The Seer, The Seen, The Flesh (according to Merleau-Ponty)

In his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticized what he called “perceptual faith”. For him, the philosophical and scientific tradition has been working with faith in the opposition between the subject (seer) and the object (seen). But this faith in itself has never been fully discussed. Consequently, Merleau-Ponty tries to go beyond the opposition between subject and object and presents a very basic and, at the same time, unusual argument: The seer is always visible; the seer is not merely a subject who sees the other. On the contrary, the seer is deeply implicated in the visible. Thus, there is not such a binary opposition between the seer and the visible; but rather, they both participate in the same element, of the same “flesh”.

I

One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself –or the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body, and a ramification of the world, and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside.
The Visible and the Invisible(1968:136)

II

..to see the other is essentially to see my body as an object, so that the other’s body could have a psychic “side”. The experience of my own body and the experience of the other are themselves the two sides of the same Being:
where I say that I see the other, in fact it especially happens that I objectify my body, the other is the horizon or other side of this experience.
The Visible and the Invisible(1968:225)