Blake's Fourfold Vision: Unlocking Divine Imagination Beyond Coleridge's Primary/Secondary

At the end of the first volume of his Biographia Literaria Coleridge makes a distinction between Primary and Secondary Imagination:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the ‘kind’ of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially ‘vital’, even as all objects (‘as’ objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (1965, pp. 57-58)

Richards characterises the primary imagination as:

normal perception that produces the usual world of the senses,
That inanimate cold world allowed

To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd the world of motor-buses, beef-steaks, the framework of things and events within which we maintain our everyday existence, the world of our routine satisfaction of our minimum exigencies. (1960, p. 58)

Secondary reflection reforms this world, not only through poetry, but also through endowing every aspect of the routine world with values beyond those of mere survival; the mundane is transformed into the realm of value through acts of loving admiration that outreach the perspective of scientific inquiry.

This characterisation of the two imaginations, the foundational natural, which exists without aesthetic value, and the constructive symbolic, which alone defines it, may well make a good deal of sense from the point of view of the established poet, whose task is to add value to the everyday object or event, but it surely does not capture the sense of Coleridge’s primary imagination as "the living Power and prime Agent” which asserts a self-identity through the acts of creating a world. It is this living power that is responsible for the continuity between the natural existence of imagination in the human mind and its secondary manifestations, so that the secondary is "identical in kind” with the primary. It is the life-embracing vitality of the primary imagination which, in Heidegger’s terms, "throws” us into a world of value: the value of survival, physical and psychological, the value of ‘making’ a world beyond the immediate, a world defined by our capacity both to order and manipulate it (the achievements of science and technology) and to make a sort of order for ourselves within it through religion and poetry. We shall see subsequently how each of these three modes possesses its own form of truthfulness. Coleridge writes:

He {the poet} diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonises the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter. (1965, p. 67)

Then the journey of the reader:

But if the definition sought for is that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportionate harmonising with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement...The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical interest of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air: at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. (1965, p. 66)

Central to the work of the artist, Coleridge affirms, is the creation of a proportionate harmony. There is an excellent description of this process by Schonberg who asserts that the ‘idea’ of the work is the totality which the creator wishes to present:

Every tone which is added to a beginning tone makes the meaning of that tone doubtful. If for instance, G follows after a C, the ear may not be sure whether this expresses C major or G major or even F major or E minor; and the addition of other tones may or may not clarify this problem. In this manner there is produced a state of unrest, of imbalance which grows through most of the piece, and is enforced further by similar functions of the rhythm. The method by which balance is restored seems to me to be the real ‘idea’ of the composition. Perhaps the frequent repetition of themes, groups, and even larger sections might be considered as attempts toward an early balance of the inherent tension.One thinks only for the sake of one’s idea. An idea is born; it must be molded, formulated, developed, elaborated, carried through and pursued to its very end. (1984, p. 122-123)

Henri Matisse, similarly, states that his work is guided through a search for a "proportion of tones” which imparts to every element of a painting a defining relationship to the whole. This is the one within the all and the all within the one that constitutes, in Ingarden’s (1979) phrase, the "world of the work”. It follows that any valid appreciation of a work itself requires thinking for the sake of its guiding idea; in a painting or similar art object, we must "read back” from the completed product to see the necessity of the artist’s choices, whereas with a story or poem, music or ballet, we are given the sense of an immediate unfolding of meaning driving towards its end.

We look at the diminutive figures and industrial landscapes of a Lowry painting set in the 1920s and arrive at a view, for example, of life lived within the machine of capitalism (though this may not accurately reflect Lowry’s own perspective), whereas in reading a Graham Greene novel we become increasingly aware of entering the distinct culture of Greeneland. In both instances, the guiding idea is one of mood and of a certain Weltanschauung. Think then of this idea as a way of looking at the world which is also a way living your life. It is a lived idea, one that is validated (that is, seen as truthful) through one’s engagement with it, and it is, in Schonberg’s words, "a method by which balance is restored”.

Of all the poets of the Romantic era, (although he objected to much of the Romantic movement), it is William Blake who gives us a sense of an imagination prior to the sophistications of the secondary. For Blake, it seems as though metaphor is so part of his nature that he immediately makes it a present reality:

What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles or tears
For double the vision my eyes do see
And a double vision is always with me
With my Inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey
With my outward a Thistle across my way

The thistle is not simply observed as a part of nature. Blake’s imagination is not that of neutral observation (he calls such "Newton’s Sleep”), but one of a total engagement through metaphor of all the forces that surround the task of being human, and, in the manner of the primary consciousness of early humankind, he invents mythical figures to represent the essential nature of the forces they represent. Of the greatest importance is the figure of Los, who represents the creative fire of poetry.

Thus Los appeared in all his power
In the Sun he appeared descending before
My face in fierce flames in my double sight
‘Twas outward a Sun, inward Los in his might.

Los is accompanied by Urizen, who represents objective reason, by Tharmas, who reprints the physical world, and Luvah, who symbolises human emotion. These, and many others, represent the major aspects of human experience; they are in this sense archetypal figures which enter consciousness when it advances beyond that twofold metaphor to the third and fourth levels of metaphorical expression:

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision and Newton’s sleep

The third, "soft Beulah’s night” is a generalisation of the second: it refers to a state of mind in which all aspects of metaphorical experience unite in a peaceful and gracious whole; identical, perhaps, to the Paradise of Holderlin’s Diotima: a state of mind without evil and divisiveness but immediately destroyed by any exposure to these. Blake held that development depends upon "contraries”, that the bad is a necessary part of the progression of the good, being that which has to be overcome for its secure establishment. The fourth level he calls Divine Imagination and characterises it as the level of Infinity or Eternity, signifying the mind’s reach of absolute and universal experience. It is at once a return to Innocence and the consequence of the revealing poetic experience. He writes:

Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is Not to be Acquired It is born with us Innate Ideas are in Every Man Born with him...Man Brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born like a Garden ready Planted and Sown This World is too poor to produce one Seed...He who does not know Truth at Sight is unworthy of Her Notice...The Man who never in his Mind and Thoughts traveld to Heaven Is No Artist. (Peter Ackroyd, 1999)

This is the logic of Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle Dove, the paradoxical union of infinity and the earthly that all great Art plays upon. Blake believed, as did Vico, that, in an age in which Reason subordinates the fire of primary imagination, the mind loses its capacity to "travel to Heaven”, the knowledge of which is given by the innocent eye of the imagination. Innocence of vision in that fourth realm of the Divine Imagination requires "cleansing the doors of perception” to enter once more a world given its meaning by the activity of the poetic imagination. He characterises this world as Infinity or Eternity to indicate an experience of states of mind in which each part is experienced as a reflection of an encompassing whole. We witness here the essentially metaphorical procedure of Blake’s thought, since only through metaphor can we experience this form of experienced unity:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

Blake named his philosophy of poetry a Divine Humanism. It is, as Frye (1947) has suggested, a kind of mysticism, not one of quiet contemplation or one expressing itself in acts of piety, but a vision of the powers of imagination itself to form a mind in which the contraries of inner and outer worlds, subject and object, feeling and thinking, and, most significantly, of the human and the Divine, become one. This is Blake’s faith. God is Imagination. Nicholas of Cusa’s "knot of experience” which connects the mundane with the divine is firmly tied. Wallace Stevens, in his "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”, also proclaimed that "God and the Imagination are one”, describing this experience as "the intensest rendezvous” and "the central mind”. But, whilst Stevens makes of the experience an acceptance - "we make a dwelling in the evening air/ in which being there together is enough” - Blake’s view of imagination is visionary and prophetic and comes with the obligation to change the world we experience.

Horse of Selene: Hofstadter on Art's Vital Presence & the Aesthetic Experience

The art work that provides a particular focus for Hofstadter’s (1965) philosophy of art is a sculpture: the Head of the Horse of Selene, crafted by Phidias and situated at the Eastern Pediment of the Parthenon in the British Museum. The head is not that of a horse at rest; the mouth and nostrils are open, the eyes bulging, presumably after the exertion of a race. Our attention ceases to wander. It is drawn exclusively to the sculpture; this is, says Hofstadter, the primal experience of the aesthetic: we are gripped or seized, before any reflection or judgment, by "its power of vital presence” in an experience which binds us to the work and hold us there.

