by Boyu Xie, McGill University

We speak of “inspiration.” This word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being. 

– Merleau-Ponty 

Breathing is our body’s first openness to Being.

– David Michael Levin

The True Man breathes with his heels; the mass of men breathe with their throats. 

– Zhuangzi 

Introduction

The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi relates a story about the “True Man” in the parable of “The Great and Venerable Teacher”. The “True Man” particularly has been honored as the great teacher, for he is the one who brings truth into being. Then, Zhuangzi continues his depiction of the perfect being as who lives in Dao, whose “demeanor is still and 

silent,” whose mind is “free from all thoughts,” who becomes “the one with nature,” as if his anger is the expression of a gust of autumn wind, his joy is the expression of the singing of the morning birds; to whom, no mutual oppositions firmly stand. A being as great as this breathes deep, to/from the deepest, to/from the toes and heels. It is the deep and anonymous breath that makes the greatest being a-live. The story is very touching and thought-provoking, for it encourages us to explore ‘breath’ and ‘depth’ beyond their literal meanings and think ‘deep breath’ in relation to the greatest being at a non-dualistic and anonymous level. Motivated by this philosophically seductive story, this paper will rethink silent,” whose mind is “free from all thoughts,” who becomes “the one with nature,” as if his anger is the expression of a gust of autumn wind, his joy is the expression of the singing of the morning birds; to whom, no mutual oppositions firmly stand. A being as great as this breathes deep, to/from the deepest, to/from the toes and heels. It is the deep and anonymous breath that makes the greatest being a-live. The story is very touching and thought-provoking, for it encourages us to explore ‘breath’ and ‘depth’ beyond their literal meanings and think ‘deep breath’ in relation to the greatest being at a non-dualistic and anonymous level. Motivated by this philosophically seductive story, this paper will rethink breathing against the background of a Merleau-Pontian conception of the anonymous life. 

The significance of my approach embodies many aspects. First, anonymous life is a relatively new field wherein breathing as the focus is carefully examined. Our common understanding of breathing is usually based on the biological or physiological views of the section of the respiratory system in a materialistic worldview, in which not only breathing is given but also space and time are given. Consequentially, the source of breathing is concealed, together with the origin of time and space. To deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of breathing, we need to uncover the role of breathing in the primal perception of spatiality and temporality. Arguably, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, especially his revolutionary new theories of perception and of the temporal-spatial background of perception, are capable of providing our examination of breathing with a sound theoretical basis and making my project possible and feasible in the first place. Secondly, although the anonymous subject of perception repeatedly shows up in Phenomenology against a solipsistic or empirical view, Merleau-Ponty does not offer us a hermeneutically comprehensive explanation on what the anonymous life is and how it exists and relates to the origin of time and space, as a result of which constant debates arose. Rethinking breathing at the anonymous level might help us to clarify part of the mystery of the conception of anonymity per ce. Therefore, I propose we examine breathing at the anonymous level such that both a fruitful notion of “deep breath” and some ambiguous terms, such as “sleep” and “the depth of night” and even the embodiment of perception in Phenomenology, would be illuminated. If truly we are facing a promising direction, the first step would be having a general idea of ‘the anonymous.’ 

The concept of “anonymity” in the Phenomenology of Perception has a range of meanings.  Often it is tightly connected to “the impersonal” and “the prepersonal”. Part One of Phenomenology, “The Body,” rejects the body as one object among others that have been woven into the physical, physiological, and psychological causal chains. In criticizing bottom-up empiricism and top-down intellectualism, the unity of the body, the “almost impersonal existence” (PhP 86) is uncovered. The body schema is introduced to name the deeper dynamic through which the body structures itself habitually and expressively. Part Two “The World” turns toward an inquiry into the ontological source of the embodiment of perception. The unity of the body as a perceiver is placed into a more original and broader picture of the “pre-logical unity of the body schema” (PhP 241) and the unity of the perceiving and the perceived. Perception was understood as a temporal process, a synchronization that occurs as the body responds to the solicitation of the world by intricately “taking up” and “slipping into” (PhP 221) sensible rhythms. Drawing on Phenomenology and its commentators, such as Rudolph Bernet, Glen Mazis, Lisa Gunther and Petri Berndtson, berndt life as the prepersonal life held by the impersonal body in a “pre-objective domain” (PhP 13), which precedes the personal life and lays the ground for it. 

