No More Learning

In 1945 he was appointed a Professor at Lyon; in 1950 he became Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris; and then in 1952 he was appointed to the most prestigious position for a French philosopher, the chair in philosophy at the Colle`ge de France, a position which he held until his unexpected early death in 1961. During this period he published three collec- tions of essays: Sense and Non-Sense (1948) which brings together his early post-1945 essays, of which most are about Marxism and politics;10 The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) which deals with his break with Sartre and includes his later thoughts about 'Western' Marxism;11 finally, Signs (1960) which contains some new philosophical work, mainly on lan- guage, together with further political essays. 12 After his death it became apparent that Merleau-Ponty had been working on a major new monograph. This had originally been intended as a study of language and truth which would develop themes from the earlier writings under the title 'The Origin of Truth'; but as the work progressed Merleau-Ponty found himself drawn back to some of the themes concerning perception that he had addressed in his earlier philosophy, and the manuscript that was published posthumously in 1964 bears Merleau- Ponty's later working title, The Visible and the Invisible. 13
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After his death Merleau-Ponty's reputation in France declined quickly as French philosophers turned away from French existential phenomenology to the study of German philosophy, especially to the works of Heidegger and the 'mas- ters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Elsewhere, however, and especially in the United States, his former pupils preserved his reputation and ensured the translation into English of all his major works. More recently, within the ana- lytic tradition, there has been a growth of interest in his writings: his discussions of the 'intentionality' of conscious- ness (especially of the ways in which things are presented in perception) and of the role of the body in perception are recognised as important contributions to the understanding of these difficult topics. It is to be hoped that these radio talks will help to make his ideas available to a wider public here, just as their publication in France in 2002 is evidence of a long overdue revival of interest there in his work.
MERLEAU-PONTY'S PHILOSOPHY: PERCEPTION AND THE BODY
Merleau-Ponty sets out his main aim for these lectures at the end of the first paragraph of this first lecture: 'I shall suggest . . . that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy . . .
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has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget'. This world which we are to rediscover is the 'world of perception', which is the world as we perceive it, the 'perceived world' (le monde perc? u) as it is often called. Merleau-Ponty devotes most of his lectures to explo- rations of this perceived world, in order to enable his audience to 'rediscover' it for themselves. But he does not explain straight- forwardly why this rediscovery is so important. Since this point is a central theme of Phenomenology of Perception it is worth saying a little about it here in order to help readers of these lectures understand where Merleau-Ponty is coming from.
Any philosophy which seeks to take us back to the perceived world is, in its general perspective, empiricist; and Merleau- Ponty signals his empiricism when he explicitly endorses Berkeley's thesis that 'we cannot conceive anything that is not perceived or perceptible'. 14 The classical empiricism of Berkeley and Hume, however, is based on the claim that the contents of thought are restricted to possible contents of sense experience, and this thesis was famously revived by the Logical Positivist philosophers of the 1930s when they affirmed the 'verification principle' that the meaning of a proposition is given by its method of verification, i. e. by the way in which its truth or falsity can be settled on the basis of observation. Merleau-Ponty makes it clear, however, that his
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empiricism is not of this kind. This is partly because he rejects the emphasis on 'scientific' observation that was characteristic of the logical positivists; this connects with the critical attitude to the status of science he adopts in the first lecture, which I discuss below. But, more fundamentally, Merleau-Ponty fol- lows Husserl in taking it that the relationship between perception and all other modes of thought, including science, is one of 'Fundierung' (foundation), which involves a kind of rootedness that does not restrict the capacity for more sophis- ticated articulations of experience in the light of deeper understandings of the world. So he consistently rejects those forms of empiricism which aim to restrict or reduce the con- tents of thought to possible contents of experience. 15
A further respect in which Merleau-Ponty departs from clas- sical empiricism concerns the 'a priori'. Classical empiricists held that because all our ideas are derived from experience, there is no legitimate role for ideas, or concepts, which are not thus derived, even where there is no obvious account of such a derivation, as with mathematical concepts such as infinity. The 'rationalist' philosophers opposed to the empiricists, such as Descartes (whom Merleau-Ponty uses as a foil throughout these lectures), held that ideas are innate within the mind, and that the role of experience was primarily just to bring them into use by us. This hypothesis was not easy to believe, but Kant
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famously moved the debate forward by distinguishing between a priori concepts, such as identity, that are integral to the pos- sibility of experience and thought, and empirical concepts that are acquired on the basis of experience and are answerable to the ways of thinking about the world which are best confirmed by experience. Thus Kant held that while the empiricists were largely right about empirical concepts, the rationalists were largely right about a priori concepts, which are the most impor- tant ones for philosophy. Most subsequent philosophers have agreed with Kant on this point, and Merleau-Ponty certainly does. But he gives a very distinctive twist to the Kantian posi- tion, by maintaining that our embodiment is integral to the role of a priori concepts in sense experience. He sets out his attitude to Kant in the following passage:
Kant saw clearly that the problem is not how determinate shapes and sizes make their appearance in my experi- ence, since without them there would be no experience, and since any internal experience is possible only against the background of external experience. But Kant's con- clusion from this was that I am a consciousness which embraces and constitutes the world, and this reflection caused him to overlook the phenomenon of the body and that of the thing. 16
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The central theme of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and the Invisible, is precisely the way in which 'the phenomenon of the body' is to be integrated into a Kantian philosophy, so that each of us is not so much a 'consciousness' as a body which 'embraces and constitutes the world'. He puts the point in Phenomenology of Perception in the fol- lowing way: 'by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception. '17 His main claim is, then, that our embodiment brings to our perceptual experience an a priori structure whereby it presents itself to us in consciousness as experience of a world of things in space and time whose nature is independent of us. It is our 'bodily' intentionality which brings the possibility of meaning into our experience by ensuring that its content, the things presented in experience, are surrounded with references to the past and future, to other places and other things, to human possibilities and situations.