This is the first, elemental experience of the aesthetic: it produces a living present which has an empowering identity to which we can return again and again. That identity may be attained in the drama of a ceremonial ritual or in the peace of the art gallery: in both instances the created expression is fulfilled by our engagement with it. In that moment self and world, expression and recognition, inner and outer, are experienced as ‘arising" together. This arising signifies, as Hofstadter points out, that we cannot talk either of an expression (the working of the artist or the group) as simply revealing something that ‘already existed within the mind (individual or collective) of the creator or of an object (the work) merely as copying an already established object. Phidias has not copied the head of a horse, nor did he know exactly how it should be expressed in the beginning. The working is not a steady progress to an already defined criterion of fulfilment; the criterion is found through the working.

The excitement we feel in a work of art lies in that ‘finding’ which binds us to its vital presence. The work, becoming a part of our world, allows us to find its significant presence repeatedly. Hamburger (1991) refers to art as our "second nature”, signalling its power to be at once created (ours) and yet beyond ourselves. Nowadays, we are accustomed to think of the art work as primarily only a matter of self-concern, its significance lying solely in "my" enlightenment: appreciation is heightened inwardness. But this was not the case in the beginning.

The drama of the ritual, the tribal dance, the cave painting, was essentially a communal activity in which there was no differentiation between its effects upon the individual and the group. We have become so accustomed to being an audience for the work that we have forgotten its original force as that which forms and unites a community. This was Vico’s insight. Early humans may, indeed, have shared activities which aided their survival in a hostile environment, but he understood that a lasting community of shared norms could only flourish in the light of a symbolic unity provided by experiences which are both created by us and experienced as beyond ourselves: the poetic world that makes possible a sense of renewal in an achieved balance of forces from within and from without.

The symbolism of the work of art succeeds through situating the self that makes and the object that is given in a co-dependent relationship. The unity is that of a joint expressiveness of the inner with the outer, a mutuality of forms of expression in which we are able to affirm our being as a being-in-the-world. It is in this sense that we can assert the truth that aesthetic reality is a joint differentiation of self and world, of inner and outer. The head of the horse of Selene is not the horse which can appear in a classification of horses in general according to their particular features; it is that individual horse expressing itself at a particular moment of its existence. We respond to the artist’s depiction of the expressiveness of the creature’s being because it speaks a truth that our own human being can recognise. There occurs in the moment of seizure a conjunction of the horse’s perceived qualities in the life it expresses with a matching sense on our part of a recognition that confirms and defines our own sense of being alive. That’s the great gift of the art that rewards our participation: we are enlarged and experience the world more fully.

What we experience in instances such as this is not a truth made by observations which reveal a reality independent of our selves, nor is it the truth to be found in the manipulation of objects in order to "make them work”. It is not the beginning of science or technology. Observation and technique are, of course, present, but serve a different purpose. Hofstadter quotes Hegel in this regard;

Truth in the deeper sense consists in the identity between objectivity and the concept. It is in this deeper sense that we speak of a true state, or of a true work of art. These objects are true, if they are as they ought to be, i.e., if their reality corresponds with their concept. When thus viewed, to be untrue means much the same as to be bad. A bad man is an untrue man, a man who does not behave as his concept or vocation requires. (1965, p. 141)

This man, says Hofstadter, is not bad primarily in the moral sense, although he is that too, but in the sense that he is an "unliving, inactual man whose spirit is defective in some way...”. He possesses no "ought to be” and could, in our aesthetic example, show no appreciation of the ought-to-be of the horse. In the language of phenomenology, he has no intentional hold on things, no purposeful projecting of himself into the intentionality, the ought, displayed by the sculptured horse: thus there can be no meeting of minds. This is Hegel’s truth of spirit. In its aesthetic mode, an object (painting, poem, music) is made which fulfils itself. It fulfils the being that is in its nature. It is also Vico’s idea that the essential aspects of the made - the divine in its poetic nature, the sense of the communal, and the symbolic world that humans create - are both within our nature and that which we cultivate to express our humanity. Science and technology also make a symbolic world that maps aspects of the world as it exists and has developed, but their methodologies exclude what Natanson (1970) called "the journeying self”, which seeks its own being, its ought, through its engagement with a world that is itself expressive of its own nature.

