STUDIA PHNOMENOLOGICA XVI (2016) 469487

Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys

Ontology of Ontology1
Frank Chouraqui
Leiden University

Abstract: This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working

notes from The Visible and the Invisible. In these notes Merleau-Ponty ques-
tions not only the accuracy of the ontology he is elaborating, but also the in-
cidence and place of this ontology within the Being it describes. He finds that
his ontology transforms Being as it describes it, and therefore keeps chasing its
tail endlessly. This view is suggested by Merleau-Pontys use of Nietzsches ex-
pression circulus vitiosus Deus as a formula that both he and Nietzsche use to
describe the ontological place of their ontology. Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche,
offers an ontology in which Being is highly sensitive to ontological accounts,
thereby construing Being as a principle of commensurability between action
and description, language and reality, philosophy and world.

Keywords: Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, ontology, God, hyperdialectics.

One of the most precious prerogatives of phenomenology is to articulate

critique and affirmation in a novel way. For if phenomenology begins with a
critique of the world and of all objective illusions, it cannotprecisely be-
cause it is phenomenologyrest content with calling them illusions. This
is because, in the very terms of phenomenology, illusions are given and as
such they resist dismissal. In other words, a phenomenologist sees illusions
as a challenge and critique as a responsibility: one must explain how illusions
come to be and how they come to be believed. This is also a responsibility
Nietzsche made his own, and one which explains the ambiguity we find in
much of his writing: the ambiguity informed by the constant tension between

1
This paper has greatly benefitted from advice and comments by two anonymous readers
for Studia Phnomenologica. I wish to thank them here.
470 Frank Chouraqui

critique and explanation, dismissal and recuperation. For, as Nietzsche repeat-

edly reminds himself, being true to the earth2 (Nietzsches very own version
of the phenomenological appeal to the things themselves) should not make
one overlook the fact that this truthfulness is always threatened, in fact, that
we do not begin with it, but rather, that we begin with illusions. Nietzsche
goes as far as to say that the psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra
is how he, who to an unheard of degree says No, does No to everything that
has so far been said Yes to [Allem, wozu man bisher Ja sagte], can all the same
be the opposite of a nay-saying spirit.3
The problem of Zarathustra comes therefore from the fact that illusions
(everything that has so far been said Yes to or in Husserlian language, the
Weltthesis) do not dissolve when they are unmasked; on the contrary they need
accounting for. In the moral context, Nietzsche urges himself to not dismiss
oppressive moral rules on the basis that they are unjustified, for if they need
critique, it is because they exist, and yet, as Nietzsche declares in his later
notebooks, his very own method of critique rests on the idea that moral rules,
by passing sentence on the will to existence4 are self-contradictory. Yet, this
consistency test, he notes, may be turned against the critique itself. This is why
casting morality as negation is not enough to remove the fact that it exists, and
Nietzsche locates there what he calls the problem. He concludes this pas-
sage thus: Problem: but what is morality?5 Here, Nietzsche poses a question
that, given that it surfaces just after a definite characterization of morality as
negation, can only point to a new sense of is. The question is no longer only
about its essencenegationbut it is about its being: the fact that morality
is is the problem that makes any rejection of it guilty of the very errors it de-
nounces: it places what isnt (a world without slave morality) before what is (a
world with it). In this sense, it is partially akin to asceticism defined as hatred
for the world. (WP 579, see also Reginster, 2009: 2526) In another text from
the same period, Nietzsche exclaims:

And if this moral judging and discontent with the real were indeed, as has
been claimed, an ineradicable instinct, might that instinct not then be one of
the ineradicable stupidities or indeed presumptions of our species?But by
saying this were doing exactly what we rebuke: the standpoint of desirability,
of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of
things.7

2
KSA: Za-I-Vorrede-3 and Za-I-Tugend-2. NB: unless an English translation is cited,
translations from the German and the French are my own.
3
KSA, EH-Za-6.
4
KSA, 10 [192], 1887.
5
Ibid.
6
Reginster 2009.
7
KSA, 7 [62], 1886.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 471

So, simply dismissing illusions might justify a shift of modes of being (il-
lusions exist as illusions but not as truths), but it cannot make it so that illu-
sions dont exist at all. As Plato saw clearly in the Sophist, illusions threaten
the Parmenidian alternative of being and non-being, and it demands that we
recognize different modes of being. Philosophical critique (be it Nietzschean
or phenomenological) requires a new ontological category: what is the being
of illusion?8
It is out of the same concern that Merleau-Ponty goes sometimes as far as
to say that everything is true in its place9 and therefore that philosophy
especially critical philosophyshould not fall into the trap of legislating be-
tween what is true and what isnt. It can only legislate on what place each
truth should restrict itself to. Surely, this will be a place that will be different
for realities and illusions, even more: truth and illusions become two modes
of some higher truth that encompasses them both, and which is the object of
the late Merleau-Pontys ontological thought.
The problem, therefore, is for both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty to es-
tablish a ground where this ambiguous relationship to illusions can find rest.
Now there is more that is shared by the two authors regarding this question:
the illusions revealed in both their philosophies (even if approached from
the point of view of morals by Nietzsche and from the ontological point of
view by Merleau-Ponty) all have one characterstic in common: they stand as
absolutes. Indeed, both thinkers contend that presenting oneself as possess-
ing any absolute character is the surest sign of illusion. Both Nietzsche and
Merleau-Ponty recognize absolute, self-identical or fully determinate objects
as always and in principle illusory. Bearing in mind their ambiguous position
regarding illusions, this indicates that their recuperation of illusions must
amount to a recuperation of the absolute.
In this paper, I trace Merleau-Pontys recuperation of the absolute through
an elucidation of his cryptic reference to Nietzsches remark that the ambigu-
ity in his philosophy makes it look like a circulus vitiosus Deus. This is an ex-
pression Merleau-Ponty in turn uses to characterize the ambiguity in his own
philosophy. For both philosophers share the same ambiguity: an ambiguous
relationship to an absolute that must at once be criticized and recuperated.

