He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science - and also the insidious
stickiness
of honey, and the mystery of anger.
Mεᴙleau-Ponty-World-of-Pεrcεption-2004
The World of Perception
'This is that rare genre, the careful popularisation, done by the original author. In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principal themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science - and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Ce? zanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty's deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes. '
JAMES ELKINS, AUTHOR
STORIES OF ART AND PICTURES AND TEARS
'Merleau-Ponty is one of the seminal thinkers of the post- war period, and these short talks to a radio audience, from a relatively early moment in his writing career, show his humane intelligence at work. '
MICHAEL FRIED, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The World of Perception
TRANSLATED BY OLIVER DAVIS
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in French as Causeries 1948 (C) Editions du Seuil, 2002
First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Translation (C) Routledge 2004 Introduction (C) Thomas Baldwin 2004
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Franc? ais du Royaume-Uni.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 [Causeries 1948. English]
The world of perception / Merleau-Ponty.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Title B828. 45. M47 2004
121! . 34-dc22
2003026843
ISBN 0-203-49182-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-33727-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Print Edition)
Contents
Foreword by Ste? phanie Me? nase? vii
Introduction by Thomas Baldwin 1
1 The World of Perception and the World of Science 37
2 Exploring the World of Perception: Space 47
3 Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects 57
4 Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life 67
5 Man Seen from the Outside 79
6 Art and the World of Perception 91
7 Classical World, Modern World 103
Notes 115 Index 123
Foreword
The seven lectures collected in this volume were commis- sioned by French national radio and broadcast on its National Programme at the end of 1948. Copies have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel for use by researchers and other professionals alike.
These seven talks were written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for a series of radio broadcasts and delivered by him in 1948. 1 According to the official radio listings, six were broadcast on the French national station, one each week, between Saturday 9 October and Saturday 13 November 1948. The lectures were recorded for a programme called 'The French Culture Hour' and were read continuously, without interruption. Copies of the recordings have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA).
vii
On Saturdays, the general theme of this programme was 'The development of ideas'. Merleau-Ponty's lectures were broadcast on the same day as others by Georges Davy (on the psychology of primitive peoples), Emmanuel Mounier (on the psychology of character), Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (on psychoanalysis) and Emile Henriot of the Acade? mie Franc? aise (on psychological themes in literature). The INA's archives suggest that there is no surviving record of the preamble intro- ducing the speakers and specifying the precise topic of each broadcast.
The lectures were devised by Merleau-Ponty to form a series and it was he who decided on their order and individual titles: (1) The World of Perception and the World of Science; (2) Exploring the World of Perception: Space; (3) Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects; (4) Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life; (5) Man Seen from the Outside; (6) Art and the World of Perception; (7) Classical World, Modern World.
This edition is based on the typewritten text prepared by Merleau-Ponty from his written plan. These papers (which are part of a private collection) carry corrections in the author's own hand.
The recording is, for the most part, a faithful rendition by Merleau-Ponty of his written text. Bibliographical references
foreword
are preceded by a number. We have endeavoured to go back to the editions available to Merleau-Ponty and his contempo- raries. Our research reveals just how scrupulously attentive Merleau-Ponty was to recent and newly published work. Books referred to are listed in the bibliography at the end of the volume.
We would like to express our particular thanks to those at the INA who have assisted us in our research into the broad- casting of these lectures.
Ste? phanie Me? nase?
ix
Introduction
THOMAS BALDWIN
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-61)
Merleau-Ponty was one of the most creative philosophers of the twentieth century. He combined a new way of thinking about the basic structures of human life with reflections on art, literature and politics which draw on this new philosophy. These lively radio talks from 1948 show him at the height of his powers, moving easily between philosophical themes and discussions of painting and politics; the emphasis on painting is indeed specially notable here, as is the way in which he uses this to indicate his philosophical themes. The result is a brief text which provides the best possible introduction to his phi- losophy, especially since this is dominated by a larger and more complex text published in 1945 - Phenomenology of Perception. 1 But these talks should also be valued in their own right, for in many respects the contrasts with the past which Merleau-Ponty
1
draws and the anxieties which he articulates are still ours. In my own introduction, after a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and philosophy, I shall say a little about each talk ('lecture'), connecting them with Merleau-Ponty's other writings, and also reflecting briefly on their significance for us.