For Hofstadter, this world meeting our engagement is primarily that of beauty. He writes:

Vitality, energy, power is the ground of being; measured form is the condition or the determinate state in which the dynamic ground of being becomes a being; the entity formed is the being that results as an actuality.

The horse strikes us as a being that is actualised, that has come to its own truth. In it - as in the colour of gold or in the snowflake - we perceive the actuality of being: energy, dynamism, life emerging into the open sphere of actual existence. It is able to emerge ‘as’ being, exactly by the measure of the form. The measure gives it opportunity to take shape, i.e., emerge, without obstructing it by a too unrelenting stricture or dissipating it by one too weak, without smothering it by a too great burden of corporeity or thinning it out by one too slight.

Life disports itself in the horse, living itself out there in all the naive glory of animal existence. And that is one reason, in addition to the long friendship between us, and despite the intervention of a thousand technological marvels of speed and transportation, we love the horse, finding it beautiful. (1965, pp. 147-148)

The beautiful gives us the sense of a vital presence revealed as proportionate form. This is Hegel’s truth of spirit: a being becoming, projecting, as it were, its own ought or concept as its final, limiting and definitive state. All creatures (and, by extension, nature itself) display this “will" to be. The elephant or giraffe are just as alive as the horse, but, argues Hofstadter, they lack the proportionate form which defines the beautiful; they are what they are without meeting the aesthetic criteria of the beautiful in their actuality. But here is a quandary: having made the beautiful the ultimate criterion of aesthetic truth, must we then conclude that all living things which fall below this standard cannot attain to the truth of spirit? Hofstadter, recognising this dilemma, makes the distinction between what a creature ‘is’ and what it looks like, i.e., its appearance. “The truth of beauty lies, however, in the appearance. Beauty is the appearance of truth - not of any truth at random, but of truth of ‘being’" (Hofstadter, 1965, p. 148). I’m not sure that introducing the idea of beauty is helpful here. It suggests an unnecessary contradiction, namely that, on the one hand, we recognise truth of spirit as the appearing of being in its becoming, that is, in its becoming what it is according to its concept, and, on the other hand, as an appearance distinct from the actuality of its becoming in the sense that it requires for its truth the exercise of a judgment of aesthetic proportionality. The unity of the aesthetic process seems disrupted, the form of beauty imposed upon the living will to be.

We can attempt to resolve this contradiction if in the first place we distinguish two phases of the aesthetic. The first, primordial phase is the newly found, vital presence of something previously hidden to awareness. There is no judgment other than the recognition of a powerful presence: for Hofstadter, a horse, for D. H. Lawrence a black snake at a waterhole which made him feel “so honoured”, for the Ancient Mariner, the sight of the sea eels that precipitated the release from the albatross. The second phase is that of contemplation or reflection which is the assessment of the significance of the sudden appearance: why is it that one returns to that sculpture of the horse’s head again and again to be entranced by its power and proportion, why did Lawrence feel so honoured, why that sudden release of a burden for the Mariner? In the first instances of the appearance of the aesthetic among humans, there is, of course, no contemplation in the modern sense. For Vico’s first humans, the powerful presence was perceived as a threat or punishment that could only be assuaged through ritualised expressiveness occurring within special or sacred places; confronted with an environment in which life and death existed in equal measure, the aesthetic was an aid to survival, a way of responding to the gods in the space cleared for that interaction.

That dialogue stimulated by a powerful presence remains the inner space guarded by the aesthetic. The aesthetic object provides the space in which both a revelation and a reflection upon its significance can occur. But, witness the great diversity of styles and topics in its history, it is not a space whose boundaries can be well-defined, nor does it seem possible to single out and define one unchanging, supreme criterion of what constitutes proportion or beauty that may be universally granted. In the ‘Phaedrus’ and the ‘Symposium’ Plato identified eros, love, as the force leading to beauty and the good, a force which eternally strives to grasp the "whole” but always fails to attain this goal. There can, it seems, be no universal abstraction from the concrete particulars of aesthetic endeavour in the manner of a class concept, since the aesthetic symbol is not a summarising identity; nor is it a system whose parts bear only a functional relation to each other; it has an intrinsic cohesiveness (the world of the work), together with a lack of boundary, suggestive of a way of living more fully and intensely. The aesthetic is projective of life itself, both as a powerful drive in all its manifestations and a supreme focus in each of them. This focus on the particular both gives us a sense of a whole beyond itself and the failure of any particular to define that whole. But it is not a question of definition. The particular is always experienced as an’ example’ of other possible validating experiences, revealing, not just itself but a ‘way of coming-to-be’, another step for the journeying self to take.

Vico’s Philosophical Anthropology captures this essential nature of the aesthetic, experienced as the symbolic form whose vitality embraces individuals within the shared mythology of the sensus communis. It also charts the way in which this sense of the communal has been replaced by the collective: an aggregation of parts imposed by a dominant technical worldview which at once entertains and subordinates its audience. But, as Vico indicated, the poetic- religious form of symbolism is a necessary feature of the human mind. It has not disappeared with the advancing priority given to the objective and technological in modern society; indeed, we can say that it flourishes as a corrective force to that priority. However, to speak generally, it no longer provides the necessary context or ground within which society itself can flourish as a community of shared concern.

The sensus communis is broken. Can it be restored? Can the poetic be once more the way in which the sense of the communal provides us with the purpose that unites, that which shows us that we are most our selves when in joint pursuit of that which is beyond our selves? Vico argued that an “answer" only arrives through excess - when the dominance of one stage results in an anarchy which impinges disastrously upon its participants. It’s not simply the case that God is supposed “dead"; it is, at least equally, the deep and unrelenting selfishness of power exercised in our divisive institutions - the political and the economic - that turn nation against nation, individual against individual, to destroy the earth life depends upon. But we live in hope that, in this instance, Vico was wrong, that we may not destroy ourselves in destroying the world, and that what we might call an aesthetic rationality may yet save us.

References:
Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural supernatural. W.W Norton.
Ackroyd, P. (1999). Blake. Vintage.
Coleridge, S. T. (1965). Biographia literaria. J.M. Dent.

Corngold, S. (1994). The fate of the self. Duke University Press.
Frye, N. (1947). Fearful symmetry: A study of William Blake. Princeton University Press. Hamburger, M. (1991). Art as second nature. Carcanet Press.
Hofstadter, A. (1965). Truth and art. Columbia University Press.

Exploring Motor Intentionality & Physiognomic Perception: Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Foundations of the Pre-Reflective World

To answer these questions, we must begin by examining how the phenomena that define the symbolic life arise within the context of a world experienced prior to the symbolic world. Traditional empiricism assumes the starting point for development as an opposition between raw and isolated sensations and the constructive act of thinking which gives them meaning. But we know now that it is impossible to limit what is directly experienced in this way.

Gestalt psychologists showed that the perception of harmony and simplicity in structure has the same status in experience as the perception of colour or figure and this led to the recognition that it is impossible to distinguish between meaningless sense-data and acts which bestow meaning upon them. Perceptions are not instantaneous: they are extended over time to form an event, and that event is continuous with others in the primary flow of experience. They are also “spatially” organised as figure and ground, form and context, prior to deliberate acts of thought. Merleau-Ponty goes further:

My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the content of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately “place” in the world, without ever confusing them with my day-dreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams around things. I imagine people and things whose presence is not incompatible with the content, yet who are not involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of ‘representations’, it ought to be forever hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities...But this does not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric. (1962, p. x)

To understand just how this “closely woven fabric” is constituted we need, in the first place, to understand phenomenology’s idea of the intentionality of consciousness. When you feel, think, remember, or anticipate, there is always an object to which your attention is directed: your feeling about someone’s comment, your memory of that day, and so forth. Consciousness is directed towards its object and in the course of development that directedness returns to the subject as self-awareness. The self thus attains a measure by which it can relate itself to itself. But the spatial metaphor of direction itself fails to capture the sense of a fundamental need, that of the fulfilment of one’s own being in experience which confirms identity: the identity of the self with the other as a confirmation of the self’s identity.

In Marcel’s (1949) terminology intentionality is necessarily an availability, a capacity to absorb the significance of the other into oneself; he calls this underlying need "ontological exigency”: the need to confirm your being in the being of the other. It should not be seen as solely an act of the intellect. The experienced unity of fulfilment is primarily an affair of feeling - understood as an integral part of cognition. This is why it is a lived unity, distinct from and prior to, one posited by intellect through a specific act of identification. Merleau-Ponty asserts that there is "a unity of the imagination and the understanding and a unity of subjects” that precedes the distinction between subject and object.

