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close grasp of the sleight of the hand, between survey and fusion, between the screen ofcypress trees and the bottom of the pool, there is the vision of the eyes. The eyes see thatthings are not flat and juxtaposed; one thing stands behind another and is thereforeobscure and hidden. But, the eyes see in this way only if the body is upright with the feeton the ground. 35 The verticality of the upright body is not, of course, vision absorbedinto the cogito, as in Descartes. Nevertheless, I think that it is necessary to recognize thatwhenever Merleau-Ponty speaks of verticality, as he does so often in the working notesto The Visible and the Invisible, he is privileging the human body and its uprightness. (Cf.VI 325/271-72) In “Eye and Mind” he says, “This interiority [that is, the indivision of thesensible and the sensing] does not precede the material arrangement of the human body,and it no more results from it.” (OE 20/125, my emphasis) For Merleau-Ponty, the“fundamental of painting, perhaps of all culture” (OE 15/123) is the human -- and not theanimal -- body. The upright human body is the “between” of survey and fusion, the “milieu,”the “mi-chemin” between essence and fact. (Cf. VI 328/274). Since the human bodyis visible, the human is the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as thefigure, man can be studied as an empirical positivity. 36 And, since the human body sees,the human resembles the ground of the visible; as the ground, man can as well be takenas the transcendental foundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [ofthings] doubles itself [se double] in my body.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore wemust conclude by saying that Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his “mixturism,” is defined by thephrase “l’homme et ses doubles.”35For more on verticality and vision, see Erwin W. Strauss, “The Upright Posture,” PsychiatricQuarterly 26, no. 4 (October 1952): 529-561, especially 546.36For more on the question of man in both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, see also Etienne Bimbinet,Nature et Humanité: Le problème anthropologique dans l’œuvre de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 2004),especially 312-13.138