Vertical Being

Merleau-Ponty's name for the irrelative source of transcendence in his late ontology — the "from-above" (Hoheit) that is not a relativity of subject or object but their common source. The cardinal phrase is "All verticality comes from vertical Being" (VI, 234; VI, 287; January 1960 working note). Vertical Being is closely related to but structurally distinct from wild-being: where wild Being names the brute, uncultivated, pre-objective Being that the late ontology aims to bring to expression, vertical Being names the source-axis — the irrelative, abyssal "from-above" that makes any horizontal transcendence (subject-object correlation) possible. Madison (1973/1981) is the foundational secondary reader who treats verticality as the organizing trope of MP's whole trajectory from Structure of Behavior onwards.

Key Points

  • The cardinal phrase: "All verticality comes from vertical Being" (VI, 234; VI, 287). The phrase locates verticality as a property of Being, not of consciousness or of the world taken separately.
  • Not horizontal: the contrast is with Sartrean horizontal transcendence (the for-itself "transcending" toward the in-itself). Vertical Being is the "abyss" (Abgrund) that is not a "lack of ground" but a positive source of transcendence.
  • Madison's trajectory reading: verticality begins in *The Structure of Behavior* as "vertical structuration" (the integration of physical/vital/human orders); continues in *Phenomenology of Perception* as échappement (the body's transcendence); reverses in 1952 with "Indirect Language" ("Transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer," S, 71; S, 88); and culminates in Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible as vertical Being — the irrelative source.
  • Distinct from wild Being: see Connections below. The wiki's wild-being page treats "vertical being" as an alias, but Madison's reading preserves them as related but distinct sub-registers — vertical = source-axis (the "from-above" irrelative origin); wild = expressivity-axis (the unmotivated upsurge that flesh names).
  • Vertical history: the cumulative-not-empirical historicity of MP's late philosophy of history — what Madison reads as MP's "two historicities" applied to Being. "An absolute, a philosophy, which is immanent in the history of philosophy" (VI, 188; VI, 242). The history of philosophy is vertical because earlier philosophy is taken up in later (the classics keep their meaning outside their context — VI, 199; VI, 253).
  • Connection to indirect ontology: at VI, 178; VI, 232, the incompleteness of the reduction "is not 'an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.'" Madison reads this as the Pyrrhonian moment of MP's negative philosophy — the impossibility of complete reduction positively reveals something (vertical Being), it is not a defect.

Details

Verticality as Madison's Organizing Trope

Madison reads MP's whole development as a working-out of verticality:

  1. SB (1942): "vertical structuration" is the subsection title of Madison Ch I §I.2 (l. 599-617). Life is "circular and, precisely as such, vertical" (l. 617). The integration of physical/vital/human orders is already "a kind of movement of transcendence" (l. 617) — "Already in its beginnings life is oriented upwards."
  2. PhP (1945): verticality is échappement (escape, transcendence) — the body's intrinsic transcendence beyond its actual occurrence. The Madison Ch I §II.2 (Being-in-the-World as Transcendence) treats this. But the verticality of PhP remains contingency-grounded — MP's "bad ambiguity" is precisely the gap between transcendence (vertical) and the unmotivated upsurge of the world (horizontal contingency).
  3. "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952): the hinge. "Transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer" (S, 71; S, 88, Madison Ch II §II.3 l. 1359). The reversal: where the theological vertical placed transcendence above man (God descending), MP's late vertical Being is borne through man (Being requiring man to be).
  4. "Eye and Mind" (1960): the painter's vision occurs in the visible; body and world are "made of the same stuff" (PriP, 164; OE, 21). The chiasm sensing-sensible is "Being as radiance, explosion, transcendence, opening" (Madison Ch II §III.3 l. 1447). The deflagration of Being is the vertical-Being event that grounds the infinite Logos.
  5. V&I (1959-1961 working notes): explicit vertical-Being thesis at VI, 234; VI, 287 ("All verticality comes from vertical Being") and VI, 178; VI, 232 ("the rediscovery of vertical being" via reduction's incompleteness).

The trajectory shows verticality is not a late MP concept but a constant organizing trope whose ontological resonance increases as MP moves from SB-phenomenology to V&I-ontology.

