Merleau-Ponty on religion

Merleau-Ponty had a complex relationship with religion in his own lifetime. Raised a Catholic, he continued to attend Mass during his time as a student at the École Normale. However, by the end of the 1930s, he had left the Church in protest over its response to socialist politics (Matthews (Reference Matthews2002), 3). While we cannot be sure precisely when Merleau-Ponty decided to leave the Church, we know that he was appalled by the Church's refusal to condemn the Austrian government's shelling of working-class districts of Vienna (Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus and Dreyfus1964a), henceforth SNS, 172–173). Merleau-Ponty derides the Catholic for being ‘a poor conservative and an unsafe bet as a revolutionary’, expressing his distaste for the loyalty demanded by the Church, as well as a general mistrust of religious authority and hierarchy (SNS, 178). This social and political mistrust parallels a more philosophical attack on religious belief which challenges any notion of ‘an absolute thinker of the world’ (SNS, 96). Unable to engage with the idea of an absolute consciousness, the human mind can only consider the idea of God through the prism of human understanding and, in the end, religion ‘arrives by an unavoidable dialectic at an anthropology and not a theology’ (SNS, 76; see also Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty, Wild and Edie1963), henceforth PrP, 26). Yet, Merleau-Ponty's evaluation of Christianity was not wholly negative: in ‘Faith and Good Faith’, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the religion of the Father and the religion of the Spirit. The former concerns the kind of authoritarian and absolute concepts of God and religion which repelled Merleau-Ponty; the latter, however, is for Merleau-Ponty the fulfilment of Christianity, whereby ‘God is no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication, whenever men come together in his name.’ The problem with Catholicism is that it ‘arrests and freezes this development of religion’, inhibiting Christianity's revolutionary spirit (SNS, 177). However, while Merleau-Ponty might appear to be a potential ally for Christian theology (see, for example, Kearney (Reference Kearney, Semonovitch and DeRoo2010), 156–157), a note of caution must be made. The Christianity Merleau-Ponty praises is far removed from orthodox Christian theology in its rejection of Trinitarian theology and dialectical interpretation of the relationship between the Father and the Spirit. Merleau-Ponty lauds the potential social and political resources in Christianity; this does not make him an ally of Christian theology.

Despite this critique of traditional religion, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless retained a deep sense of wonder which permeates his philosophical writings. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, he described phenomenology as ‘a “wonder” before the world’ (Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty and Landes2014), henceforth PhP, lxxvii). The first task of philosophy is not to find solutions but to ‘see the world anew’, to recapture humanity's basic enchantment with the perceived world. While we might describe this attitude of wonder as religious or religiously inspired, Merleau-Ponty's sense of wonder never transcends the perceived world, nor opens the door for theological reflection. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty presents this philosophical wonder as antithetical to theology, arguing that, when theology uses wonder as a route to God, the wonder is lost along the way (PrP, 44). Once God is invoked as the explanation for the world, the world is no longer mysterious. Merleau-Ponty insists on the contingency of the world not as a precursor to some cosmological argument but as a basic fact of the world. This is neither the world of objectivism and scientism, nor that of the absolute constituting consciousness, but rather the world of phenomenology: that is, the perceived world, as seen from the limited, human perspective which is made meaningful by the act of perception. Contingency is neither a source of nihilistic despair nor the preamble to theology; rather, it expresses the limited perspective of human beings who do not understand the world but stand before it in wonder.

Literature on Merleau-Ponty and religion

While Merleau-Ponty had a complex relationship with religion, there is relatively little literature which deals with the possible implications of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy for theology or the philosophy of religion. Most of this literature has been written in the last decade, although there is a small body of work published in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of this older literature takes an orthodox Christian perspective and attempts either to defend religion from some of Merleau-Ponty's criticisms (Jolivet (Reference Jolivet1963)), or alternatively to find theological resources in Merleau-Ponty (Vandenbussche (Reference Vandenbussche1967); Lowry (Reference Lowry1978)).Footnote ¹ While there is not space here to discuss in detail this early literature, we can briefly comment that Merleau-Ponty would have found these theological appropriations of his work unnecessary and would certainly have opposed any attempt to find some theological conclusion as the logical progression of his thought. In the introduction to Signs, Merleau-Ponty refers to the ‘insurpassable richness . . . of perceptual being’: there is a religious sense of wonder here but it is strictly immanent and based in perception. Later in the same passage, he writes that the hidden side of perception's ‘significance is based on what is perceptible to me’ (Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty and McCleary1964b), henceforth S, 16). In 1991, Dominique Janicaud praised Merleau-Ponty for remaining faithful to the phenomenological method, which ‘presupposes nothing other than an untiring desire for elucidation of that which most hides itself away in experience’ (Janicaud (Reference Janicaud, Janicaud, Henry, Ricoeur, Marion, Courtine, Chretien and Prusak2000), 27). That which exceeds human perception is not to be found in transcendence but in ‘the depth of the world’ (ibid.). Equally, Michael Berman notes that for Merleau-Ponty, ‘there is an excess to the world. The world as surplus outruns, overflows, and overspills perceptual experience per se’ (Berman (Reference Berman2017), 2). This is where Merleau-Ponty differs from later thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion, for whom excess is the sign of a transcendent phenomenon.