This sounds like a psychological thesis; and indeed it is one, substantiated by Merleau-Ponty with detailed discussions from the psychological literature (mainly from the work of German psychologists of the 1930s, such as Kurt Goldstein). This very fact, however, invites the accusation of 'psycholo- gism', of misrepresenting a psychological theory concerning
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the bodily contribution to the organisation of perception as a philosophical theory about the a priori structure of experience. Since Husserl's phenomenological method was precisely moti- vated by a wish to set himself apart from the 'psychologism', as he saw it, of his contemporaries, it would be ironic if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology turned out to be a form of psychologism after all. But Merleau-Ponty anticipated this objection: his reply to it is that the alternatives 'psychological' and 'philosophical' are not exclusive. Precisely because man is 'transcendental', in the sense that man is the being which gives meaning to things, the 'psychological' understanding of man is at the same time a 'philosophical' understanding of the mean- ing of things. The accusation of 'psychologism' tacitly assumes that human psychology is a natural science, a branch of biology, whose ontology and methodology are to be thought of as comparable to other natural sciences. But Merleau-Ponty rejects this assumption: as he famously puts it in Phenomenology of Perception, perception is not a fact within the world, since it is the 'flaw' in this 'great diamond', the world;18 because perception is the capacity whereby there is a world it cannot be just another fact within the world.
This line of thought can be questioned. It is not as clear as Merleau-Ponty assumes it to be that one cannot combine a conception of human perception as a natural fact with an
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acknowledgement of its special status as the root of the human understanding of the world. But this is not the place to take the argument further. Instead I want to return to the starting point of this discussion, to Merleau-Ponty's suggestion at the start of these lectures that we need to 'rediscover' the perceived world with the help of modern art and philosophy. On the face of it, as Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, this is an odd suggestion, since, surely, we are aware of the perceived world all the time that we are awake. But we can now begin to see why, for Merleau-Ponty, the 'natural attitude' of common sense leads us to overlook the phenomenon of the perceived world. For Merleau-Ponty's account of the role of the senses in perception is that they make it their business to cover their tracks as they organise experience in such a way that it presents to us a world of things arrayed before us in a three-dimensional objective space within which we are located as just another object. So as we get on with our life we do not notice the role of the senses in organising experience and 'constituting' the physical world; it is precisely their business to make this role invisible to us. Hence to rediscover and articu- late it, we have somehow to get a detached, 'sideways', look at ordinary experience, and this is what, for Merleau-Ponty, modern art and phenomenological philosophy make possible. He char- acterised this kind of philosophical reflection in a memorable passage in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception:
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Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. 19
In these lectures, as we shall see, he complements this account of philosophy with a discussion of modern art in which he suggests that painters such as Ce? zanne likewise aim to make apparent to us the ways in which the emergence of the ordi- nary world in visual experience is 'strange and paradoxical'.
MERLEAU-PONTY'S LECTURES
Lecture 1: The World of Perception and the World of Science
As I have indicated, Merleau-Ponty opens his lectures by announcing that we need to rediscover the perceived world. I have tried to elucidate this demand by setting the lectures in the context of Merleau-Ponty's general philosophical project; and this will also help to elucidate the main thesis of the first lec- ture, which is that it would be quite wrong to suppose that the
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world of perception can be dismissed as mere 'appearance' in contrast with the 'real' world revealed by the natural sciences.
Merleau-Ponty describes the temptation to make this sup- position as one which is 'particularly strong in France'. To a contemporary British reader this will seem an odd claim, since for us France is the land of the modern movements in art and literature, as well as of the post-modernism which denies any special status to the natural sciences. But it is good to be reminded that within France there has also been, as there still is, a strong tradition that takes the natural sciences as the par- adigms of knowledge; and, as Merleau-Ponty indicates, this is a tradition that can be traced back to Descartes. Descartes took an extreme view of the unreliability of the senses; but a more common view would still be that the natural sciences show us that our ordinary perceptions of things are a poor guide to their fundamental structure. This is obvious if one thinks of, say, the molecular structure of physical substances, since this is invisible; but what is more striking is the way in which scientific enquiries can lead us to reorganise the classi- fication of familiar objects, such that, for example, we come to take the view that whales are not fish.
Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that he does not contest the value of scientific inquiry. What he does reject is the thought that science penetrates 'to the heart of things, to the object as
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it is in itself '. Instead, he holds, science provides only abstract representations of aspects of the world that are of technolog- ical value, but which do not constitute 'absolute and complete knowledge'. It seems to me that Merleau-Ponty runs together different points here, in the closing paragraphs of his lecture. The thesis that the natural sciences might provide 'absolute and complete knowledge' of the world is an extreme view since there are many activities and interests, - sport, for exam- ple - such that facts about them are not, on the face of it, accessible to the natural sciences. To bring them within the compass of the natural sciences would require the hypothesis that the thoughts and movements of all those engaged in sport can somehow be brought within the compass of a scientific psychology that can be integrated into natural science. No great degree of scepticism is required to dismiss this hypoth- esis. But this gives too easy a triumph to the critic of science, since this kind of aspiration for absolute and complete knowl- edge is not essential to scientific inquiry. What is important is 'scientific realism', the belief that the account of the structure of things and forces provided by physics and other sciences does indeed reveal to us things that are really there, even if we cannot observe them, and the further belief that reference to this structure is of fundamental importance when we seek to explain natural phenomena.
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When Merleau-Ponty says that science offers us only 'approximate expressions' of physical events, it is not clear whether he would reject scientific realism thus understood. For the scientific realist will of course allow that the accounts of structure provided by a science typically involve many approximations and simplifications, especially since the details needed vary from context to context (e. g. sometimes it is important to distinguish between the different isotopes of a molecule, sometimes not). The general implication of Merleau-Ponty's discussion, however, is undoubtedly hostile to scientific realism since, in effect, he seeks to reverse the appli- cation of the appearance/reality distinction to the relationship between the perceived world and the world of science. Unlike Descartes he holds that the perceived world is the 'real' world, as compared with which the world of science is just an approx- imation, i. e. an appearance. It seems to me, however, that these alternatives are not exhaustive. One does better to combine sci- entific realism with an acknowledgement that natural science is far from complete, and thus that there are important aspects of reality which escape science, including those which are mani- fest within the perceived world. These latter aspects are likely to be of fundamental importance for our primary under- standing of things, just as those which are characteristic of the world of science are of fundamental importance when we
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seek to explain natural phenomena. There can also be differ- ent priorities here, and it is simply not necessary to take sides in the way that Merleau-Ponty appears to in order to defend the importance of an inquiry into the structure of the per- ceived world.