The further step is – by carefully reading the “L’espace” and “Le Sentir” chapters in Phenomenology – to argue that the anonymous life must be opened, powered, subsisted and coevolved with the ‘deep breath’. Armed with this preliminary revelation of breath as a pivotal role played in the anonymous life, I will then engage with Leder’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s neglect of the visceral and intangible body. I will attempt to show that his suggestion of using “Flesh and Blood” to replace “Flesh” would have been even more productive had we not taken it as something opposed against the surface body. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji, David Levin, and David Abram, I reinterpret the visceral body as the anonymous and impersonal body and argue that we must supplement the “Flesh and blood” with both the “Flesh-Breath-Blood” and a deeper sense of breathing.

Towards a Radical Reflection on Breathing in the Anonymous Life 

Merleau-Pontian scholars recognized the concept of the “anonymous” as a crucial yet ambiguous concept not fully elaborated on in Phenomenology, which leaves much room for further discussions on its possible conceptual meanings and ontological implications. However, instead of diving into these different hermeneutic possibilities, I will attempt to harmonize the different views and develop a broad sense of the anonymous as the horizon of my phenomenological investigation of breathing. A general understanding of the anonymous life can be grasped in the following three points.

First, it refers to the “blind adhesion” (PhP 265) to the “pre-objective space” (PhP 31) and “the general form of the world” (PhP 86). Being an original field of sensation and an “anonymous existence” (PhP 370), the anonymous life lies beneath and grounds the level of one’s personal life; It is the “one perceives in me” (PhP 223) with a sensing power synchronized and born together within the milieu. The pre-subjective and the pre-objective coexist in the anonymous space. 

Secondly, seeing the anonymous in this manner enables us to reconsider the relationship between the sensing and the sensible, the body and the world. No longer viewing them as two independent components sitting at the two ends of intentionality, the body and the world cannot be described in the passive/active framework or any other dualistic frame. Merleau-Ponty calls the relation of sensing and sensible a “co-naissance,” which means that the sentient does not externally or laterally exert its power on the sensible. Rather, as two different rhythms with different manners of vibrating and living in different bodies, they synchronize and communicate with each other in a way that pulls each other affectively (PhP 219). To illustrate this “pull/push”, Merleau-Ponty invited us to think about the relationship between the sleeper and his sleep (PhP 219-220). The situation of one’s falling asleep must be a result of a bipartite gesture: the sleeper needs to call forth sleep and his calling must be answered by the “immense external lung” (PhP 219). Between the sleeper and the atmosphere engulfing her, there is always a sense of communication and negotiation. Similar things can be said about the sentient and the sensible; sensations arrive only with the communication, resonance (or dissonance) of the two rhythms. I do not possess my sensation and my sleep in the same way as I possess my thought. The communication and negotiation are neither subjectively constituted nor transparent to the mind but hidden behind some magical, theological or aesthetic curtain. 

Finally, time and space cannot be something ready-made in one’s personal life; they must appear as their primordial mode of being in the anonymous life, namely as pure past in depth, which means before my personal life gains a history and before time is constructed in its familiar past-present-future form, there exists the anonymous One that precedes me and confirms a prehistory. Nevertheless, the prehistory is not another sequence of perceptual time but rather remaining “in virtual,” being “unconscious.” It exists as “the unreflected” (PhP 250), the “interconnected and infinitely detailed whole.” Similarly, primordial depth should be distinguished from its common designation as one of the three dimensions of  physical or geometrical space, for the thematic attitude towards depth is built on the fact that we are already being embodied and located within depth. Original depth must be the “dimension of the dimension,” the co-existence and envelopment of the breadth, height, and depth, and this, for Merleau-Ponty is the unique hold that our body has upon the world, the general accommodation of “the incompossible.” Although a Merleau-Pontian reflection on the anonymous level reveals a pre-subjective and pre-objective origin, we should not take it as an absolute emptiness devoid of meaning. In effect, the co-existence of the differentiated rhythms has already involved “a direction of signification” that is able to cross “the different regional spheres and receives in a particular signification” (PhP 297-298). In this sense, the sensory life is already an embodied life with qualitative, affective and emotional vectors, although in the primordial silence, they are not expressed or articulated as explicit qualities, affections, or emotions. 

With this precursory understanding of the anonymous, we need to ponder breathing at this level: what relationship does breathing hold with this anonymous in general? What is new that we can say about breathing when it is considered in the anonymous life? Rarely is breathing a theme in Phenomenology, but breathing does play a pivotal role in leading us into a dormant state. It is noteworthy that sleep was used as ‘the comparable’ twice. First, it is compared to the situation of aphonia, and secondly, as aforementioned, to the relations between the sentient and the sensible. Finding the similarities shared between these two cases may shed light on how ‘sleep,’ especially a detailed description of the breathing leading us to sleep can be so helpful. An obvious parallel is that they both refer to the impersonal existence: the symptom and the recovery of aphonia “are worked out at a deeper level than that of objective or thetic consciousness” (PhP 166). The deeper relationship between the sensing and sensible needs to be uncovered at the anonymous level. Seeing blue is not something I constitute or I do; it happens when one perceives blue or where there is a blue. Similar things could be said about the aphonia patient who suffers from absolute indifference towards X. A normal world is not there for him and that is not something his will can remedy. Things seen from the impersonal level are what we are unacquainted with on account of the familiar binary opposition being effaced and replaced by the intertwined incompossible. Hence, sleep, as a familiar situation, must be drawn to illuminate the impersonal operations beneath the personal level. A reasonable inference is that sleep provides the experience of returning to the anonymous existence in a manner not strange to us.