Recent work on Merleau-Ponty and religion is relatively sparse. There is not the space here for a full review of the literature so I will limit my comments to what I believe are two of the most promising recent approaches.Footnote ² Orion Edgar and Michael Berman both argue for the resourcing of theology with Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but, while Edgar argues that the incarnational logic of flesh in Merleau-Ponty can support an immanentist Christian theology wherein God is known through the incarnation, Berman's is a negative theology of divine absence in which the perceptual world offers a source of religious wonder which has no need to surpass the excess of meaning given in perception. Edgar overcomes the limitation of earlier theological appropriations of Merleau-Ponty because he resists the temptation to find a latent theology in his work. For Edgar, Merleau-Ponty's work does not contain ‘an approval of all the contents of Christian belief and experience’ but insists that ‘Christian theology does imply an ontology that is something like the fleshly ontology we have developed here’ (Edgar (Reference Edgar2016), 242–243, original emphasis). The direction of travel in Edgar's work is one-way. While Merleau-Ponty can be a useful resource for Christian theology to understand the ontological implications of the incarnation, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty's theology must be used in this Christian way. Merleau-Ponty is strictly agnostic (even atheist) and, while his philosophy is ripe for Christian appropriation, it must be remembered that this remains appropriation and takes Merleau-Ponty further than he himself would be willing to go – or than his logic requires.

In contrast, Berman offers a rare example of Jewish theological engagement with Merleau-Ponty and, if Berman is not an atheist, then he certainly rejects the God of classical theism and develops unique and compelling critiques of omnipotence (Berman (Reference Berman2017), 39–56) and theodicy (ibid., 113–130) by examining the consequences of Merleau-Ponty's thought. For example, in his chapter on the love of God, Berman asks us to consider the idea of an apathetic God, which ‘certainly would provide a solution to the problem of evil, for the traditional predication of omnibenevolence could be dropped’ (ibid., 36). Berman's achievement is to find theological meaning in Merleau-Ponty without appealing to transcendent or absolute being. He is deeply influenced by Martin Buber's I and Thou yet finds no need to appeal to the transcendent other. The meaningful encounter with the other is meaningful because it takes place within a lifeworld which is already intrinsically meaningful yet, unlike Buber, Berman (and Merleau-Ponty) finds no need to validate this meaning by reference to a transcendent other (ibid., 254). Faith is to be placed in the fecund meaningfulness of the perceived world, which overruns and exceeds our perceptual capabilities and offers the possibility of hope. Hallowing the hollow, therefore, means securing the meaning of the world by avoiding explanations and objective answers, instead seeking sacredness and meaning as it appears to us in the perceptual world.

This conclusion certainly is compatible with Merleau-Ponty's thought, as it captures the spirit of philosophical wonder which so arrested Merleau-Ponty without thereby overreaching the capacities of reason and establishing some transcendent existence beyond the world. However, Berman's optimistic thesis is built on Merleau-Ponty's notion of perceptual faith and we might want to question just how much optimism this idea can support. If optimism in understood in terms of meaning, then Berman is right: for Merleau-Ponty, perception is intrinsically meaningful and always contains more meaning than we can immediately perceive – this is why we should approach the world with wonder (SNS, 15–17; PhP, 238–239). However, if Berman expects a moral optimism, we will need to temper our expectations. Berman himself recognizes that Merleau-Ponty regards the world's goodness as contingent, a ‘cynical edge one can expect of an existentialist’ (Berman (Reference Berman2017), 123). Progress for Merleau-Ponty comes through contingent social and political human means, such that ‘we cannot even exclude the possibility that humanity . . . will suffer shipwreck on its way’ (S, 239). There is hope but, because this hope is not grounded in any metaphysical guiding principle, it is only the phenomenological hope of probability. Thus, while Berman shows that an atheist existentialism like Merleau-Ponty's need not be nihilistic, we must also remember the pragmatism of a French philosopher writing in the decades following the Second World War.

