The Other in Perception

A Phenomenological Account of Our Experience of Other Persons

Susan Bredlau

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471730
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Drawing on the original phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, and John Russon, as well as recent research in child psychology, The Other in Perception argues for perception's inherently existential significance: we always perceive a world and not just objective facts. The world is the rich domain of our personal and interpersonal lives, and central to this world is the role of other people. We are "paired" with others such that our perception is really the enactment of a coinhabiting of a shared world. These relations with others shape the very way in which we perceive our world. Susan Bredlau explores two uniquely formative domains in which our pairing relations with others are particularly critical: childhood development and sexuality. It is through formative childhood experience that the essential, background structures of our world are instituted, which has important consequences for our developed perceptual life. Sexuality is an analogous domain of formative intersubjective experience. Taken as a whole, Bredlau demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience.

1

Phenomenology

Introduction

What do we perceive? An obvious answer would be that we perceive a specific physical object—for example, this cup. Yet, what if, rather than beginning with this answer, we actually turned to our perceptual experience and tried to describe what we perceive? We might think that we already have a good grasp of our perceptual experience; it is, after all, our perceptual experience. We might think, then, that we already know what the results of such a description will be and that there is no need for us to actually give it. Moreover, we might think that since we already know what our experience is like, those who do give a description are unnecessarily complicating what is already evident. The project of phenomenology, the philosophical method pioneered by Husserl, is just such a description of experience and, in fact, such a description, far from being a simple repetition of what is already obvious to us, is in fact a revolutionary transformation within our experience.

Husserl and Intentionality

In what Husserl, in his groundbreaking work Ideas, calls our “natural attitude”—the attitude we normally adopt in our everyday life—we take our consciousness of physical objects for granted.1 We assume that the things we perceive first exist independently of our consciousness of them, and we assume that their existence in themselves explains our awareness of them, their existence “for us.” This line of thinking often leads us, then, to think that we are actually conscious of “mental representations”—cognitive constructions we make based on the sensory stimulation produced in us by things in the world. In fact, though, a careful description of our perceptual experience reveals that the things we perceive cannot be equated with such mental representations, objects that are, by definition, distinct from real objects. Though everything we are conscious of is indeed relative to us, inasmuch as it is by definition the object of our experience, everything we are conscious of is not merely relative to us. The categories of the “in-itself” and the “for-us” are in fact not mutually exclusive and thus being “for-us” does not necessarily mean being “in our minds” rather than “in the world.”

Husserl argues that we must put aside the question of whether the things we perceive correspond to the “reality” that we presume to be independently defined and independently existent and begin, instead, by simply describing the things we perceive. If, for example, I look out the front window of my house, I see my neighbor’s house. Yet this is inadequate as a description: I do not simply see my neighbor’s house. In fact, I see my neighbor’s house across the street and in the midst of some trees. While I may not usually notice that, in addition to the house, I also see a street and trees, I would certainly be surprised if I looked out my window and saw the house across a river or in the midst of a city. Moreover, I can, upon reflection, realize that while I could see this house in a different place, surrounded by different things—if it were lifted from its foundation and moved to another site—I could never see it in no place, surrounded by nothing.2 In other words, I cannot see just one thing. If I am seeing one thing, I must be seeing other things as well; I can only see one thing surrounded by other things.

Our description still needs further refinement, however. It is true that I see both the house and the street, but when I am looking at the house across the street I do not see the house in the same way that I see the street. The house “stands out,” and I see it quite determinately. I barely notice the street and trees, though, and I see them much less determinately. Just as I do not ever see only one thing but, instead, see one thing surrounded by other things, I also do not ever see all things equally determinately or prominently. Instead, I see some things more determinately and more prominently than others.