Lecture 2: Exploring the World of Perception: Space
Merleau-Ponty begins his 'exploration' of the perceived world with a discussion of space, and his basic theme is a contrast between the 'classical' conception of space and that which actually informs the world as we perceive it. The classical con- ception of space is that of Newtonian physics, which relies on a conception of 'absolute' space within which physical objects have an absolute location at a time and can move about with- out any alteration of their intrinsic physical properties. 20 Merleau-Ponty associates this conception of space with that found in 'classical' art, the kind of painting whereby objects are depicted in accordance with the perspective they would present when viewed under a gaze directed at a point of the horizon, what Merleau-Ponty calls 'a gaze fixed at infinity'. Such paintings, Merleau-Ponty says, 'remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer'; Merleau-Ponty gives no examples but one can perhaps think here of the paintings of the early
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Florentine Renaissance, or, in a French context, of the works of Nicholas Poussin.
Merleau-Ponty holds that this conception of space is mis- leading. In this context he is happy to begin by recruiting natural science to suggest that this conception of space does not even apply to the physical world. Merleau-Ponty is broadly right about this, though he gets the details wrong. It is not, as he suggests, the adoption of a non-Euclidean geometry that marks the downfall of the Newtonian conception of space, but the adoption by Einstein (in his general theory of relativ- ity) of the nineteenth-century Riemann-Clifford hypothesis that geometry and physics are interdependent, in that gravity just expresses the curvature of space which is determined by the local distribution of matter. But Merleau-Ponty gives most attention to painting, and in particular to the manner in which Ce? zanne attempts to capture the way in which visual experi- ence, through the distribution of colour, gives birth to the outline and shape of objects. Merleau-Ponty notes that in doing this Ce? zanne breaks with the traditional laws of per- spective, using instead local points of view that are not integrated into the classical 'gaze at infinity'. As such, accord- ing to Merleau-Ponty, Ce? zanne's paintings show us the structure of the visual world, in which not all objects are attended to at one time from one point of view; instead our
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perceived world is structured by a plurality of overlapping perspectives within which different aspects are somehow seen together, as aspects of just one world.
Merleau-Ponty's choice here of Ce? zanne is characteristic. In Phenomenology of Perception he often alludes to Ce? zanne's work in order to illustrate his account of the way in which the visual world forms itself through our gaze. 21 One might be inclined to object that there is in fact a great deal more variety and com- plexity in the history of painting: Titian's use of space and colour, for example, does not fit within Merleau-Ponty's classi- cal paradigm, but it is also plainly not of the same kind as Ce? zanne's. But Merleau-Ponty is just using his comparison from the history of painting to illustrate a philosophical theme; he is not offering it as the key to a general account of the depiction of space within painting. So although the cases he discusses are far from exhaustive, the contrast he draws between Ce? zanne and classical art is, I think, fair enough for his purposes.
Merleau-Ponty concludes his discussion by introducing the perceptual constancies noted by the Gestalt psychologists, whereby the perceived size or shape of an object takes account of our implicit beliefs about its real size and shape; thus a tilted round plate normally looks round (and not oval), and the apparent dimensions of a person's feet when viewed from below do not match the real perspective that is captured by a
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photograph in which the feet look absurdly large. Merleau- Ponty connects this with the long-standing puzzle that the moon looks so much larger when it is on the horizon than when it is high in the night sky; somehow its apparent size when viewed on the horizon is affected by this context. Merleau-Ponty suggests that this can be explained by percep- tual constancies in the horizontal plane, but this cannot be the whole story. Still his general point is right: the space of the perceived world is not the unique space of a 'disembodied intellect', but, like physical space, has different regions which are structured by our expectations concerning the things which we find in them.
Lecture 3: Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects
Merleau-Ponty now turns to the things which fill the space of the perceived world. The view he opposes is one which regards these as substances which we experience in a variety of uncon- nected ways, and whose intrinsic properties have no essential relation to our experience of them. By contrast Merleau-Ponty holds that our experiences are interconnected and reveal to us real properties of the thing itself, which is much as it appears and not some hidden substance that lies beneath our experi- ence of its appearance.
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Merleau-Ponty, following Sartre, brings out the intercon- nectedness of our experience of things with the examples of honey and lemon. These are both foods, and it is the familiar experience of eating them which gives rise to the tacit gustatory and tactile expectations that are inherent in ordinary visual experience, though it is when these expectations are disap- pointed, as they are by fake foods (e. g. plastic lemons), that the existence of these expectations is brought to our attention. Merleau-Ponty's main point, however, concerns the status of the properties manifest in ordinary experience. Because these properties, such as the sticky sweetness of honey, can be under- stood only in the context of our experience of them there has been a perennial temptation to regard them as superficial appearances, merely 'secondary' qualities which need to be backed up by intrinsic 'primary' qualities of things. This is a view which goes back to the Greek atomists, but was influen- tially revived by Descartes, Galileo and Locke. Against it, Merleau-Ponty holds that we have no good reason to down- grade the manifest properties of things even though their definition includes reference to our experience of them. In one way this is right: appearances can be entirely objective, and for that reason there is reason to regard them as appearances of real, genuine, properties, such as colour, taste and the like. But one can still hold that extrinsic properties of this kind presuppose
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intrinsic properties which explain why things appear as they do. Merleau-Ponty might regard this as merely a scientific hypoth- esis; but I suspect that it is rather more deeply embedded than that in our ordinary perceived world, since this includes a 'folk science' whereby we presume that it is possible to make sense of why things happen as they do.
