Voir-Selon / Vivre-Selon

Frank Chouraqui's systematized technical term for Merleau-Ponty's most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith — a "style of seeing/living" that is partial both in its arbitrary focus and in its structural incompleteness, where belief is reducible to voir-selon that has forgotten its hypothetical character. The term is taken from MP's "Eye and Mind" passage on Cézanne's watercolors (E&M 126: "Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it [je vois selon ou avec lui]") and extended by Chouraqui — first in *Circulus Vitiosus Deus* (2016), more fully in *Healing Schneider* (2025), and most systematically in "The Political Genealogy of Truth" (2026 ch. 10) — into a structural concept of pre-doxastic representation that bridges aesthetics, ontology, and politics. The extension to vivre-selon (living-according-to) names the basic structure of social agency and lets Chouraqui argue that "all 'good' politics is a politics of distraction."

Key Points

  • Origin in painting: MP's Eye and Mind p. 126 — confronting Cézanne's watercolors, MP says "I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. ... Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it." We do not believe Cézanne's watercolors; we see according to them. The painting becomes a "context for our viewing in general."
  • Pre-doxastic, not doxastic: Voir-selon is a representational state that is not truth-directed. This distinguishes it from belief (which is doxastic) and from sub-personal information processing (which is non-representational). It belongs to a different regime than belief, with no bivalence.
  • Style as arbitrariness AND incompleteness (after Garelli): a voir-selon is partial in two senses. (i) It focuses arbitrarily on certain features rather than others (style as arbitrariness). (ii) Its content is structurally incomplete, calling for further articulation (style as incompleteness). The two partialities together define the operation.
  • Belief is faith that forgets itself: Chouraqui's mechanism for the soft-to-strong transition. When voir-selon suffices to bring the world into view, the foreground/background distinction collapses, the voir-selon "no longer becomes an object of thought, but truly becomes the way one thinks." At that point "there is — literally — nothing more certain in the world." Belief is the crystallization of voir-selon.
  • Extension to vivre-selon: Chouraqui generalizes from seeing (perceptual) to living (existential-political). Just as we see according to Cézanne's watercolors without believing them, we live according to a regime, a culture, a perceptual field, without consciously assenting to it. The vivre-selon is the basic structure of social agency.
  • Saturated attention, not propositional content: Chouraqui's bridge to MP's account of power. Vivre-selon is "an experience of saturated attention" — a structure of the perceptual / attentional field rather than a propositional state. This is why "what moves humans is not their beliefs but the state of their perceptual field" (MP, "Note on Machiavelli" 213).
  • Political payoff: the politics of distraction: if political agency is an extension of vivre-selon, then a regime that elicits vivre-selon without grounding produces obedience-and-thereby-legitimacy directly. The "job of the prince" is to "saturate our attention" so the question of truth is constantly deferred. Post-truth politics is the structural norm, not an anomaly.

Details

Textual origin in Eye and Mind

The locus classicus is MP's confrontation with Cézanne's watercolors at Eye and Mind p. 126. Chouraqui treats this passage as not aesthetic-regional but as MP's "most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith." The watercolors do not present themselves as something I might affirm or deny; they install themselves as the medium of further seeing. The painting becomes "a context for our viewing in general" rather than an object of vision.

Chouraqui's key move: voir-selon is not a special perceptual modality of the aesthetic; it is the structure of all perception, made visible by the watercolor case. The watercolor exposes what ordinary perception conceals — that perception always proceeds according to a style that organizes what becomes visible without itself becoming visible.

Two partialities (after Garelli)

Chouraqui draws on Jacques Garelli's reading of voir-selon to identify two senses of "style" at work:

  1. Style as arbitrariness: the voir-selon focuses on certain features rather than others; the focus is not derivable from the object's intrinsic properties. Cézanne's watercolor focuses on chromatic transitions; Vermeer focuses on light-gradient; both are arbitrary in this technical sense (no necessity dictates the choice), yet both are organizing.

  2. Style as incompleteness: the voir-selon is structurally incomplete — its content calls for further articulation, the partial view "lacks" what it does not focus on, but the lack is internal to the operation, not an extrinsic deficit.

Together, the two partialities define the operation: voir-selon is at once arbitrary in focus and structurally incomplete in content. This is what distinguishes it from a complete perceptual presentation (which would be doxastic) and from raw sub-personal processing (which would lack arbitrariness).

Belief as self-forgetting voir-selon

The mechanism by which voir-selon hardens into belief is Chouraqui's distinctive contribution. Belief is not added to faith; belief is faith that has forgotten its own nature as faith. The forgetting is a collapse of the foreground/background distinction:

  • In voir-selon, the style is foreground (we are aware that we are seeing-according-to-X);
  • In belief, the style has receded to background (we just see X, no longer aware of the selon);
  • The transition is not by inference, addition, or judgment — it is by a kind of attention-collapse in which the hypothetical character of voir-selon is no longer registered.

Chouraqui himself notes that "I find no specific discussions of the mechanism that introduces this forgetting in Merleau-Ponty's text" (MIOP p. 239). The mechanism is therefore his reconstruction, anchored in MP's Circulus Vitiosus Deus (2016) work on ontology of ontology and in MP's own remarks on faith and certainty.

When the forgetting completes, "there is — literally — nothing more certain in the world." The certainty of belief is not an additional epistemic fact about belief; it is the structural consequence of the voir-selon having ceased to register itself as a selon.

Extension to vivre-selon

If voir-selon is the structure of perceptual representation, vivre-selon extends it to existential and political agency. Just as we see according to a style without believing it, we live according to a regime, a class position, a culture, a perceptual field, without consciously assenting to it. The "individual grows through the very gifts he makes to those in power" (MP, Note on Machiavelli 215) — the individual is constituted by what they pre-doxastically grant.

This extension is the bridge from MP's perceptual ontology to MP's political philosophy: the vivre-selon is both the structure of perception (per PhP and VI) and the structure of political agency (per "Note on Machiavelli" and Humanism and Terror). Political action does not respond to beliefs; it responds to saturated attention, to the state of the perceptual field.

What the Concept Does

  • Provides MP's positive account of pre-doxastic representation. Without voir-selon, MP's repeated claim that belief is secondary to faith remains gestural; with voir-selon, the pre-doxastic regime has a structural mechanism. Voir-selon is what perceptual faith is.
  • Bridges aesthetic and political registers. The same operation explains how Cézanne's watercolors become visible and how a political regime elicits obedience without explicit assent. This unification is non-trivial: it tells us that MP's politics and MP's aesthetics share a structural mechanism, not just a vocabulary.
  • Reconstructs what "humanism of meaning" requires. Chouraqui's "true humanism" thesis (humanism of meaning, not truth) needs an account of how meaning operates pre-doxastically. Voir-selon supplies it: meaning is what we see according to, not what we believe about. A humanism of meaning is therefore a humanism of voir-selon.
  • Diagnoses post-truth politics structurally rather than morally. If political agency is an extension of vivre-selon, then post-truth politics is not a failure of public reason but the structural norm of political life. The diagnosis converts a moralized political complaint into an ontological observation: "all 'good' politics is a politics of distraction."

What It Rejects

  • Doxastic primacy in epistemology: the view (essentialist humanism, Cartesian-Kojèvean tradition Fessard inherited) that belief is the basic representational state and faith is a deficient mode. Voir-selon inverts this: faith is basic, belief is derivative.
  • Sociological reduction of perceptual content: the view that perceptual content is exhausted by social-causal explanation. Voir-selon is neither propositional belief nor sub-personal causation — it is a third regime, with its own structure.
  • The deflationary "perceptual faith as incomplete belief" reading (Bimbenet's "dogmatism of perceptual faith"; Morris's empirical-commitment reading): both treat faith as still truth-directed, just less determinate. Chouraqui's strong reading insists faith is not truth-directed at all.
  • Moralized opposition to post-truth politics: the view that lying regimes can be opposed qua false, on epistemic grounds. Chouraqui: "If falsehoods are to be rejected from the public sphere, it will have to be for political reasons, not epistemic ones."

Stakes

If voir-selon-vivre-selon is accepted as the structure of pre-doxastic representation:

  • MP's "true humanism" (humanism of meaning) acquires a precise mechanism. The humanism-of-meaning vs humanism-of-truth distinction is not just a label-shift; it is a thesis about what kind of representation humanism protects.
  • MP's politics is reframed as ontology of perceptual-field management, not as ethics of belief or as theory of legitimate consent. This puts MP into structural alignment with Foucauldian genealogy of power without making MP a Foucauldian.
  • MP's account of recognition-and-institution gains traction: recognition is voir-selon-level, not belief-level — which is why "obedience adds something to power that force cannot produce" without any propositional consent.
  • The wiki's perceptual-faith page acquires a new Positions section: Chouraqui's strong reading vs Bimbenet's dogmatist reading vs Morris's radical-empirical reading.
  • The agnosia-mp connection becomes load-bearing: the political subject is structurally agnosic in MP's positive sense — possessed of voir-selon / saturated attention without articulated recognition / belief.

Problem-Space

Voir-selon-vivre-selon addresses the recurring philosophical problem: what is the right grammar for pre-doxastic representation? The problem appears wherever a discipline must credit a kind of "knowing" that is not propositional belief, not raw causal information, and not bare phenomenal qualia.

Three classical attempts at solution all fail:

  1. Doxastic reduction: pre-doxastic states are incomplete beliefs. Fails because such "incomplete beliefs" are still subject to bivalence and inferential normativity, which the cases (Cézanne's watercolors, political regime adhesion) clearly are not.
  2. Sub-personal reduction: pre-doxastic states are causal information. Fails because they have content (we see according to a style with arbitrary focus and incomplete content); causal information lacks this aboutness-with-arbitrary-style structure.
  3. Phenomenal-quality reduction: pre-doxastic states are qualia / what-it-is-like-ness. Fails because pre-doxastic states organize further perception/action; bare qualia do not organize.

Voir-selon is the fourth option: pre-doxastic representation is a representational state with its own grammar (arbitrariness + incompleteness) that organizes further perception/action without becoming propositional. The chain of reactivations is the voir-selon.

Recurrence-under-different-vocabularies test:

  • Style of seeing (MP, PhP; Cézanne case);
  • Voir-selon / vivre-selon (Chouraqui's systematization);
  • Habitus (Bourdieu — adjacent but tied to social-causation reduction);
  • Form of life (Wittgenstein — adjacent but linguistic-pragmatic in cast);
  • Stimmung / attunement (Heidegger — adjacent but anti-perceptual in cast);
  • Background (Searle — adjacent but propositional-derivative).

The criterion is met. Voir-selon is the term that preserves MP's perceptual-aesthetic register most explicitly while doing the political work the concept must do.

Connections

  • is the mechanism of perceptual-faith — voir-selon gives perceptual faith its structural content; faith is "saturated attention" voir-selon-style
  • crystallizes into recognition-and-institution — when voir-selon forgets itself, recognition occurs; recognition is voir-selon that has installed itself as background
  • is the perceptual register of true-humanism / humanism-mp — humanism of meaning is humanism of voir-selon; what humanism protects is the basic activity of seeing-according-to
  • is the agency-structure of political-genealogy-of-truth — political agency is extension of vivre-selon; this is what makes the political genealogy of truth possible
  • enacts chiasm — the seeing-seen reflexivity of chiasm is the structural form of voir-selon; the painter who sees-according-to-Cézanne is the painter Cézanne is in the act of seeing
  • is the condition of intelligibility of politics-of-distraction — without vivre-selon, the politics-of-distraction thesis cannot get traction; the prince saturates attention only because attention can be voir-selon-saturated
  • contrasts with broad-vs-narrow-psychoanalysis — Chouraqui's strong reading is structurally close to MP's "broad psychoanalysis" of the 1949–50 Sorbonne lectures (re-creation, ambivalence, corporality) — both refuse psychoanalytic-belief reduction
  • informs agnosia-mp — the political subject's agnosia (in MP's positive sense) is the vivre-selon-state of saturated attention without articulated recognition

Open Questions

  • Chouraqui himself notes the mechanism of belief-as-self-forgetting-faith is not explicitly discussed in MP's text. Does any MP passage authorize the "collapse of foreground/background distinction" mechanism? Circulus Vitiosus Deus footnote 35 (Chouraqui) anchors the mechanism in his earlier work; cross-source check needed.
  • Does the move from voir-selon (clearly textual in Eye and Mind p. 126) to vivre-selon (Chouraqui's extension) preserve the aesthetic specificity of the original case, or does the generalization flatten the watercolor's particularity into mere instance-of-political-style?
  • How does voir-selon relate to Gestalt in MP's earlier work (Structure of Behavior, PhP)? Gestalt organizes perception by figure-ground; voir-selon organizes perception by style. Are they two registers of one operation or two distinct operations?
  • The voir-selon-vivre-selon extension makes contact with Bourdieu's habitus. Chouraqui does not engage Bourdieu; the relation is open.

Sources

  • mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics — chapter 10 (Chouraqui), §3.2.3 "Voir-Selon and Vivre-Selon" (pp. 235–239); §4 "Political Implications" (pp. 240–243). The most systematic single statement of the concept; also primary source for the politics-of-distraction extension.
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — p. 126: "I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. ... Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it [je vois selon ou avec lui]." The locus classicus.
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — pp. 12–13 ("perceptual faith"); p. 3 fn. 1 ("Notion of faith to be specified. It is not faith in the sense of decision but in the sense of what is before any position, animal faith"). Key working-note material on faith as non-doxastic.
  • chouraqui-2025-healing-schneider — pp. 6–9: prior treatment of the "true humanism" / meaning-maker thesis that voir-selon-vivre-selon operationalizes.
  • chouraqui-2016-circulus-vitiosus-deus — footnote 35 (per MIOP 2026): the earlier articulation of the belief-as-self-forgetting-faith mechanism.

Connections (typed)