This is the pre-reflective world. It is a unity formed through the existence of a form of intentionality that Husserl called ‘operative intentionality’ in recognition of its distinction from actions proceeding from the premise of a separation of the active subject from an environment to be acted upon. This latter perspective, he argued, can only provide connections which are "extensional” - ones that are merely spatial or temporal - whereas psychological connections are intrinsically related in the flow of consciousness. Psychology "knows only ‘internally’ interwoven states, interwoven in the unity of one all-inclusive nexus, which itself is necessarily given along with them as nexus in internal intuition” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 5).

Merleau-Ponty develops Husserl’s position in the Phenomenology of Perception with two significant advances: he suggests the term ‘motor intentionality’ to define the character of the subject- side of this unity and replaces the object-character of the world with the recognition of its physiognomic qualities. It is the motility of the body which takes up the physiognomic qualities of the physical world; the body responds, "gestures towards”, to the body, "the flesh”, of the world - it’s intermingled colours, shapes, movements, and textures - in a founding synchronicity of subject and world which precedes and accompanies all future imaginative encounters that occur through perception, remembering, and thinking.

The idea of physiognomic perception was, in fact, a matter of interest to the academic psychology of the early Twentieth Century but its philosophical significance for a theory of imagination did not become mainstream. Werner’s (1948) Comparative Psychology of Mental Development provides a useful summary of this work, pointing out its occurrence in young children, oral cultures and certain kinds of mental illness. A particularly striking feature of this form of perception is synaesthenia, the intermingling of different senses in perception. A child says, for example "that leaf smells green”; another asks her mother to "open her eyes to hear what she has to say”.

Werner notes that this phenomenon is an example of a general mode of perception which is diffuse and homogeneous: a child is observed to be frightened by the bite of spiders and this fear generalises to floating bits of the spider’s web and to a little hair stuck to his hand: biting is related not just to the spider but also to the web, with each characteristic having a potential “biting" quality. He concludes on the basis of such examples that the underlying structure of this perception is that each part carries the whole within it.

The significance of this finding is, however, lost within a psychological narrative which regards such behaviour as a lower form needing correction through the advance of analytic reason. In the previous chapter we have seen how the quality of a whole fostered by imaginative feeling precedes and guides perception: the parts arise within the whole. And we observed how the symbolism of the metaphor replicates and creatively extends this founding structure of physiognomic perception. We also noted in that chapter how Vico described the original mode of response of humankind to the world as “shouting back", that is, as primarily a motor phenomenon, one of pitting one’s body against the body of the world. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a world prior to thought, the pre-reflective world, certainly contains both aspects of wholeness and motoricity, but, more than that, it unites them in a necessary and lived relationship: a world presupposed by our actions and a world predisposed to incorporate them, a living unity that precedes the distinction between the thinking subject and the objects of thought.

Motor intentionality signifies that the body is known to us in the first place, not as an observable object, but as the foundation or point of origin of our movements towards the world. Its nature is that of the taken-for-granted, not the reflected-upon. It is, moreover, a being that takes for granted that the world exists as the field of its operations: what is acquired is through participation grounded upon a world that encompasses itself and the other. Merleau-Ponty in ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ illustrates this character through its failure in certain cases of brain damage. For example, one patient, asked to draw a circle in the air, must first "find his arm”, after which he then executes various movements until he recognises a pattern corresponding to a circle. He is not able to rely upon that immediate access to his own body schema that grants him immediate access to the world. As a result the world itself is not experienced as a unified field; whereas for a normal person a stimulus arouses a kind of ‘potential movement’ rather than actual: “the part of the body in question sheds its anonymity, is revealed, by the presence of a particular tension, as a certain power of action within the framework of the anatomical apparatus” (p. 109). It is this potentiality of movement that places the body within the realm of the potential - one might refer to this capacity as ‘enactive imagination’.

It may be instructive at this juncture to draw upon Piaget’s (1952) description of the development of what he calls ‘circular reactions’ in the sensory- motor period. A circular reaction is a movement towards an object initiated by the infant that “returns" to the body. Piaget distinguishes primary, secondary and tertiary reactions. In the primary form the entire purpose of the movement is to return a stimulus to the organism - for example, the infant grasps a toy and brings it to her mouth, a behaviour that is clearly an extension of the sucking reflex. In the later secondary reaction, however, a movement is initiated in which the characteristics of the object itself are of interest - say, discovering the noise when it is deliberately banged against the sides of the cot.

