Reading Merleau-Ponty

On Phenomenology of Perception

Thomas Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134147663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important contributions to philosophy of the twentieth century. In this volume, leading philosophers from Europe and North America examine the nature and extent of Merleau-Ponty's achievement and consider its importance to contemporary philosophy.

The chapters, most of which were specially commissioned for this volume, cover the central aspects of Merleau-Ponty's influential work. These include:

• Merleau-Ponty's debt to Husserl
• Merleau-Ponty's conception of philosophy
• perception, action and the role of the body
• consciousness and self-consciousness
• naturalism and language
• social rules and freedom.

Contributors: David Smith, Sean Kelly, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, Thomas Baldwin, Simon Glendinning, Naomi Eilan, Eran Dorfman, Francoise Dastur

1
THE FLESH OF PERCEPTION

Merleau-Ponty and Husserl

A. D. Smith

We are here to celebrate Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (PhP). Its publication sixty years ago is the occasion of our being here. That is the occasion; but what is the reason for our being here? If we have a reason, it must be that something new in philosophy appears in the pages of that work: something that is still worth remembering and celebrating today. The task that I set myself here is to discern what it is that is original in that work. Because of Merleau-Ponty’s situation, and because of various pronouncements of his own, I shall raise this question in a particular way: What is there to be found in the Phenomenology of Perception that is not already to be found in the work of Edmund Husserl? It is not uncommon for admirers and followers of Merleau-Ponty to expound his work by contrasting it with that of Husserl. Unfortunately, as often as not, what we are then presented with is but a caricature, or at best a one-sided view, of Husserl. But how do matters stand when the real Husserl is taken into account?

Before proceeding I should say that I shall be concerned with only one aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s book, albeit the central one. For despite its title, the Phenomenology of Perception is a wide-ranging book, covering such issues as culture, history, art, freedom. I shall here be concerned only with the account of perception and our fundamental relation to the world that we find in its pages.¹

I

Merleau-Ponty situates his own philosophical position in relation to two others – which he terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘intellectualism’. The former he also characterises as ‘realism’ or ‘objectivism’, and the latter as ‘idealism’. Repeatedly, when he broaches a subject, he lays out how these two positions treat it, and then expounds his own position in opposition to them. If anywhere, it is here, in his carving out a position that is different from both intellectualism and empiricism, that we shall find what is fundamentally new in Merleau-Ponty.

Although intellectualism and empiricism, idealism and realism, may seem, and indeed are, radically opposed to each other, Merleau-Ponty can stake out an alternative, third position for himself because, as he repeatedly points out, these two positions actually agree on certain issues; and it is precisely this source of agreement that underlies the inadequacies of both, in Merleau-Ponty’s view. One fundamental thing they have in common is presupposing an initial, at least notional, separation between the physical and the mental. They then privilege one side of this division. Realism starts with objects in the world as given, and tries to understand the mental in terms of them. Even when such realism, or empiricism, is avowedly dualist in character, so that there is no question of a reduction of the mental to the physical, the mental is conceived along the same general lines as the physical. Mental laws of association, for example, are patterned on the character of physical causality. Intellectualism, or idealism, starts with the mental as what is given, and then tries to explicate the physical in terms of it – by reference to such things as forms of intuition and categories of the understanding. Merleau-Ponty seeks to overcome what these two schools of thought have in common by starting with an irreducible involvement of subject and world. He encapsulates this new starting point by asserting that it is the body that perceives. The ‘subject’ of perception is the body. Here we have two things that both empiricism and intellectualism would regard as separate and in need of being related. Perception is a ‘mentalistic’ notion; and the body is ‘physical’. Merleau-Ponty, however, unifies them as the subject and the predicate of his fundamental assertion: the body perceives.

In this paper I shall be concerned with Merleau-Ponty’s relation to intellectualism, since I am concerned with his relation to Husserl. For given the two options, it is clearly with the intellectualists that Husserl would be classed – and commonly is by interpreters of Merleau-Ponty. So in this section I shall consider how Merleau-Ponty distinguishes his own position from intellectualism.

In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s central claim, intellectualism places perception firmly in the hands of ‘consciousness’: of a ‘constituting’, understanding consciousness that contains within itself the a priori structure of the world. Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental objection to this is that it overlooks the opacity of the world and our relation to it. ‘If a universal constituting consciousness were possible,’ he writes, ‘the opacity of the fact would disappear’ (PhP, 61/70–1; cf. 325/378). It is in opposition to such a perspective that he asserts that we do not ‘possess’ the world (PhP, xvii/xix). ‘I am not’, he writes, ‘a constituting thought, and my “I think” is not an “I am”, unless by thought I can equal the world’s concrete richness, and re-absorb facticity into it’ (PhP, 376 n1/437 n16). The world cannot, even in principle, be intelligibly laid out before consciousness. Even as regards its basic structures it has no ‘ideal model’ (PhP, 53/61). This is because we are ourselves caught up in the world, inextricably bound to it. The world is opaque because we are opaque to ourselves. There is no ‘cognitive’ subject, nor even a set of cognitive principles, above or prior to the world. We do, indeed, Merleau-Ponty accepts, carry the basic structures of the world with us (PhP, 326/380); but that is because we are essentially of the world. There is no ‘form’ that is the a priori condition of possibility of the world; rather, form arrives with the world (PhP, 61/70).

Merleau-Ponty’s claim that we perceive with the body is explicitly posited as an alternative (and antidote) to intellectualism. At one point, for example, after criticising intellectualism, he sums up his critique by writing, ‘We have expressed this by saying that I perceive with my body’ (PhP, 326/380). Elsewhere he says that what he has done is to ‘substitute for consciousness, as the subject of perception, existence, or being in the world through a body’ (PhP, 309 n1/360 n22). And it is precisely the opacity of the world that this substitution is meant to enshrine. It is in the interests of doing justice to such opacity that Merleau-Ponty can deny that basic intentionality, the intentionality that fundamentally relates us to the world, is any kind of thought: ‘What is meant by saying that this intentionality is not a thought is that it does not come into being through the transparency of any consciousness, but takes for granted all the latent knowledge of itself that my body possesses’ (PhP, 233/270).

What is of primary importance in all this is that the body operates pre-personally and anonymously: ‘My organism, as a pre-personal cleaving to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath my personal life, the part of an inborn complex’ (PhP, 84/97). It is in virtue of this pre-personal level of existence that we fundamentally exist in the world:

My personal existence must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body.

(PhP, 254/296)

My body, as it were, perceives the world for me. My body is already at grips with the world, before the offices of understanding: ‘The thing … is not first of all a meaning for the understanding, but a structure accessible to inspection by the body’ (PhP, 320/373).

The immediate objects of perception, for Merleau-Ponty, are meanings, or structures (e.g. PhP, 58–62/68–73). Perhaps we should say meaningful, structured objects and scenes. The world has a perceptual ‘syntax’ (PhP, 36/42). Indeed, it has a logic and a language. Significantly, however, it is a ‘wordless’ logic and a ‘silent’ language (PhP, 48–9/56). By this Merleau-Ponty means that the meaningful structures of the world are not originally for the understanding, but for the body. The logic of the world is a logic that we ‘live through’ (PhP, 49/57), a logic that my gaze ‘understands’, and to which my body in its entirety conforms (PhP, 326/381). It is, we might say, a ‘vital language’: for Merleau-Ponty certainly characterises a sensory quality as having a vital value, the meaning of which is first grasped by the body (PhP, 52/61). You can perceive a world because (and only because) your body is already attuned to the world. Because, and only because, of this can sense experience be what it is: a ‘vital communion’ with the world (PhP, 52/61). We are in the world because we, in our bodies, are alive to the world. Indeed, we live the world: ‘In order to perceive things, we need to live them’ (PhP, 325/379).

This is, in part, what the term ‘flesh’ in my title is meant to express. We are vulnerable to the world, and affected by it, because our bodies are of a piece with the world. But the body is also what fleshes out a world for us: it is the living interpreter of the world. So we must begin our philosophising, not with self or world, but their intertwining and reciprocal conformation. In this way, for Merleau-Ponty, the body overcomes the divide between the ‘physical’ and ‘mental’. This is possible, of course, only because the body that is here in question is not the ‘objective’ body of the realists – something that would already be on one side of the supposed divide. ‘The eye is not the mind, but a material organ. How could it ever take anything into account?’ Merleau-Ponty asks at one point. And the answer is immediately forthcoming: ‘It can do so only if we introduce the phenomenal body beside the objective one, if we make a knowing body of it’ (PhP, 309 n1/360 n22). Merleau-Ponty raises this issue of how the mental-physical divide is to be overcome on a number of occasions in the pages of the Phenomenology of Perception, and he always answers in two equivalent ways: by starting with existence or being in the world. He writes, on one occasion, for example, of ‘this third term between the psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself … which we call existence’ (PhP, 122 n1/140 n55). And he states that he has found such ‘existence’ in the body (PhP, 89/102).

Such ‘existence’ is ‘being in the world’; and so he can characterise the latter, too, as what allows us to unify the psychic and the physiological (e.g. PhP, 80/ 92). Existence of this kind is possible only because my body is already familiar with the world:

My act of perception … takes advantage of work already done, of a general synthesis constituted once for all; and this is what I mean when I say that I perceive with my body or my senses, since my body and my senses are precisely this familiarity with the world born of habit, that implicit or sedimentary body of knowledge.

(PhP, 238/277; cf. 326/380)

We have an environment through ‘stable sense organs and pre-established circuits’ (PhP, 87/100). Because of this Merleau-Ponty can claim that the body ‘is better informed than we are about the world’ (PhP, 238/277).

II

The preceding section has highlighted what I take to be the principal features of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘third’ position. What, however, is there in it that is new – in the sense that it is not to be found in Husserl? Well, essentially, nothing. The language is certainly different; but in so far as the essential points are concerned, it is all already there in Husserl, as I shall briefly indicate in this section.

For Husserl the body – the ‘lived’ body (Leib), not the ‘objective’ body (Körper) – is essential for perception of the world and for being in the world. Husserl writes quite explicitly that the body ‘is necessary in all perception’ (Hua, IV, 56, original emphasis; cf. Hua, IX, 107).² ‘The constitution of n...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES OF WORKS BY MERLEAU-PONTY
• 1 THE FLESH OF PERCEPTION
• 2 WHAT DO WE SEE (WHEN WE DO)?1
• 3 MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE POWER TO RECKON WITH THE POSSIBLE
• 4 REPLY TO ROMDENH-ROMLUC
• 5 THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL RULES1
• 6 SPEAKING AND SPOKEN SPEECH
• 7 THE GENIUS OF MAN
• 8 CONSCIOUSNESS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMMUNICATION
• 9 FREEDOM, PERCEPTION AND RADICAL REFLECTION
• 10 PHILOSOPHY AND NON-PHILOSOPHY ACCORDING TO MERLEAU-PONTY1
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX