No More Learning

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
introduction
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.
29
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
introduction
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
31
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'.
33
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.
39
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
the world of perception
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
41
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
the world of perception
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
43
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
the world of perception
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.
45
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
49
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
space
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
51
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
space
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
53
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
55
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.
space
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
59
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
sensory objects
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
61
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
sensory objects
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
63
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
sensory objects
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. 8 He shows how each element is home to a certain kind of individual of a particu- lar kind, how it constitutes the dominant theme in their dreams and forms the privileged medium of the imagination which lends direction to their life; he shows how it is the sacrament of nature which gives them strength and happiness. These studies have all grown out of the surrealist experiment which, as early as thirty years ago, sought in the objects around
65
us and above all in the found objects to which, on occasions, we become uniquely attached, what Andre? Breton called the 'catalysts of desire': the place where human desire manifests itself, or 'crystallises'. 9
So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intel- lect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes. We shall have occasion to return to this point when, in conclusion, we try to establish how our view of the place of human beings in the world has changed over the course of these lectures.
sensory objects
LECTURE 4
Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life
In the first three lectures, we argued with respect to science, painting and philosophy that the transition from classical to modern was marked by what might be thought of as a reawak- ening of the world of perception. We are once more learning to see the world around us, the same world which we had turned away from in the conviction that our senses had noth- ing worthwhile to tell us, sure as we were that only strictly objective knowledge was worth holding onto. We are redis- covering our interest in the space in which we are situated. Though we see it only from a limited perspective - our per- spective - this space is nevertheless where we reside and we relate to it through our bodies. We are rediscovering in every object a certain style of being that makes it a mirror of human modes of behaviour. So the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying to master an object
69
or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly) but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in which every object displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze.
Yet we are not alone in this transfigured world. In fact, this world is not just open to other human beings but also to ani- mals, children, primitive peoples and madmen who dwell in it after their own fashion; they too coexist in this world. Today we shall see that the rediscovery of the world of perception allows us to find greater meaning and interest in these extreme or aberrant forms of life and consciousness. So much so that the whole spectacle that is the world and human life itself takes on new meaning as a result.
It is well known that classical thought has little time for ani- mals, children, primitive people and madmen. You will recall that Descartes saw animals as no more than collections of wheels, levers and springs1 - in effect, as machines. Those clas- sical thinkers who did not view animals as machines saw them instead as prototypes of human beings: many entomologists were all too keen to project onto animals the principal charac- teristics of human existence. For many years, our knowledge of
animal life
children and the sick was held back, kept at a rudimentary stage, by the same assumptions: the questions which the doctor or researcher asked of them were the questions of an adult or a healthy person. Little attempt was made to understand the way that they themselves lived; instead, the emphasis fell on trying to measure how far their efforts fell short of what the average adult or healthy person was capable of accomplishing. As for primitive people, they were either looked to for a model of a more attractive form of civilisation, or else, as in Voltaire's Essay on Morals, their customs and beliefs were seen as no more than a series of inexplicable absurdities. 2 Which all goes to sug- gest that classical thought was caught in a dilemma: either the being that stands before us may be likened to a human being, in which case it can be given, by analogy, the usual human attrib- utes of the healthy adult. Alternatively, it is no more than a blind mechanism - living chaos - in which case meaning cannot possibly be ascribed to its behaviour.
But why were so many classical authors indifferent to ani- mals, children, madmen and primitive peoples? Because they believed that there is such a thing as a fully-formed man whose vocation it is to be 'lord and master' of nature, as Descartes put it. 3 Such a man can accordingly, in principle, see through to the very being of things and establish a sovereign knowl- edge; he can decipher the meaning of every phenomenon (not
71
just those of nature in its physical aspect but also those of human society and history) and explain them by reference to their causes. Ultimately, such a man can locate the particular bodily flaw in the child, primitive, madman or animal, that accounts for the abnormalities which keep them from the truth. For classical thinkers, this is a question of divine law: for they either see human reason as a reflection of the creator's reason, or, even if they have entirely turned their back on the- ology, they are not alone in continuing to assume that there is an underlying harmony between human reason and the essence of things. From this standpoint, the abnormalities mentioned above can at best be accorded the status of psychological curiosities and consigned condescendingly to a quiet corner of 'normal' sociology and psychology.
