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At the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty himself is seeking the mixture of the visible and theinvisible. We can already see the pursuit of this mixturism in his 1947-48 lectures on theunion of the body and soul. In the second lecture, he says,In Descartes, the question of the union of the soul and the body is not merely aspeculative difficulty as is often assumed. For him, the problem is to account for aparadoxical fact: the existence of the human body. In the Sixth Meditation, the unionis “taught” to us through the sensation of hunger, thirst, etc., which issue from the“mixture [mélange] of the mind with the body.” 10How are we to conceive Merleau-Ponty’s mixture?One conception of a mixture that we can rule out immediately is Sartre’s dialectic ofbeing and nothingness. According to Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible,Sartre starts from abstract concepts of being and nothingness, that is, concepts abstractedfrom experience. As abstract, these concepts are “verbally fixed,” as Merleau-Ponty says(VI 95/67). And then they are put in absolute opposition to one another. The logicalconsequence is that we have a pure nothingness which is not, and a pure being which is.But, since this pure nothingness is nothing, it collapses; it is in fact identical to being. AsMerleau-Ponty says, “as absolutely opposed, being and nothingness are indiscernible.” (VI94/66) For Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s dialectic is only so called; it is in fact a philosophyof identity. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism is opposed to Sartre’s philosophy ofidentity, Sartre’s, we might say, “ontological monism.” 11 So, we can see already thatMerleau-Ponty’s mixturism will have to be something like a philosophy of difference.In order to understand positively the difference in which Merleau-Ponty’s mixtureconsists, we can make use of three conceptual schemes from Merleau-Ponty’s writingsprior to “Eye and Mind.” The first comes from Merleau-Ponty’s 1942 The Structure ofBehavior. 12 As is well known, in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty appropriatesthe idea of Gestalt -- the form or the shape -- in order to overcome the dualism of thephysical and the psychological; here too, even earlier than in the lectures on the union ofthe body and soul, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a mixture. 13 (SB 212/197) A mixture is, fornature lectures, Merleau-Ponty also says that nature is a mixture (La nature, 164; Nature, 121).10Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris:Vrin, 1978), 13; English translation by Paul B. Milan as The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, andBergson on the Union of Body and Soul (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001), 33. In this passage,Merleau-Ponty is quoting Descartes’s Sixth Meditation. The quote can be found on p. 192 of the Haldaneand Ross translation of the Meditations (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [London: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973]). See also Meditationes de prima philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, textelatin et traduction du Duc de Luynes (Paris: Vrin, 1978), 81, line 13: in the Latin: “permixtione”;“mélange” in the Duc’s French translation.11See Galen Johnson’s introduction to “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader,35-55. Here Johnson claims that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh, the philosophy opposed to greatrationalism, is not an ontological monism, not “a metaphysics of substance and sameness, a monism ofthe One.” (49) The concept of sameness that I am attributing to Merleau-Ponty, his mixture, is not areductive identity, as I am trying to show through the three conceptual schemes. It is the sameness ofidentity and difference. Sartre’s philosophy, according to Merleau-Ponty, is an ontological monism.12Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1990); English translation by Alden L. Fisher as The Structure of Behavior (Pittsburgh: DuquesneUniversity Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as SB, with reference first to the French, then to the Englishtranslation.13We are justified in returning to this work that is nearly twenty years earlier than “Eye and Mind,”because, in the course already mentioned (“Descartes’s Ontology and Today’s Ontology”), Merleau-Pontymakes use of the figure-ground formula of the Gestalt when he criticizes Descartes’s theory of vision. We127