This comparison of Edgar and Berman illustrates some of the opportunities and pitfalls of employing Merleau-Ponty in philosophical theology. Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the perceived world offers a route to finding sacredness through phenomenal engagement with the world, without setting up an absolute transcendent divinity beforehand. Whereas Edgar finds an immanent incarnated divinity, Berman discovered a wondrous and hallowed absence in the depth of the world. This illustrates the fecundity of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and, while there may appear to be a considerable distance between the two positions, the attention given to Merleau-Ponty's careful phenomenology and the wonder and mystery he finds in perception reveals the two works to be much closer than first imagined. In adjudicating the issue, we might indeed find that the mystery inherent in both positions – and within Merleau-Ponty's own phenomenology – requires us to postpone an answer indefinitely. This is perhaps no bad thing since, as Merleau-Ponty would agree, finding a solution to the world robs it of the mystery which was the source of the original religious instinct. No doubt that attention to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology will lead us to find an endless fecundity in the perceptual world which, taken seriously, ought to be a source of endless wonder and mystery. This offers opportunities for positive and negative theologies alike; Merleau-Ponty should not be made to judge between these positions but will hold both accountable to the centrality of perception against the tendency of philosophy to absolutize.

At this juncture it is worth making a brief comment on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Much of the literature I have discussed which deploys Merleau-Ponty's philosophy theologically can be classified as philosophical theology. That is, these works use philosophical methods and resources to reach theological conclusions. My criticism of these projects is strictly philosophical; or, more precisely, I challenge the notion that such theological conclusions can be reached using the philosophical resources of Merleau-Ponty alone. It may well be that Merleau-Ponty's theology can resource various theological reflections. I take no issue with this position and it is neither unusual nor inappropriate for theologians to appropriate philosophers in this way. My purpose here is to argue against the view that any kind of theology is already implicitly present in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy; theological use of Merleau-Ponty is legitimate but we must recognize that it involves the augmentation of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy with theological methods.

Moving forwards: the ontology of flesh

As I have argued, attempting to find a latent theology in Merleau-Ponty's work runs the risk of distorting his philosophy and performing exactly the kind of absolutizing reflection which Merleau-Ponty condemned. If we are to use Merleau-Ponty theologically, this must be done in acknowledgement of the interpretive liberties this involves. However, this does not exhaust the uses to which Merleau-Ponty's thought can be put in the service of philosophy of religion. My final purpose is thus not theological but to offer a contribution to philosophy of religion and, to a lesser extent, religious studies. By referring to philosophy of religion, I do not mean I intend to offer philosophical reflections on religious or theological questions; rather, my intention is to examine the implications Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has for a philosophical anthropology and then show how these findings might be used to help us better understand the human phenomenon of religion. Hence, I hope to present Merleau-Ponty as a valuable philosophical resource to philosophers interested in the phenomenology of human religious experience (such as the contributors to Ellis (Reference Ellis2018)), and scholars in the field of religious studies.

While Merleau-Ponty regarded many of the great theological questions as ‘prosaic’, he was impressed by the ‘constant manifesting of religious phenomena through all stages of world history’ (PrP, 45). While Merleau-Ponty may have resisted an investigation into the nature of God, he was curious about the perennial emergence of religious and spiritual practices throughout history and across diverse cultures. Thus, I propose that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is well placed to help us understand religion as a human phenomenon. This question is strictly neutral with regard theology and I do not suggest that an explanation of the human religious impulse would be fatal to theology. Rather, I contend that theist and atheist alike ought to be interested in the human condition and what makes us open to religious or spiritual experiences – whether this openness is believed to refer to anything beyond human experience is not my concern. My contention is that Merleau-Ponty's thought can form the basis of a philosophical anthropology which can explain the presence and nature of the religious impulse without either explaining away religion or finding some logically necessary movement from this religious inclination to a theological affirmation. I will first make some brief comments on Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy of embodiment before arguing that, for this to be useful to a philosophical study of religion, it must be augmented by Merleau-Ponty's later ontology of flesh. I will thus briefly outline this later ontology, before expanding on its applications to the philosophy of religion.

Merleau-Ponty is often understood to be a philosopher of embodiment and, while this is not wrong, neither is it the whole truth. When reading Merleau-Ponty, it is important to remember that his thought underwent significant development throughout his life (Berman (Reference Berman2017), xiii–xiv). Thus, while it is not inaccurate to call Merleau-Ponty a philosopher of the body, this approach tends to overemphasize his earlier work.Footnote ³ Later in his life, Merleau-Ponty came to regard the problems with which he contended in the Phenomenology of Perception as ‘insoluble because I start there from the “consciousness”–“object” distinction’, which makes it impossible to see how ‘objective’ events (such as a brain lesion) can affect the phenomenological structure of the perceived world (Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Lingis1968), henceforth VI, 200). The problem with a philosophy of embodiment is that it still contains an implicit dualism between the mind and the body which ‘put[s] the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box’ (VI, 138). As Merleau-Ponty reached the latter stages of his life, he increasingly moved away from a philosophy of embodiment and sought to do away with the distinction between mind and body, and subject and object, entirely. Hence, his later writings began to move in a more ontological direction; the question was no longer how a human being could perceive the world but rather what the nature of the world was, such that it could give rise to perception. Later works such as The Visible and the Invisible and ‘Eye and Mind’ thus step back from the conscious subject and concern themselves with pre-reflective being.