Yet it is precisely this conviction, or rather this dogmatic assumption, that science and philosophy of a more mature kind have called into question. In the case of children, primi- tive people, the sick, or more so still, animals, the world which they occupy - insofar as we can reconstruct it from the way they behave - is certainly not a coherent system. By contrast, that of the healthy, civilised, adult human being strives for such coherence. Yet the crucial point here is that he does not attain this coherence: it remains an idea, or limit, which he never actually manages to reach. It follows that the 'normal'
animal life
person must remain open to these abnormalities of which he is never entirely exempt himself; he must take the trouble to understand them. He is invited to look at himself without indulgence, to rediscover within himself the whole host of fantasies, dreams, patterns of magical behaviour and obscure phenomena which remain all-powerful in shaping both his private and public life and his relationships with other people. These leave his knowledge of the natural world riddled with gaps, which is how poetry creeps in. Adult thought, normal and civilised, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought, but only on one condition. It must not masquerade as divine law, but rather should measure itself more honestly, against the darkness and difficulty of human life and without losing sight of the irrational roots of this life. Finally, reason must acknowledge that its world is also unfinished and should not pretend to have overcome that which it has managed simply to conceal. It should not view as beyond challenge the one form of civilisation and knowledge which it is its highest duty to contest.
It is in this spirit that modern art and philosophy have come to reexamine, with renewed interest, those forms of existence which are the most distant from our own. For they bring to light the movement by which all living things, ourselves included, endeavour to give shape to a world that has not been
73
preordained to accommodate our attempts to think it and act upon it. Classical rationalism allowed no middle ground between matter and intellect and ranked living beings without intelligence alongside mere machines; it consigned the very notion of life to the category of confused ideas. Psychologists working today, by contrast, have shown us that there is such a thing as a perception of life and they have tried to describe the various forms this takes. Last year, in an engaging work on the perception of movement, Albert Michotte from Louvain demonstrated that, if lines of light move in certain ways on a screen, they evoke in us, without fail, an impression of living movement. 4 If, for example, two parallel vertical lines are moving further apart and one continues on its course while the other changes direction and returns to its starting position, we cannot help but feel we are witnessing a crawling movement, even though the figure before our eyes looks nothing like a caterpillar and could not have recalled the memory of one. In this instance it is the very structure of the movement that may be interpreted as a 'living' movement. At every moment, the observed movement of the lines appears to be part of the sequence of actions by which one particular being, whose ghost we see on the screen, effects travel through space in furtherance of its own ends. The person watching this 'crawling' will think they see a virtual substance, a sort of fictitious protoplasm,
animal life
flow from the centre of the 'body' to the mobile extremities which it projects ahead of itself. Thus in spite of what mecha- nistic biology might suggest, the world we live in is not made up only of things and space: some of these parcels of matter, which we call living beings, proceed to trace in their environ- ment, by the way they act or behave, their very own vision of things. We will only see this if we lend our attention to the spectacle of the animal world, if we are prepared to live along- side the world of animals instead of rashly denying it any kind of interiority.
In experiments conducted as long as twenty years ago, the German psychologist Ko? hler tried to sketch the structure of the chimpanzee's universe. 5 He rightly observed that the origi- nality of the animal world will remain hidden to us for as long as we continue (as in many classical experiments) to set it tasks that are not its own. The behaviour of a dog may well seem absurd and mechanical if we set it the task of opening a lock or working a lever. Yet this does not mean that if we consider the animal as it lives spontaneously and confronts the questions which lie before it, we will not find that it treats its surroundings in a manner consistent with the laws of a sort of nai? ve physics and grasps certain relationships to exploit them in pursuit of its own particular goals and, finally, that it works upon its environ- mental influences in a way that is characteristic of its species.
