Love and Existence - Affectivity in Primordial World From Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

“Metaphysics – the emergence of a beyond nature – is not localized on the level of knowledge: it begins with the opening to an “other”, it is everywhere and already contained within the distinctive development of sexuality. Of course we have, following Freud, generalized notion of sexuality. So how can we speak of a distinctive development of sexuality? How can we characterize a content of consciousness as sexual? Indeed, we cannot.” 1

Introduction
What is love? This question has been troubling people since ancient Greek, Plato spent a lot of discussion on love in Symposium. Even in the modern world, love is still unsolvable by scientific knowledge. There are many experiments carried out to find out what our bodies will change, such as the hormone level, when we are in love but all of these experiments fail to explain what love is. Some people say that love is a pure idea that transcends all the physical limitations in the world. Some people may argue that love is an erotic lust in which our bodies react sexually due to our biological structure. If love is either one of the above cases, love will be something we are controllable in the first case, or uncontrollable in the latter case.

From our own experience, we certainly identify several types of love. While referring to the ancient Greek words of love, love is expressed as philia(φιλία), storge(στοργή), agape(ἀγάπη) and eros(ἔρως), which shows different properties of love and adds difficulty to the quest of the love’s essence.

Therefore, in this essay, I will first briefly discuss about the types of love. Then I will aim to investigate what love is by using Merleau Ponty’s view of cogito and sexuality. Although the love discussed by Merleau Ponty is eros, I attempt to understand all kinds of love. My second part will argue that other kinds of love are based on the perception in the primordial world so that different kinds of love are possible. However, even we understand the essences of love, if love is irrelevant to our existence, we indeed are not necessary to spend time contemplating it. In this view, I will also discuss the importance of love in our existence as a genuine being in the world.


I. Types of Love
Facing different people, we react differently and thus have different kinds of feelings and affections. In ancient Greek, love was classified into four categories: philia, storge, eros and agape. Philia means brotherly love which is similar to the love of friendship. Storge refers to the love between parents and children and eros refers to the intimate love with associated sexual possession. Agape usually refers to the love of God for man which is unconditional, but if loosely defined, becomes an unconditional and equal love to otherness whose identities are irrelevant to the loving agent. For example, Mother Teresa served people who are dying of HIV/AIDS is a kind of agape of a mortal human being. In the strictest sense, agape may not be achieved by mortal humans but such a question is not an attempted investigation in this essay.

Although there are different kinds of love, eros has always been a central analysis in philosophy since ancient Greek. Plato devoted much discussion in his two dialogues: Phaedrus and Symposium. In Symposium, Socrate argued that eros is a desire for truth, virtue and beauty, which these values are universal and immortal. Later, philosophers followed Descarte’s idealistic interpretation on Cogito, love is understood as an object that is transcendental to the world, unaffected by our experience in the world, and irrelevant to our changes through the life journey.

Eros, as a sexual desire, relates to the body of the object so the body certainly plays a part in it, but also not totally, as it is common that one loves someone even when the loved one becomes old and there are still reasons to justify our love. Therefore, both classical empiricism and intellectualism fail to explain the phenomenology of love. In this case, I believe Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy, the importance of the body and the primacy of perception, provides a good framework for explaining what love is. In the book the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau Ponty discussed eros love in two sections: Sexuality and Cogito, which will be discussed below.


II. Cogito and Love
In Part three, Section One, Merleau Ponty discussed Cogito, aiming to revise the concept of Cogito as omniscient being interpreted under the idealist framework. He explained that if following Descartes’s argument, the thought formed in each person during thinking will be universal and eternally true, i.e. purely transcendental to the world. However, by examining our lives experience, one would discover that the content of thoughts and consciousness formed during thinking bases on the thinking framework one has already acquired in mind. Further looking into the formation of the idealist theory, he pointed out that this pure consciousness is the outcome of reflection which is based on our primordial perception.

Our perception requires our pre-acquired knowledge so that we can recognize the thing is that thing but not the other thing so consciousness should not be equal to a universal certainty of “I” without otherness, affective and receptive aspects. Besides, in phenomenology, while going back to the experience or thing itself, by this going back action the certainty of the perceived thing can be affirmed by the certainty of our acts of perceiving:-

“Perception and the perceived necessarily have the same existential modality, since perception is inseparable from the consciousness…There can be no question of maintaining the certainty of perception by denying the certainty of the perceived thing.” 2

Cogito is a cogito “in action”, i.e. we do not deduce “I am” from “I think”, but rather the certainty of “I think” rests on the “I am” of existential engagement:-

“It would be contradictory to maintain simultaneously that the world is constituted by me and that I can only grasp the outline and essential structures of this constitutive operation; I must see the existing world appears - and not merely the idea of the world – upon the completion of the constitutive work, otherwise I would only have an abstract construction and not a concrete consciousness of the world.” 3

What Merleau Ponty argued provides a new way to understand how love is. Love, as a kind of consciousness, is no longer purely transparent knowledge existing in oneself and unaffected by the outer world. Love should be understood from a view of a living body that his various actions are orientated to the tasks he is facing in the world. That is, when one is in love, whatever he meets in his life will bear the existence of his lover that provides a whole new meaning to his mundane world. Furthermore, if cogito is a cogito “in action”, it means the consciousness requires a body, a sign, or an action to accomplish itself. In this view, one can only certain he is in love when he does a loving act, for example, I know I love that person if I will leave my schedule behind to take care of that person when he is sick. Merleau Ponty affirmed this view in the latter part of the section:-

“My love, my hate, and my desire are not certain as simple thoughts comes from the certainty of acts of loving, of hating, and of desiring, but rather all of the certainty of these thoughts comes from the certainty of acts of loving, of hating and of desiring, of which I am certain because I am the one who does them.” 4

From the above discussion, it is concluded that love is a union of body and mind.

Merleau Ponty analyzed the phenomenology of erotic love to demonstrate how to understand "love" which also provides a framework to understand other kinds of love. In this part, he illustrated many characteristics of eros through the phenomenon that happened between lovers, his main aim was to clarify that love was not purely a sensation of emotion nor clearly defined knowledge but rather affective intentionality by distinguishing between the illusory love and true love. He argued that, even though we had the feeling of engagement, it may not be true love because one may discover that he was loving the qualities of the loved one rather than the being of the loved one upon his later reflection on himself. He argued that “true love summons up all of the subject’s resources and affects him completely, whereas false love has to do with only one of his personate” 5 and one “can no longer conceive of my life without this love”6. Therefore, love is something always ambiguous and a merging of my life with my loved one:-

“Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it. It is not a thing that one could outline and designate... because it is rather the way the lover establishes his relations with the world; it is an existential significant.”7

I agree with Merleau Ponty that love is the incorporation of one’s world with the world of his lover as lovers always relate the objects/experiences they encountered to another half and thus assign a specific significance to the things. However, I think that Merleau Ponty defining true love can summon up all of the subject’s resources and affects him completely is too exaggerating. It is because if one’s world only centers on another half, he will no longer able to relate himself with his surrounding so he will lose his world, he is no longer being in the world. In fact, I believe that Merleau Ponty slightly changed his view on love in his later stage which he argued that love is an institution that required imagination and necessary for our projection to the future.8 However, I will not discuss this institution in detail here but I would like to point out that Merleau Ponty still viewed love to be ambiguous and a relation with the world of otherness in his later philosophical stage.

If love is an intentional relationship with the world of the beloved one, we then puzzle why we are only willing to form this relationship with a particular person but not another person. This puzzle poses a contingency on the love that lovers always doubt whether they are genuinely in love. I believe this puzzle may be solved, even though may partially, by Merleau Ponty’s view on sexuality.


III. Sexuality and Affectivity of Being
In section five of part one, he again examined the pathological case of Schneider, showing that Schneider didn’t have any sexual reaction while looking at obscene pictures or having conversations on sexual topics. Therefore, the explanations provided by representational and behaviorist theories fail. Rather, he argued that sexuality is a form of intentionality, which is called a sexual schema. The sexual schema affects a being in a pre-cognitive sense, resulting in an intertwinement between intellectual life and biological life, and renders the world with a special significance:-

“There must be an immanent function in sexual life that guarantees its unfolding, and the normal extension of sexuality must rest upon the internal powers of the organic subject. There must be an Eros or a Libido that animates an original world, gives external stimuli a sexual value or signification, and sketches out for each subject the use to which he will put his objective body…the visible body is underpinned by a strictly individual sexual schema that accentuates erogenous zones, sketches out a sexual physiognomy, and calls forth the gestures of the masculine body, which is itself integrated into this affectivity totality.” 9

Therefore, the things we perceived in the world have already embarked on a specific sexual significance in our pre-reflective world so our affectivity towards an object is being affected unconsciously. Merleau Ponty explained that “Erotic perception is not a cogitation that intends a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and it is accomplished in the world, not within consciousness.” 10 In this view, erotic perception (i.e. assigning an object with sexual significance and having sexual desire) illustrates being as an expression of the sexed body and as a subject of desire, rather than a purely intellectual or biological being.

Since sexuality exists in our primordial world and affects our actions, it is one of the existential dimensions, as being is always a sexed being who is situated in the world.

“The same reason that prevents us from “reducing” existence to the body or to sexuality also prevents us from “reducing” sexuality to existence: it is because existence is not an order of facts (like psychical facts”) that one could reduce to other facts or to which these others could be reduced; rather, it is the equivocal milieu of their communication, the point where their boundaries merge, or again, their common fabric.” 11

Not only the sensation or feeling we perceive in the past affects our affective intention to a specific object. Sexuality shows that human exists as an individual one and human species at the same time. Merleau Ponty explained that as a being having a concrete body, he inevitably has to interact with others in the world so the responses and thoughts of other people in the world that all these otherness will become parts of our primordial world which then affects our affectivity.

As Being has a body, this body can be reduced to an object under the observation of another being. However, the body has the function of vision so I can reduce the body of the other person as an object at the same time. Therefore, the body can be the master and the slave at the same time which forms a dialectical property. Merleau ponty stated that “to treat sexuality as a dialectic is not to reduce it to a knowledge process nor to reduce the history of a man to the history of his consciousness...it is the tension from one existence to another existence that negates it and without which it can nevertheless not be sustained. Metaphysics - the emergence of a beyond nature- is not localized on the level of knowledge: it begins with the opening to an "other" “ 12 Therefore, beings have a social dimension. The subject body expresses itself and modifies itself under the response of otherness, in this view, the social culture and practices are imbued in our primordial world, affecting our affectivity on various qualities without our explicit awareness.

Furthermore, through Freud’s psychoanalytic discovery, sexuality shows that human have a historical dimension. Merleau Ponty explained that psychoanalysis assumes that every human acting has a reason so the past events of the patients should be understood and not simply tying human acting to mechanical conditions. It is because the historical events and experiences from one’s primordial world, and affect how one response to the existing circumstances. Merleau Ponty put it:-

“For Freud himself,......the libido is not an activity naturally oriented toward determinate ends - rather, it is the subject’ through different experiences, and of acquiring structures of behavior: the libido is what ensures that a man has a history.” 13

It is easy to see from our real-life experience that we don’t aware of why we love a person until someone asks us why. After contemplation, we may then come up with a list of qualities our lovers possess but clearly, we already have affectivities to our lovers even before listing out the qualities.

As sexuality is one of the existential dimensions, which operate in our unreflective state, I believe it explains why we are attracted by a specific type of person which subsequently becomes one’s romantic lover or friend (i.e. eros and philia). Affectivity is more than a sexual stimulus, it is an intention on something when the subject is projecting his future. Therefore, this intended object must possess some qualities that we believe will bring us pleasure or benefits. It is human nature that we pursue pleasure and avoid pain, for example, babies cry for hugging by their mother as the touch of the mother provides a safe feeling to babies. Babies do not need to be taught for asking this good feeling, they are born with this nature of seeking pleasure. In this sense, the interaction between us and the environment in where we are growing provides different senses to us, some of them may be good sensation while some of them may be a bad sensation. We assess whether we like an object by referring to our past experienced sensation. For example, once we experience help from other people in a problem, then we experience the benefits of this help and thus will seek a person with a helpful personality. Not only the good sensation affects our affectivity, but painful sensation also affects us. For example, a girl who was being bullied by her classmates when she was young may seek to find protective qualities in her lover or friends when she grows up.


IV. Storge and Agape

Storge
While ero and philia are largely determined by our affectivity, storge is quite irrelevant to the pleasures or benefits that parents expect to receive from their children. Parents don't care about the sexual identities nor the appearances of their children. In real life, one would observe that most parents scarify their enjoyments and give the best to their children even though their children behave badly, it is common news that many parents love their deformed babies dearly. Although sometimes we heard some parents mistreat their children, such as starving their kids to death, my explanation is that those parents are lacking storage for their children. Why some parents are lack of storage which seems not a nature of human being? We should look into the phenomenon of storage.

From the discussion in section III, it is demonstrated that the primordial world consists of historical and social dimensions and I will argue that they are to be used for understanding storge. I believe storge is more largely determined by social and historical conditions and personal history under where beings are situations. Most societies, if not all, advocate that parents should love their children. I believe this advocation, if traced back to ancient times, arose from the necessity of preserving the human species which is a kind of human nature. If all the parents mistreat their kids, the younger generation will die easily which is not favorable in preserving the human species. Therefore, I believe this ideology survives from ancient times to now and affecting us nowadays. Further from social effect, one is also affected by his personal history and I believe this explains why some parents mistreat their children. is because those parents never received correct loving acts, they don't know what love is, they don't love their children, even not themselves.

Agape
One may notice that the unconditional love in storge is similar to agape, but if using the affective, historical and social dimensions, we fail to explain agape. It is because agape, the unconditional love towards all other people, are irrelevant to one’s pleasure nor his relationship with all the other, but the unconditional love in storge presume a basic assumption – the relationship of parents and children. In the following, I will discuss the phenomenon of agape using the concept of “Chiasm” and “Flesh”.

In “The Visible and the Invisible”, which is a later stage of Merleau Ponty’s philosophical thinking, a new concept was introduced - Chiasm. Chiasm means for reversibility of the body and is an ontology of flesh. As a being having a concrete body in the world, the being is a sensor and receiver at the same time. For example, when one touches a thing, one feels the textures of the object and feels he is touching something at the same time, which the body of a being is a sensible body and sentient body. The flesh of our bodies here means more than our physical bodies, it means a universal one which is the element of the world and constitutes the world. As our existence is the union of our mind and physical bodies, our bodies embark on the signification of our mind, and since the being is in the world, the being intertwines with the world, the world is the extension of our body which accomplishes its fullness during its expression in the world. Therefore, the flesh possesses intellectual and sensing properties. Merleau Ponty stated that:-

“It uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh.”14

With flesh, we have the same dimensional order as the otherness in the world and are then able to communicate with them:-

“There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence…..there is finally a propagation of these exchanges to all the bodies of the same type and of the same style which I see and touch - and this by virtue of the fundamental fission or segregation of the sentient and the sensible which, laterally, makes the organs of my body communicate and founds transitivity from one body to another.” 15

As I possess the flesh which has the same dimensional order as the world, I communicate with and feel the world. Therefore, I know how other people feel in a situation as if I am in the situation. The concept of flesh implies that if one understands he is part of the world and the world is an extension of his body, he no longer can deny his part in the intertwining with the world. The pain of the world is his pain, the suffering of the world is also his suffering so he is driven to treat others kindly as they are the existential part of himself. This merging of oneself and the world is more than sexuality, but not separated from sexuality. It is because if one didn’t ever experience the affectivity manifested in sexuality, one never understands the affectivity of otherness.