We do not have the space here for a full account of Merleau-Ponty's ontology, and the existence of quality commentaries on the subject makes such a task unnecessary.Footnote ⁴ However, a few points will be made for the unfamiliar reader. Owing to his untimely death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty's ontological project remained unfinished and so it never reached full articulation. However, there is enough in his later publications, along with the incomplete and posthumously published The Visible the Invisible, to sketch an outline of this ontological project. The motivating force behind Merleau-Ponty's ontology was to attempt to overcome the dualisms of mind/body and subject/object, and understand the world pre-reflectively. Merleau-Ponty regarded dualism as the consequence of ‘high-altitude thinking’ [le pensée de survol] (VI, 91), a mode of thinking which establishes an acosmic constituting consciousness able to ‘soar above’ objective things and survey the whole world in one go (VI, 30). Merleau-Ponty aimed to return to an ontology which recognized the limitation of human understanding and could account for the perspectival nature of perception. Dualism in this context is not limited to the substance dualism of classically understood Cartesianism. For Merleau-Ponty, dualist ontology is established with the division of possible being into res cogitans and res extensa. Accordingly, physicalist ontologies are just as dualist as substance dualism: physicalism accepts the division of res cogitans and res extensa but adds the caveat that nothing exists which falls into the category of res cogitans. While this appears to make for a monist philosophy, the single physical substance is still subject to all the restrictions of extended matter in the Cartesian system.Footnote ⁵

To overcome these dualist categories, Merleau-Ponty began to use the language of flesh to describe both human beings and the being of the world. This language can make Merleau-Ponty's ontology appear quite obscure. Merleau-Ponty does depart from traditional ontological categories, but this is done intentionally in order to escape the pull of Cartesian thinking which affects the language of mind, body, subject, and object. Flesh is a category which takes in the world and the human being. It ‘is not mind, is not matter, is not substance’ but is rather the shared mode of existence assumed by human beings and the world. Flesh precedes the reflective division of the world into subjects and objects or minds and bodies and so human flesh is continuous with the world's flesh – it is ‘made of the same stuff’ (Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty, O'Neill and Dallery1974), 284). Our experience of our own being, however, is not that of complete continuity with the world: we experience ourselves – at least to some degree – as distinct beings. Merleau-Ponty describes this distinction as a ‘folding’ or ‘coiling over’ of the flesh to create a ‘thickness’ which is the body (VI, 135–146). This establishes what Dillon calls an ‘identity-within-difference’ between the human and the world: the coiling of the flesh allows for a distance between the human and the world while maintaining an ontological identity (Dillon (Reference Dillon1997), 159).

The effect of Merleau-Ponty's ontology is to radicalize the philosophy of embodiment. In Cartesian terms, Merleau-Ponty wants to articulate the deep embeddedness of mind and body, the ‘reciprocal intertwining of one in the other’ (VI, 168); the ontology of flesh articulates this while avoiding the implicit Cartesianism of such language. The human being is not simply an embodied subject in the world; rather, my body and subjectivity are continuous with the world so that it can accurately be said that I am a part of the world perceiving itself. Whereas Cartesian language assumes a basic separation or difference between mind and body, the ontology of flesh regards any such distinction as dependent on a prior unity. Douglas Low refers to ‘nonreciprocal reversibility’: while there is simultaneously a sameness and difference between humans and the world, the sameness is the primary term, upon which the difference is derived (Low (Reference Low2000), 80).Footnote ⁶ There is, therefore, an important distinction between this and Merleau-Ponty's earlier philosophy. Here, in contrast to a philosophy of embodiment, the embodied human being is not just in the world but exists as a continuous part of the world. Merleau-Ponty's ontology is not a philosophy of the human being but a philosophy of the world and, at the most basic ontological level, no division exists between human being and the world's being. Consequently, our philosophy must do more than simply pay heed to the effects of the body or the external world on the mind; rather, we must see mind, body, and world as one organic whole which are only divided through reflection.

We must be careful at this point in how we classify Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh. It might be argued that Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh eventually just collapses into a monist ontology, with flesh standing in as some kind of singular physical substance. On this view, while perceptual experience is of the aforementioned ‘identity-within-difference’ of flesh, the difference ultimately collapses into identity. There is a degree to which this criticism is right: in Low's terms, the identity of flesh is the primary term over the difference and it is in fact essential for Merleau-Ponty's ontology that the differences we perceive in the world are based on a prior sameness. However, the criticism that Merleau-Ponty's ontology just collapses into monism is not correct. Merleau-Ponty's ontology is at heart a response to the problem of perception: how is it that minds can perceive the physical world? In The Visible and the Invisible, this involves an extended discussion of the concept of reversibility. Reversibility is modelled on the phenomenon of double touch, in which one hand touches the other hand which is in turn touching something else (Dillon (Reference Dillon1997), 159). While in earlier works, Merleau-Ponty argued that this experience eventually collapses into an insurmountable ambiguity of subjectivity and objectivity (PhP, 95), in VI this experience is described as a ‘crisscrossing . . . of the touching and the tangible’ (VI, 133). There is a reversal between the touching and the touched which is never fully completed, ‘a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two’ so that, between my body as touched and my body as touching, I experience an ‘overlapping or encroachment’ (VI, 123). I experience an ineluctable divergence between my hand as subject and my hand as object, yet this divergence is founded on the prior unity of my body; the two experiences are ‘recorded on the same map’ (VI, 133).