Lecture 4: Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life
In the previous lecture Merleau-Ponty emphasised that the perceived world is a human world, a world of things whose character involves a relationship with the human beings who experience them. In this lecture he addresses an anxiety con- cerning this thesis: that this emphasis on humans implies that there is no proper place for the experiences of 'animals, chil- dren, primitive peoples and madmen'.
Merleau-Ponty here anticipates the attention that is now paid to voices that were for long excluded from official histo- ries and philosophies, though he does not recognise the need to include women in his list, and the category 'primitive people' is not one with which we can now feel comfortable. His claim is going to be that it is a characteristic of 'modern' thought, with its rediscovery of the perceived world, that it can accommodate these alien voices better than 'classical' thought did. According
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to Merleau-Ponty classical thinkers (represented here by Descartes and Voltaire) take it that the only voice worth lis- tening to is that of an adult rational civilised human being (and, we might add, a male one), since it is the only voice that makes sense; the experiences of animals, children, primitive peoples and madmen can be summarily dismissed as nonsense. Descartes symbolised this exclusion of the experience of mad- ness when, at the start of his Meditations, he simply dismisses without argument the hypothesis that, for all he can tell, he is mad. But, it is worth adding, other philosophers of the classi- cal period were not so dismissive: Hume deliberately includes in his Treatise of Human Nature ironic comparisons between humans and animals - where the joke is on the humans.
What, however, of the ability of modern thought to make space for these alien voices? Merleau-Ponty's main claim is that where classical thought saw a sharp division between sense and nonsense, modern thought sees only a difference of degree, accentuated by recognition of the fact that adult life is prone to illness, prejudice and fantasy. Thus although there is still a hierarchy in Merleau-Ponty's position ('Adult thought, normal or civilized, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought'), he allows that there are insights in the alien experi- ences that classical thought excluded, insights which we can ourselves understand and use when we think of the ways in
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which our own life has been disturbed by illness, childish fix- ations and other complexities that psychoanalysis has taught us to acknowledge. In the lecture Merleau-Ponty then turns to a brief discussion of animals and the status of their experience, but before commenting on this it is worth reflecting a little on Merleau-Ponty's discussion so far. The most striking point is his hierarchy, with its valuation of 'adult thought, normal or civilized'; for this contrasts very sharply with the romantic valuation of children (as in Wordsworth), of genius, which is often conceived as a form of madness, and of the 'noble savage'. I find it very odd that Merleau-Ponty does not address this line of thought, which will have been very familiar to his audience from Rousseau; perhaps the barbarisms of the Second World War led him to dismiss it. The other point to make is that in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty fre- quently draws on accounts of the disabilities of those with brain damage to develop his account of our preobjective bodily experience of the world. 22 So although he discusses the existential significance of these disabilities, the basic theme of his discussion is one of the continuity between the experience of the disabled and that of the normal, rather than the hier- archy emphasised here.
In the closing pages of this lecture Merleau-Ponty turns (as his title always suggested) to the case of animals. As ever he
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begins by rejecting the Cartesian conception of them as mere machines; instead, drawing on the work of the Gestalt psy- chologist Wolfgang Ko? hler, he briefly sketches the way in which one might try to show how an animal 'gives shape' to its world. Merleau-Ponty had discussed this subject at greater length in The Structure of Behavior, and he shows there how his existential phenomenology, with its emphasis on preobjective perception and organised behaviour, can readily accommodate animal experience alongside that of human beings. 23 But he ends his lecture here by noting a different way in which ani- mals play a part in the spectrum of experiences he has been concerned to revive, through the symbolic role that animals often play in childish, primitive, and even religious thought.
Lecture 5: Man Seen from the Outside
Merleau-Ponty continues his exploration of the perceived world by turning to our understanding of other people. This was already a theme of the previous lecture; but what he is here concerned to discuss is the way in which we can integrate our understanding of others with our understanding of ourselves. He begins, as ever, with Descartes, who famously held that we understand ourselves best when, in self-conscious reflection, we grasp ourselves as just a stream of consciousness that is
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only contingently connected to a physical body located in physical space (in reading Merleau-Ponty's discussion of this, it is important to note that the translation here uses the two words 'mind' and 'spirit' to translate the single French word 'esprit' in order to capture the connotations of the French word as it occurs in different contexts in Merleau-Ponty's text). As Merleau-Ponty explains later, he thinks that there is something importantly right about Descartes' conception of ourselves. But first he explains why it is unsatisfactory as it stands.
He begins by discussing our experience of others. The Cartesian position notoriously alienates us from others, since it implies that we can know them only indirectly via their behaviour, which is only a detached, contingent, expression of their thoughts and feelings, and one whose interpretation we can never validate since we have no other way of finding out about the other's thoughts and feelings. As against this alien- ation from others, which rests on the detachment of their mind from their behaviour, Merleau-Ponty, whose discussion at this point exemplifies the phenomenological appeal to 'lived experience', brings forward our experience of another's anger. In this case, he suggests, we have no temptation to detach the other's anger from their behaviour; their anger is 'here, in this room'. The Cartesian separation of emotion from behaviour
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radically misconstrues our experience of others in this case. Furthermore, he argues, when I reflect on my own anger, I have to recognise that, contrary to Descartes' account of the matter, it too was bound up with my own body, with my gestures, my speech and my behaviour.
Merleau-Ponty then generalises this last point. He suggests that self-consciousness is always dependent upon our con- sciousness of others, which is inextricably linked to our experience of their behaviour, especially their speech. In this lecture he just cites child psychologists in support of this claim; in Phenomenology of Perception he had invoked Husserl's thesis that 'transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity' and argued in detail that there is no coherent conception of self- consciousness which is not regulated by the consciousness that others have of us. 24 So our self-consciousness is always 'medi- ated' by a language that we have learnt from others and which is dependent upon their use of it. Hence, although Descartes was right to posit the conception of a self that is detached from physical circumstances, this is a 'critical ideal' which expresses the idea of freedom as detachment, and not a meta- physical truth about human beings.