“I lie down in my bed…I close my eyes, breathe slowly, and distance myself from my projects. But this is where the power of my will or consciousness ends…I call forth the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper.” (PhP 166)

“I breathe slowly and deeply to call forth sleep, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense external lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back. A certain respiratory rhythm, desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and sleep, intended until then as a signification, turns itself into a situation.” (PhP 219)

The above quotations are more than plainly describing a mundane situation and having multiple phenomenological implications. The first thing to say is that sleep often starts with readiness, a purposeful withdrawal of a perceiving self from the awakening world to the dormant world. By breathing slowly and deeply, I calm myself down and allow the heaviness and the tiredness of my body to occupy my world; I express my willingness to pause my personal projects and recede into a sleep state. But what I express through my bodily gestures, especially through the rhythm of my breathing, is not fully actualized until “some immense external lung” confirms my calling and visits me by possessing my breathing. The sense of sleep only exhibits itself when the sleeper’s breathing is no longer against the external lung but submerged into it. 

A key move I want to make now is to creatively utilize Merleau-Ponty’s analogy. If sleep can help us to intuitively understand the relation between the sensing and the sensible, and vice versa, the prepersonal theory also can enlighten us as to the phenomenon of breathing. If, as previously shown, the resonance between the sensing and the sensible implies the co-existence of the two at the prepersonal level, then the insertion of my breathing into the immense external lung must also imply a respiratory communion that proceeds my personal life. The external lung must already be a milieu that my breathing is familiar with such that I breathe in the world, and simultaneously, the world also breathes in me. The inside and outside, therefore, must be intertwined and inseparable in a respiratory body. Now, we may say that one dimension of our blind adhesion to the world manifests in our respiratory adhesion to the external lung. The first movement of breathing opened a (aerial, clear, affable etc.) world for us and we retain it in our deep and peaceful breathing. This primordial contact with the aerial world is thusly preserved in our accustomed inhalation and exhalation like the umbilical cord preserves the pre-history of life. Once this primal layer of meaning of breathing is revealed, the comparisons between breathing and aphonia, breathing and sensation, can be extended at least in the following two aspects. 

The example of aphonia shows us that the relation between the consciousness and the world must be built on a deeper level at which the impersonal body upholds the world for us. We must “eat and breathe” before perceiving and awakening to relational living…before “reaching a relational life” (PhP 162). “This body living in the world is like the heart living in the organism,” said Merleau-Ponty: “it continuously breathes life into the visible spectacle, animates it and nourishes it from within, and forms a system with it…” (PhP 209). If one’s conscious life needs support and nourishment from the impersonal operations of the function systems, what does motivate and sustain these internal systems? If “The world is sustained by our taking it up as our motive and yet is also the motive for our taking it up in the anonymous life,” what does 

motivate the impersonal life and keep it moving? I contend that our respiratory body must play a key role in subsisting the impersonal existence in its constantly opening itself to the external lung. Although “a seed of dream or depersonalization” is carried in our breathing, it constantly motivates, sustains and renews the anonymous One within us. In some extreme cases, it can be the strongest motive of life, motivating the life in the way of just keeping breathing. 

In sensing the blue colour, I must “deliver over” (PhP 219) my body and lend my gaze to a certain manner of vibrating. Bule is sensed as blue only when my gaze was caught up by the sensible, namely, the blue. The sensation of blue is actualized in the process of synchronization between my bodily rhythm and the rhythm of blue. Analogously, my breathing too unceasingly anticipates and responds to the atmosphere of the external being by lending my respiratory body out. It allows itself to be caught up by certain vibrations that permeate in the milieu and synchronize with them so that the style of breathing can be actualized as a situation, a way of one’s being. In short, breathing senses the atmosphere. Home suggests to breathing that is slow down, so I naturally slow down my breath when returning from busy work. Forests suggest to breathing that is deep down, so I deepen my breath inadvertently as I walk into the heart of the timberland. “As pre-personal horizons” (PhP 223), different patterns of breathing, like different sensations, rise and fall, born and died. 

