The last works of Husserl and those of Merleau-Ponty have tried to rethink the unity of the human compound. For phenome-nology and hermeneutics, the human person is not consciousness first of all, but effective existence in the concrete unity of being-at-the-world. The existing human being is a unity who lives through all its encounters with things, with others and with the world in general. Husserl has characterized the unity of consciousness by intentionality as the "tension of consciousness towards the world." It is constitutive of our openness toward the world in a temporal movement of memory and anticipation: The world is full of sig-nification. Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty takes up the phenomenological thesis regarding "consciousness of" transforming it into "existence": existentially man is a relational being, or being-at-the-world. This mode of existing, which is proper to human, distinguishes them from other beings. The world is the ho-rizon of existence or of openness to a lived whole. Thus, the world is not nature in the scientific sense of a natural universe, but is rather the horizon of meaning: its is "habitat". As universe of meaning, the world is what we make ours by language and action. Concretely it is constituted by the whole of culture -- our traditions and our projects -- which manifest the destiny of our humanity. The scientific meaning of the term, nature, is a second concept built on the basis of being anchored in that reality.

In Le visible et l‘invisible, Merleau-Ponty has shown firstly how existence is found in the actual reality of lived bodiliness (the lived body or the "I exist") and secondly how it itself is but the ex-emplary mode of the ontological anchoring of being as ontological differentiation, texture or meaning.

In the introduction to Phenomenologie de la perception, published in 1945, Merleau-Ponty describes the nature of pheno-menology as a philosophy of essences (eidos) based upon a cons-ciousness rooted in the facticity of existence. The goal of the philosopher is to reread Husserlian intentionality, no longer as a transcendental subjectivity linking the subject with the object as consciousness "of" something, but by returning the existing being in its effective openness to the world and defining one’s own exist-ence as "being-at-the-world". From this point of view Merleau-Ponty underlines the character of our embodied situation. To perceive what is manifest in the intuited presence of the object and to catch its meaning is to give rise to the phenomenon as a meaning-ful event, to catch the phenomenon in its ontological emergence. Reversing the method of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty privileges "re-duction" with respect to intentionality, which is still a manifesta-tion of consciousness. For Husserl reduction was only an epistemo-logical method by virtue of which he placed the metaphysical objectivity of the world "in parenthesis", in order the better to perceive the conditions of the consciousness of something. That is the noematic side or object for consciousness, rather than the noetic side or subject as creator of meaning directed at the object as meaningful for consciousness.

"Reduction" for Merleau-Ponty is an ontological method inasmuch as it enables one to see the being of existence as "being-at-the-world". It gives the very act of seeing our being-at-the-world, the phenomenality of the phenomenon of existence or open-ness to the world. At the same time it enables one to see the world as the permanent horizon of our presence to things and to others; it grasps our point of view as the center around which things receive their meaning and orient themselves with respect to each other. Things appear under diverse profiles and organize themselves according to the vision which constitutes them as they separate from the whole in the process of appearing. The subject exists for him or herself only while overcoming himself according to the temporal character of constituting oneself. Thus, on the side of the perceived (noematic) object as well as on the subjective (noetic) side, signifying always is open on the life-world. As temporal per-ception is borne by its own negativity, others enable us to discover that we transcend our situation: we see them as seeing us. Thus vision is by principle reversible and narcissistic. One’s own body or bodiliness, that is our relational character articulated with the world, constitutes our lived, effective existence. The body is the basis of the differentiation from which the world derives its meaning.

As interpretative method, reduction enables one to see the intentional threads linking existing beings to the world as so many ties connecting the subject with its world. Thus, through perception the body as the point of the senses or sense organs is not only the central viewpoint, but also the space-making dimension which seizes things with respect to each other and articulates them in depth in the field of space-time. Based upon the world as the total horizon they understand things as dispersed from the here to there. In this sense, my body opens space and time while depending upon other things in order to orientate its motor capacity. By generating space it is able to move in a field of perception which has sense and orientation. The differentiation of the five senses is itself the result of an originary differentiation: one’s proper body anticipates some meaning as regards the other: vision encroaches upon the sense of touch, in a certain way hearing is a mode of seeing, touching is also vision, and so on. Intersecting with one another, the senses slip from the concrete towards the abstract. As a result they see a problem, hear or grasp a question and manifest participation of the field of perception through metaphoric expressions.

