The Intertwining: Merleau-Ponty and the World That Looks Back

We tend to imagine perception as a relationship between two clearly separate things. There is a subject, somewhere inside a body, and there is a world outside. The subject looks at a tree, touches a stone, listens to music or observes another person. Information travels from the external object towards the perceiving mind, where it is processed and interpreted. In this familiar picture, the world is there and we are here, looking at it.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent much of his work questioning whether our experience is really structured in this way. In his late, unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, he developed one of his most intriguing ideas: the intertwining, or l’entrelacs. Perception, he suggests, is not simply an encounter between an independent subject and an independent object. The perceiver and the perceived already belong to one another. We are not spectators standing outside the world. We are part of the world we perceive.

This may sound abstract, but Merleau-Ponty begins from something extraordinarily ordinary: the body.

The Hand That Touches and Is Touched

Place one hand on the other. At first, the distinction seems straightforward. One hand is touching; the other is being touched. The first appears to occupy the position of the perceiving subject, while the second has become the object of perception. But the relation can suddenly reverse. The hand that was being touched can become aware of the other hand touching it. The touched becomes the touching; the perceiving body discovers itself as something perceived.

This simple experience disturbs the clean division between subject and object. My body belongs to both sides. I can touch because I am myself tangible. I can see because I belong to the visible world. I can hear sounds while knowing that my own movements and voice can be heard. I am never merely a consciousness observing material reality from somewhere outside it.

Merleau-Ponty extends this strange reversibility to perception more generally. The person who sees is also visible. The person who touches can be touched. We encounter the world because we already belong to it. This is the basis of what he calls the intertwining.

The Flesh of the World

To describe this relation, Merleau-Ponty introduces an even stranger concept: flesh, or la chair. He does not simply mean the biological flesh of the human body. Nor does he propose a mysterious substance from which everything is literally made. He is trying to name something more fundamental than the familiar opposition between mind and matter.

The flesh describes a kind of common texture of perceiver and perceived. My body and the tree I am looking at are obviously not identical, yet they belong to the same visible world. My hand and the stone are different, but both belong to the realm of the tangible. There must already be a certain kinship between the body and the world for perception to be possible at all.

This means that perception is not merely something I do to the world. It is something that happens between the world and me.

When I look at a landscape, I do not manufacture it. It resists me, surprises me and exceeds me. Yet neither do I receive it like a camera recording neutral information. My position, my body, my attention and my movement participate in what appears. The landscape reveals itself from somewhere, to someone, through a particular embodied encounter.

The perceiver and the perceived cannot be collapsed into one another, but neither can they be completely separated. They are intertwined.

Is the Landscape Really Melancholy?

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider emotional and aesthetic perception. Imagine a winter landscape beneath a grey sky. The trees are bare, the fields empty, the light fading. You experience the landscape as profoundly melancholy. A certain account of perception might say that the landscape itself is neutral. It consists of physical objects, wavelengths of light, atmospheric conditions and spatial relations. The melancholy exists only in you. You have projected an internal emotion onto an indifferent external world.

The opposite claim would be equally problematic: that melancholy exists objectively in the landscape in the same way as the trees or temperature do. Merleau-Ponty allows us to escape this choice. The melancholy can belong to the encounter itself. It is neither a measurable property hidden inside the landscape nor an arbitrary decoration imposed upon it by a detached mind. The landscape presents itself in a particular expressive way to an embodied consciousness that is already involved in it.

We can later analyse what happened. We can measure the light, identify the trees, describe the weather, investigate the psychology of the observer. All of these descriptions may be perfectly valid. But they are already abstractions from the original event. Before I explain the landscape, I encounter it. And it may already be melancholy.

Before the Neutral World

This challenges a deeply rooted assumption about human experience: that reality is originally neutral and meaning is something we subsequently add to it. Our actual experience rarely seems to begin with neutral sensory data. We do not normally see a geometrical configuration of eyes, skin and muscles and then reason our way towards the conclusion that someone is angry. We see an angry face. We enter a room and immediately feel uncomfortable. We hear tenderness in a voice before analysing its pitch and rhythm. A place can appear inviting, oppressive, peaceful or uncanny before we have formulated a single judgement about it. The theoretical description comes later.

This is one of the points at which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology becomes particularly interesting for art. If lived perception is already expressive, then poetry and painting do not necessarily take a neutral reality and embellish it with subjective fantasy. They may sometimes do almost the opposite: return us to the density of perception before analysis has separated it into clearly defined objects, properties and causes.

The poet who describes birds as joyfully wheeling above a field is not necessarily making a defective scientific statement about avian behaviour. The poem is attempting to remain faithful to an encounter. An ethologist may ask what behaviour the birds are performing and why. The poet asks what it was like to see them. These descriptions do not have to compete. They disclose different dimensions of the same world.

