Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty's Thought

It is well known that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960-1961. More precisely, through a self-criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness - which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome - to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the ``element'' of Being, and on Being itself as ``true negative,'' or as ``Being of deflection'' and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this term inherited from Heidegger's philosophy. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considered Being no longer as a determined Being namely, as the essence of what is - but rather as an irradiation of interior or exterior horizons from which subjects and objects arise as ``rays of the world.'' This comprehensive movement manifests a clear rejection of substantial dualism for the benefit of ``brute Being'' or ``wild Being'' monism.