8
As is well-known, Nietzsches ontological project was to overcome the opposition of Par-
menideanism and Heracliteanism. It was not, as is sometimes believed, to make Heraclitus
triumph over Parmenides, for Nietzsche remained committed to the idea of an eternal struc-
ture of being as supporting becoming (which only means affirming that becoming is eternal
and cannot disappear, i.e.: it cannot lead into being). It is visible here that Merleau-Ponty is
committed to a very similar project: finding the permanent structures of being that may sup-
port an equivocal ontology of becoming as sedimentation. I discuss Merleau-Pontys views on
becoming in section II, 2 and II, 3.
9
Merleau-Ponty, 1996a: 156. See also for the same idea in a different context, Merleau-
Ponty 1980: 63.
472 Frank Chouraqui

This is an ambiguity that they both solve by incorporating it within the struc-
ture of being and in return, by colouring the whole of Being with the dye
of ambiguity. The way in which they do so seems to be encapsulated in this
cryptic expression: circulus vitiosus Deus.

1. Merleau-Pontys Philosophical Recuperation of the Absolute

1.1. Faith in the Absolute as Contradictory

But why Deus? The question of the relations between the absolute and
the sacred occurred to Merleau-Ponty as an important challenge in his Cogito
chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, where he presents the absolute in re-
ligious terms, as God. In this text, he already states that a divine absolute is
rendered impossible by the very phenomenological approach:

Behind the absolute of my thought, it is even impossible to conjecture a divine

absolute. If it is perfect, the contact of my thought with itself seals me within
myself, and prevents me from ever feeling that anything eludes my grasp; there
is no opening [] and the Cogito ultimately leads me to coincide with God.10

This coincidence precisely constitutes the impossibility to conjecture a

divine absolute, insofar as the self-identical subject does not possess within it-
self the distance that allows for the reflexivity of self-awareness, implying that
the subject becomes fully determinate and self-identical, like God. What this
implies, of course, is that God, if conceived as ens realissimum, is a contradic-
tory concept. This is because, as Merleau-Ponty stated earlier in Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception, any absolute object must be conceived as fully determi-
nate, and full determinacy is impossible, for it contradicts the transcendence
that one finds everywhere.11 This passage already puts into play a number of
themes that Merleau-Ponty will explore further in his later writings.
The first is the ambiguity of absolute determinacy. Absolute determinacy
poses boundaries between self-identical entities (for example God and the
subject), and therefore institutes a manifold of entities which it cannot ac-
count for. For as they are self-identical, these entities become inaccessible to
each other, and therefore, any perspective that could embrace even just two
of them becomes impossible. This is the core of Merleau-Pontys critique of
Sartre in the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible entitled Interrogation
and Dialectic. Merleau-Ponty proposes to solve this problem through his
emphasis on the concept of generality.
The second is the question of the inability for one to trace back the expe-
rience of the absolute to any subject or any object, and stemming from this,

10
Merleau-Ponty 1945: 373.
11
Merleau-Ponty 1945: 40.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 473

The third is the emphasis on the paradoxical fact that when the absolute
becomes an object of thought it therefore ceases to be absolute. Here, Merleau-Ponty
extends his critique of the Cartesian Cogito into a critique of Descartes on-
tological argument for the existence of God. For Merleau-Ponty, the belief
in an absolute God, which he characterizes in The Prose of the World as the
rudimentary conception of God12 proves not its existence but its inexistence.
This, however, is not to say that phenomenology must depart once and for
all from any concern with the sacred, for precisely if phenomenology seeks to
be not only a description of the world, but also its elucidation, it is responsible
for understanding the phenomenon of the sacred. In his Praise of Philosophy,
Merleau-Ponty addresses Father Henri de Lubac who in his 1944 The Drama
of Atheist Humanism accused philosophers such as Marx, Feuerbach, Comte
and, remarkably, Nietzsche13 of giving up the task of elucidating the phenom-
enon of the sacred. Merleau-Ponty declares: Father de Lubac discusses a kind
of atheism that, according to him, goes so far as to seek the suppression of the
problem that gave rise to God within consciousness.14
For Merleau-Ponty, Lubacs complaint is nothing more than a renewal of
the ontological argument since Lubac believes that reminding us of the prob-
lem of the existence of God within consciousness would suffice to demon-
strate the existence of God.
Merleau-Pontys response is radical: taking seriously this problem does not
necessarily lead into theism. In fact, the false alternative that considers that any
non-believer fails to heed the problem (and which therefore assumes that this
problem suffices to demonstrate the existence of God) is again, guilty of a bad
kind of Parmenideanism. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty believes that one
can take this problem seriously without committing themselves to theism: if
it is true that the phenomenon of faith indicates the existence of something, it
doesnt have to indicate the existence of God, or of any absolute entity at all.
Merleau-Ponty writes: So little is this problem ignored by the philosopher that
on the contrary, he radicalizes it and places it above those solutions that choke
it to death.15 Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty tried to express it in Phenomenology of
Perception, taking the problem of faith seriously means seeing that faith (which
is a relation) and its object are mutually incompatible, as long as this object is
seen as absolute (hence excluding relations). Merleau-Ponty continues:

One must recognize that any philosophy that defines the sacred different-
ly [from the religious concept of a self-identical God] is bound to be called

12
Merleau-Ponty 1969: 84.
13
Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty himself recognizes in this group a sample of all philosophers
(under the indeterminate and general phrase le philosophe) including himself. See Merleau-Ponty
1960: 4849.
14
Merleau-Ponty 1960: 48. See also Lubac 1944: 8.
15
Merleau-Ponty 1960a: 49.
474 Frank Chouraqui

atheistic, and that philosophy, which never places the sacred here or there, as a
thing, but at the junction of things and words, shall always be exposed to this
accusation without being able to touch upon it.16

Merleau-Pontys response to Lubac is striking. Far from a coincidence be-

tween them, there is a mutual exclusion between the problem of the sacred
and the affirmation of the sacred. Indeed, in Merleau-Pontys mind, the ex-
perience of the sacred testifies not to any form of the absolute, but to faith as
a (possibly empty) intentional relation, and as such, one must refrain from
overlooking its intentional essence by assigning it absolute determinacy or an
absolute object, this would be precisely, choking to death the problem, i.e.:
it would collapse into univocal ontology.

1.2. From Psychology to Ontology

This mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my Be-

yond Good and Evil, without goal unless the joy of the circle is itself
a goal, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself.17

In two notes from February 1959, entitled The Tacit Cogito and the Speak-
ing Subject, and Genealogy of Logic, History of Being, History of Sense,
which will constitute the focus of the remainder of this paper, Merleau-Ponty
offers a clarified version of the foregoing argument through his critique of Sar-
tre. There he argues that Sartres alleged absolutism makes the existence of the
world impossible or unfathomable because it precludes any continuity between
the for-itself and the in-itself, therefore locking up each term of the relation into
its own solitude, which he calls the night of identity. As a result, he argues
that one must propose an element whose essence is its pregnancy: the flesh as
a unique element of the multiple. As a result, any truly philosophical account of
the sacred cannot rely on the positing of any determinate deity.
It is this meditation on the equivalence between the one and the multiple
and on the necessity to overcome this alternative that leads the later Merleau-
Ponty to develop the thoughts sketched in the Cogito chapter of the Phenom-
enology of Perception: the ambiguity that makes absolute thinking oscillate be-
tween the impossible One and the impossible Multiple means that we must
renounce the realm of entities in order to attain the underlying level where they
are unified. Merleau-Ponty writes that the failure of the thesis, its (dialectical)
reversal, unveils the source of the theses.18
It is worth stressing how Merleau-Ponty describes the passage from the
object to the element as a passage not from the Singular to the One, but

16
Ibid.
17
KSA 38 [12], 1885.
18
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 227.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 475

from the singular to the general and presents it as the unified source of the mul-
tiple. This move, as appears clearly in the finished chapters of The Visible and
the Invisible, and as Merleau-Ponty wrote several times in the notes of Febru-
ary 1959, is the move to intra-ontology, which concerns itself with nothing
but the horizonal unity of the multiple beings within the unique generality of
the flesh. Thus, Merleau-Pontys criticism of the rudimentary conception of
God as the object of faith informs what a radical understanding of the sacred
must be: it must account for the sense of the sacred in ontologicalthat is to
saynon-absolute, terms.19
Further in this note entitled The tacit cogito and the speaking subject,
Merleau-Ponty re-evaluates critically the meaning of the phenomenological
Cogito he had presented in The Phenomenology of Perception and urges himself
to [s]ay that I must show that what could be regarded as psychology (Ph.
of Perception) is really ontological. Show this by indicating that the being of
science can neither be nor be conceived as selbstndig.20
The Cogito, which in Phenomenology of Perception was intended to show
that transcendence constitutes our understanding of the world, becomes radical-
ized to constitute being itself. This is because since the time of Phenomenology of
Perception, it had become clear that no object was selbstndig, and therefore, that
intentionality was essential to everything. With regard to the sacred, however,
the transfer of the Cogito to the ontological level entails that Merleau-Ponty
loses access to the traditional line of argument that explains away the experi-
ence of the sacred in mere psychological terms (like Freuds Future of an Illusion
for example). This has become impossible for Merleau-Ponty insofar as such
arguments place precedence on the psychological subject over the structure of
being. He wishes to reverse this precedence. On the contrary, the elucidation
of the sacred must now constitute it as an aspect of the flesh, that is to say, as
structured by an open process of determinative intentional reference (or as he
says further, some Heideggerian Offenheit of the Umwelt21).
Indeed, it is at the end of this very note that Merleau-Ponty makes a
new mention of God by borrowing Nietzsches expression: circulus vitiosus
Deus.22 There, the concept of God is meant to characterize at once:

