Happy Existentialist Metaphors: Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World and the Chandos Complex

Annabelle Dufourcq

doi:10.3390/h11010017

Abstract

This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes.

Highlights

Existentialism famously overturns the classic link between imagination and nothingness into an ontological superpower, or rather superweakness
It is crucial to hold on to the notion of the flesh of the world as being and with the same intensity a metaphor and an ontological concept. This figure can evade a gnostic version of existentialism
A strength of Merleau-Ponty philosophy is his idea of “indirect ontology” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 179): no direct access to a mysterious Being separated from beings, but rather an ontology that is immanent in a process of reinforcing affective relations with other beings

Summary

Introduction

Existentialism famously overturns the classic link between imagination and nothingness into an ontological superpower, or rather superweakness. Merleau-Ponty—who devoted his master’s thesis research to Plotinus’ philosophy—resolutely opts for more radiant images He embraces a fundamental mood that Bachelard described in The Poetics of Space as the “enthusiasm” that “is born of adherence to the felicity of an image”, by way of an alternative to the propension of existentialism to showcase images of man as “cast [jeté] into the world” Let me be clear: showing the essential link between the existentialist ontology and the imaginary is certainly a way of deflating ontology, as it were, but not of reducing it to psychology It is precisely at the level of the flesh of the world that being and the human being, tells itself stories. I will contend that the irony and the ambivalence of Chandos, as manifested in a fanciful and playful piece of literature, stand at the heart of ontology in its most fundamental form

The Flesh of the World

A Failed Metaphor?

Merleau-Ponty’s Oscillations

The Chandos Complex

The Ontological Imaginary Dimension of the Flesh

Conclusions