Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh in neutral terms, bypassing the sexual difference? Or is flesh always already sexually determined, such that the notion of sexless flesh is a nonsensical and misguided product of political correctness? And what is in this connection the meaning of Christianity, where the Incarnate Word is decisively masculine (“The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” – with some good will, the Holy Spirit can be described as feminine, as some Christians do). How does Christianity relate to the ancient religion of the Mother Goddess as the feminine power in the earth? Do these exlcude each other or is a dialogue possible between them, leading to a deeper onto-theological understanding of the incarnation of Being in which both male and female play a role? What is the significance here of Mary as the Mother of God? And of the fact that the baptismal fond is sometimes referred to as “the womb of Mary”? Does this allow us a synthesis of Christianity with the older religion of the Earth Mother?

But the most fundamental question concerns the incarnation of Being as such. Is onto-theology of that kind tenable in the light of Heideggerian ontology, which we have taken as our starting point here? Is it possible to do justice to the fundamental thought of the ontological difference – the thought of Being as the background of non-being against which beings can appear – and at the same time understand Being as incarnated in a concrete being? Does this remain an insurmountable paradox? Or does the solution lie, as I already suggested, in the mortality of that onto-theologically “highest” being? Is the being that dies – and which as such moves in the twilight region between something and nothing – capable of incarnating Being while also upholding the ontological difference? Is it possible, in other words, for Being to incarnate itself in a disappearing being? And how does this constitutive disappearance relate to sexual difference? Is the disappearing being primarily male or female? Or neither? Or both, like something between them?

On media as milieu

In medias res
How to begin? A meaningless question... You have already begun. You have always already begun, and not even by yourself. Thinking begins in medias res, in the midst of an existence that has been going on for a long time and that apparently provides food for thought. During the course of things one comes to self-awareness. Like a sleepwalker wakes up during his walk as he bumps up against something. Or worse...

“During the course of things one comes to self-awareness.” Can I put it in even more impersonal terms? Whereas the consequence is precisely that thinking is always personal, or more accurately formulated: tied to the concrete situation of a person's position in the world, in life. Thinking emerges from that personal situation and expresses it. In Marxist terms: thinking is an expression of a concrete interest – where “interest” has two related meanings. Firstly the obvious sense of importance, of having an interest in someone or something. Second, the literal meaning of being in-between (Latin: “inter” = between, “esse” is being). The situatedness of the thinking subject is his being in-between, his position among things, among people, surrounded by society, embedded in matter. In that sense thinking is an expression of a milieu – literally, a place in the middle (French: “mi” = middle, “lieu” = place), a place surrounded by everything.



Chiasm #1: Language in man, man in language
The milieu in which man moves – is this not first and foremost: language? Man is distinguished from the (other) animals through – among other things – his use of self-made instruments and media: weapons, fire, technology, clothing, housing, music, drugs... Thus man mediates his relationship to nature and his own development as a human being. Man is homo mediator, the media wielding primate. Of these instruments, however, the most important one – the most human instrument – is no doubt language. Social organization – and the cooperation to which man owes his productivity (Marx) – would be impossible without language. In this sense, language is the primary means of social production. And this social organization forms man in the capillaries of his consciousness. Man becomes self-aware through his relation to other people: as they look at him, so he learns to look at himself. Self-awareness is an internalization of social relationships (G.H. Mead, Hegel). In that sense, language as the medium of social organization is also the medium of self-awareness. Man hears his own voice. By speaking to others, man discovers his own thoughts and learns how to control them, how to think consciously. Thinking develops through language from thinking aloud to “silent inner speech” (Vygotsky). The grammatical structure of language forms the categorical structures of consciousness. We ‘see’ the world through the ‘spectacles’ of language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Language opens up the world to us. What Chomsky has called the “generativity of language” plays a major role here: language enables us to create an infinite number of words and phrases from a finite number of elements (most obviously: the alphabet) – a potential infinity thanks to which our experience of the world is basically unlimited. Thanks to language, man is not tied to an Umwelt – as each animal is adapted to a particular Umwelt (environment) – but he is weltoffen, open to a world with indefinite horizons (Heidegger).

Language is our element, we move in language as fish in water, birds in the air or moles in the earth. This is a paradoxical relationship: we are in language, yet at the same time language is within us and between us. Language is our means, we have it and produce it by speaking and writing. In this sense, language is our expression, our externalization, our reflection. As a medium of communication (Latin: “medium” = middle) language exists only between us, in our interaction. At the same time, that medium is our milieu, the element in which we live. The relationship between man and language is therefore a relation of mutual implication: humans in language, language in humans. This chiasm is perhaps strange and paradoxical, yet it gives an extra dimension of meaning to the term “milieu”. The milieu of language is not just a ‘middle place’ in the sense that we live in the middle of it, but also in the sense that language is our medium and as such lives only as the middle between us. The fact that language is our milieu then means something like: we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.