So far, I have proposed that we should see breathing as an important way of our “gearing into” (PhP 367) the world. Then I showed that the respiratory communion must be there, and it opens a space for life nourished and motivated by breathing. Next, I will engage in some further inquiries: what is the external lung? What does it have to do with the night and our slow, long, and deep breaths? If space has an origin in our gearing into the world, and breathing is the crucial element of our holding this general world, then what relation does breathing bear with the origin of space?

To have a sense of the spatiality of breathing, let’s recall how Merleau-Ponty starts his reflection on the origin of space. He first warns us not trying to find its anchorage points in the determinate space. If my gearing into the world does not occur in the given space that is oriented “in itself,” then Merleau-Ponty says:

“My first perception and my first hold on the world must appear to me as the execution of a more ancient pact established between X and the world in general; my history must be the sequel to a pre-history whose acquired results it uses; my personal existence must be the taking up of a pre-personal tradition. There is, then, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am there and who marks out my place in that world.” (PhP 265)

Life is not an event that happened in space but the condition of that space. This is true for Merleau-Ponty not on the basis of a Kantian theory but because beneath one’s personal existence, there is “a pre-personal tradition,” “a more ancient pact” and this pre-historical acquisition is my body. Yet, it is not the instrumental body reified against our personal existence; rather, it is “the system of anonymous ‘functions’ that wraps each particular focusing into a general project” (PhP 297). It is the germ of the body hibernating in the mother’s womb, the sleepy and dreamy body situated in the whole infantile period, a fortiori, the newly mature and fleshy body blossomed in puberty. This impersonal body is unified and motivated by the vital force, the “power of existing” (PhP 136), the mystical “mana” (PhP 296). It moves and grows like a wolf, a tree, and any other wild beings and in its communication with the general world, pre-personal life unfolds, time and space unfold. In view of this, we can understand why Merleau-Ponty emphasized that the anonymous life does “not merely occur at the beginning but started over at each moment” (PhP 265). Since we have had an impression of the anonymous life through which time and space are opened, the following question would be how it happens. In what form does the anonymous life co-emerge with the world? And what does the space initially opened for us look like? Some sayings on the respiratory spatiality outside Phenomenology may shed light on these questions. In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” following Henri Wallon, Merleau-Ponty writes as follows:

“As has often been said, the body is at first ‘buccal’ in nature…One could say more generally, as Wallon does, that the body is already a respiratory body. Not only the mouth but the whole respiratory apparatus gives the child a kind of experience of space. After that, other regions of the body intervene and come into prominence. All the regions linked to the functions of expression.” 

The “L’espace” chapter tells us that only the body, not the constituting mind, can be “an actual starting point” (PhP 258) whereby we have a direction(sense), an experience of space. Now, we can add that the body as “an absolute here” (PhP 258) could gradually give a direction to the determinations of space, for it is a respiratory body; by breathing life in and out, one exists spatially. Maples grow into a more open area; zebras migrate to a more fecund land. All life makes sense having the background of their living space. 

However, this shouldn’t be misunderstood as the view that breathing frontally opens for us a three-dimensional space for the seemingly conspicuous reason that any breathing is three-dimensional. That would mistakenly take breathing to be an act in space performed at the personal level. The primal breathing must be taken as breathing in depth, for we have seen that only in depth, in the “dimension of dimension”, the anonymous first holds the body upon the world. Therefore, breathing in depth is also the co-breathing of the body with the immense external lung; it arises from the first resonance of two different rhythms, the first union of inhalation and exhalation. Apparently, a taste of co-breathing still can be experienced as breathing in sleep; it becomes a uniform situation that has hitherto conditioned the most living creature. Every night, I faithfully imitate the respiratory rhythm in the manner of breathing slowly and deeply. I expect the ancient communication’s arrival; I expect the immense external lung, once again, “calls my breath forth and forces it back.” Suddenly, my voluntarily breathing stops and some outside force takes it over and breathes in me. The boundary between inside and outside blurs; insofar as the external lung breath in me, “the world is entirely on the inside,” and insofar my breath is motivated by the outside force, “I am entirely outside of myself” (PhP 430). The immense lung surrounds and traverses me; I recede into this “unseeing and nearly unthinking mass” and am “no longer in the world except through the anonymous vigilance of the senses,” the “impersonal functions.” This is “the last link” that makes my waking up possible. (PhP 166-167) Admittedly, breathing is the prominent component of the link; it, as always, opens to the world, and enmeshes in the world so that “things will return through” it (PhP 167). In this sense, Merleau-Ponty says: “sleeper is never completely enclosed in himself, never fully asleep” (PhP 167). The envelopment of the immense lung, like the envelopment of the night, never eradicates me out from the world but only transforms me from a perceiver/perceived subject into something soliciting between the two. That is the primordial sense of subjectivityemerged in “a tidal relation” first held between the perceiver and its world.