75
Centred on the animal is what might be called a process of 'giving shape' to the world; the animal, moreover, has a partic- ular pattern of behaviour. Because it proceeds unsteadily, by trial and error, and has at best a meagre capacity to accumulate knowledge, it displays very clearly the struggle involved in exist- ing in a world into which it has been thrown, a world to which it has no key. In so doing, it reminds us, above all, of our fail- ures and our limitations. It is for all these reasons that the life of animals plays such an important role in the dreams of prim- itive peoples, as indeed it does in the secret reveries of our inner life. Freud has shown that the animal mythology of prim- itive peoples is reborn in young children of every generation, that the child pictures itself, its parents and the conflicts it has with them in the animals it encounters. Thus in the dreams of Little Hans, the horse comes to embody as unchallengeable a malefic power as the animals sacred to primitive peoples. 6 In his study of Lautre? amont, Bachelard observes that there are 185 animal names in the 247 pages of the Chants de Maldoror. 7 Even a poet such as Claudel, who as a Christian might be tempted to underestimate all that is not human, draws inspiration from the Book of Job and exhorts us to 'ask the animals':
There is a Japanese engraving which shows an Elephant surrounded by blind men. They have been sent as a
animal life
delegation to identify this monumental intrusion into our human affairs. The first of them has put his arms round one of the feet and declares, 'It's a tree'. 'True', says the second, who has found the ears, 'and here are the leaves'. 'Absolutely not', says the third, who is running his hand down the animal's side, 'it's a wall'. The fourth, who has grabbed hold of the tail, cries, 'It's a piece of string'. 'It's a pipe', retorts the fifth, who has hold of the trunk . . . .
The same is true of our Holy Mother Church, which shares the weight, gait and carefree disposition of this sacred animal, not to mention the two-fold protection of pure ivory which protrudes from its mouth. I see the Church with its four legs planted in the waters that descend straight from paradise; with its trunk, it draws them up to deliver a copious baptism along the entire length of its enormous body. 8
How amusing to think of Descartes or Malebranche reading this passage and finding that the animals which they saw as mechanisms have become trusted bearers of the emblems of the human and the superhuman. Yet, as we shall see in the next lecture, this rehabilitation of the animal world requires a sar- donic form of humanism and a particular kind of humour which lay well beyond their reach.
77
LECTURE 5
Man Seen from the Outside
Thus far we have tried to look at space and the things which inhabit it, both animate and inanimate, through the eyes of perception and to forget what we find 'entirely nat- ural' about them simply because they have been familiar to us for too long; we have endeavoured to consider them as they are experienced nai? vely. We must now try to do the same with respect to human beings themselves. Over the last thirty or more centuries, many things have undoubtedly been said about human beings. Yet these were often the products of reflection. What I mean by this is that Descartes, when he wanted to know what man is, set about subjecting the ideas which occurred to him to critical examination. One example would be the idea of mind and body. He purified these ideas; he rid them of all trace of obscurity and confusion. Whereas most people understand spirit to be something like very subtle
81
matter, or smoke, or breath (consistent, in this regard, with primitive peoples), Descartes showed admirably that spirit is something altogether different. He demonstrated that its nature is quite other, for smoke and breath are, in their way, things - even if very subtle ones - whereas spirit is not a thing at all, does not occupy space, is not spread over a certain extension as all things are, but on the contrary is entirely com- pact and indivisible - a being - the essence of which is none other than to commune with, collect and know itself. This gave rise to the concepts of pure spirit and pure matter, or things. Yet it is clear that I can only find and, so to speak, touch this absolutely pure spirit in myself. Other human beings are never pure spirit for me: I only know them through their glances, their gestures, their speech - in other words, through their bodies. Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words. These I remember and they go to make up my sketch of their moral character. Yet I cannot detach some- one from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. If I see them for even a moment, I can reconnect with them instantaneously and far more thoroughly than if I were to go through a list of everything I know about them from experience or hearsay. Another person, for us, is a spirit which
man seen from the outside
haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities. So the process of looking at human beings from the outside - that is, at other people - leads us to reassess a number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body.
Let us see what becomes of this distinction by examining a particular case. Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shout- ing. But where is this anger? People will say that it is in the mind of my interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent's looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some other- worldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth. It is in the space between him and me that it unfolds. I would accept that the sense in which the place of my opponent's anger is on his face is not the same as that in which, in a moment, tears may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may harden on his
83
mouth. Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice . . . And if, for one moment, I step out of my own view- point as an external observer of this anger and try to remember what it is like for me when I am angry, I am forced to admit that it is no different. When I reflect on my own anger, I do not come across any element that might be sepa- rated or, so to speak, unstuck, from my own body. When I recall being angry at Paul, it does not strike me that this anger was in my mind or among my thoughts but rather, that it lay entirely between me who was doing the shouting and that odious Paul who just sat there calmly and listened with an ironic air. My anger is nothing less than an attempt to destroy Paul, one which will remain verbal if I am a pacifist and even courteous, if I am polite. The location of my anger, however, is in the space we both share - in which we exchange argu- ments instead of blows - and not in me. It is only afterwards, when I reflect on what anger is and remark that it involves a certain (negative) evaluation of another person, that I come to the following conclusion. Anger is, after all, a thought; to be angry is to think that the other person is odious and this thought, like all others, cannot - as Descartes has shown - reside in any piece of matter and therefore must belong to the mind. I may very well think in such terms but as soon as I turn
man seen from the outside
back to the real experience of anger, which was the spur to my reflections, I am forced to acknowledge that this anger does not lie beyond my body, directing it from without, but rather that in some inexplicable sense it is bound up with my body.