In the last part of the lecture Merleau-Ponty points to the ethical implications of this new picture of human life. It is one in which we can neither escape personal responsibility by
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imagining that our dependence upon others determines how we are to act, nor escape this dependence upon others by imagining that our freedom enables us to shape our future inalienably. Instead, and this, for Merleau-Ponty, is the 'modern form of humanism', we have to accept that there is an inescapable 'ambiguity' in human life, whereby we have to accept responsibility for our actions even though the signifi- cance of everything we try to do is dependent upon the meaning others give to it. It is here that Merleau-Ponty's idiom is recognisably 'existentialist', as he acknowledges the 'anxiety' inherent in this situation and calls for 'courage' in accepting both the inescapability of our responsibility and the impossi- bility of guaranteeing what our responsibilities will turn out to be. 25 But he disavows the conclusion that human life is there- fore inherently absurd, even though it may often appear so. Instead, he urges, we should use humour to prepare 'for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another'.
Lecture 6: Art and the World of Perception
Merleau-Ponty's aim here is to use the account he has given of the perceived world as the springboard for an aesthetic theory. In doing so he builds on the earlier discussion in Lecture 2 of
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the way in which modern art (or, at any rate, Ce? zanne's paint- ings) helps us to rediscover the creation of the perceived world that we are all too prone to pass over as our attention is drawn to the things that it makes manifest to us. Reciprocally, then, having learnt that the things of the per- ceived world are manifest to us in experience, and not substances hidden behind a veil of appearances, he wants us to see that much the same is true of works of art. Their meaning is what is given in our experience of them; it does not reside in their relationship to something else, something not perceived but represented.
While it is easy to see how this applies to abstract painting, it is less clear how it applies to representational paintings, such as portraits; for a portrait is clearly intended to be a por- trait of someone (Ce? zanne, perhaps). Yet the portrait is not, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, simply intended to evoke the person portrayed; that would be better achieved by a biography. Instead, the portrait has to be 'a spectacle which is sufficient unto itself ', something which cannot be appreciated without seeing it, and which, in the seeing of it, enables us to see the person portrayed in the painting. The meaning must be accomplished within the painting itself, and cannot depend upon a relationship to something extrinsic to the painting, even the person portrayed.
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Merleau-Ponty now extends this aesthetic approach to other art forms. Interestingly, he looks forward to applying it to film, and his remarks here are suggestive of the features we do indeed look for in the films we value. In the case of music it is almost too easy to apply his approach, since music is not rep- resentational. But the difficulty in this case lies in knowing how to add to formal descriptions of music, for example how to characterise the expressive aspects of music, and Merleau- Ponty does not really contribute to this. In the case of literature, Merleau-Ponty's approach is problematic for the opposite reason. Our appreciation of literature seems to depend on our understanding of the language used, and thus on our grasp of the relationships between the words used and their worldly meanings. So it does not seem that the ideal of the self-sufficiency of a work of art can have application here. Merleau-Ponty's response is brief: poetry, or at least the kind of poetry Mallarme? wrote, does not draw on any antecedent meanings: instead here too, the meaning is supposed to be inherent in the poem itself. While there is obviously something right about this - prose commentaries cannot substitute for a poem - the poet has to rely on the fact that the reader brings certain expectations and understandings to their reading of a poem, even if these are not straightforwardly endorsed in the poem. So only a qualified version of the self-sufficiency thesis
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is tenable; but the issue is clearly more complicated than Merleau-Ponty's discussion here allows for. 26
Lecture 7: Classical World, Modern World
In this final lecture Merleau-Ponty looks back over the con- trast he has been drawing between the classical and modern worlds; while acknowledging that it can be seen as a tale of decline that would justify only pessimism, he suggests that the fact that the modern consciousness is more truthful to the ambiguities of the human condition makes it possible to be optimistic, to look forward without illusion to the creation of something whose value is 'solid and lasting' even if it lacks the rational clarity of the classical ideal.
The contrast is drawn in familiar terms: where the classical world believed in the possibility of a rational final under- standing of the world that will obtain for all time, and created works of art whose meaning is unequivocal, the modern the- orist accepts that we are inescapably fallible, and that we should not hope for final solutions in physics any more than in politics. We must learn to live with contestable theories and principles that are inherently provisional; and, equally, be con- tent with works of art that leave open the possibility for a variety of interpretations. It is no good looking for some
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better conception of reason (e. g. discursive reason) that will definitively show us how to live. We must learn to live not only after the death of God, but also without the dream of reason (these are perhaps the same thing).
Merleau-Ponty does not, however, prescribe a conservative reaction to the failure of the classical ideal of reason, in the manner of, say, Hume and Burke.
Instead he affirms the exis- tential ambiguity ('tension' might be a better word) of human life, whereby there is no escape from the requirement to justify our actions, but, equally, no escape from the fact that as we locate our justifications in a space of reasons whose dimen- sions are set by others, we have to accept that they are bound to be found wanting in some ways. This very affirmation, however, he proclaims to be not just a 'modern truth', but 'a truth of all time', a truth which captures the human condition as it is. As such, he suggests, it should be possible for us to do things which are genuinely worth doing even if they are not informed by the classical ideal; by internalising the ambiguity of human life we should be able to create something as 'solid and lasting' as the paintings of Ce? zanne.
It is an attractive conclusion. But one cannot help thinking, in a post-modern way, that Merleau-Ponty betrays himself here. If he had really internalised the fallibilism and provi- sionality of modern thought from which he starts, he should
introduction
not have allowed himself to present, at the end, his existen- tialism as a truth that is 'a truth of all time'. A fallibilist does not undermine his fallibilism by taking a fallibilist attitude to it; for fallibilism is inconsistent with dogmatism, not confi- dence. So we see Merleau-Ponty, at the end of these lectures, poised to move beyond 'modern' thought to post- modernism - but not quite taking the step. But to say this is not to say that these lectures do not present, in the incomplete and sketchy way of modern art, a sketch of a philosophy whose value is 'solid and lasting'.
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The World of Perception
LECTURE 1
The World of Perception and the World of Science
The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this is a delusion. In these lectures, I hope to show that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude. I shall suggest that much time and effort, as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.
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This temptation is particularly strong in France. It is char- acteristic not just of French philosophy but also of what is rather loosely termed the French cast of mind to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experi- ence of the world seems by contrast to be of little value. If I want to know what light is, surely I should ask a physicist; is it not he who can tell me what light really is? Is light, as was once thought, a stream of burning projectiles, or, as others have argued, vibrations in the ether? Or is it, as a more recent theory maintains, a phenomenon that can be classed alongside other forms of electromagnetic radiation? What good would it do to consult our senses on this matter? Why should we linger over what our perception tells us about colours, reflec- tions and the objects which bear such properties? For it seems that these are almost certainly no more than appearances: only the methodical investigations of a scientist - his measure- ments and experiments - can set us free from the delusions of our senses and allow us to gain access to things as they really are. Surely the advancement of knowledge has consisted pre- cisely in our forgetting what our senses tell us when we consult them nai? vely. Surely there is no place for such data in a picture of the world as it really is, except insofar as they indicate peculiarities of our human make-up, ones which physiology will, one day, take account of, just as it has already managed to
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explain the illusions of long- and short-sightedness. The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes. It consists, rather, of the waves and particles which science tells us lie behind these sen- sory illusions.
Descartes went as far as to say that simply by scrutinising sensory objects and without referring to the results of scien- tific investigations, I am able to discover that my senses deceive me and I learn accordingly to trust only my intellect. 1 I claim to see a piece of wax. Yet what exactly is this wax? It is by no means its colour, white, nor, if it has retained this, its floral scent, nor its softness to my touch, nor indeed the dull thud which it makes when I drop it. Not one of these properties is constitutive of the wax because it can lose them all without ceasing to exist, for example if I melt it, whereupon it changes into a colourless liquid which has no discernible scent and which is no longer resistant to my touch. Yet I maintain that this is still the same wax. So how should this claim be under- stood? What persists through this change of state is simply a piece of matter which has no properties, or, at most, a certain capacity to occupy space and take on different shapes, without either the particular space filled or the shape adopted being in any way predetermined. This then is the real and unchanging essence of the wax. It will be clear that the true nature of the
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wax is not revealed to my senses alone, for they only ever pres- ent me with objects of particular sizes and shapes. So I cannot see the wax as it really is with my own eyes; the reality of the wax can only be conceived in the intellect. When I assume I am seeing the wax, all I am really doing is thinking back from the properties which appear before my senses to the wax in its naked reality, the wax which, though it lacks properties in itself, is nonetheless the source of all the properties which manifest themselves to me. Thus for Descartes - and this idea has long held sway in the French philosophical tradition - per- ception is no more than the confused beginnings of scientific knowledge. The relationship between perception and scientific knowledge is one of appearance to reality. It befits our human dignity to entrust ourselves to the intellect, which alone can reveal to us the reality of the world.
When I said, a moment ago, that modern art and philoso- phy have rehabilitated perception and the world as we perceive it, I did not, of course, mean to imply that they deny the value of science, either as a means of technological advancement, or insofar as it offers an object lesson in precision and truth. If we wish to learn how to prove something, to conduct a thorough investigation or to be critical of ourselves and our preconcep- tions, it remains appropriate, now as then, that we turn to science. It was a good thing that we once expected science to
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provide all the answers at a time when it had still to come into being. The question which modern philosophy asks in relation to science is not intended either to contest its right to exist or to close off any particular avenue to its inquiries. Rather, the question is whether science does, or ever could, present us with a picture of the world which is complete, self-sufficient and somehow closed in upon itself, such that there could no longer be any meaningful questions outside this picture. It is not a matter of denying or limiting the extent of scientific knowl- edge, but rather of establishing whether it is entitled to deny or rule out as illusory all forms of inquiry that do not start out from measurements and comparisons and, by connecting par- ticular causes with particular consequences, end up with laws such as those of classical physics. This question is asked not out of hostility to science. Far from it: in fact, it is science itself - particularly in its most recent developments - which forces us to ask this question and which encourages us to answer in the negative.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, scientists have got used to the idea that their laws and theories do not provide a perfect image of Nature but must rather be considered ever simpler schematic representations of natural events, destined to be honed by increasingly minute investigations; or, in other words, these laws and theories constitute knowledge by
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approximation. Science subjects the data of our experience to a form of analysis that we can never expect will be completed since there are no intrinsic limits to the process of observation: we could always envisage that it might be more thorough or more exact than it is at any given moment. The mission of sci- ence is to undertake an interminable elucidation of the concrete or sensible, from which it follows that the concrete or sensible can no longer be viewed, as in the classical paradigm, as a mere appearance destined to be surpassed by scientific thought. The data of perception and, more generally, the events which comprise the history of the world, cannot be deduced from a certain number of laws which supposedly make up the unchanging face of the universe. On the contrary, it is the scientific law that is an approximate expression of the physical event and which allows this event to retain its opacity. The scientist of today, unlike his predecessor working within the classical paradigm, no longer cherishes the illusion that he is penetrating to the heart of things, to the object as it is in itself. The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each partic- ular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situa- tion; it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the
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exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it. This does not make the need for scientific research any less pressing; in fact, the only thing under attack is the dog- matism of a science that thinks itself capable of absolute and complete knowledge. We are simply doing justice to each of the variety of elements in human experience and, in particular, to sensory perception.
While science and the philosophy of science have, as we have seen, been preparing the ground for an exploration of the world as we perceive it, painting, poetry and philosophy have forged ahead boldly by presenting us with a very new and characteristically contemporary vision of objects, space, ani- mals and even of human beings seen from the outside, just as they appear in our perceptual field. In forthcoming lectures I shall describe some of what we have learned in the course of these investigations.
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LECTURE 2
Exploring the World of Perception: Space
It has often been said that modern artists and thinkers are difficult. Picasso is harder to understand, indeed to love, than Poussin or Chardin; the same is said of Giraudoux or Malraux, as opposed to Marivaux or Stendhal. Some, such as Julien Benda, have even drawn the conclusion that modern writers are 'byzantine', are difficult simply because they have nothing to say and peddle subtlety in place of art. 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. If modern thought is difficult and runs counter to common sense, this is because it is con- cerned with truth; experience no longer allows it to settle for the clear and straightforward notions which common sense cherishes because they bring peace of mind.
Thus modern thinkers seek to render obscure even the sim- plest of ideas and to revise classical concepts in the light of our experience. Today I would like to consider, as an example
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of this approach, an idea which seems at first sight to be the clearest of all: the concept of space. Classical science is based on a clear distinction between space and the physical world. Thus space is the uniform medium in which things are arranged in three dimensions and in which they remain the same regardless of the position they occupy. In many cases, the properties of an object are seen to change when the object is moved. If an object is moved from the pole to the equator, its weight and perhaps even its shape will change, on account of the rise in temperature. Yet neither of these changes - of weight and shape - can be attributed to the movement as such: space is the same at the pole as at the equator. The vari- ation which occurs from one place to the other is one of physical conditions, of temperature. Thus the fields of geom- etry and physics remain entirely distinct: the form and content of the world do not mix. The geometrical properties of the object would remain the same after the move, were it not for the variation in physical conditions to which it is also subject. Or so it was assumed in classical science. Everything changes if, with the advent of so-called non-Euclidean geometry, we come to think of space itself as curved and use this to explain how things can change simply by being moved. Thus space is composed of a variety of different regions and dimensions, which can no longer be thought of as interchangeable and
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which effect certain changes in the bodies which move around within them. Instead of a world in which the distinction between identity and change is clearly defined, with each being attributed to a different principle, we have a world in which objects cannot be considered to be entirely self-identical, one in which it seems as though form and content are mixed, the boundary between them blurred. Such a world lacks the rigid framework once provided by the uniform space of Euclid. We can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space and the things which occupy it, nor indeed between the pure idea of space and the concrete spectacle it presents to our senses.
It is intriguing that the findings of science should coincide with those of modern painting. Classical doctrine distin- guishes between outline and colour: the artist draws the spatial pattern of the object before filling it with colour. Ce? zanne, by contrast, remarked that 'as soon as you paint you draw', by which he meant that neither in the world as we perceive it nor in the picture which is an expression of that world can we dis- tinguish absolutely between, on the one hand, the outline or shape of the object and, on the other, the point where colours end or fade, that play of colour which must necessarily encom- pass all that there is: the object's shape, its particular colour, its physiognomy and its relation to neighbouring objects. 2
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Ce? zanne strives to give birth to the outline and shape of objects in the same way that nature does when we look at them: through the arrangement of colours. This is why, when he paints an apple and renders its coloured texture with unfail- ing patience, it ends up swelling and bursting free from the confines of well-behaved draughtsmanship.
In this drive to rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience, all the precautions of classical art fall by the wayside. According to classical doctrine, painting is based on perspective. This means that when a painter is confronted by, for example, a landscape, he chooses to depict on his canvas an entirely conventional representation of what he sees. He sees the tree nearby, then he directs his gaze further into the dis- tance, to the road, before finally looking to the horizon; the apparent dimensions of the other objects change each time he stares at a different point. On the canvas, he arranges things such that what he represents is no more than a compromise between these various different visual impressions: he strives to find a common denominator to all these perceptions by ren- dering each object not with the size, colours and aspect it presents when the painter fixes it in his gaze but rather with the conventional size and aspect that it would present in a gaze directed at a particular vanishing point on the horizon, a point in relation to which the landscape is then arranged
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along lines running from the painter to the horizon. Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passes without hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistance to this supremely easy movement. But this is not how the world appears when we encounter it in perception. When our gaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we are forced to adopt a certain point of view and these successive snapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be super- imposed one upon the other. It is only by interrupting the normal process of seeing that the painter succeeds in master- ing this series of visual impressions and extracting a single, unchanging, landscape from them: often he will close one eye and measure the apparent size of a particular detail with his pencil, thereby altering it. By subjecting all such details to this analytical vision, he fashions on the canvas a representa- tion of the landscape which does not correspond to any of the free visual impressions. This controls the movement of their unfolding yet also kills their trembling life. If many painters since Ce? zanne have refused to follow the law of geo- metrical perspective, this is because they have sought to recapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the
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landscape. They have been reluctant to settle for an analytical overview and have striven to recapture the feel of perceptual experience itself. Thus different areas of their paintings are seen from different points of view. The lazy viewer will see 'errors of perspective' here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simul- taneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other, a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.
Thus space is no longer a medium of simultaneous objects capable of being apprehended by an absolute observer who is equally close to them all, a medium without point of view, without body and without spatial position - in sum, the medium of pure intellect. As Jean Paulhan remarked recently, the space of modern painting is 'space which the heart feels', space in which we too are located, space which is close to us and with which we are organically connected. 3 Paulhan added:
it may well be that in an age devoted to technical meas- urement and, as it were, consumed by quantity, the cubist painter is quietly celebrating - in a space attuned more to the heart than the intellect - the marriage and reconcil- iation of man with the world. 4
space
In the footsteps of science and painting, philosophy and, above all, psychology seem to have woken up to the fact that our relationship to space is not that of a pure disembodied subject to a distant object but rather that of a being which dwells in space relating to its natural habitat. This helps us to understand the famous optical illusion noted by Malebranche: when the moon is still on the horizon, it appears to be much larger than at its zenith. 5 Malebranche assumed that human perception, by some process of reasoning, overestimates the size of the planet. If we look at it through a cardboard tube or the cover of a matchbox, the illusion disappears; so it is caused by the fact that, when the moon first appears, we glimpse it above the fields, walls and trees. This vast array of intervening objects makes us aware of being at so great a distance, from which we conclude that, in order to look as big as it does, notwithstanding this distance, the moon must indeed be very large. On this account, the perceiving subject is akin to the sci- entist who deliberates, assesses and concludes and the size we perceive is in fact the size we judge. This is not how most of today's psychologists understand the illusion of the moon on the horizon. Systematic experimentation has allowed them to discover that it is generally true of our field of vision that the apparent size of objects on the horizontal plane is remarkably constant, whereas they very quickly get smaller on the vertical
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plane. This is most likely to be because, for us as beings who walk upon the earth, the horizontal plane is where our most important movements and activities take place. Thus what Malebranche attributed to the activity of a pure intellect, psy- chologists of this school put down to a natural property of our perceptual field, that of embodied beings who are forced to move about upon the surface of the earth. In psychology as in geometry, the notion of a single unified space entirely open to a disembodied intellect has been replaced by the idea of a space which consists of different regions and has certain priv- ileged directions; these are closely related to our distinctive bodily features and our situation as beings thrown into the world. Here, for the first time, we come across the idea that rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things. We shall see in the next lecture that this is not only true of space but, more gen- erally, of all external objects: we can only gain access to them through our body. Clothed in human qualities, they too are a combination of mind and body.