However, this tidal relation and indissoluble link between embodiment and world should not be recognized as something graspable in the mind. To recall, “depth is… the most ‘existential’” (PhP 267), for it is not one of the abstract dimensions but a “certain ‘scope’”, “a certain hold” (PhP 278) of the body in relation to the world. Given that our primary hold on the world is an existential link, the breathing in depth has existential meanings indispensable to us. When Merleau-Ponty says: “[d]uring sleep, however, I only keep the world present in order to hold it at a distance” (PhP 297), this means neither that the world becomes further away from me nor that I step back out the world while I fall asleep. Here, distance is another word for depth. The existential distance is that I hold myself at a distance from myself in depth (PhP 420). The respiratory body initially opens a space wherein the interior and the exterior are inseparable. Breathing in and breathing out belong to one movement that simultaneously distances me from and unifies me with the immense lung. Distance is consummated in “the act gathers together also moves away” (PhP 430), and that becomes the basic way how we hold an object. 

Think about a case of vision: how do we see a table as a table? The key is to gather the table surface and the rest of it in the distance together; then, the table appears to me as a real table in its appearance.  For this reason, distance and the apparent size are necessarily implied in each other. The same principle also applies to the respiratory field; the depth and the length of my breath are read in each other. No one could deny that a long breath naturally goes deep. In light of this, we come to understand, as in the vision field, “increasing distance merely expresses that the thing begins to slip away from the hold of our gaze” (PhP 273), I hold the world at a distance in sleep only means that the world tides gradually from my awakening life to the horizon of the unconscious and pre-personal life. Nevertheless, I can never tell how far my pre-personal life beneath me or what capacity of my visual field exactly is because the primary experience of space is not open to measurement but rather unfolds through the qualitative, and even affective, opening of a dimension.” Deep breath yields softness and flexibility; unfulfilled breath breeds heaviness and stiffness. Emotions are trapped in the darkness of breath; Different language (especially musical language and spoken language) cooperates with different paradigms of breath. Free breathing brings about multiple levels of easiness, freshness, openness and liveness. Chronological breathlessness, in many ways, oppress one’s life and even stifles one’s spiritual growth. A list of breathing-related phenomena would be too long to complete. 

So far, we have seen from the previous discussion, as a pivotal existence in the anonymous life, the respiratory body adheres us to the world, it plays with the atmosphere, it invokes different modes of subjectivity in transforming the voluntarily controlled awakened body into the minimally controlled sleeping body. We also have seen how it provides the primordial spatial level, “the pure depth of atmosphere of air,”as “the between-space,”upon which visual and auditory space, for example, can be laid. All above indicate a vague yet profound idea: the “inspiration and expiration of being” could be vitally important “direction of signification” that fundamentally shapes our life at both the personal and prepersonal level. Next, I will strengthen this impression by developing a more nuanced theory of lived body on the basis of Drew Leder’s critique of Merleau-Ponty. I will introduce a new terminology: “Flesh-Breath-Blood” to capture the three-fold structure of the body as a whole. Then I will conclude this paper by considering an implication of my Merleau-Pontian account of breathing: to breathe is to start/restart “a new possibility of situations” (PhP 429). 

From “Flesh and Blood” to “Flesh-Breath-Blood”

In his book, The Absent Body, Drew Leder notes  the limitation of the ‘lived body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s work as a mere perceiver/perceived. He argued that “beneath the sensorimotor surface lies the anonymous strata of the visceral, a prenatal history, the body asleep,” and neither the picture of the ‘lived body’ delineated in nor the rich notion of ‘flesh’ (la chair) coined in The Visible and The Invisible is sufficient to do full justice to the visceral. Both terminologies tend to focus on the visible and tangible body, what Leder called the surface of the body but missing the depth of the body, the invisible and intangible part. With the example of digestion, Leder described three essential features of the visceral sensations submerged in “impenetrable silence.” Firstly, qualitative reduction. That is to say, albeit a variety of sense-receptor types found in visceral organs, often they are experienced as a single dimension of perception and only to be able to be expressed by a few limited vocabularies. Second, spatial ambiguity results from the difficulty in precisely localizing my pain and other discomforts, which has its deeper reason in the fact that the visceral organs sustain within my body as a whole. Rarely can we point it out as being “there” or maintaining a distance from “here.” Third, spatiotemporal discontinuity is associated with the insensitivity and invisibility of the visceral life as if its presence is concealed, hiding in a dark hole of time and space so that it can escape from our reflections. 