19
Going from God to the problem of God is going from truth to faith, and, it is placing the
sacred before its object. As Emmanuel de Saint Aubert points out, for Merleau-Ponty, the sacred is
the object of philosophy; this object is also named Being. For Merleau-Ponty, ontology is an explo-
ration of the sacred, but it is atheistic because it establishes the sacred as instituted as such by our
faith (this means that there is a sense of the sacredthe sacred as faiththat pre-exists the object of
the sacredgod). According to Saint Aubert God and Being are equivalent in Merleau-Pontys
language. See Saint Aubert 2008: 371405 (see especially pp. 374 and 402).
20
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 227.
21
Ibid.
22
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 231.
476 Frank Chouraqui

The structure of being,

The structure of any proper ontological account of being, and
The structure of the relations between being and the philosophy of being.
This expression circulus vitiosus Deus is famously one of the most cryptic of
a generally cryptic writer, not least because of the peculiar use of the Latin nom-
inative throughout, which makes it impossible to translate with any certainty.
What is more, it is difficult to record the details of Merleau-Pontys engagement
with Nietzsche, and therefore even harder to speculate on what Merleau-Ponty
held Nietzsche to be addressing with this expression. The only verifiable read-
ing of Merleau-Pontys that mentions this thought is precisely Lubacs book
(a book generally haunted by Nietzsche), where Lubac inexplicably translates
circulus vitiosus Deus as a vicious, circular God23 and Heideggers Nietzsche
book that had just come out in German and that elucidates the expression
as referring to a God understood as the collective character of Being as a
whole.24
In the forthcoming section therefore, I will try to avoid biographical spec-
ulations about Merleau-Pontys reading of Nietzsche25 and assume that it may
be illuminated by a direct reading of Nietzsche himself. Nietzsches own men-
tion of the phrase, in 1886s Beyond Good and Evil, along with his general
thoughts about the divine from the years 18857 offer a number of parallels
with Merleau-Pontys intention in the notes at hand, and I think that they
constitute a necessary passage towards the elucidation of Merleau-Pontys dif-
ficult texts. Like Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsches suspicion towards the concept of
God comes from the discrepancy between the phenomenon of faith and the
anti-phenomenality of the concept that faith refers to: God as an in-itself. For
Merleau-Ponty as well as for Nietzsche, any notion of God as absolute and self-
enclosed makes it a contradiction, and in the notebooks of 1885 Nietzsche writes
emphatically a single God would only ever amount to a devil [Teufel]!26 In
other words, Gods divinity is lost in its absolute status, for God is only con-
ceivable if it is not alone, that is to say, if it has an outside: Gods divinity is in

23
Lubac 1944: 491.
24
Heidegger 19791987: 65.
25
Although Merleau-Ponty was not indifferent to Nietzsches thought, he did not develop
first-hand knowledge of it until the last months of his life. Indeed, most of his references to
Nietzsche can more easily be traced to some of his better-known commentators than to any
direct reading of Nietzsches texts. Unsurprisingly, Merleau-Pontys sources on Nietzsche gravitate
around the phenomenological tradition (Fink, Jaspers, Heidegger, Lwith whom Merleau-Ponty
invited to contribute an article on the early Nietzsche for the collection he was editing entitled
Les Philosophes de lAntiquit nos Jours) or the French existential philosophers such as Jean
Wahl who gave a Sorbonne course on the later thought of Nietzsche in 19591961. This was
a course that Merleau-Ponty is known to have attended and which is contemporaneous with
the Circulus notes.
26
KSA, 35 72, 1885. Note how in German: vicious circle (Teufelskreis) literally trans-
lates as circle of the devil [Teufel].
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 477

its openness to alterity. Indeed, Nietzsche eventually comes to see the godli-
ness of God in relationality itself (for without relation, God loses his godliness
to become a devil), as if to say that God is what faith sees when it looks into
a mirror and fails to recognize itself: God is reflexivity. This thought is a clear
anticipation of Merleau-Pontys intention, and although there is no evidence
to my knowledge that Merleau-Ponty had any access to these Nachlass texts,
he concludes his discussion of Nietzsches Preface to the Gay Sciencea text
from 1886 as wellwith Hegels similar idea whereby God defined as abyss
or absolute subjectivity had to deny himself in order for the world to be,
that is to say that God was submitted to the principle of relationality.27 It
seems therefore clear that Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche are of one mind
on the impossibility of conceiving of God as ens realissimum; and that
Merleau-Pontys instincts that directed him to the texts of 188687, were
shrewd. This detour through Nietzsche can allow us to see more clearly what
Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he characterizes his philosophy (along with
any adequate philosophy) as circulus vitiosus Deus.
The parallel could be extended in many directions, but it may be enough
to follow one of them, namely the way in which both Nietzsche and
Merleau-Ponty come to call their own philosophy circular at the very mo-
ment they discover that the absolute (or God)28 fails. In the circulus vitiosus
passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche is seen casting a glance over his
shoulder at the movement of his own philosophy and at its place in the his-
tory of culture. Like Merleau-Ponty, he concludes that it is characterized by a
series of reductions that, like Merleau-Pontys reductions, do not lead into
a fully reduced apprehension of the world ( la Husserl), but rather, into this
that truly resists the reduction, and therefore returns to the pre-reductive ex-
perience. Nietzsche writes: Whoever has, like me, had to come to grips with
a mysterious urge to think pessimism through to its depths and to redeem it
[] may have thereby opened his eyes to the opposite ideal []what, and
this wouldnt becirculus vitiosus Deus?29
For Nietzsche, therefore, what resists the reduction is an ideal that is the
opposite of pessimism. Yet, what makes the relation between the ideal of pes-
simism and the ideal of affirmation into a circular relation is that they are both
ideals. It is ideality (that is to say, the absolute) that makes each ideal a moment
of the other and stands as a dialectical device around which the revolutions
of pessimism and affirmation revolve. For Merleau-Ponty, as the Preface to
The Phenomenology of Perception makes clear, what resists phenomenological
reduction is transcendence itself.30 The difference between Nietzsches ideal-