This analysis of double touch as fundamentally reversible is extended to perception of the world: to touch the world, I must be touched by the world; to see the world, I must be visible. Hence, ‘he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at’ (VI, 134). Just as was the case with the phenomenon of double touch, so perceptual experience of the world is characterized by reversibility: there is an identity between perceiver and perceived – without which any perception would be impossible – yet there remains a dehiscence or divergence (ècart) between the perceiver and the world. Without this divergence, perception is equally impossible, since perceiver and perceived would collapse into one another making any relation between the two terms impossible. This divergence of perceived and perceiver is experienced as the body. As mentioned above, flesh folds or coils over to create a thickness. The perceiving body is thus both irreducibly identical with the world, while at the same time experiencing an ineluctable divergence with it.

Therefore, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty's ontology can be described as monist; however, we must be careful to clarify exactly what we mean by this. This is not substance monism. Merleau-Ponty repudiates the category of substance; for him, flesh is best designated by the term ‘element’ (VI, 139). The single element flesh is precisely that within which perception, in its ineluctable reversibility, takes place. Flesh is the intertwining of mind and body: or, more properly, flesh is the fundamental yet complex element within which reflective philosophies draw distinctions between mind and body. According to Merleau-Ponty, my being is continuous with the world yet, if this is a monist claim, it is not monism as it is traditionally understood. The world is an irreducible intertwining of what reflective philosophy calls mind and body; I am continuous with this flesh.

Before moving on, it is worth briefly dealing with one further potential objection, that a physicalist philosophy coupled with a supervenience theory of consciousness appears to overcome the traditional problems of dualism and other forms of physicalism without the need to embark on a new ontological project – thus rendering Merleau-Ponty's ontology obsolete (see, for example, Haugeland (Reference Haugeland1982), 93–103). There is space for only a brief response here. Supervenience philosophies of mind still privilege internal experience, consciousness and subjectivity, contrasting these experiences with external, non-mental, bodily experience. The emergent mind, while supervening on physiological structures and functioning entirely within the physical realm, remains a private internal experience, accessible only to the experiencing ego. Hence, supervenience still delivers a dualist philosophy of mind, according to which the mental is meaningfully distinct from the physical. This problem does not exist for Merleau-Ponty, not because he reduces mental events to physical events but because he rejects the division of physical and mental explanations. For Merleau-Ponty, physical events in perceiving beings are intrinsically mental events. This is not because there is a second-order mental explanation that can be applied to certain physical phenomena but rather because physicality and mentality are so deeply intertwined as to make the separating out of the two a fool's errand. Supervenience recognizes that consciousness is a function of the brain but it remains an in-body or in-brain philosophy of mind. This means that there is no capacity for the conscious subject to extend beyond the brain: experiences described by Merleau-Ponty wherein the human body incorporates equipment into its body schema remain unexplained by supervenience (PhP, 114).

Consequently, supervenience philosophies undervalue the body and thus over-privilege reason and logic: according to supervenience, human-like consciousness could plausibly emerge from a computer without a body, provided that its hardware could replicate the structures and neuronal connections of a human brain.Footnote ⁷ Human consciousness requires a body: not only is the body an essential component in human sense perception, the body itself affects how the world is perceived. For example, the perception of phenomena such as colour and temperature depend not simply on objective judgements about the world but also on how the body reacts to these objective facts. Further, Shaun Gallagher has shown that human thought is affected by prenoetic bodily factors such as hormone or blood sugar levels (Gallagher (Reference Gallagher2005), 151); supervenience leaves these features of embodied experience unaccounted for. If the mind emerges from the structure of the brain, this does not help us to understand why physical and chemical changes in my body and the external world affect how I experience the world. Supervenience alone, therefore, cannot fully account for conscious human experience. Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh provides a framework for understanding human embodiment because it asserts the basic continuity between mind, brain, body, and world. Whereas supervenience involves the emergence of mind from brain structures, the ontology of flesh involves the coiling over of the flesh of the world to form the body. The mind is never separated from the body and remains continuous with the world and so the deep intertwining of mind and body is comprehensible.

Perceptual faith and the sense of wonder

This has significant implications for the philosophy of religion, and we will round off this article by exploring some of them. The first point to make is that Merleau-Ponty's ontology can begin to answer what he regards as the mystery of the human religious instinct: the question of why humans repeatedly engage in religious and spiritual practices and beliefs throughout the world across diverse historical periods and cultures. The basic answer we can ascertain from Merleau-Ponty's later writings is that we would expect the human being to regard the world as inspiring or wondrous because their primary mode of engagement with it is not scientific or rational. In the early pages of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses ‘perceptual faith’, the basic assumption which underlies all human experience that the world exists and exists roughly as I perceive it (VI, 3–14). This is basically an anti-sceptic disposition which precedes any and all reflection. The perceptual faith is the faith that the world exists roughly as it appears but has the capacity to exceed my perception. I am sure of the world's existence but its content can surprise me (VI, 40). We will return to this notion in a moment but we can already see the basis of religious faith. If my basic experience of the world involves the expectation that the world will exceed my perception of it, then human perception must involve a basic openness to experiences beyond those which can be rationalized. Religious and spiritual perception can be interpreted as a consequence of this openness.Footnote ⁸ Merleau-Ponty's ontology allows for perceptual faith, rather than wholesale scepticism. Because the body is not a veil of appearances but rather a limited part of the world it perceives, we can recognize the limitation of our perspective secure in the knowledge of the world's existence. Thus, Merleau-Ponty's ontology allows an openness to mystery without falling into scepticism. This also guards against the temptation to spiritualize our uncertainty. The world's capacity to exceed our perception of it is a direct consequence of our status as limited parts of the world. When we experience mystery it is because the world is bigger than we are and so bound to surprise us: these mysterious experiences should prompt us to continue interrogating the world, rather than suppose a mystical cause.

Merleau-Ponty regards the perceptual faith to be discoverable on a phenomenological analysis of pre-reflective thought; however, perceptual faith also provides an insight into the ontology of flesh. The purpose of Merleau-Ponty's ontology is to challenge reflective philosophies with their tendency for high-altitude thinking and the pre-reflective perceptual faith is the perfect route into this. Perception indicates the role of the body in structuring perception; this operates ‘as if my vision of the world were formed from a certain point of the world’ (VI, 7). Perceptual faith exists because I am not an acosmic constituting consciousness: my thought does not fly over the world, able to comprehend it in its entirety. Perceptual faith is always perspectival, disclosing an aspect of the world from a particular point of view which is limited and cannot include all possible viewpoints. To perceive is to perceive partially. However, this perspectivism does not arise simply from my insertion into the world. While the Phenomenology of Perception was concerned with the effect of the body on perception, by the time of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty recognized that perception does not just appear to take place from within the world but appears so immersed in the world as to be formed from it. This is what happens when we truly escape the dualist picture of the mind: we cannot just say that perception is embodied but rather we must insist that perception is part of the world. I am not an embodied subject immersed in the world; I am a localized part of the world. I experience divergence in perception but this divergence is only possible because of a prior unity.

This makes perspective a necessary part of perception. I have perspective, not simply because I happen to be spatially and temporally located in a particular position within the world but because I exist as a discrete and limited part of it. My perspective is not just a matter of personal location but of ontological identity. My existence is the existence of the world and is a necessarily limited existence; the incompleteness of my perception is thus a necessary aspect of my existence which could not be remedied by extracting myself from the world. This would not present me with a God's-eye perspective but rather eliminate perspective altogether. The world appears mysterious because I am the world – but not the whole world. While humans can attempt to dissolve the world's mystery through reflection, reflection will never utterly overcome our ontologically guaranteed experience of perspective because it will always be based on the more primitive perceptual faith. This does not mean that reflective knowledge (including science and rational thought) is necessarily wrong; however, it does mean that, even as humans learn through these reflective processes and construct an objective picture of the world, they will still inevitably and instinctively respond to it with wonder. Whether we then develop spiritual or religious beliefs or theologies is a question for the theologian; Merleau-Ponty's own position was to reaffirm that the world's mystery does not require any spiritual or religious explanation. While a theologian might want to appropriate the instinctive spirituality of human existence, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy must be regarded as implicitly theological. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty was content to accept that we will never fully understand the world and resisted anyone who sought to provide such an explanation.

Freedom

So far we have considered the relationship between Merleau-Ponty's ontology and the primitive wonder he identified in the human approach to the world which can help us to understand the basic religious instinct of human beings. We need not end here, however: Merleau-Ponty provides the resources to understand not only why humans are disposed to religion and spirituality but how this is expressed in practice. One important development in the study of religion in recent decades is the move away from a belief-centric view of religion and the recognition of the importance of the physical, ritual, and affective elements of religious practice (see, for example, Keane (Reference Keane2008), S110–S127; Schilbrack (Reference Schilbrack2014); Schaefer (Reference Schaefer2015)). Even before we consider his ontology, Merleau-Ponty is already helpful here. As Matthews notes, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can be described as a hermeneutic phenomenology which recognizes that phenomena are more than just private, inner experiences but are involved in an intrinsically meaningful external world (Matthews (Reference Matthews2002), 39–41). For an investigation into the phenomenon of religion, this would imply that religion is not just an inner experience, and that religious experiences are more than just internal events. Rather, a hermeneutic phenomenology such as Merleau-Ponty's would have us recognize that religious phenomena are historically situated, both within their own traditions and within a wider contemporary social, political, and economic situation. At this point, we must be careful not simply to equate hermeneutics with the interpretation of texts or even of religious traditions. As various scholars within religious studies have shown, this Christocentric emphasis on texts and the paradigm of World Religions can often distort our understanding of historically and culturally varied religious phenomena, marginalizing non-European religious practices, such as the diversity of Indian-American or African traditions (Balagangadhara (Reference Balagangadhara1994), 21; Cotter & Robertson (Reference Cotter and Robertson2016), 3–13, Fitzgerald (Reference Fitzgerald1997), 98–100). Pleasingly, this is cognate with Merleau-Ponty's hermeneutic approach, which went beyond the interpretation of texts and regarded historical, political, and economic realities as meaningful human experiences to be interpreted and responded to. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology thus already has the tools to recognize the situatedness of religious phenomena in the context of historically mediated religious traditions, as well as the wider historical, political, and economic power structures within which religious phenomena occur.

The usual response to the affectivity and materiality of religion is to reassert a philosophy of embodiment which can help us to understand better the embodiment of religion. This is a reasonable move to make, since without an embodied approach, it is hard to see why religion would manifest itself in this way. However, my contention is that a philosophy of embodiment alone is insufficient if we want a more complete understanding of religion. Embodiment alone does not necessarily free us from an intellectualist picture of religion; it is plausible for someone to recognize the physical and affective influences undergone by the human body and yet maintain that a rational human subject ought to be able to overcome these and make rational decisions about their religious beliefs. On this view, physical or affective religious practices are regarded as manipulative or oppressive: if someone's thoughts can be changed by encouraging them to participate in a particular ritual or with the use of emotionally charged music, then the religion is manipulating their emotions. Any subsequent religious belief or affiliation becomes tainted – it is not freely chosen and so not as legitimate. Even a religious practitioner who chooses to engage in affective practices is not off the hook. Anyone who engages in an embodied religious practice is open to the charge of self-deception. The problem with this is that all religion ends up being implicated in the charge of manipulation. All religion is embodied and involves aesthetic, affective, ritual practices, whether this involves visceral, bodily ritual practice, or is more muted, such as a Protestant who engages visually and aurally with Scripture and responds with their bodily posture to a sermon. A philosophy of embodiment by itself does not necessarily preclude the sceptical view that religion is nothing more than manipulation and self-deception.

The problem here is that Cartesian ontologies do not deal well with freedom. Freedom is threatened when the actor ceases to be responsible for their actions: I am not free if I am not the author of my own decisions. This is what drives the fear of manipulation: that I will end up affirming a God in whom I did not believe because of some external affectively charged factor. This notion of freedom is based on a view of the authentic self, that there is some real ‘me’ in the driving seat who should be making my free decisions. For a substance dualist, this is the immaterial soul which is rendered unfree when it is overpowered by anything external to it. At first glance, physicalism seems to avoid this problem since it rejects the notion of an immaterial soul that would treat influence from the body or world as entirely foreign to the acting subject. However, to avoid falling into determinism, an alternative conception of freedom, other than the freedom from external influence, must be articulated. The authentic self is thus recast as the rational self and non-rational interference is regarded as unfree. Thus, for the compatibilist, freedom is still a case of rational decision-making. While this view might be able to accommodate the fact that our rational decisions are affected (even determined) by the atoms in our brains, the idea that I might train my body to believe something I did not previously believe is still rejected as coercive. However a dualist tries to account for freedom, as soon as the human subject is affected by their body or the material world (i.e. as soon as they enter the world), their freedom is compromised.

With an ontology of flesh, these problems disappear. From the perspective of flesh, there is no conflict between the ego's freedom and the effect of its embodiment because, at this most basic level, they are one and the same thing. The ego is the body; the body does not restrict freedom but rather is the condition of the possibility of freedom. The idea that the world can threaten the freedom of the human subject makes no sense when we consider that the human subject is the world. This means that, for an ontology of flesh, freedom cannot be based on an authentic self. From the perspective of flesh, this idea is meaningless since I am continuous with the world: there is no clear demarcation between what is authentically me and what is external. The divergence I experience between myself and the world is not a fundamental difference and so it is not possible to distinguish between my own rational actions and the irrational material effects of the physical world. Hence, there can be no separating my own actions from the effects of the world – they become one and the same thing. While the inseparability of my own actions from the world might seem to undermine freedom, it in fact makes it possible. Rather than seeing the body as something which restricts freedom, we should rather see it as the condition of the possibility of freedom: without my body, I cannot act at all. The body is that which opens up possibilities for me and through which I act. Certainly, the body sets limitations on my actions; however, this is less a limitation and more a horizon of possibility, within which I am free to act.

