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Modern science or small rationalism takes its operations as absolute. (S 185/147) Today’sscience has become absolute by means of working on indices, models, and variables thatit has made for itself. In contrast, what Merleau-Ponty calls “large rationalism” (le grandrationalisme), which is the philosophy of the Seventeenth Century, in a word, Cartesianism,takes its science and its artifices or techniques as relative, relative to somethinglarger, to God or to the “infinite infinite” or to the “positive infinite.” Merleau-Ponty callsthe positive infinite “the secret of large rationalism.” The positive infinite is not numericalindefiniteness; rather, the positive infinite contains everything within itself: “every partialbeing directly or indirectly presupposes [the positive infinite] and is in return really oreminently contained in it.” 15 (S 187/149) Every part being eminently contained in Godmeans that all beings resemble God. Or, there is a relation of analogy between thecreatures and the creator. Resembling God, every partial being would have to be a totalpart. With large rationalism, we are very close to Merleau-Ponty’s own thought, 16 andwe have already noted that the concept of the mixture comes from Descartes.Indeed, in “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Merleau-Ponty expresses some nostalgia forlarge rationalism, telling us that large rationalism is “close to us.” But, most importantly,he says that large rationalism is the “intermediary through which we must go in order toget to the philosophy that rejects large rationalism.” I do not think it is an exaggerationto say that “Eye and Mind” is Merleau-Ponty’s precise attempt to go through thisnecessary intermediary of large rationalism to the philosophy that is opposed to it. 17 In“Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty is trying to make today’s science and its thought, whichhe calls “operationalism,” relative once more to something other and larger than itself. Inother words, he is trying to make us understand that “small rationalism” (which again ismodern science) belongs to a “heritage”; (S 186/148) small rationalism is a “fossil” of the“living ontology” found in large rationalism. But, we cannot return to large rationalism;instead, its living ontology has to be “translated.” In “Everywhere and Nowhere,”Merleau-Ponty says that “Descartes said that God is conceived of but not understood byus, and that this ‘not’ expressed a privation and a defect in us. 18 The modern Cartesiantranslates: the infinite is as much absence as presence, which makes the negative and thehuman enter into the definition of God.” (S 189/150, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis) In aword, the translation makes the finite enter into God. Then the living ontology of largerationalism becomes the ontology of “sentir,” the ontology of sensibility that we see laid15Deleuze begins his examination of Spinoza by referring to this passage from Merleau-Ponty. SeeGilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 22; English translation byMartin Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 28. It is alsoclear that this distinction between positive infinite and the indefinite maps onto Hegel’s distinctionbetween the good infinite and bad infinite, but Merleau-Ponty never mentions it.16See Renaud Barbaras, who clearly sees the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Leibniz; idem,The Being of the Phenomenon (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), 229-234.17While all commentators have noted the relation of “Eye and Mind” to Descartes, no one, as faras I know, has presented its central thesis as being about the heritage of large rationalism. In particular,see Hugh J. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” in Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader,262-277, especially 265; also Véronique Fóti, “The Dimension of Color,” in ibid., 293-308, especially296-97; also François Cavallier, Premières leçons sur L’Œil et l’esprit de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 38-46. In particular, none of the commentators systematizeMerleau-Ponty’s analysis of Descartes’s Optics. Galen Johnson’s introduction to “Eye and Mind” in TheMerleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, while excellent in many regards, does not mention Descartes, 35-55.18In Les mots et les choses, Foucault describes the exact relation to the infinite that Merleau-Pontyhere is describing. Foucault says that the relation to the infinite in the Classical epoch (Cartesianism), wasa “negative relation.” See MC 327/316.129