27
Merleau-Ponty 1996b: 93.
28
According to Emmanuel de Saint Aubert these two words are equivalent in Merleau-Pontys
language. See Saint Aubert 2008: 371405.
29
KSA-JGB-56.
30
Merleau-Ponty 1945: viiiix.
478 Frank Chouraqui

ity and Merleau-Pontys transcendence is not as striking as their languages

make it sound, if we remember how in Phenomenology of Perception, the es-
sence of the prospective activity of consciousness (i.e., transcendence)31 is
to constitute overdetermined objects, and to misrepresent what really are only
horizonal presences as idealities. In the terms of our discussion, we could say
that for Nietzsche, the reduction of the concept of God did not reduce the
intentional reference to God. The circulus vitiosus, therefore, is related to
Deus in two ways:
Firstly, God was precisely what Nietzsches thought sought to reduce in the
series of reductions that he claims characterize his philosophical career (in the
phenomenological sense). God is also that which returns in a renewed form at
the end of the reductions,
Secondly, Nietzsche believes that the insight that this circle is necessary
makes it divine, that is to say, it builds it into an ontological motif in a way
that parallels the way that Merleau-Pontys psychological cogito became built
into ontology. Let me explain.

2. Merleau-Ponty and Good Circularity

So it seems that the problem of the sacred, insofar as it poses the question
of how to construe an ontology of intentionality which would be deprived
of an object (a faith without object), poses the question of the possibility
of recuperating the experience of the sacred qua absolute without commit-
ting it to any object, that is to say, the possibility of making experience into
the experience of experience itself. If the object of faith is truly itself, then it
becomes clear that faith and God become two aspects of the same thing that
constantly aim at each other in a circular fashion, and yet remain incomplete
without each other: they are two terms of a relation that in fact aim at them-
selves through each other.
As is well-known, Merleau-Ponty quotes Nietzsches suggestion that God
should be viewed as a circle at the end of his own note, but this is only one
more iteration of a long-held worry that the circular movement of the Visible
and the Invisible would appear fallacious, for Merleau-Ponty insists that his
intra-ontology offers the world as it was before ontology, and as such reveals
the circularity that gives rise to ontology itself. He writes:

I will be able to take a final position in ontology and to specify its theses in an ex-
act manner only after the series of reductions that are developed in the book and
that are all contained in the last one, this reversal itselfcirculus vitiosus Deus
is not hesitation, bad faith and bad dialectic, but the return to Syge, the abyss.32

31
Merleau-Ponty 2000: 38.
32
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 230231.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 479

Like Nietzsche therefore, Merleau-Ponty embraces this vicious circle as at

least one emblem of his philosophy, even though in the same texts, he also
describes the project of The Visible and the Invisible in terms of other meta-
phors (including metaphors of verticality and abyss) which we have already
encountered in the Notes de Cours and whose mention immediately follows
that of the circulus vitiosus Deus. It is to these that I now turn, in the expecta-
tion that their consistency with the themes of circularity and the sacred may
allow them to illuminate one another.

2.1. Abyss and Verticality

In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty declares that the being of a fully determi-
nate God is an abyss for us.33 Likewise, in the note at hand, there is a refer-
ence to the abyss as Sygeborrowed from Claudel this timebut Merleau-
Pontys intention is, I think, the same. In the text that Merleau-Ponty alludes
to, Claudel writes: Time is the invitation to death, an invitation sent out to
every phrase to come and decompose itself within a total and explicative har-
mony [accord] to consummate [consomme] the adoring speech by whispering
it in the ears of Syge, the abyss.34
What is this harmony, and what is this consummation if not the attain-
ment of full self-identity and complete determinacy? This, Claudel suggests,
is death by full determinacy, anticipating Merleau-Pontys own oft-repeated
statement that the absolute positing of a single object is the death of con-
sciousness, since it congeals the whole of existence, as a crystal placed in a
solution suddenly crystallizes it.35
Indeed, for Claudel, the Poetic Art (the art, literally, of poiesis, whose artist
is natura naturans) is the art by which speech makes its way towards determi-
nacy and dies into silence, it is not speech that says, it is speech that makes, and
therefore speech that leads outside of speech.
The fact that Merleau-Ponty makes Claudels model of full determinacy
his own ontological project is problematic to say the least. Indeed, so is the
talk in these very notes of any final reduction, ontological theses specified
in an exact manner and, one line further, of an ontology that is conform
to being.36 In fact, it should be noted that in the final version of the note,
which appears in the chapter on Sartre entitled Interrogation and Dialectics,
Merleau-Ponty devotes a very long passage to a softening of the perfectionist
aspects of these expressions. But this should be seen, I think, more as an im-
provement in Merleau-Pontys expression of his original idea than as a change
of heart about that idea. For it is clear from the first that the discourse of

33
Merleau-Ponty 1960b: 56.
34
Claudel 1984: 61.
35
Merleau-Ponty 1945: 86.
36
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 230231.
480 Frank Chouraqui