Leder then reminds his readers that the mysterious quality of our visceral life is marked not only by the limited experience we can have but also by experiences that we cannot have. The experience of the visceral organs is not directly presented on the surface of the body but radiates from the depth of the body such that I cannot perceive directly from it, nor can I perceive to or act to it. However, this passivity of the visceral life does not make it independent from the thematized perceptual life. Rather, the vegetative process is intertwined with my purposiveness expressing moods and desires no less than my surface body. To highlight this hidden vitality of the body not fully justified by the conception of flesh, Leder suggested that “Flesh and Blood” should be used as one word to redefine the entire body, whereby both the sensorimotor of the body and “a dimension of depth hitherto unspoken” are expressed. I appreciate Leder’s move and his metaphorical expression – of ‘Blood’ as a supplementary to our understanding of the ontological notion of ‘Flesh.’  However, the ambiguous attitude held toward breathing is perplexing. On the one hand, Leder juxtaposes respiration with circulation, excretion and the alkie systems, treating the respiratory process as one of the self-moving operations engaged in the moving-becoming of the organic whole; on the other hand, he does not deny the great potential of breathing in awakening more subtle sensations of the visceral organs. He even said that “the awareness of and control over the inner body exhibited by trained yogis has far surpassed what used to be thought possible in the West.” I believe these equivocations have roots in our intuition that breathing owes the surface body as much as the visceral body. Could this small problem mean something big, something fundamental inappropriateness in our view of the visceral? A closer reading is in order. Leder first portrayed the visceral as the supplementary of the mere perceiver/perceived body, and then he further interpreted it as the intangible and invisible body as the supplementary of what he called the surface body, i.e., the visible and tangible body. And finally, he developed his full discussions with the example of the body “in depth” that is spatially or temporally out of our sight: the visceral organs, sleep, birth etc. The problem lies in that his phenomenological investigation of the visceral is still based on the naïve understanding of the body as a whole in space and in time, not that of space and of time. The first step is correct. Indeed, a supplementary of the perceiver/perceived body awaits to be explored, but what can integrate the perceiver/perceived-split body to make it a whole is the perceiver/perceived-coexistence body, that is the anonymous body that lives and is active in the pre-personal life.  

The visceral body under my skin seems to be capable of supplementing the perceiver/perceived-split body because it symbolizes the anonymous body in pure depth. The interior body encloses an area that naturally resists our measurement and reflection, yet it won’t become ontologically unmeasurable or unreflective until it is uncovered at the pre-personal level as living in pure depth. In the same vein, one’s infantile life is easily understood as what Bernhard Waldenfels called “a prior forgetting” since we never “consciously lived through or even planned,” but understood in this way, it remains salvageable given it essentially belongs to the sequence of “now.” There is a deeper layer of meaning dwelling in our infantile life, viz., the infantile body first must be the impersonal body, which lives in a past which has never been present. In light of this, we come to understand that the visceral body seen from the prepersonal level is neither the lumped mass physically underneath the surface body nor the infantile or sleep body of which we lack of memory. The visceral body should be another name for the anonymous body that dominates our pre-personal life, and insofar as it lives in the pure past and pure depth, it is virtual!

Now we know on account of that the perceiver/perceived-split body itself is perceptible; its being must be synchronized with consciousness, or put differently, its being must be a refracted trace left by the past, impersonal body. With this in mind, we can, from a new perspective, review the three essential features of our visceral sensations proposed by Leder through his profound and penetrating phenomenological observation.

First, it is not accidental that across languages and cultures, much more words exist for praising the sensorimotor flow of the body than the words for our visceral systems since all visceral organs largely are immersed in the unspoken silence. But what does cause the insensitivity of the visceral systems in the first place? A close reading of “Le sentir” reveals that perception is not the atemporal correspondence or to use Merleau-Ponty’s own word “self-enclosed states” (PhP 217) between a thinker and “a quality” (PhP 219); rather, it is the temporal resonance (the synchronization) between different moving rhythms (bodies), which made the meaning arise from the becoming on the ground of the sensory life. Each perception “involves openness, call, and response.” “The living connection,” or more specifically, “the mutual belonging of lived body and world” made up a “communion” where different rhythms are connected affectively. The “absent, lack, ‘tension’” between the different rhythms (the rhythmic difference) issues the call and response, whereby resonance and negotiations proceed. Then, in anticipation and synchronization the sensing and the sensible are actualized together with the actualization of the present. The idea is that only an absence, a tension, can start the reversible calling-responding process off. If no major tension or rhythmic difference lies across different parts of the body and the body and its world, no motivation will arise so much so that the body will not be suspended from its primal affiliation with the world. In this sense, different rhythms, “different speeds or tempos of being,” define different bodies. 

