By the late 1950s, Merleau-Ponty felt that his Phenomenology of Perception had not gone far enough. Describing how the body structures perception still risked leaving intact the old oppositions between subject and object, inner and outer, self and world. What was needed was a deeper account of being itself—an ontology that could explain why these dualisms arise and how they might be overcome. His unfinished masterpiece, The Visible and the Invisible, takes up this task.
Reversibility and the Chiasm
A striking example guides his shift: the hand that touches another hand. When I place one hand upon the other, I am both the toucher and the touched. The roles can reverse in an instant, but they cannot be lived simultaneously. This reversible relation reveals a truth deeper than either subjective experience or objective description: the body is woven into a circuit of perception where the seer can be seen, the toucher can be touched.
Merleau-Ponty calls this structure the chiasm, borrowing the Greek word for a crossing or intertwining. Consciousness and world are not two separate orders that somehow connect—they are folded into one another.
The Flesh of the World
To name this deeper layer, he introduces the concept of flesh. Flesh is not matter, substance, or spirit. It is the elemental fabric of reality, the shared medium that makes perception and relation possible. My body is made of the same “stuff” as the world it perceives, and so there is no absolute gulf between subject and object. Instead, there is a continuous texture that allows for their reversible relation.
This ontology of flesh transforms phenomenology into a philosophy of being. The world is not an object before a subject; it is the very tissue in which subjects and objects co-emerge.
The idea of flesh dissolves the classical binaries that haunted Western thought. Mind and body, nature and culture, even self and other, are not radically opposed but variations within the same fabric. This does not erase difference but situates it within a field of intertwining.
The implications are wide-ranging. In ecology, it suggests a kinship between humans and the natural world: we belong to the same flesh, not as detached observers but as participants. In ethics, it grounds intersubjectivity in a shared being: the other is not radically alien but already inscribed in the fabric I inhabit. In art, it illuminates how painting, music, or poetry can disclose dimensions of reality inaccessible to science.
An Unfinished Vision
Merleau-Ponty died suddenly in 1961 at the age of 53, leaving The Visible and the Invisible in fragments. Yet even in its incomplete state, the work reveals the trajectory of his thought: from describing the lived body to articulating a new ontology where body and world, self and other, meet in the elemental flesh.