I am not, however, restricted to seeing the house more determinately than the trees. After all, a branch on one of the trees can suddenly catch my eye, and I can see the tree as determinately as I saw the house before and, simultaneously, see the house as indeterminately as I saw the tree before. When this occurs, I see the tree as always having been as I see it now, although in fact it was not fully determinate in my perception prior to my attending to it. In other words, neither the determinateness nor the indeterminateness of the things surrounding the house is permanent. Instead, the indeterminateness is one that can be made more determinate, an indeterminateness that is potentially determinate: I can come to see and, indeed, may already have seen, determinately what I now see indeterminately. Similarly, just as I come to see determinately what I previously saw indeterminately, I come to see indeterminately what I previously saw determinately. This variability in what, within my perception, is determinate and what indeterminate is constitutive of all of my perceptual experience: in short, perception always has a structure of “figure and background.” In Husserl’s language, we would say that to see one thing, this one thing must have an “outer horizon”:3 it must be surrounded by other things, things that have, he says, a “determinable indeterminateness”—an indeterminateness that would become determinate were I to make it the focus of my attention.4

We can go still further in describing our experience precisely and accurately. Just as I do not see only my neighbor’s house but, instead, see my neighbor’s house as a figure against a ground of a street and trees, my seeing of the house itself is also not simple. I never have the whole house in my actual experience; instead, I always see the house from this side or that: in Husserl’s language, I see it “in profile” or through an “aspect” (Abschattung).5 Just as we do not typically notice the other things that contextualize our perception of an object, so do we not usually notice that we do not see the whole of the thing we perceive. This recognition that what we perceive is perceived as “in profile” has significant implications.

As I walk around a table, for example, I continue to see the same table even as specific parts of the table come into, and then pass out of, view. Similarly, I continue to see the table as having the same color, even as certain parts of the table are bathed in light and other parts are hidden in shadow; Husserl writes, “The same color appears ‘in’ continuous multiplicities of profiles of color [Farbenabschattungen]. Something similar holds for other sensuous qualities and also for every spatial shape. The one, same shape (given ‘in person’ as the same) appears continuously but always ‘in a different manner,’ always in different profiles of shape [Gestaltabschattungen].”6 Thus, typically, I would say, “I see the house,” not, “I see the front of a house,” and, indeed, we do perceive the house as a whole, even though we only actually perceive a profile. In other words, we precisely see the house—or any object—as exceeding our perspective upon it: we see the object as something real. If we describe our experience carefully and accurately, we must acknowledge our experience has the form of presenting us with real objects, objects we experience as exceeding our experience of them.

To be conscious of a thing as in profile is to be conscious of this thing as being irreducible to our consciousness of it. We are conscious of the things we perceive as offering more to consciousness than we are conscious of. This “more” is not, however, another thing beyond the thing that we perceive. Husserl stresses that the things we perceive are not mere signs of a “real” thing that we do not perceive; “The spatial physical thing which we see is, with all its transcendence, still something perceived, given ‘in person’ in the manner peculiar to consciousness. It is not the case that, in its stead, a picture or sign is given. A picture-consciousness or a sign-consciousness must not be substituted for perception.”7 Instead, this “more” is more of the thing that we already perceive.

That we are conscious of the things we perceive as these particular things rather than other particular things entails that, analogously to the way in which the tree and the street are “on the horizon” of the perception of the house, so are the further profiles of the thing “on the horizon” of whatever profile we are actually experiencing. Husserl refers to this horizon of further profiles as the “inner horizon” of a thing.8 The thing itself, like the world surrounding the house, offers itself to our perception as a “horizon of determinable indeterminateness”9; this indeterminateness, Husserl writes,

necessarily signifies a determinableness which has a rigorously prescribed style. It points ahead to possible perceptual multiplicities which, merging continuously into one another, join together to make up the unity of one perception in which the continuously enduring physical thing is always showing some new “sides” (or else an old “side” as returning) in a new series of profiles [Abschattungen]. … The indeterminacies become more precisely determined.10

The horizons that are constitutive of the object of our perception are thus not further objects that we perceive. They are, rather, the immanent meaning of all of the things that we perceive. When I look out at the ocean, for example, I do not see the ocean as having a horizon in the way that I see the ocean as being choppy or calm: the perceptual horizon is not one more empirical “attribute” of the ocean. Rather, I see the ocean as having a horizon insofar as I am implicitly conscious of the ocean as continuing to exist beyond what I see of it.11 The house that I perceive, then, is not itself “contained” within my experience of it; it is, rather, the essential meaning that defines all my perspectival experiences of it, a meaning that is precisely given as exceeding the finite terms of those limited experiences.