Chiasm #2: Medium as milieu, milieu as medium
Of course, language is not our only medium. We relate to others by means of numerous media, from the light that allows us to see and be seen to the clothes through which we express our public personalities, from the music that synchronizes dancers to money as a medium of exchange between individuals... In this respect, the postmodern, mediatized network society is nothing new. Digial media are merely the high-tech continuation of the typically human, mediated relation to the other. As embodied, sensory beings, we need to rely on material means in our dealings with others. This contact is never direct, never im-mediate: there is no telepathy. The communication of ‘spiritual’ contents (meanings, intentions) is always materially mediated. The only direct contact possible for us is exactly the contact with the material means or medium through which we reach for something or someone else. The contact with the medium itself cannot be mediated, at the risk of an infinite regression of media (which would make mediated contact with something else entirely impossible). Marx formulates this insight with respect to the technical means of production as follows: “The object of which the laborer takes immediate control [during the proces if production, PS] is not the worked upon object [Arbeitsgegenstand], but the means of production [Arbeitsmittel].”[1] In this sense we can speak of the immediacy of technology to humans.  

   The immediacy of technology à la Merleau-Ponty

But this unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium makes it clear that an immediate contact is strictly speaking impossible. For in the unmediated ‘contact’ with the medium, the medium itself is not the goal of the contact, i.e. the theme of the contact-seeking attention: this intended theme is the other to be reached through the medium. The medium itself is indeed immediately ‘given’ but it is also unthematically ‘given’ to the subject using the medium. The immediate contact with the medium remains unconscious. Conscious contact, however, is always materially mediated. Once the subject becomes aware of his contact with the medium, it no longer functions as a medium but as an object of conscious attention – an object in turn given to consciousness through another medium. A blind man, for example, uses his cane to feel the environment,  and in that sense the cane – qua medium – is an extension of his feeling hand and arm, like an antenna, with which he has an immediate but unthematic contact. As soon as the blind man becomes aware of his cane, however, at that moment the immediate contact with it stops and his hand becomes the new medium through which he feels the cane. In turn, the hand stops being the sensitive medium as soon as the blind man tries to feel it with his other hand: the first hand becomes an object, the second hand becomes the feeling medium through which that object is given.[2] In this way one’s conscious contact with one's surroundings – even with one’s own objectified body – is always mediated by a more primary environment, an unthematically given “immediate milieu” so to speak, namely the material medium through which we perceive and interact with others. In the first place that immediate environment – that mediating milieu – is the ek-static body, the unobjectified body that stands out toward the world (Greek: “ek” = out, “stasis” = stand). Our focus on the world – or rather on the other in the world – always starts from the looking, feeling, tasting, smelling and hearing body. “Consciousness is”, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body.”[3] As Merleau-Ponty has shown with abundant detail, that focus on the world through the body always involves a hiddenness, a retreat, a “recess of the body”[4] in unconscious immediacy. The body as the primary medium is never object of conscious attention. As such the ek-static body underlies all the other media we use. Obviously, we use external media always through our bodies: we press our ear to the mobile phone, we move the mouse with our hand, we focus our eyes on the screen. In this sense we can say with McLuhan that media are extensions of our bodies, like the cane of the blind man is an extension of his hand scanning the environment.[5] This partly in the superficial sense that we greatly extend the reach of our bodies by using media: microscopes allow us to see the very small and near, telescopes allow us to see the very large and distant, cranes allow us to lift enormous weights, computers allow us to extend our memory and computing power...


 

Digital flesh: The Borg Queen from the Star Trek movie First Contact









But media are also extensions of our body in the more interesting sense that the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body is passed on to the external media we use. The external media share in the unconsciousness of the medial body. The cane, with which the blind man scans his environment, is not itself thematically given but ‘merges’ with the scanning hand. The mobile phone ‘merges’ with the ear through which we hear the other. The mouse ‘merges’ with the hand with which we navigate the computer screen. Even the light, when we see objects, is an extension of the eye: as the medium of visibility, the light shares in the unthematic immediacy of the eye itself – the light that makes everything visible, remains itself invisible and is ‘dark’ so to speak. In this way we can understand Marx’s claim that the entire world as man’s means of living [Lebensmittel] is his “inorganic body”.[6] Merleau-Ponty speaks in this regard of “the flesh of the world”, where “flesh” is synonymous with the unthematic immediacy of the ek-static body. In that sense, all the media through which we relate to an other – including light as the medium of visibility – are part of this flesh: the light is luminous flesh, the crane is mechanical flesh, the computer and the mobile phone and the iPad and such are digtal flesh… This ‘mediating flesh’ – the ‘meat of the medium’ – constitutes our immediate environment, our milieu. One could even argue that this is the correct definition of “milieu” as such, namely to be our mediating flesh. A milieu, after all, is an environment in which one is immersed, it surrounds and embeds. And the primary surrounding is the immediate environment, i.e. the flesh of the ek-static body and its mediating extensions. The milieu, then, is first and foremost the environment of media in which one is immersed. From this perspective, ​the statement above regarding language – that the medium is the milieu – can also be chiastically reversed: the milieu is essentially medium. The above formula of “mediating milieu” is therefore strictly speaking a pleonasm. The milieu is – to repeat an earlier insight – not just a middle position in that we live in the middle of it, but also in the sense that it is our medium and as such is the middle between us and the other. That we live in a milieu, then, means something like: we are right in the middle of the middle that connects us.

[1] Das Kapital I, MEW, p. 194.

[2] Both examples are inspired by Merleau-Ponty.

[3] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p.138.

[4] Merleau-Ponty, The visible and the invisible, p.9.

[5] McLuhan (1964), Understanding media: The extensions of man, London.

[6] Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, MEW.