Inversely, we could say the rhythmic consistency within the body is what, at the bottom, makes the sensorimotor schema become the impersonal One and offers us the ultimate felt-consistency of our own body. The transparency and insensitivity of the temporospatial body, being “an absolute here,” found its ontological source in its being the absolute unity of the impersonal One. 

If as Leder suggested, we secure this impersonal body as part of the entire body by affixing Blood to Flesh, can “Flesh and Blood’ then be capable of expressing the structure of the whole body? I think not. Given that the prepersonal life is irreducible to the personal life, one might first wonder how the sensorimotor surface of the body interplays with the impersonal body holistically. How does the personal life make sense of the sensory life? I believe a key role at play is the rhythm of our breathing. Our rhythmic breathing is the always-opened door through which the personal life can be channelled into the pre-personal life or the other way around. Let’s begin with an attempt to appreciate the difficulty unwittingly bypassed by Leder in his writing: how to explain our almost equal reluctance to attribute breathing to the sensorimotor body and the “visceral body.” 

I had a general discussion of the respiratory body as the first opening to the world and how breathing leads us to the dormant situation. Now, I want to deepen that discussion by first building a relationship between breathing and night. Then, I will show how breathing, night, and sleep are entangled together, bringing us a basic rhythm, shaping and limiting “the scope” of our life from beneath (PhP 141). Night is like breathing in many ways, for both can push our subjective experience to the limit and expose us to “the prepersonal matrix.” According to Merleau-Ponty, night abolishes all objects yet does not become another object for me. Instead, night tends to erase me: it “envelops me,” “penetrates me,” “suffocates my memories,” and “effaces my (personal) identity” (PhP 296); it touches me by itself and leaves me no “observation post” (PhP 296) that through which I distinguish myself from others. However, in its threat of abolishing my personal existence and stifling my subjectivity, night also pulls me infinitely close to it, arrives on me, and engulfs me in its “mystical” unity- “the unity of the mana” (PhP 296). This Janus-faced feature of night might be enigmatic yet not completely strange to me in that with our sleep-inducing breath, I also feel it in the encroachment of my voluntary control of the breath and my involuntary enmeshment in the bed, the night and the immense external lung of the world. They bothwithdraw me from my world so that I can be unified with the immense external lung or the mana. But what meaning can there be in my rhythmical reunion with them? Merleau-Ponty writes: “During sleep… I turn toward the subjective sources of my existence” (PhP 297). I agree with Gunther in treating this “turn towards” not only as a simple shift from one bodily or mental state to another but rather a vital return, which “allows me to retain…recover my sense of personal identity, my distinction from the night, the root of my own subjective existence.” By constantly being breathed by the external lung and embraced by the sleep and the night, I allow myself repeatedly return to the impersonal body and reconfirm “an absolute here” of my body so that a “there” can be clearly determined. A “clear space” and a steady flow of time thereby could possibly be experienced, upon which all the rest, the explicit perception, flood in. “I am always rooted to a natural and non-human space,” says Merleau-Ponty (PhP 307). Some sense of this quote is saying that the conscious life needs to be restored, nourished, and refreshed, but cardinally to be drawn on in the depth of the natural life. As the canvas shine through from beneath all paintings, this natural life, anonymous life, shimmers in silence, being the only source of our individuality and subjectivity and that “gives the human world an air of fragility.”(PhP 307) At the heart of this fragility, I believe, locates a complex of breathing, night and sleep, functioning like the stem of our life that grows into and is part of the anonymous root (the originary consciousness) and the consciousness flower.  

However, breathing, as tissues and tendons that connect Blood and Flesh, so to speak, its power of communication and transformation also manifests its infinite expressivity. An articulation of the world has already been dreamed of in the primordial silence through rhythmic breathing. The speaking/spoken co-existing subject, according to afore argued, needs to adhere itself onto a primordia silence, from which speech emerges and into which speech is swallowed up. And let’s not forget this “self-arrival/self-erasure” structured self is available only because we are the body, the immanence and the transcendence, the nature and the culture. In identifying our body with “a nature loaded with symbolic significations,” we also discovered nature as “a symbolic system of the body.” The signification of air does not  need to be mediated by any subject but co-naissance with it; rather, sense springs forth in the process of synchronization of the sensing and sensible, and it is a living process that opens to the inhabitant lived in that life. In a word, the sense is relational, situated sense. It flashes at the “transitional” moments when the external logos encounters the internal logos. And breathing must be the concomitant of their first encounter, the first bodily manifestation of the logic, in which the “what is expressed” has not yet been much differentiated from “what is expressing” or “what is to express.” It is just a gesture of collecting in and a gesture of releasing out, a quiet rhythm, an in-and-out. No wonder ‘psyche’ bears two threads of meanings: “breath” and “Soul/Logos.” 