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LECTURE 3
Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects
Let us turn now from our examination of space to the objects which fill that space. If we consult a classical psychology textbook, it will tell us that an object is a system of properties which present themselves to our various senses and which are united by an act of intellectual synthesis. For example, this lemon is a bulging oval shape with two ends plus this yellow colour plus this fresh feel plus this acidic taste . . . This analysis, however, is far from satisfactory: it is not clear how each of these qualities or properties is bound to the others and yet it seems to us that the lemon is a uni- fied entity of which all these various qualities are merely different manifestations.
The unity of the object will remain a mystery for as long as we think of its various qualities (its colour and taste, for exam- ple) as just so many data belonging to the entirely distinct
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worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on. Yet modern psy- chology, following Goethe's lead, has observed that, rather than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses. For example, anyone who has had to choose carpets for a flat will know that a particular mood emanates from each colour, making it sad or happy, depressing or fortifying. Because the same is true of sounds and tactile data, it may be said that each colour is the equivalent of a particular sound or temperature. This is why some blind people manage to pic- ture a colour when it is described, by way of an analogy with, for example, a sound. Provided that we restore a par- ticular quality to its place in human experience, the place which gives it a certain emotional meaning, we can begin to understand its relationship to other qualities which have nothing in common with it. Indeed our experience contains numerous qualities that would be almost devoid of meaning if considered separately from the reactions they provoke in our bodies. This is the case with the quality of being hon- eyed. Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a
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particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. The living, exploring, hand which thought it could master this thing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky exter- nal object. Sartre, who must take the credit for this elegant analysis, writes:
in one sense it is like the supreme docility of the pos- sessed, the fidelity of a dog who gives himself even when one does not want him any longer, and in another sense there is underneath this docility a surreptitious appro- priation of the possessor by the possessed. 1
So the quality of being honeyed - and this is why this epi- thet can be used to symbolise an entire pattern of human behaviour - can only be understood in the light of the dia- logue between me as an embodied subject and the external object which bears this quality. The only definition of this quality is a human definition.
Viewed in this way, every quality is related to qualities associated with other senses. Honey is sugary. Yet sugariness in the realm of taste, 'an indelible softness that lingers in the mouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing', constitutes the same sticky presence as honey in the realm of
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touch. 2 To say that honey is viscous is another way of saying that it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationship between us and the object or to indicate that we are moved or compelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a partic- ular way of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subject who stands before us. Honey is a particular way the world has of acting on me and my body. And this is why its various attributes do not simply stand side by side but are identical insofar as they all reveal the same way of being or behaving on the part of the honey. The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Ce? zanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees. 3 In a similar vein, Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that each attribute 'reveals the being' of the object:
The lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its shape and its color to what may be called the alimen- tary intuition . . . . The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish
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color, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others. 4
The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolises or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions which are either favourable or unfavourable. This is why people's tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround them- selves, their preferences for certain colours or the places where they like to go for walks. Claudel claims that the Chinese build rock gardens in which everything is entirely bare and dry. 5 This mineralisation of their surroundings must be inter- preted as a rejection of the damp of life, as though expressing a preference for death. The objects which haunt our dreams are meaningful in the same way. Our relationship with things is not a distant one: each speaks to our body and to the way we live. They are clothed in human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely they dwell within us as emblems of forms of life we either love or hate. Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it. To use the language of psychoanalysis, things are
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complexes. This is what Ce? zanne meant when he spoke of the particular 'halo' of things which it is the task of painting to capture.
This is also the message of the contemporary poet Francis Ponge, whose work I shall now offer by way of example. In a study devoted to him, Sartre wrote that,
Things lived in him for many years. They populated him, they carpeted the furthest recesses of his memory. They were present within him . . . and what he is trying to do now is much more to pluck these monstrous slithering flowers from his inner depths and render them than to fix their qualities on the basis of minute observations. 6
And indeed the essence of water, for example, and of all the elements lies less in their observable properties than in what they say to us. This is what Ponge says of water:
Water is colourless and glistening, formless and cool, passive and determined in its single vice: gravity. With exceptional means at its disposal to gratify the vice: cir- cumvention, perforation, infiltration, erosion.
The vice plays an inner role as well: water endlessly ravels in upon itself, constantly refuses to assume any
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form, tends only to self-humiliation, prostrating itself, all but a corpse, like the monks of some orders. [. . . ]
You might almost say that water is insane, given this obsession, this fixation, the hysterical need to obey its gravity alone. [. . . ]
By definition, LIQUID is what seeks to obey gravity rather than maintain its form, forgoes all form to obey its gravity. And loses all bearing because of this fixation, these unhealthy qualms. [. . . ]
Water's anxiety: sensitive to the slightest change of incline. Leaping downstairs two steps at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, returning the moment we call it back by tilting the slope this way. 7
The same sort of analysis, extended to take in all the ele- ments, is to be found in the series of works by Gaston Bachelard on air, water, fire and earth.