This interest in the final stage develops further through a deliberate variation of movement such that different effects may occur - for example, dropping something from different heights or with variations in force to observe the outcome. With these stages we witness the progress of the enactive imagination in its fulfilment of the potentials inherent in the environment, a fulfilment in which play and exploration are synonymous; note also the child’s enjoyment of repetition as a consolidation of achievement.

But to talk of a motor intentionality irrespective of the qualities of objects themselves is half the story. The complementary notion of a physiognomic perception begins to be developed in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology. In the chapter, ‘The Thing and the Natural World’ he points to the interrelated character of sensation. Commenting upon Cezanne’s assertion that a picture of a landscape should contain even its smell within itself, he says:

The unity of the thing beyond all its fixed properties is not a substratum, a vacant X, an inherent subject, but that unique accent which is clearly to be found in each one of them, that unique manner of existing of which they are a second order expression. For example, the brittleness, hardness, transparency, and crystal ring of a glass all translate a single manner of being... There is a symbolism in the thing which links each quality to the thing (italics mine)...The passing of the sense-data before our eyes or under our hands is, as it were, a language which teaches itself, and in which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of the signs, and this is why it can literally be said that that our senses question things and that things reply to them. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 319)

Later in the same passage he talks of value as an organiser of such perception and our perception of other people as that of intuiting a whole meaning from the various manifestations of behaviour. But at this stage in his writing, he does not believe that imagination has a role. Influenced apparently by Sartre’s account, he separates imagination from “natural” perception. Imagination has no depth, he asserts, and does not respond to our efforts to vary our points of view; it does not support observation, for in perception it is the material itself which assumes significance and form.

Merleau-Ponty’s desire to emphasise the ‘givenness’ of the sensory world, as that which transcends an imaginative or interpretive motive, is understandable, but has he not introduced a fateful dualism of act and object? Surely, it is imagination which links the two by forming a unity integrating a creative subject within a responsive world. This I understand to be the major impetus of his later work. His Phenomenology is a significant advance in our understanding of the pre-reflective for it brings into focus the contribution of activity (both actual and virtual) to learning and understanding, the intrinsic vitality of the perceptual field with all its interrelations, and the way in which imagination acts as their intermediary. In this perspective, the environment is neither a collection of stimuli nor an impersonal whole awaiting a subject. The activity of the subject is "held together" by an "intentional arc" which receives the gestures of the physical and social world. We have only to witness mother and child together to appreciate the beauty and harmony of this silent, gestural interaction. Or observe its presence alongside explicit communication as an underlying language of intimacy when people meet as friends.

I think that when Merleau-Ponty talks of a "virtual activity" he has in mind a readiness, an openness, to possible experience that is the nature of all inten- tionality. We see its failure when the intentional arc "goes limp" - in those cases of brain damage he discusses but also in illnesses of depression and alienation. But there is a further meaning of the term, one describing how an actual action may become virtual though its interiorisation as a purely mental activity. For example, in the sensory-motor period a child learns to remove an obstacle that would prevent a door opening: the occurrence is imagined prior to the actual action by a virtual action. Indeed, it is Piaget’s major purpose to show how logical operations are the result of internalised actions, that is, virtual actions, coordinated into a system.

Can we say, then, that motor intentionality retains a presence to be drawn upon within the development of our interaction with the world? For example, think of those tasks whose completion requires a coordination of "moves" for their solution. A chess master or skilled craft person is able to see the connections between acts prior to their execution: a virtual whole is created to form a basis of action to complete the task successfully. Imagination "lines perception", as Merleau-Ponty puts it. Of course, this example relates to a system of identifiable parts successfully related in a conclusion, whereas in aesthetic perception there is no such finality. We do not look at a painting, read a poem, or listen to music in order to come to a conclusion. A painting’s "parts" (a necessary parenthesis since they are no longer parts) are essentially appreciated as interrelated: forms, colours, textures, create a vibrant whole which remains indefinable, a meaning or idea which resides within the sensual that requires to be lived - to define it would be to destroy it.