V. Love and Existence
While we have discussed the phenomenon of love and how love is possible, the whole discussion will become meaningless if love doesn't have a significant meaning in human life. It is important to understand what the relationship between existence and love is. To begin, I believe we should start thinking about the existence of beings. Merleau Ponty summarized existence as being in the world well as quoted below:-

“...…there is no essence, no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography. Not that it is confined there and inaccessible for the others, but because, like that of nature, the space or time of culture is not surveyable from above, and because the communication from one constituted culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they all have originated. Where in all this is the essence? Where is the existence? Where is the Sosin, where the Sein? We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings, nor essences without place and without date. Not that they exist elsewhere, beyond our grasp, but because we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time nor the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity— a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration.” 16

From the above discussion, it is demonstrated that the existence of a being is the union of mind and body because beings are always situated in the world and facing different tasks. Therefore, one should go back into the unreflective primordial world to explore the existential element. In this case, it is concluded that, as presented in the “Phenomenology of Perception”, the existential dimensions of a being include sexuality, language, space, nature, intersubjectivity, time and freedom. One cannot deny his sexuality and affectivity as a sexual being in the world. Otherwise, he is denying his existence at the same time. As a sexual being, he shows affective intention to other objects and people in the world which this intention towards otherness is the basic layer of the structure of love. Love, as a kind of consciousness, is discovered when one reflects on his completed action and thus his existence is understood. For example, when one says he loves A, he must have reflected his action and feeling about A. He cannot say he loves without an object or being loved, even though the object is imaginary in mind. The being then understands his affectivity and, if deeply reflected, also figures out his desires hidden in the unreflective world. Thus, he grasps his existence. In other words, love manifests one’s existence as a being in the world.

Furthermore, I believe that to exist genuinely in the world, a being must understand his true self so that he would live incongruent to his true self. Like what Heidegger said, "Being-true as Being uncovering, is a way of Being for Dasein." 17 and “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. “ 18. Merleau Ponty shared a similar belief of truth as Heidegger, for Merleau Ponty, truth is not any universal idea in our mind, instead, truth is the outcome of correction of previously perceived illusion. We perceive the world only from a particular perspective which forms a part of the truth (i.e. illusion) so truth can only be revealed only through the correction of this illusion resulted from our previous perception. Therefore, the previous perceptual error is a source of truth, which the truth is obtained at the end of endless perception and subsequent correction. He put it as:-

“Illusion essentially does not present itself as an illusion, and, even if I am unable to perceive an unreal object, I must here be able to at least lose sight of its unreality; there must be at least an unconsciousness of the non-perception, an illusion must not be what it appears to be and, at least this once, the reality of an act of consciousness must be beyond its appearance....it presupposes an examination, a doubt, and a break with the immediate, it is the correction of a possible error.” 19

Love helps us to understand our true selves. Love is an engaging-relation action with other entities in the world. As beings are situated in the world, beings cannot avoid having a relationship with other entities, this engagement means the being has to open his world, merging his world with the world of another being, as his world is affected by all the things in the world will bear a new meaning and significance to the being. New possibilities of being something he is not being revealed to him, as a result, he unconceals himself, he knows himself.

Conclusion
To conclude, I classified different kinds of love at the beginning of the essay as they have different properties that require separate discussion. Then, under Merleau Ponty’s philological framework, I discussed love, as a cogito, which shares the same properties as cogito which links to one’s primordial perception and action. I then discussed how sexuality in our primordial world affects our choices on intended objects that includes affective, historical, and social factors, and I argued that the phenomena of sexuality help us understanding non-erotic love. Finally, I argued that love is important to us as it is a manifestation of our existence in the world by using the concept of chiasm and flesh and explained love helps beings uncovering our true self.


Footnote
1. P.207, Maurice Merlau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Abbreviated as PhoP later on), Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2011
2. P.393 PhoP
3. P.394 PhoP
4. P.402 PhoP
5. P.398 PhoP
6. P.399 PhoP
7. P.401 PhoP
8. Institution and passivity, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, Northwestern University Press, 2003
9. P.158 PhoP
10. P.159 PhoP
11. P.169 PhoP
12. P.171 PhoP
13. P.161 PhoP
14. P.137 The Visible and Invisible (Abbreviated as V&IV later on), Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, 1968
15. P. 143 V&IV
16. P.115 V&IV
17. P.221, Marin Heidegger, “Being and Time”, Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1962 (Abbreviated as BT later on)
18. P. 13 BT
19. P. 308-309 PhoP