The Visible and the Invisible must notand cannotlead into full determi-
nacy and its promised death, and so precisely because at the moment of self-
determinacy, the discourse itself becomes frozen into death, demonstrating
that the discourse cannot be perceived to be external to its object, and yet, by
being identical with it, collapses into silence.
One motif that seems to allow for the consequentiality of the discourse
to the fate of its object is Merleau-Pontys idea of verticality, which we now
must try to explicate. If the newly-gained ground of ontology is flesh as the
possibility of sedimentation, this means that Merleau-Ponty cannot conceive
of an intentional reference as it were, in a vacuum. On the contrary, this
intentionalitys activity, Merleau-Ponty declares, is its own sedimentation. He
writes: the reflection that I practice is not a return to the conditions of pos-
sibilityand that is why it is an ascent on the spot [ascension sur place],37
that is to say, a layering of itself, and a process towards determinacy. Here,
Merleau-Ponty offers a new presentation of his recurrent theme of verticality
where the accumulative activity of the constituting flesh becomes understood
as an activity of being over itself, and replaces the transcendental exterritoriality
of the traditional (and Kantian) forms of reflexion. It is therefore precisely
because of verticality that Merleau-Ponty proposes to describe this process in
circular terms.

2.2. Circularity
One reason why Merleau-Ponty regards the circle as the best emblem for
his ontology lies in the fact that the project of this ontology is a phenomeno-
logical project and therefore a project of recuperation, of the sacred and of
the rest. As in Nietzsches circle, Merleau-Pontys recuperation must be seen
as a return to all original experiences from a point of view that was attained
as a result of such experiences.38 A second reason is perhaps more profound:
Merleau-Ponty is careful to point out that faith, like any of the forms of the
cogito, is determined by what he calls an intentional reference39: faith is
always faith in something. This is not to say that the object of faith is real, and
indeed, the question of the existence of God becomes irrelevant after the move
to ontology, but it is to say (as discussed earlier) that what used to be seen as
psychological must now be seen as ontological. One consequence of this is
that the intentional reference that constitutes the newontologicalcogito
seems to be condemned to infinite aimlessness, insofar as it is at the same time
structured by a projective movement towards determinacy and sustained by
the impossibility of such determinacy. Even more, this wandering, being truly

37
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 177
38
As a result, Merleau-Ponty refers to Le Temps Retrouv, in which Proust closes his work
with the narration of the episode in which he takes the decision to write it.
39
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 292.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 481

infinitethat is to say absolutely indeterminateruns the risk of bringing

Merleau-Ponty back to a position of the sort he criticizes in Sartre, whereby
intentional reference ceases to play its role of transcendence at the moment it
becomes absolutely determinate or indeterminate.40
With its eternal wandering, the circle illustrates the inability for transcend-
ence to transcend itself, to find a resolution and consummate death in Clau-
dels abyss of determinacy. In a sense, therefore, the metaphor of intentionality
as a circle is merely a new formulation of the idea exposed in the Preface to
Phenomenology of Perception according to which intentionality is more funda-
mental than its own subjects and objects.41 This circularity, however, can only
be justified in Merleau-Pontys view if it is not the circularity of the discourse
on Being, but of Being itself, and indeed, Merleau-Ponty sees circularity as a
direct consequence of the essence of Being, that is to say, of intentionality.42
It is because the reduction is incomplete that the essence of the flesh will be
the sedimentative activity of intentionality. Yet, this intentionality can never
lead to any determinate object (this would mean the death of consciousness).
Therefore, if we must conceive of being as circular, and of circularity as
the only form of the absolute, we may understand Merleau-Pontys cryptic
allusion to negative theology two lines after mentioning Nietzsches circulus
vitiosus Deus. In fact, the point of negative ontology is,
That we are most familiar with what Being is not,
That there is a difference between what we are familiar with and the truth
we wish to formulate about it, and
That the process responsible for this difference is sedimentation, for sedi-
mentation places the sedimented at the heart of our everyday life, and there-
fore places the sedimented at the beginning of any exploration.
All of these implications of negative theology summon images of circles
insofar as the circle offers the potential unity of identity and difference that
satisfies Merleau-Pontys requirement to attain a transcendence [which would
support] identity within difference.43
If we bear in mind the earlier discussion of the overcoming of the ques-
tion of the singular and the multiple by the move to the ontological level
of a single generality pregnant with multiplicity, it becomes apparent that
intentionality is both constitutive of multiplicity and unique, that is to say
that the flesh constitutes non-fully determinate (horizonal) objects without
breaking its own unity as generality. What Merleau-Ponty seems to be con-
cerned with therefore are the relations between identity and difference, and
the ability of the flesh to overcome their duality. As such, the circlewhich
contains both difference and identityappears as Merleau-Pontys preferred

40
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 103.
41
Merleau-Ponty 1945: viii.
42
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 229.
43
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 225.
482 Frank Chouraqui

metaphor for the fleshs horizonal creativity. The circle, Merleau-Ponty notes
in the Circulus passage, is difference that never leads into the different. It is a
promise offered by an ontology of the multiple that is not a physics.44 It
is therefore, in Merleau-Pontys language, the ground of the half-object.45
Like an object, it contains the element of differentiation, and like Being, it
is not limited to any specific thing.
Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, the description of Being that constitutes the
fundamental thought46 of The Visible and the Invisible cannot ignore that
it is always already taken in the very movement of the Being it describes.
That is to say that The Visible and the Invisible is a sedimentation of Being
and that the very writing of the book entitled The Visible and the Invisible
is part of the activity of Being over itself, namely, the activity of coming to
expression. As Merleau-Ponty writes in his essay entitled The Philosopher
and the Sociologist: Philosophy is irreplaceable because it reveals to us the
movement through which lives become truths, and the circularity of this
peculiar being which, in a certain sense, is already everything it will come
to think.47
So, it seems that the awareness of how lives turn into truths, that is to say
(in the language of The Visible and the Invisible), the movement that takes one
from one logos to the other and that of the circularity of Being are embraced
in one single gesture, for lives and truths are not external to each other,
but they are polar opposites in a circle that runs through them both and unifies
them.