Like the figure-background structure, the horizon structure is not a contingent feature of some perceptions, but it is the very form of our experience of objects as such: “[I]t is evident and drawn from the essence of spatial physical things … that, necessarily a being of that kind can be given in perception only through a profile [Abschattung].”12 Thus, when Husserl describes physical objects as “transcendent”13 to consciousness, he is not claiming that the things we are conscious of as physical objects first exist independently of our consciousness of them, as we presume in the “natural attitude”; he is rather describing the way in which these things exist within our experience.

Consciousness, then, is not a container for a collection of “mental representations.” Instead, consciousness is, in Husserl’s language, “intentional”: it is the very presenting of some defining object; “the word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be consciousness of something.”14 In the case of perceptual consciousness, the meaning of this defining object is that it exceeds our experience of it.15 Perceptual consciousness is always “of” a “transcendent” object.16

It is by describing what we perceive as objects of consciousness that we can recognize that what we perceive are real things rather than mental representations. In the introduction to part 1 of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes that “we must come to understand how, paradoxically, there is for-us an in-itself.”17 Husserl has shown us that there can be an in-itself that is for-us precisely insofar as our perceptual consciousness is “intentional”—always “of” an object that is given with the meaning that it exceeds our experience of it. To refer to what we perceive as an in-itself for-us is not to fall into contradiction but, instead, to offer a careful description of the “horizon of determinable indeterminateness” that defines perceptual experience. We are conscious of something as real, rather than as, for example, imagined or illusory, precisely because we are conscious of it as present to us in profile.

To be a perceptual consciousness, to be a consciousness that takes the form of a perspective, is to be a consciousness that always tacitly recognizes itself as being one of many possible consciousnesses of what we perceive rather than being the consciousness of what we perceive. Thus, although what we perceive is always what we are conscious of, this does not preclude us from being conscious of things that exist “in the world” rather than “in our minds.” Indeed, it is perceptual consciousness’s tacit recognition of itself as a perspective—its tacit recognition of its consciousness of what we perceive as only one way out of many possible ways to be conscious of what we perceive—that insures there is a kind of objectivity within subjectivity. Insofar as we are consciousnesses of objects in profile rather than consciousnesses of objects in full, we are not trapped in our minds with no access to anything beyond our own thoughts or “representations.” Instead, we are engaged with a real world that constantly calls on us to perceive it more adequately. As Husserl writes, what we perceive “calls out to us, as it were … ‘There is still more to see here, turn me so that you can see all my sides, let your gaze run through me, draw closer to me, open me up, divide me up; keep on looking me over again and again, turning me to see all my sides.’ ”18 In the experience of the inner and outer horizons of what we perceive, we experience what we perceive as imposing a norm upon us; these horizons “prescribe a rule for the transition to actualizing appearances.”19 In perceptual experience, it is we who answer to the world as much as the world that answers to us. Moreover, not only does what we perceive call on us to experience it more fully, but it also calls on us as bodies; it calls on us, that is, in our capacities for moving and grasping.20 The object of our perception presents us with a sort of norm—a “call” or imperative—and it is a norm that we answer to behaviorally, that is, in a worldly, “embodied” manner and not simply in a “mental,” imaginative manner.

Husserl has shown that our experience is a presentation of the world, not a representation, and thus our experience—the “intentionality” of consciousness—is inherently “objective” rather than “subjective” in that it is always already occupied with a reality that is given as transcending it. At the same time, however, inasmuch as a contribution on our part is involved in perceiving the world adequately, the object of our experience cannot simply be understood as one-sidedly determining our perception. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is particularly powerful in exploring the nature of this, our contribution to our perceptual experience. In The Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that perception presents, rather than represents, the world to us.21 The world we perceive is not the image of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Citations
• Introduction
• 1 Phenomenology
• 2 The Phenomenological Approach to the Experience of Others
• 3 The Institution of Interpersonal Life
• 4 Recognition and Sexuality
• Conclusion: The Concrete Ethics of Lived Experience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover