Beyond Correspondence: Merleau-Ponty on Metaphor, Embodied Imagination, and the Indirect Path to Truth

This direct application of metaphorical thinking to the form of cultural life can still arouse our sense of wonder, but its way cannot be our way, which arises from a reflection upon metaphor. We may liken our love in the old-fashioned manner to "a red, red rose” but we do not assert their identity: the metaphor is a point of view, not an assertion of correspondence; the symbolism of flowers is and remains powerful, since it calls up a whole matrix of sentiments - the precious, the faithful, an inherent beauty - all of that which cannot be named but must, for the sake of the very meaning it signifies, remain implicit: its necessity, its truth, is its indefinability.

The metaphor of a feeling limits its own assertion in a tacit acknowledgment of its inadequacy - there is, as lovers know, always so much more to be said, for all that is said is insufficient. This is the heart of poetic imagination which for Merleau-Ponty, as for Vico, is the original and originating form of our being within the world. It constitutes a poetic ontology as a form of participation, a self-engaging with the nature of things to discover their meaningful relation. We can see how the indirectness of metaphor reveals its truth through a kind of encircling of an invisible, indefinable centre - a phenomenon which is, of course, best described poetically. Here’s the full version of Emily Dickinson’s poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man turned blind.

The centre is an enlightenment. Johnson et al. (2020) point out that when Merleau-Ponty connects metaphor with light, "he seeks to shift it to a new idea of light as various and varied "lightings” in which light is no longer portrayed as an ideal of truth (but) as a direct and univocal analogical relationship with the Sun” (2020, p. 178). Poetry succeeds through the mobility of its indirectness to reflect a truth of becoming rather than of being. Dufrenne argues that the purpose of a poem or any other work of art is to reveal the things "affective essence”: "by allowing us to perceive an exemplary object whose reality consists in being sensuous, art invites us to read expression and to discover the atmosphere which is revealed only to feeling” (Johnson et al., 2020, p. 178).

But how can that which cannot be defined have an “essence”? It cannot be a conceptual universal defined as that which a number of individuals, differing in other respects, have in common. The aesthetic object demands that we restrict our attention to it alone. Heidegger (1971) characterises the conceptual essence as the “indifferent” essence for it is that feature which holds indifferently for many things. He contrasts this with the essential essence of something which consists of what the entity ‘is’ in truth. The true essential nature of a thing is determined by nature of its true being: here truth is that which reveals itself, which becomes unconcealed. Indeed, the notion of truth as the correspondence of assertion with fact is itself dependent upon the idea of truth of the unconcealed, as fact showing itself to be fact, for how otherwise could we talk of the assertion conforming to the fact. Moreover:

Not only must that in which a cognition orders itself be already in some way unconcealed. The entire ‘realm’ in which this ‘conformity to something’ goes on must already occur as a whole in the unconcealed...With all our correct representations we should get nowhere, we could not even presuppose that there is already manifest something to which we can conform ourselves, unless the unconcealdness of beings had already exposed us to, placed us in, that lighted realm in which every being stands for us and from which it withdraws. (1971, p. 52)

"That lighted realm” is, as we know from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, not itself an object standing before us or a mere collection of things. Nor, Heidegger says, is it a "merely imagined” framework added by thought to those things: "World is the ever-non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep us transported into being” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 44). We can add: the framework is not “merely imagined” because imagination is embedded in the physiognomy of the world and it is that given condition that allows, or better, necessitates its creative task of transporting us into the symbolic. This is why the aesthetic always has the character both of a recovery and a discovery, of finding a hidden depth of one’s own experience within a new perspective.

In scientific and pragmatic thought truth is the conformity of assertion and outcome: the hypothesis is supported, the machine works. But in aesthetic thought the object before the mind is itself intentional, aiming at fulfilment through the expression of its own nature. The qualities inherent in a work of art demand a response in which we participate with it to understand how it has come into being. We perceive each part as contributory to the fulfilment of its wholeness; the whole as a meaning that accomplishes its own essential purpose through expression of that purpose.

The word “through" must be understood in a certain way. It is not a question of an externalisation or projection that is formed prior to and in the absence of expression; it is more a case of the intuition of purpose and its expression are co-determinate. And, in addition, what is achieved is not a universal of sameness, since the differences are retained in an embracing unity; we should bear in mind Walt Whitman’s remark: "Do I contradict myself? So, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain contradictions”. We need look no further than to poetry for the ways in which paradox is often used to powerful effect. At the beginning of Brooks (1956) The Well Wrought Urn, a book devoted to the apparent differences of statement which themselves contribute to the whole experience of the poem, he cites Wordsworth:

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a
Nun Breathless with adoration

The poet is filled with worship but the girl who walks besides him is not at all worshipful: the implication of the first three lines is that she should be. Then:

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought
Thy nature is not thereby less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with these when we know it not.

The paradox makes the point that the girl in her innocent worship takes for granted what inspires the self-conscious poet for she has by her own nature an unconscious sympathy with all around her in contrast with the poet’s momentary enthusiasm. In this instance the poet “solves" the paradox for us; in many other instances there is a demand upon the reader to do so in order to perceive an overall integrity of expression. Such differences allow the reader to follow the movement of the poem to the completion of its sensible idea.

This conclusion takes us to the centre of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Contrary to the view that identity is abstracted as sameness from the particulars of experience, the felt unity of experience guides us as a movement of recognition across difference. It’s as though the “gaps" provided by the perception of difference are seized upon by the imagination as the potentials to be unified.

One has the curious feeling of looking directly at a unity through differences, a perception of unity-in-difference without the mediation of conscious thought. In other words, the differences are metaphorical and can, therefore, be united within an aesthetic totality. This is the thinking of art and thought guided by feeling. It’s as though we have won through to a silent centre that appears to us as both a fertile source and a satisfactory conclusion.