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in certain cases, together with the feeling for what is its cause and the knowledge of itsmilieu and its object.” 44 To dig deeper in the direction of that sui generis power of thewill, transmutes the very endeavor of extending the concept of experience to a feeling ofbeing cause, lived in the effort as a concrete and singular “given,” simultaneously distinctfrom the causality obtaining in modern natural sciences and that obtaining in ancientmetaphysics. In this context, the concept of duality, when correctly understood -- and not,it should be noted, the concept of dualism -- will play a decisive role here. The cause weare is not unknown to us, since it is somehow exercised in the very reflection upon itselfor, in other words, it happens in the very movement that, as de Biran put it, retrieves itsnatural base. And that is the reason why this philosopher uses the expression sentimentd’être cause rather than any other.That it should be a “feeling” to tell the reality of an experience of oneself, which is a“knowing that one is,” is no doubt significant. Everything is as if the “self” felt, in knowing,what allows knowledge, and already knew, in feeling, what allows feeling. In other words,it is a “feeling” that allows us to declare that being cause and knowing oneself to be causeare coincident, and that this coincidence is originary. In a word, the “feeling of being cause”reveals the way in which the self is influenced in its depths by the inner resistance of thebody to the power of the will. Therefore, de Biran allows us to demonstrate that the powerof thinking always already intrinsically comprises the power of the will and the presenceof the body, of a subjective body, of a corps propre. On the other hand, the relationbetween will and body, long forgotten in the history of philosophy, is now breaking intothe very heart of thought that thus discovers itself as contemporary to “a first effortconnecting an act, a movement, a resistance,” 45 without which it could not be constituted.The basis of thinking is then, one would say, the feeling of being the power present to theact of “ex-isting,” an outward movement that cannot make do without the presence ofcorporality, that is, one that discovers the beginning of its existence in an immediateapperception that has the body as its main element. 464.For Merleau-Ponty, these considerations would be complete, if it were not for the necessityof extending them to the idea of a chiasm between the interior and the external. Theimage of an “outer space” wherein an “inner space” moves, does compel us to recognize inthe latter an intrusion of the opaqueness of the former. This in turn compels us to meditateon the reflexivity of “corporeal thinking” as a manifestation, icon, figure or element of awider reflexivity, which comes from the sensible itself. Merleau-Ponty would thereforeargue, first of all, that the natural attitude of seeing, by which I make common cause withmy ‘Look’ and give myself up to the spectacle of the visible, must be underlined, andsecondly, that this reveals an original layer of feeling whose correlate is the “corporealpresence” 47 of space. It must, however, be noted that this analysis would be incompleteif we did not return to that “my own body” (which harbors, at its interior, the very ambiguityof existing), while starting now from the sensible, 48 through which its mode of beingas a decentering force will be radically elucidated.4445464748Ibid., 100.Montebello, Décomposition, 79.Pierre Montebello, “Le corps de la pensée,” Les Études Philosophiques (2000): 207.Ibid., 269.Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 304.120