Cézanne and the Birth of the Visible

This helps explain Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with painting and particularly with Cézanne. Painting, for him, is not simply the production of representations of objects that already exist fully formed before the painter begins. The painter is immersed in the visible.

Cézanne’s landscapes and still lifes interested Merleau-Ponty because they seem to capture a world before it has completely settled into the stable geometry of conventional representation. Colours, volumes, distances and surfaces emerge through their relations to one another. The painter is not merely copying a finished world but trying to catch something of the world becoming visible.

This is why Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception can also illuminate poetry. Ordinary language tends to stabilise things. It names them: tree, bird, house, woman, river. Naming is necessary, but the name can make us forget the strangeness of the thing itself. Poetry can disturb that familiarity. Through metaphor, rhythm, unexpected association and attention, it can make the familiar world strange enough to become visible again.

The purpose is not necessarily to invent another world. It may be to recover this one.

The World Looks Back

There is another unsettling consequence of the intertwining. If I belong to the visible world, then seeing cannot be understood simply as my possession of what I see. This becomes particularly vivid when another person enters the scene. I look at someone and discover that this person can look back at me. The body before me is not simply another object among objects. It is a centre of perception from which I, in turn, can appear.

The relation is reversible, but never completely so. I cannot literally occupy another person’s perception. I cannot see myself exactly as they see me, just as they cannot inhabit my experience from within. Merleau-Ponty therefore does not dissolve individuals into some harmonious cosmic unity. The intertwining always contains an écart — a gap, divergence or distance. This distance is not a failure of relation. It is what makes relation possible.

If there were no distinction between myself and another person, there would be no encounter at all. Yet if we were absolutely separate, sealed inside private worlds, encounter would also be impossible. We meet because we are simultaneously separate and connected, touching and touched, seeing and visible.

There is something beautiful in this conception of intimacy. To encounter another person is not to absorb them into my own consciousness or finally discover what they “really are”. They remain another perspective on the world, close enough to touch and yet never entirely possessable.

The Intertwining and Mystical Experience

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy also offers an interesting way of approaching experiences that have traditionally been described as mystical. There are moments in which the usual boundary between self and world seems to weaken: standing before the sea, walking alone through a forest, listening to music, watching the light change over a landscape. For a moment, one may cease to experience oneself primarily as an isolated observer looking at something outside.

Religious traditions have often interpreted such experiences metaphysically, as union with God, nature or a deeper reality. Merleau-Ponty allows us to take the structure of the experience seriously without immediately deciding what metaphysical conclusion should follow from it.

Perhaps such moments reveal something that ordinary practical consciousness tends to obscure: our separation from the world was never absolute in the first place. We breathe its air. Light enters our eyes. Sounds pass through us. We touch surfaces and are touched by them. The distinction between inside and outside remains real, but it is porous. The body is precisely the place where the two continually cross.

We do not need to become one with the world. We were never entirely outside it.

Beauty Between the World and Us

The intertwining also offers an alternative to one of the oldest arguments about beauty. Is beauty in the object, or is it merely in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps the question assumes too much. Beauty may not need to be a fixed property residing inside an object, like its weight or chemical composition. But neither must it therefore be an arbitrary subjective reaction that tells us nothing about the world. Beauty can happen between.

The evening light possesses real qualities. The person who sees it has a particular body, history, sensibility and attention. Neither alone is sufficient to produce this particular experience. Something emerges through their encounter.

This does not make beauty unreal. A conversation is also relational, yet we do not conclude that conversations do not exist because they cannot be located entirely inside either participant. Beauty may similarly be an event. The world offers something; consciousness answers. Or perhaps even this language still separates them too much.

Art as a Return to Experience

We spend much of our lives turning experience into manageable objects. We identify, categorise, explain and use things. A tree becomes a species, a resource, an obstacle, a property boundary. A person becomes a colleague, customer, patient or demographic category. A sound becomes data. A feeling becomes a symptom.

None of these descriptions is necessarily false. The problem begins when we forget that they are descriptions produced from particular perspectives and start treating them as though they exhausted what is there.

Art can interrupt this process. A painting makes us look again at colour. A poem makes a familiar word strange. Music can produce an experience we cannot paraphrase. For a moment, the world escapes the categories through which we normally manage it. This may be one of art’s deepest functions: not to decorate reality, but to restore our contact with it.

Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining helps explain why such an experience can feel simultaneously intimate and mysterious. The world is not an alien object standing completely outside us, nor is it a projection produced inside our minds. We are already entangled with it, bodily and perceptually, before we begin to explain what it is.

Perhaps this is why a landscape can sometimes seem to recognise something in us. Why a piece of music can feel strangely familiar before we understand it. Why a colour can stop us in our tracks. Why looking deeply at something can occasionally make the boundary between the observer and the observed feel less certain. We look at the world, but from within the world. We touch it while being tangible ourselves. We see because we also belong to the visible. And sometimes, in art, beauty or simple attention, we become aware of the intertwining that was there all along.