The phenomenological analysis of perception is so important because it lead us to the institution of a new ontology. Merleau-Ponty situates the lived body as both a feeling-being and as affected; it is at once both active and passive. The experience of the hand touching and touched, which at the same time wants to feel itself in the very act of being affected by itself, reveals a reflexing circularity which is always failing and incomplete. That discovery orients all of Merleau-Ponty’s Le Visible et l‘invisible. In a way this incomplete posthumous world (1964) gives witness to an ontology which is always ensnared in its own teleological transcendence.

If the perceptive body is a differentiating opening of the senses, it is also their reflected and reflecting pole: the fact that things are appearing makes it an embodied body, located in their regard. A fortiori, this situation of embodiment unveils itself in the openness of the body as expression. By gesture and word, the body unfolds a field of meanings. After the fashion of the cycle of feeling and being affected which constitutes the perceptive reflection of things upon the perceiving body, the lived bodiliness of the other and of others reflects itself upon the speaking subject as figure upon the background of the world. At the level of affective per-ception, by intropathy the body is already living from its very cen-ter the behavior of the other by a kind of connivance which inter-weaves my body with his or hers and reciprocally. It is as if the bodies understood each other, without succeeding completely in doing so. The other is always irreducible to my constitution, as I am for myself in the impossible narcissic reflection of the signifying I. In the same way that the word of the other extends my gesture and inhabits my expression, the expressive meaning escapes even while itself making sense. Visible because invisible, it leaves in its very presence. This is also the way temporality fills itself with nothing-ness in going ahead, while remaining open to a new act of signifying.

Thus an interrelation is formed which consists in a common belonging to the same sense and the same world. My perceptible gesture signifies my expressed word, and conversely. The ex-pressive meaning always goes ahead of itself with respect to what remains unsaid in the expression, displacing the actuality of what is signified without exhausting its meaning. What is expressed in language always turns over upon itself in order to evoke the per-petual motion of a meaning whose sense it can never totally realize. In actuality the word is both voice and expression both for the one who utters it and for the one who listens: it listens to itself, as if the expressive body differentiated itself from itself in each of its expressions. Just as perception was both feeling and being affected, it is both expressive voice and phenomenon: the speaking subject constitutes a concrete unceasing movement of perceptibility re-garding the sense present in language. Thereby the three meanings of the word "sense": the perceptive sense, orientation of sense and meaning, all meet each other as reversibly concrete and abstract. The lived meanings of the body meet each other in the space from me towards the other in intropathy and in language expression.

At this level of understanding through gesture and language, one’s expressiveness opens to perception by the other. Here we can apprehend the internal affective interplay of encounter. As the differentiating dimension of one’s own body, perception manifests itself as at once both gesture and word -- the gesture again taking up the word. In receiving my gesture, the other is actively assumed in it and speaks it in his own way. In the interchange of discourse which is always transcended, the perceptible sense unfolds itself in symbolic terms, thus opening the invisible depth of what is per-ceived in language. But the voice makes itself word addressed to somebody so that at another level we find once again the movement of differentiation: language achieves a visible form through lis-tening or the material form of writing and differentiates itself as the invisible form of sense.

Thus, the perceiving body is at the same time active and passive, both being-affected and feeling itself in the differentiation which links one existing being to another through intropathy and the mediation of language. This originary perceptive and affective dimensional openness is an awakening which characterizes every encounter or actual communication.

That ever present distance, differentiating the touching-touched or the perceptive sense and the perceptual with respect to the expressive sense which is expressed in language, constitutes the reversibility from the concrete to the abstract and inversely. This distance points to a measure or foundation of sense which is always at work and exceeds itself in all perceptive moments. Lived as differentiating between feeling and being affected, the perception expressed interrelationally in language constitutes that eminent "difference" which creates the dimensionality or the living inter-relation. In its own overcoming this is at once concrete and inte-lligible. Merleau-Ponty calls this the "flesh of the world".