A detailed hermeneutical interpretation of this can be found in Levin’s paper “Logos and Psyche,” but the basic idea is that “Breathing gives the primordial Logos (law) to our speech (logos) because it is through the breath (psyche) that the Logos is first gathered up.” It is essential to recognize, as Levin reminds us, that due to this rhythmic pattern, breathing can be “restricted” and “released” in the sense that it can block the way or give way to speech. In our adjustment, modification, distortion and even manipulation of breathing, we are able to sing to speech. The first cry asks for the first breath; a big laugh is often followed by a choking in breath; when one is unburdened, she tends to make a sigh of relief; as the danger is approaching, one’s breath is always tuned to be short and ragged. We express ourselves on the basis of the mode of our breathing. Derivatively, how we breathe will affect the quantity and quality of our linguistic expression. For example, the rhythms, expansiveness, tightness or calmness of one’s breathing may inflect the rhythms, emotion, and tone of their linguistic meaning. Singers, poets, actors, and experts of expression will tell you how their expressive activity is inseparable from and deeply engaged with breath. We even could also imagine a poem that is pure breathing, participating in the world in a relationship of the most intimate taking and giving. In every gesture of inhalation and exhalation, it reminds us that we are woven into the currents of an atmosphere, an encompassing presence, from which we are inseparable, and without which it would be impossible for us to survive.

As the paper approaches its end, I would like to discuss its significant implications and the doors it opens for further research. Much of the study in phenomenology has hitherto aided in helping us understand how sensory and motor systems are fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. Yet, few consider the depth of the body and how it grounds our mind. My research attempts to redress this lacuna by first pointing out the concealed meanings of the respiratory system beyond its physiological functions. Along this line, a systematic phenomenological explication of the visceral body awaits to be explored. The exposure of the profound entanglement of the visceral body with the impersonal life will add, upon the layer of ‘body schema,’ a further nuance within the theory of the embodiment of the mind.

Besides, a significant question lurks behind my investigation of the phenomenon of breathing is on the subject of breathing, viz, who is breathing? That my breathing surely means I am breathing, but it also implies that One breathes. Subjectivity, in light of this, is neither reducible to pure consciousness nor to the impersonal or prepersonal existence but a combination of both. Subjects, therefore, never consist of individual minds or mere illusions but emerge from the depth of time and space, the co-nnaissance of the body and the world. If this is promisingly to be true, seriously considering the question -“Who is breathing?” will shed light on the heated debate on subject and subjectivity in general. It suggests an indirect yet productive way of thinking about the mind-body problem and the rest that counterpose subjectivism to the anti-subjectivism.

Towards The End, Towards a New Possibility

“One day, and indeed once and for all, something was set in motion that, even during sleep, can no longer cease seeing or not seeing, sensing or not sensing, suffering or being happy, thinking or resting, in a word, that can no longer cease  ‘having it out’ with the world. What began was not a new batch of sensations or states of consciousness, nor even a new monad or a new perspective, since I am not attached to any particular one and since I can change my point of view, only being always bound to occupy one and to occupy only one at a time – let us say that what began was a new possibility of situations. (PhP 429)

One thing unchanged is that for Merleau-Ponty, this possibility is always an existential possibility and has something to do with openness, indeterminacy, as well as freedom. What was set in motion, however was further thematized and better coined as “wild being” in his latter work. (VI) It vertically exists and sketches out the movement of existence in itself; it expresses possible situation but also starts new possibility within the given situation. No doubt it is the moving, attentive life and the ancient vegetative life, yet also the force which motivates that life, “the immense lung” and “the mana”, the more-human-world popularized by David Abram. Above and beyond, it is the restless impulse and solicitation flowing between the body and its world. It is the whole, the “Flesh-Breath-Blood.”

Now, think about how we wake up from a long night and a bad dreamful sleep, occasionally in a shadow of fear still hovering around with the memory of trying to scream, yet no sound coming out. (For I was yet able to control my breath and had my voice!) We re-breath deeply. We yawn to pour the fresh morning air into the body and let them float the limbs, lift the refreshed mind, and by that, we re-take up a coherent story of the self. All living creatures make their own way to re-commence their breathing after sleep. All life comes to expression in the temporal wave with an atmosphere of breathing because there is always a possibility that stands higher than the actuality. The man who is aware of this possibility in each of his breaths is, in my opinion, the master of breathing, the so-called “true man.” He is perpetually conscious of and constantly engaged in the mutual expression of the self, the body, and the world, meanwhile experiencing the vastness of breath in all of its spiritual and ontological possibilities.

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Keywords; breathing, philosophy