Co-Naissance

A portmanteau from Paul Claudel's Art poétique (1907) that fuses naissance (birth) with connaissance (knowledge): to know is to be co-born. Merleau-Ponty adopts this concept from his earliest work (The Structure of Behavior, 1942) through the unpublished Being and World manuscripts (1958), where it becomes his formula for ontology itself: "Ontology is the attempt to formulate this nascence and co-naissance, to find that which is beyond naturalism and idealism, to portray man as he really is: not the sketch of an absolute subjectivity, but a surrection, a light at the top of this incredible arrangement that is the human body" (EM1, unpublished).

Key Points

  • Not merely a neologism but an ontological formula: Co-naissance names the inseparability of perceiving, being, and being-born. Claudel's network of equivalences — to perceive = to be = to be co-born — provides the passive-active dynamic at the heart of MP's philosophy of the flesh.
  • Present throughout MP's career: From Structure of Behavior to Phenomenology of Perception ("a relation of co-naissance," in the chapter on Sensing), through the 1948-49 lectures, the 1954-55 courses on passivity, to Being and World (1958) and the final courses (1961, "The Cohesion of Being and Simultaneity: Claudel").
  • Against Sartre: MP's late manuscripts reproach Sartre for having ignored co-naissance. Sartre's "double incarnation" in the poser-contre of bodies represents the failure of co-naissance.
  • Sensation as co-naissance: PhP's chapter on Sensing is largely based on Claudel's Treatise on Co-Naissance (though Claudel is not named). The passage on sensation as "communion" is the key text: "Every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body with the things" (PhP).
  • Four Claudelian figures describe co-naissance's passive-active dynamic: communion (mutual manducation), coupling (the biblical sense of "knowing"), vibration ("the cradle of things"), and respiration ("inspiration and expiration of Being").

Details

From Claudel to Merleau-Ponty

Claudel's Art poétique articulates a radical conception of perceptual life as an experience of being: "We are not born alone. For everything, to be born is to be co-born. All birth is a form of knowledge. . . . To know is therefore to be: that which is lacking in everything else." For Claudel, being is held together only in movement, in an ever-nascent state of coexistence — "To live is to be perpetually born." Every perception is a co-emergence into visibility, where the perceiver and perceived are simultaneously nascent, one from the other and one into the other.

MP reproduces most of Claudel's general equations without always naming him. The Claudelian osmosis is deepest in the PhP chapter on Sensing, where the vocabulary of coupling, communion, and vibration is deployed to describe the relation between sentient and sensible. De Saint Aubert notes that "this Claudelian infusion, so obvious to those immersed in both authors' worlds of thought, is difficult to demarcate precisely, given the extent and subtlety of the poet's influence on the philosopher."

The Enveloping-Enveloped and the Engendering-Engendered

De Saint Aubert argues (Ch 2 of *Poetic of the World*) that co-naissance operates through two interlocking topologies:

  1. Enveloping-enveloped — the spatial/topological layer: respiration, nutrition, coupling all involve the body's being enveloped by what it envelops. Breton's "sublime point" is the figure for this structure's intensification.
  2. Engendering-engendered — the temporal/archaeological layer: the enveloping-enveloped unfolds into engendering. The reversibility of inside and outside is already a pregnancy; coupling culminates in birth. Co-naissance proper: the co-birth of myself and the world.

The dynamic leads from flesh → flesh of the world → being: "If the surrection of desire is extended into the surrection of beings, this is only because we are open to being and the upward lift (portance) of being."

Simultaneity and Coexistence

Jean Wahl, who knew both Claudel and MP, summarized their shared principle: "Both you and Claudel take as fundamental a universal perception made within us rather than by us, you both affirm that to perceive, is to be." Claudel never ceases to celebrate the ontological simultaneity of coexistence: "All these things that exist together!" MP consciously cultivates this Claudelian formula throughout his late work, from the Nature or the World of Silence manuscript ("nature bears us, bears us pell-mell with other people") through the preface of Signs ("man exists only in movement") to The Visible and the Invisible.

Hollow-and-Melody as Ideation (Carbone 2015)

Carbone's *Flesh of Images* ch. 6 ("The Sensible Ideas Between Life and Philosophy") develops co-naissance as the structure of ideation itself. The governing passage: "When we invent a melody, the melody sings in us more than we sing it, it goes down into the throat of the singer, as Proust says [. . .] [T]he body is suspended in what it sings: the melody is incarnated and finds in the body a type of servant" (MP, Nature 174).

Carbone's analysis: inventing-a-melody is a letting-be (Heideggerian sein-lassen). The "we" of the melody is a hollow (creux, invagination) that opens in the encounter — not a pre-existing receptacle. Both "idea" (the melody) and "hollow" (the welcoming body) are co-born: "they are 'co-born.' More exactly, they are born together in an indistinction of activity and passivity" (carbone-2015-flesh-of-images ch. 6). Carbone cites Claudel's Art poétique (1907) directly.

Three consequences:

  1. Ideation is not Platonic: the idea does not exist before its advent. "The idea does not exist prior to its advent, which is another decisively anti-Platonist element."
  2. The hollow is not khôra-like: the hollow does not pre-exist the idea as a receptacle waiting to be filled. This would make us "pure passivity" and make ideas pre-formed "elsewhere." Instead, both idea and hollow arise simultaneously in the encounter.
  3. We are not the authors: "I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat" (MP V&I 101). Co-naissance is a "creativity that we are, yet without being its authors."

This is Carbone's most systematic post-Claudel development of co-naissance. See light-of-the-flesh for the correlative anti-Platonist doctrine of how ideas appear on the diffused luminosity of the flesh, and generative-passivity for Beith's parallel "birth as institution of a future."

E&C II: co-naissance as answer to idealism and realism

Saint Aubert's Épilogue § 3c consolidates co-naissance as the structural answer to MP's long polemic: neither idealism (knowledge as construction) nor realism (knowledge as reception), but co-naissance as shared emergence.

"La coexistence que la vie perceptive contribue à instituer implique enfin une participation et une réalisation communes. (...) La perception suppose de laisser l'être porter les êtres et nous porter nous-même avec eux pour que nous puissions recevoir et concevoir, percevoir et reconnaître. Mais encore faut-il consentir à être (et à naître), consentir à ce que ce qui est soit (et naisse) et consentir à être avec (à naître ensemble). À être ensemble, dans l'être-avec de l'être." (E&C II Épilogue § 3c)

Co-naissance is the réalisation commune — a work (travail) that produces real and perceiver together. The prégnance of the flesh and the portance of being meet in co-naissance. See epreuve-mutuelle-de-la-chair-et-de-letre.

Connections

  • is the active principle of reversibility — co-naissance is the dynamic (being-born-together) of which reversibility is the structural form
  • extends primordial-expression — the communion/coupling/vibration/respiration register enriches the account of bodily expression
  • grounds intercorporeity — intercorporeity is co-naissance generalized beyond the single body
  • is the existential formula behind flesh-as-element — but de Saint Aubert argues the flesh of the world risks dissolving co-naissance's separation-within-union into fusion
  • contrasts with Sartre's poser-contre — Sartre's analysis of "double incarnation" represents the failure of co-naissance
  • is formulated through Claudel's Art poétique — the literary origin is constitutive, not illustrative
  • culminates in surrection — the vertical emergence that carries co-naissance beyond the circularity of the Ineinander
  • is the structural answer to épreuve mutuelle — the perceiver and perceived emerge together in the testing.
  • is sustained by portance — being bears both perceiver and perceived into co-birth.

Open Questions

  • How does co-naissance relate to the 1945 tacit-cogito? If knowing is always co-being-born, is the tacit cogito already a form of co-naissance — and does its later retraction affect the concept?
  • Does the Claudelian religious framework (co-naissance as sacramental communion) survive MP's secularization? Or does something essential drop out when "the religious descends into the oneiric"?
  • De Saint Aubert argues co-naissance must lead to separation (the experience of becoming separate is irreplaceable). Does MP sufficiently develop the separation dimension, or does the emphasis on enveloping-enveloped occlude it?

Sources

  • johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Ch 2 (de Saint Aubert): the most sustained treatment. Traces from Structure of Behavior through Being and World. Develops the enveloping-enveloped / engendering-engendered structure. Also Ch 5 on metaphoricity as co-naissance of body and world.
  • merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the 1954-55 courses as transitional site; references to Claudel on simultaneity and the poet's later engagement in 1961 courses
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — §2: "A human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, inside the mother's body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter's vision is a continued birth." This is co-naissance in its perceptual-ontological register: the painter does not construct but is continually co-born with the visible. Also §2: "There really is inspiration and expiration of Being" — the respiration figure that Claudel provides and MP deploys as the form of co-naissance.
  • carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — ch. 6 "The Sensible Ideas Between Life and Philosophy," pp. 75–83. Develops co-naissance as the structure of ideation: hollow and idea co-born in the encounter, not in a pre-existing subject. Cites Claudel's Art poétique (1907) explicitly and links to MP's Nature 174 (the melody-sings-in-us passage). The most systematic post-Claudel development.
  • saintaubert-2021-etre-et-chair-ii — Épilogue § 3c ("Co-naître et réaliser", pp. 333-336) for the structural-answer formulation; also Ch V for the prégnance / naissance connection and Ch I for the EM1 [128] programmatic opening of Introduction à l'ontologie.