2.3. Complicated Circles

As a result of the foregoing discussion, we may divine how in The Visible

and the Invisible the motif of the circle becomes complicated by the fact that
within the space delineated by the book, circular ontology becomes aware
of itself as circular. For Merleau-Ponty, this signifies that the circle can no
longer be approached as the aimless wandering of intentionality between its
two inaccessible poles, but that the ontological awareness of itthat is to say,
The Visible and the Invisible itselfmakes itself an object for intentionality.
What this entails is that the meta-language (of generality) created in the move
from the psychological to the ontological is now moving to occupy another
position and establish a new circle, no longer a circle between some subject
or object of intentionality (constituted in the consideration of horizonal ob-
jects), but a circle between ontology and this very circle itself (Merleau-Ponty

44
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 228.
45
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 49.
46
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 228.
47
Merleau-Ponty 1960a: 122.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 483

sometimes calls this hyperdialectics48 or surreflexion49): generality is no

longer the proliferation of objects and subjects, it becomes the proliferation
of interlinked circles.
This seems to be the reason why Merleau-Ponty adds a new layer to his use
of the metaphor of the circle when he declares that the intentional, circular
implication must be doubled over by the Philosophy-History circularity.50
Indeed, in his contemporaneous Notes de Cours, Merleau-Ponty explicitly
states that the question of the relations between philosophy and non-philoso-
phy (what lies outside philosophy and is the object of philosophy) is also the
question of the role of philosophy in its object (being, which he even calls here
the absolute).51 If we remember how for Merleau-Ponty history is always
the history of sedimentation, that is to say, the history of the fleshs activity
of bringing itself to visibility,52 it becomes apparent that the philosophy that
uncovers this vision of history is immediately taken up into its own gaze. As a
result, Merleau-Ponty regards the circle not as the motif of his own thinking
but as the motif of being itself, insofar as it is determined by the horizonal
relation that obtains between ontology and being.
The consequences are difficult to grasp, for this suggests that we must as-
sign a new dimension to the linear circle described at first: in intra-ontology,
unlike in psychology, every point of the circle becomes a point of two circular
processes, the circle of the movement of determination of beings (the one
which opens Merleau-Pontys working note) and the circle of the movement
of determination of Being, that is to say, the circle that rises vertically from
the first to the ontological view (which closes the note). Concretely, when I
look at a certain vase and my perception institutes it as a vase, I am making
the vase a moment of the determination of the beings, but I am also making
it a moment of the determination of Being (for, by virtue of intra-ontology,
Being is attained through the beings only).
The following problem becomes difficult to avoid therefore: if what I am
saying is correct, does the very utterance of this last sentence constitutes a
move outside of even this second circle, and the establishment of a new cir-
cular relationship, that observes no longer a circle, but the new circle set up
by the new perspective, and is it safe to say if we are serious about avoiding
absolute determinacy, that this process is ad infinitum?
As Merleau-Ponty writes in reference to Proust: We shall close the circle
after the study of the logos and of history just as Proust closes the circle when he
comes to the moment when the narrator decides to write. The end of philosophy

48
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 127.
49
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 60, see also Merleau-Ponty 1979: 69. On some fascinating impli-
cations of these two concepts for the place of ontology within Being, see Kaushik, 2013: 212.
50
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 229.
51
Merleau-Ponty 1996b: 281.
52
Beistegui 2005: 109122.
484 Frank Chouraqui

is the tale of its beginning.53 The parallel between Prousts literary narration and
Merleau-Pontys philosophical elaboration suggests three things:
As suggested above, the difference between the point of departure and
the point of arrival can only be expressed in terms of sedimentation: what the
author arrives at is the linguistic expression of the non-linguistic departure
point. (This is why one should not take Merleau-Ponty to commit himself to a
fully closed circle here: after all, he likens the closure of his circle to the closure
of Prousts circle, namely, a closure with a difference: the whole Recherche).
This return is the acquisition of what the whole movement was an exem-
plification of: Being as circle.
The circle is the circle coming to its own awareness, it is not a circular
line but a circular circle, that is to say that one of the qualitative gains of
the circular motion is that it transcends pure thought, or as Merleau-Ponty
says, we must remember the importance that this Besinnung possesses for the
physis54: we must remember that meaning is not transparent and withdrawn
from its object but part of it, and therefore always contributing to the world
at the very moment it describes it.
What this signifies, I think, is that the ambiguity of the move to intra-
ontologywhich seeks the conceptual benefits of externality without the sac-
rifices of absolute externalitybecomes crystalized in the form of an infinite
progress which suggests that ontology has always more to think; not more
beings (this is already implied in the first circle), but more Being. It is a matter
of an ever-changing Being which, if we are allowed to take Merleau-Pontys
circular model this far, is transformed by the awareness of itself that it keeps
producing and correcting as the transformation occurs, while remaining al-
ways one step behind it.
This circularity must therefore be understood as a circularity established
at the heart of thought, perhaps as the infinite dialogue between thought as
observation (logos endiathetos) and thought as action (logos prophorikos), an
interplay that is neither creative of facts nor of ideas, but constitutes the very
perpetuation of the ground where facts and ideas are reconciled and from
which they spring forth. For saying that ontology itself has always more Being
to think only means that Being has a past and future history, that this history
is the history of the proliferation of circles, and of the constant displacement
of the ground of ontology. For this displacement becomes essential to be-
ing in Merleau-Pontys view. As he argued already in Czannes Doubt and
later in Eye and Mind, any ontology that closes itself and eradicates openness,
shall reach one (and only one) of its aims, namely, it shall provide a theory of
Being. But in doing so, it shall fail the other, more fundamental test: that of
being able to account for itself as taking place within the being it describes.

53
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 229.
54
Merleau-Ponty 1979: 229.
 Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Pontys Ontology of Ontology 485

On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty argues, being is a failed circle, a circle that

remains open, one that cannot close onto itself, for every closure brings a new
sedimentation and initiates a new circle. And this failure of thought to attain
innocence remains, according to Merleau-Ponty the point where reason cul-
minates by recognizing this slipping of the ground below our footsteps, by
pompously calling interrogation our state of perpetual awe, calling research
our walking in circle [cheminement en cercle], and calling Being this that
never fully is [ce qui nest jamais tout--fait].55
In the Notes de Cours, Merleau-Ponty praises Nietzsche alongside Hegel for
maintaining the absolute of appearance, an absolute that, like Nietzsche, he
calls God on the basis that it satisfies the true intuition that was always lodged
within faith (the intuition of a generality), although of course, not in the way
faith intended, not as an existing self-identical God. This God that eludes
any truth or static reality presents itself as an infinitely open and essentially
deceitful appearance. It is a God, Merleau-Ponty says, that resembles an evil
genius, for in a world bewitched, the question is not to know who is right,
who follows the truest course, but who is a match for the great deceiver, and
what action will be tough and supple enough to bring it to reason.56
Indeed, it is not a matter of objects according to which we could evaluate
the truth of such and such a discourse. The question, instead, becomes that of
seeking the most appropriate understanding of this Being that keeps on pro-
ducing illusory absolutes and self-identical objects. It is this great deceiver that
makes our world, and belief in any absolute outside of itthat is to say, belief
in any ens realissimumis belief in nothing. For it is not God that faith calls
upon our knowledge to pursue, on the contrary, it is only this great deceiver
we must know, lest we know only great deceptions.

3. Conclusion

As we mentioned at the start, Merleau-Pontys reference to Nietzsches cir-

culus vitiosus Deus is cryptic and it required quite a bit of interpretive work
to become clarified, if I succeeded at all. This means also that I have had to
elaborate some of Merleau-Pontys ideas into some slightly novel directions.
Although in my view, Merleau-Ponty himself deserves all credits for those
insights, let me conclude by pointing out their relevance in a broader context.
The basic purpose of Merleau-Pontys thinking of circularity is ostensibly
ontological. It is
a) to establish the heretofore ignored proviso of self-accountability for any
ontological theory: any ontological account fails if it cannot account for its
own existence within being. Here, Merleau-Ponty discreetly (as is his habit)

55
Merleau-Ponty 1960b: 92.
56
Merleau-Ponty 1960c: 55.
486 Frank Chouraqui

provides a critical assessment of the history of ontology through Kant, Hegel

and Marx.
b) to propose one such successful ontology, namely one that is able to hold
a general discourse about being as a whole, albeit one about Beings mode of
being (it is the proliferation of circles) if not about its essence.
However, as I have attempted to show, the question begins around a dis-
cussion of faith and its relation to God. One would be mistaken in thinking
that Merleau-Ponty himself has said his final word about religion. He famous-
ly declared that he believed that the alternative of theism and atheism was
fallacious. What Merleau-Pontys critique of the rudimentary conception of
God allows us to consider is, I think, more important. It effectively legislates
between legitimate and illegitimate kinds of beliefs in a new way. Far from the
traditional view which ties legitimacy of beliefs to truth or proof, Merleau-
Ponty seems to propose the opposite criterion: any belief that subjects itself
to a crude alternative of truth and falsity, or takes place within a univocal
view of being must be suspicious as it most likely violates the interdiction to
believe in any self-identical object. The consequences leave many forms of
religious belief unaffected, but they also point to illegitimate beliefs in other
areas, and recasts the all-important problem of dogmatism and fanaticism in
an open society in a useful way: if freedom of belief is required even according
to the non-believers, how can fanaticism still be recognized and combatted
as such? The beauty of Merleau-Pontys answer is that it is confined to the
formal level, and doesnt enter dogmatic debates: regardless of their contents,
absolute beliefs are formally contradictory, and what makes a belief fanatical
is not its content, but the way that it is believed. With this encounter with
the tensions between God and faith, Merleau-Ponty taps into one of the great
resources of the founding thesis of phenomenology, which begins with Hus-
serls declaration that the thing-in-itself is a contradiction (IdeenI: 49). Here,
Merleau-Ponty gives us the ethical and political consequences of this view by
demanding a rethinking of the way we even relate to our own beliefs.

Frank Chouraqui
Leiden University
Institute for Philosophy,
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands
f.chouraqui@phil.leidenuniv.nl

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