The body is a privileged form of this "flesh" as it feels itself feeling in the expressive reversibility which language, while sepa-rating from the speaking subject, formulates objectively. But the structure of distance lived by the body is differentiation as such. This opening upon sense at all its levels belongs to a speaking sub-ject, whose expressions refer to others and who finds him or herself always already engaged in the realm of culture. It is from the milieu of sense that the possibility of speaking one to another arises, that the texture of the effective dialogue is constituted and that the differentiated poles of discourse become articulated in the power of each person to take the position of one subject facing another subject in a reciprocal creation of a common feeling and speaking.

We can see only because from that visible world of bodiliness we are susceptible of being seen -- the same "flesh" as the world. We saw how the experience of the reversibility of feeling and the felt body prevents the total reflection of the touched hand which in the same act aims at feeling itself and being touched. Similarly, the reflexivity of the body as existing, that is, as always away from itself in the transcendence of the world, reflects the originary ex-perience of the world in its ontological dimension. Depth is pre-cisely that invisible which founds that differentiation of sense which is always overcome: the "flesh" of the world. "It is by the flesh of the world that it is possible at last to understand . . . that perceived entity which my body is."

Phenomenology is not simply an anthropology of the en-counter of others, even if through language as lived intercom-munication experience thematizes itself. However, there is no con-stitution of the other; the other is taken in that signifying openness of the world which gives it to me as to be understood in the arti-culation of desire. Thus, recognizing the other occurs in encounter according to an initial and initiatory reversibility.

The other appears to me in his otherness, thanks to the desire which is born from encounter. He or she opens in the subject a tem-poral distance of objective differentiation, subtended by the lived, affected interrelation. Desire is intrinsically "flesh" in the sense of differentiating distance, which bodiliness, as at once concrete and expressive, lives as the sign of its own overcoming. This is because desire embodies the reflexive movement of narcissistic bodiliness in search of itself in the alter-ego. That is, in the ever vanishing promise of a fully realized reflexivity.

Desire gives rise at the same time to both directions of sense. On the one hand, the values which are to come appeal to the authentic liberty of an existing being understanding itself in the temporal totality of its "having to be". On the other hand, desire gives rise to the values of the past, as the temporal retaking of what originarily was lived affectively. But whatever may be its affective modalities, desire aims at realizing itself in a hope of which the other(s) implicitly hold the secret, for others bear conditioning differences which give sense.

The "epiphany" of the face is not a phenomenon, but be-speaks the authentic existing being in its very occurrence. It ex-presses the sense of being, its invisibility in the trace of the expression. Thus the other invites me to more than myself; it urges me to recognize in him or her the infinite gift of being and draws me to affirm his or her excellence.

The relation with the other is reciprocal. In every relation, even when it directly concerns things or symbols, eventually it is the other who is made present to us. Every one is at the life horizon of all the others so that cultural groups constitute themselves and those groups meet and influence each other. On the basis of that interrelational support of sense we can progressively appropriate universe of cultural meanings and build a proper truth of existence.

This is all the more true when we have to do with the affective and sexed dimension of our situation, that is to say, with our singular manner of living the human condition. The sexed character of our particular constitution, what makes us man or woman, de-termines the particular and differentiated mode according to which we inhabit the cultural world, and according to which, conse-quently, we take part in sense life. This cultural world organizes itself according to a polarity, male and female, which is quite original and not at all reduced to the set of differences of the biological order. That polarity effects the existing human being in its quality as a personal subject. Thus, the fact of being man or woman is not a simple accidental determination added to a human essence which is defined by universal features, as in classical rationalism. The human being realizes humanity in the singularity of a life which is proper to him or her as a personal subject. Subjectivity can be understood only as intrinsically affected by the reciprocal constitution of the poles of man and woman. That means that the personal truth which everyone is called to discover and to build in his life as the sense of his or herexistence constitutes itself not under the direction of a unilateral, disembodied reason, but precisely in the reciprocal exchange of the approaches of reason proper to man and woman. The truth of existence is found only within the relation of the mutual understanding or interweaving in which those two polarities interchange with each other; existential truth is authentic only in reciprocal constitution. Furthermore, every approach to truth, be it existential, practical, ethical, spiritual or even theoretical, is basically effected from that originary differentiation which institutes the objective relation of the poles, one by the other, man and woman, of human existence as sexed "difference".

Recognizing cultural difference is closely related to our being in common, which differentiates itself according to gene-rations and places. What are the conditions of this encounter? By the term horizon Husserl designates the openness of meaning which makes possible unification in a single totality of all the profiles constituting the appearance of what is given perceptually. By the expression horizon of the horizons he designates the unity of understanding of the whole of the beings. This unity is not effective, but is implied in the sense of the life world which always is already there as a primordial donation. In the concrete the ex-perience of this horizon is the condition of possibility of experience as such. It is the field of possibilities which gives meaning to our present experiences in our intercourse with things and people. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty underline the fact that the world becomes a universal frame for all experiences only in as much as it is for a being already there who explains him or herself with others. Things pertain to the world because I seize them as possible means for the realization of my possibilities. In this sense the world is the horizon of my possibilities and thus the measure of the process of temporalization, rather than the pole of a concrete universality. There is then no life world as a universal basis, but a plurality of life worlds, "each one of which contains a component which cannot be seized." That component is the mystery of the world, which, as a whole, embraces and penetrates all historical worlds; this mystery never gives itself as present in the flesh, but always as that which has to be projected from the present world. Thus primitive cultures, for example, are worlds which have the form of myth because we interpret them from our present world.

If so, does the philosophy of Husserl itself fall once again into the perspective of an universal rationality which precisely he had wanted to avoid? Must we believe that such an attitude toward universality is immanent to Western rationality, which tries always to understand and dominate everything?

Conversely, Gadamer seizes in the dimension of horizon "a fusion of horizons", in as much as they delimit each other in the historical repetition and overcoming of their reciprocal inter-pretations. This is no longer a unitary ideal, underlying universality and subtending its forms, but the reversibility of singular cultural structures which constitute the difference and the sense of history. Thus, every culture measures itself with respect to the horizon of all the others, reflecting itself in them as singular, autonomous expressions.

We have tried to reflect on the sense of a philosophy which is not based on a universality of transcendental reason, but meets the event of existing beings as being-at-the-world. The ontology of M. Merleau-Ponty has helped us to understand the dimension of reversibility; this exceeds the sensible as "sense or differentiation" and "flesh" of the world. It is along that axis of "vertical Being", the sense of sense, that the human experience of bodiliness reveals itself to us. Bodiliness itself is already taken as cultural inter-relation, and more originally as arising out of a personal appropriation in the sexed difference.

This contribution of a phenomenology open to the herme-neutics of meaning is articulated in a new ontology which under-stands Being as "difference which makes sense". That new ontology invites us to live a proper existence as "ex-ist" or event of presence.

1. Patocka, Liberté et sacrifice (Grenoble: Millon, 1990), pp. 14f.

2. Idem., p. 23.

3. M. Heidegger, "La question de la technique", in Essais et conférences (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), pp. 9-48.

4. This remains the position of F. Van Steenberghen (Louvain) in his Anthropologie philosophique (Montréal, 1990).

5. M. Merleau-Ponty, Bulletin de Psychologie (Cours de Sorbonne, 1964), pp. 747f.

6. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l‘invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 18.

7. H. Maldiney, "Chair et verbe dans la philosophie de M. Merleau-Ponty", M. Merleau-Ponty, le psychique et le corporel (Paris: Aubier, 1988), p. 59.

8. M. Merleau-Ponty, op.cit., p. 211.

9. M. Heidegger, L‘etre et le temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), ch. 72.

10. E. Levinas, Humanisme de l‘autre homme (Fatamorgana, 1992), p. 47.