We can understand now how in his philosophy symbolic meaning is both ‘given’ and ‘created’. The given physiognomic qualities of the world arouse in imaginative perception a symbolic form, one in which meaning (the idea) and the sensuous are inextricably present. This is Proust’s "sensible idea” - the discovery in memory of a sensuous hidden order of something - the hawthorns lining the path with their textures and scents - whose significance is that of a figure which reveals the ground of a meaning beyond itself. In this case it is the act of memory which transforms what might have passed as insignificant and mundane into a symbol that lives for you. Valery (1958) uses the metaphor of a pendulum, at one end of which are the concrete characteristics of the language, at the other, the meaning of the discourse, to indicate their co-presence.

The living pendulum that has swung from sound to sense swings back to its felt point of departure, as though the very sense which is present to your mind can find no other outlet or expression, no other answer, than the very music that gave it birth. (1958, p. 72)

It’s this dynamic that Merleau-Ponty refers to as "vibration”. At the same time there is a sense of openness as one enters, in Dufrenne’s phrase, the "world of the work”: a feeling of a particular experience being an example of a wider horizon in which a fulfilment is attained. The value inherent in the sensuous idea is that of a real presence demonstrating an exemplary absence - the openness of a path to be followed, a life to be lived.

Merleau-Ponty's "Language Speaking": Embodied Expression, Reversibility, and the Poetic Gesture

In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty (1973) argues for two different ways of expression through language: the language after the fact that has been acquired and which then disappears once the meaning appears, and the one which creates itself in the moment of expression, so I move from the sound to the sense: the first, he calls the "language spoken”, the second, the "language speaking” which goes beyond our present conceptions to acquire a primary sense of what the words express. He gives the example of being engrossed in a book. He says: "Suddenly a few words move me, the fire catches, my thoughts are ablaze, and the fire feeds off everything I have read”.

He comments on the simultaneous appearance of a sense of giving and receiving, a synchronicity of an outward journey to that which stimulates experience and the return inwards journey to the contemplative self. Merleau-Ponty describes this two-fold process as one of “reversibility”. Whilst the fulfilment of an established language lies in the act of representation to complete the function, the achievement of the creative language is to open up an array of new connections that are both diverse and in some sense coherent. In his later works he concluded that this language is the language of poetry and, in particular, that of metaphor with its openness to countless significations. Its creativity lies in its engagement with the physiognomy of the world as we meet its gestures towards us and relate them to our own. This is the double movement of creative language in which the outward and the inward are bound together in a joint differentiation. Cusanus, you may remember, referred to this binding as the “knot” of experience.

Abram (1997) points to Vico’s idea of the first language as the forerunner of Merleau-Ponty’s account with its identical emphasis upon the primary, gestural significance of the spoken word. As we have seen, Vico identified gestures as the first words uttered in the startled response to the power of nature, shouting back to the thunder and lightening and naming it “Jove”. Later, it was the Romantic Movement which gave special emphasis to the conjoint being of the human and natural worlds in order to achieve, in Wordsworth’s words, “an ennobling balance of forces from within and forces from without”. Abram says:

In his embodied philosophy of language, then, Merleau-Ponty is the heir of a long-standing, if somewhat heretical lineage. Linguistic meaning, for him, is rooted in the felt experience induced by specific sounds and sound-shapes as they echo one another, each language a kind of song, a particular way of “singing the world”. (1997, p. 76)

This singing is the gesture we make to a world which gestures towards us. This idea is exemplified most dramatically in the mythology of Australian Aboriginal people, the so-called “Dreamtime”. This refers to the first time, the time when the Ancestors emerged as they sang their war across the land in search of food, shelter, and companionship.

They made the contours of the land that are known today through their actions upon it, forming plains where they rested, and waterholes and lakes where they urinated, until, finally, when their work was complete, they returned to the places of the earth in which they had worked to come known by their descendants as “The Lizard. Man” or “The Leech Man”. Their aboriginal descendants, thereby, have an identity, a sense of who they are, through following the particular paths of their Ancestor - the “Songlines”. Each tribe follows its own song line, so that the earth in its wholeness is mapped as a series of lines of pilgrimage that may overlap with other, but the land is shared, for each line belongs to its natural place.