There is something of everything in Descartes, as in the work of all great philosophers. And so it is that he who draws an absolute distinction between mind and body also manages to say that the soul is not simply like the pilot of a ship, the commander-in-chief of the body, but rather that it is very closely united to the body, so much so that it suffers with it, as is clear to me when I say that I have toothache. 1
Yet this union of mind and body can barely be spoken of, according to Descartes; it can only be experienced in everyday life. As far as Descartes is concerned, whatever the facts of the matter may be - and even if we live what he himself calls a true me? lange of mind and body - this does not take away my right to distinguish absolutely between parts that are united in my experience. I can still posit, by rights, an absolute distinc- tion between mind and body which is denied by the fact of their union. I can still define man without reference to the immediate structure of his being and as he appears to himself in reflection: as thought which is somehow strangely joined to a bodily apparatus without either the mechanics of the body or the transparency of thought being compromised by their
85
being mixed together in this way. It could be said that even Descartes' most faithful disciples have always asked themselves exactly how it is that our reflection, which concerns the human being as given, can free itself from the conditions to which it appears to have been subject at the outset.
When they address this issue, today's psychologists empha- sise the fact that we do not start out in life immersed in our own self-consciousness (or even in that of things) but rather from the experience of other people. I never become aware of my own existence until I have already made contact with others; my reflection always brings me back to myself, yet for all that it owes much to my contacts with other people. An infant of a few months is already very good at differentiating between goodwill, anger and fear on the face of another person, at a stage when he could not have learned the physical signs of these emotions by examining his own body. This is because the body of the other and its various movements appear to the infant to have been invested from the outset with an emo- tional significance; this is because the infant learns to know mind as visible behaviour just as much as in familiarity with its own mind. The adult himself will discover in his own life what his culture, education, books and tradition have taught him to find there. The contact I make with myself is always mediated by a particular culture, or at least by a language that
man seen from the outside
we have received from without and which guides us in our self-knowledge. So while ultimately the notion of a pure self, the mind, devoid of instruments and history, may well be useful as a critical ideal to set in opposition to the notion of a mere influx of ideas from the surrounding environment, such a self only develops into a free agent by way of the instrument of language and by taking part in the life of the world.
This leaves us with a very different view of the human being and humanity from the one with which we began. Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind with- out already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dis- pute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of
87
being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are contin- ually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inher- ited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give up on them.
It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it has not necessarily been called to succeed, even in relative terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety and a spur to courage. In fact, these are one and the same thing. For anxiety is vigilance, it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate, then neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their behaviour and their relation- ships that very same spark which makes us recognise them,
man seen from the outside
which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate. It is simply that this modern form of humanism has lost the dogmatic tone of ear- lier centuries. We should no longer pride ourselves in being a community of pure spirits; let us look instead at the real rela- tionships between people in our societies. For the most part, these are master-slave relationships. We should not find excuses for ourselves in our good intentions; let us see what becomes of these once they have escaped from inside us. There is something healthy about this unfamiliar gaze we are suggesting should be brought to bear on our species. Voltaire once imagined, in Microme? gas, that a giant from another planet was confronted with our customs. These could only seem derisory to an intel- ligence higher than our own. Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high, which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below. Kafka imagines a man who has metamor- phosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect. 2 Kafka also imagines a dog that investigates the human world which it rubs up against. 3 He describes societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. In our day, Maurice Blanchot describes a city held fast in the grip of its laws: everyone is so compliant that all lose the sense of their difference and that of others. 4 To look at human beings from the outside is what
89
makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another.