Verticality vs. Horizontality (the Sartre Contrast)

The December 1960 working note "'Vertical' and existence" is the canonical MP-text:

"What I call the vertical is what Sartre calls existence—but which for him immediately becomes the fulguration of nothingness which makes the world arise, the operation of the for itself. In fact the circle exists and existence is not man. The circle exists, inexplicable, as soon as I take into account not only the circle-object, but this visible circle, this circular physiognomy which no intellectual genesis nor physical causality explains, and which has the very properties that I do not yet know."

The "vertical" circle is the circle as it appears in the visible — with its depth and physiognomy. The "horizontal" circle is the circle as object, derivable from a formula. The contrast organizes MP's late ontology: vertical Being has depth (latent and patent dimensions, foreground and background, what is seen and what is "behind" or "below" the seen); horizontal being is the flat plane of objective thought.

Madison's gloss: Sartrean transcendence is horizontal — the for-itself "transcends" toward the in-itself in a single plane. MP's vertical Being is the abyssal source that makes any transcendence-relation possible. "All verticality comes from vertical Being" means: any horizontal transcendence (subject toward object, body toward world, perception toward perceived) presupposes a source-axis that is not in the relation but is its condition.

Hoheit and the Abyss-as-Source

VI, 250; VI, 303 contains MP's most concentrated language for the source-axis: "upsurge of a Hoheit which holds from above." Vertical Being is the Hoheit (German: highness, sublimity, elevation) — the from-above. Madison treats this as not a "higher being" or "supreme entity" but as the direction-of-source from which transcendence flows.

The companion phrase at the same passage: "the so-called Grund is Abgrund" — the ground is abyss. Vertical Being is Abgrund in the positive sense: not a lack of foundation, but a positive source whose mode of being is to give without itself being given. Madison reads this as the structural form of MP's indirect ontology — Being is approached only indirectly, as the presupposed-but-ungraspable ground of subjectivity.

Vertical Being and the Incompleteness of the Reduction

MP's "impossibility of complete reduction" (PhP, XIV; PP, VIII) is read by Madison (Appendix II §II.2) as positively revealing vertical Being:

"This incompleteness is not... 'an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.'" (VI, 178; VI, 232)

The phenomenological reduction cannot be completed — and this incompleteness is not a defect but the positive opening through which vertical Being shows itself. The reduction's failure to dissolve the world into pure consciousness is the recognition that consciousness depends on a vertical source it cannot constitute.

This is Madison's Counter-traditional / Pyrrhonian gloss: the Pyrrhonian epoche (Sextus Empiricus) was precisely this — the impossibility of complete reduction reveals that the philosopher cannot stand outside the world to describe it. Vertical Being is the positive content of this impossibility.

Verticality of History

VI, 199; VI, 253: "a philosophy, like a work of art, is an object that can arouse more thoughts than those that are 'contained' in it." The history of philosophy is vertical because earlier philosophy is taken up in later — not by being completed (Hegel) and not by being destinally sent (Heidegger), but by being cited toward an infinite telos. Madison's "vertical history" reading (Ch V §IV) places MP's philosophy of history between Hegelian closure and Heideggerian destinal sending: cumulative-without-progression, classical-without-end.

The classics "keep meaning outside their context — and even only outside it" (S, 181; S, 228 — "teleology is written and thought about in parentheses"). The verticality of history is the structural form of MP's impensé-method applied to historical philosophy: each philosophy has more meaning available to future readers than its author could have placed in it. See unthought.

What the Concept Does

Vertical Being performs three argumentative functions in Madison's reading:

  1. It names the source-axis of all transcendence — the "from-above" that makes any subject-object correlation possible. Distinguishes MP's late ontology from Sartrean horizontal transcendence.
  2. It positively grounds the incompleteness of the reduction — the reduction's failure becomes the rediscovery of the abyssal source. Distinguishes MP's negative philosophy from Husserlian objectivism.
  3. It organizes the trajectory from SB to V&I — verticality as the constant Madison-trope across the MP corpus, gathering vertical structuration (SB), échappement (PhP), the 1952 hinge ("Transcendence no longer hangs over man"), the deflagration of Being (E&M), and vertical Being proper (V&I).

What It Rejects

  • Sartrean horizontal transcendence (the for-itself transcending toward the in-itself in a single plane)
  • Theological vertical transcendence (God above man, descending) — reversed in 1952 to vertical Being borne through man
  • Heideggerian destinal vertical (Being sending itself to thought) — MP keeps the structural verticality but refuses the destinal Geschick
  • Hegelian closed-history vertical (telos as completion) — MP's verticality is cumulative-without-progression
  • Bergsonian élan vital vertical (vertical as biological-temporal force) — MP's verticality is ontological, not vital

Stakes

If vertical Being is the source-axis of transcendence, then (i) MP's late ontology has a positive ontological substance beyond Sartrean negativity; (ii) the incompleteness of the reduction is not a defect but a positive revelation; (iii) the history of philosophy is cumulative without being progressive; (iv) the painter's vision and the philosopher's interrogation are attestations of vertical Being rather than its products.

If vertical Being is not preserved in the reading, MP's late ontology risks collapsing into either Sartrean negative ontology (no positive content) or Heideggerian destinal ontology (subjectivity abandoned).

Problem-Space

Vertical Being addresses the problem-space of how transcendence is positively grounded without becoming a theological transcendent. The problem recurs across MP's corpus under different names — Fundierung (PhP), Stiftung / Urstiftung (1953-55 institution courses + V&I), brute Being (Nature courses), il y a (V&I), the deflagration of Being (E&M). Madison's reading gathers these under the verticality-trope.

Connections

  • is structurally distinct from wild-being — vertical Being is the source-axis (irrelative, from-above); wild Being is the expressivity-axis (unmotivated upsurge, uncultivated). The wiki's wild-being page treats "vertical being" as an alias, but Madison's reading preserves the distinction. Both are MP's late-ontology vocabulary for the same Being viewed from two angles.
  • is the source of deflagration of Being / dehiscence / fission — the "explosion of Being" through the chiasm sensing-sensible is the vertical event by which Being articulates into Logos.
  • grounds indirect-ontology — vertical Being is the irrelative source that can be approached only indirectly. The Pyrrhonian epoche (Sextus) is the methodological cousin.
  • is the late form of SB's vertical structuration (if a stub) — the three orders' integration in SB anticipates the source-axis of V&I. Madison reads the relation as continuous.
  • is the source of cumulative / vertical history — VI, 199; VI, 253 establishes the verticality of history as the cumulative-not-progressive form.
  • contrasts with Sartrean horizontal transcendence — the December 1960 working note is canonical.
  • connects to barbarian-principle — Schelling's "barbarian principle" is one of the genealogical sources for vertical/wild Being. Madison does NOT foreground this connection (his reading prefers pre-Socratic + Husserlian-Earth genealogies); Ricoeur's foreword does. See madison-brute-being-genealogy-not-schelling-routed (candidate).
  • is the late development of transcendence in MP / *échappement* (if stubs).

Motif Weight & Corpus Recurrence

Verticality / vertical Being appears in motifs as a candidate HUB-weight entry after the 2026-05-22 Madison ingest:

  • Sources: MP 1942 SB (HUB — vertical structuration), MP 1945 PhP (HUB — échappement), MP 1948 SNS / 1964 Signs (HUB — 1952 hinge), MP 1961 E&M (HUB — deflagration as vertical event), MP 1968 V&I (HUB — explicit vertical-Being thesis at VI, 234; VI, 287 and VI, 178; VI, 232 and VI, 250; VI, 303), Madison 1981 (HUB — organizing trope of the whole book).
  • 6+ source attestations after Madison addition; 5+ HUB-weighted.
  • Motif entry pending — to be confirmed at Step 6a of the 2026-05-22 ingest cycle.

Open Questions

  • The wild-being / vertical-being relation: are they fully coextensive (the wiki's current treatment) or related-but-distinct sub-registers (Madison's treatment)? The 1960 working note "'Vertical' and existence" treats verticality as a property of wild Being's appearing; Madison's reading preserves the distinction as analytic. The wiki's wild-being page should be updated to reflect this nuance.
  • The Schelling-MP "barbarian principle" connection: Madison's body does NOT route vertical Being through Schelling, despite Ricoeur's foreword raising the question. Knight 2024 / Gardner 2016 / Saint Aubert 2021 readings do. The verticality of vertical Being could be read through Schelling's unvordenklich (the unprethinkable) — but neither Madison nor the wiki's current Schelling treatments make this connection explicit.
  • The relation to *il y a* (if/when created): vertical Being is the source; il y a is the event. The relation is the same as Being-to-advent in Madison Ch V §I (l. 2396).