This analysis of the body's role in freedom is something Merleau-Ponty recognizes as early as the Phenomenology of Perception (PhP, 100–148) and does not yet take us much further in overcoming the problems that embodiment causes for freedom. While the body on this analysis is no longer antagonistic to freedom, we are not much further than a Sartrean conception of radical freedom tempered by an embodied articulation of facticity: that is, we might accept that free actions require a body and that this also means we do not have utterly unfettered freedom (I cannot fly because it is a limitation of my body, for example); however, in determining how we wish to use our bodies and deciding what projects we will undertake, the old dualist conception of freedom remains. For Sartre, authenticity comes from taking full responsibility for one's actions; while the body might be a limiting factor in what actions are possible to perform, claiming that one's actions are affected by one's embodiment – or worse, attempting to manipulate one's own body in order to create alternative desires, beliefs or actions – is bad faith. Embodiment must be understood from the perspective of flesh in order to overcome this egocentricism and rationalism in freedom. The radically free authentic self cannot exist from the perspective of flesh since there is no way to draw a boundary between what is a free and authentic decision of the self and what is inauthentically influenced by the body or external world. The self which we experience is derived from the flesh. This means that non-rational influences which affect how we think (such as hormone levels, blood pressure, the ambient temperature, and so on) are inextricably linked to the experience of the self. This deciding ego cannot be separated from the extra-ego factors which influence it because, without these, the ego would not exist. If freedom means freedom from external influence, then there can be no action at all. This does not mean that coercion or manipulation is not possible – we might want to maintain, for example, that using a psychoactive substance to make someone believe something they would normally deny is manipulative and undermines their freedom. However, what it does mean is that rationality is not the measure of freedom and the irrational body can (indeed must) be involved in free acts.

The upshot is that, from the perspective of flesh, religious practice cannot be cast as necessarily manipulative or self-deceptive. A decision or belief which is based on or influenced by affective physical stimuli is no less rational for it; indeed, human rationality is grounded in physicality – no decision, however apparently rational or scientific, can be extracted from its physical and affective context. We can see the payoff of this view by considering Clare Carlisle's recent work on habit. In a 2013 article, Carlisle argues for the importance of habit in understanding human religion and brings recent work in cognitive science into conversation with historical theologians. In her article, Carlisle notes two perennial but profoundly different responses to habit: positively, habit enables spiritual training and the development of moral virtues; negatively, habit undermines human freedom and authenticity (Carlisle (Reference Carlisle2013), 49). Carlisle finds herself drawn to a more positive conception of habit since ‘it allows us to think of human freedom as situated in communal forms of life, as embodied in routines and rituals and practices, as continuous with the natural world, as embedded within history’ (ibid., 50). This is where Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh can deliver. The threat to freedom which habit seems to pose is based on a fundamentally Cartesian ontology. Habit works on the unconscious physical responses of the human body and as such seems to stand in contrast to rational human freedom. From the perspective of flesh, however, there is no difference between an action which is performed out of habit and one which is performed out of rational deliberation. Both are physical processes which involve interaction between brain, body, world, and the bodies of others. Habit might work below the level of conscious awareness but this does not make it any less free. Indeed, the language of freedom in this context is misleading, suggesting as it does an external force which can compel action and thus undermine freedom.

Merleau-Ponty can thus help us to articulate a conception of habit which does not reject it as amoral and antithetical to freedom. A human being may freely choose to exploit the physical, affective, and habitual capacities of her body to pursue projects that would otherwise be closed off. This is the technique adopted by, for example, a virtuoso pianist, for whom habit and practice are essential in opening up new projects and possibilities. It is also the approach taken by a religious practitioner – a Christian monk in the mystical tradition, for example – to open up spiritual projects and possibilities denied to the uninitiated novice. This does not require us to postulate the existence of a ‘spiritual dimension’ to which these habits and practices can help us gain access (cf. Cottingham (Reference Cottingham2005); Sherman (Reference Sherman2014), 252). Rather, this means that religious practice and habit are phenomena central to the nature of human existence and can open up new potential religious and spiritual experiences to an individual; whether these experiences point to a spiritual dimension or simply the boundless fecundity of the perceptual world is a question philosophy cannot answer. It is curious that, in a later work, Carlisle employs her own concept of flesh as an explanatory term for understanding the status of habit. This comes just a paragraph after she cites Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, yet Carlisle makes no reference to Merleau-Ponty's own conception of flesh (Carlisle (Reference Carlisle and Ellis2018), 107). It would appear that the use of Merleau-Ponty's own conception of flesh would offer the potential for a concept of habit which is freed from the dualist question of whether habit can foster authentically free actions, and can present religious practice as no less rational or free than any other human action.