LIFE
Merleau-Ponty's father died in 1913 while he was still a small child, and, along with his brother and sister, he was brought up in Paris by his widowed mother. This situation of growing up without a father was one which he shared with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and was indeed common throughout Europe after the First World War. 2 In Merleau-Ponty's case, despite the absence of a father, this period seems to have been one of exceptional happiness and intimacy, and he carried the memory of it throughout his life:
It is at the present time that I realize that the first twenty- five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence. If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained in terms of
introduction
the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating. 3
After attending lyce? e Merleau-Ponty gained admission in 1926 to the E? cole Normale Supe? rieure (where he briefly encountered Sartre, though they were not then friends). He graduated in 1930 and went to teach at a lyce? e in Beauvais; in 1935 he returned to Paris to a junior position at the E? cole Normale. During this period he was working on his first doctoral thesis, a critical survey of psychological theory with special emphasis on Gestalt theory. This was published as The Structure of Behavior in 1942, during the German occupation of France. 4 In 1939-40 Merleau-Ponty had served briefly in the French army as a second lieutenant, but after the German victory he was demobilised and returned to Paris. There he taught at a couple of lyce? es while writing a second, higher, doctoral thesis, as the French academic system then required of anyone who wanted to pursue an aca- demic career in the University system. In this work Merleau-Ponty continued the emphasis on psychology of his previous book, but he now approached the subject with a per- spective informed by 'phenomenology', the philosophical method which had been initiated at the start of the century by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, whose unpublished manuscripts Merleau-Ponty had been able to study at Louvain
3
shortly before the war. This second thesis was published in 1945, soon after the liberation of France, as Phenomenology of Perception. This is Merleau-Ponty's major, and enduring, contribution to philosophy. I say more about it in my discussion below. 5
During the German occupation of France Merleau-Ponty initially joined Sartre, with whom he now became a close friend, in a quixotic attempt during 1941 to constitute an intellectual resistance movement ('Socialism and Freedom') distinct from the forces of the communists and the Gaullists. 6 This move- ment collapsed at the end of the year, largely because of its ineffectiveness; and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre then withdrew to write their major works of philosophy (Sartre's Being and Nothingness dates from this period). 7 Later in the war Sartre and Merleau-Ponty joined Camus in the group which published the resistance paper Combat, though they took little active part in the resistance. Nonetheless, the experience of the German occupation forced Merleau-Ponty to think much harder about politics than he had previously done,8 and at the end of 1944 Merleau-Ponty was one of the group of leading intellectuals, led by Sartre and also including de Beauvoir and Aron, who founded the influential political journal Les Temps Modernes. Merleau-Ponty then helped Sartre edit the journal until 1950 when their different political judgments about communism made continued collaboration impossible. 9
introduction
After the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 Merleau-Ponty's academic career progressed quickly. 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
5
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 . . .
introduction
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
7
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
introduction
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
9
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
introduction
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
11
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:
introduction
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
13
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
introduction
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.
He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science - and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Ce? zanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty's deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes. '
JAMES ELKINS, AUTHOR
STORIES OF ART AND PICTURES AND TEARS
'Merleau-Ponty is one of the seminal thinkers of the post- war period, and these short talks to a radio audience, from a relatively early moment in his writing career, show his humane intelligence at work. '
MICHAEL FRIED, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The World of Perception
TRANSLATED BY OLIVER DAVIS
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in French as Causeries 1948 (C) Editions du Seuil, 2002
First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Translation (C) Routledge 2004 Introduction (C) Thomas Baldwin 2004
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Franc? ais du Royaume-Uni.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 [Causeries 1948. English]
The world of perception / Merleau-Ponty.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Title B828. 45. M47 2004
121! . 34-dc22
2003026843
ISBN 0-203-49182-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-33727-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Print Edition)
Contents
Foreword by Ste? phanie Me? nase? vii
Introduction by Thomas Baldwin 1
1 The World of Perception and the World of Science 37
2 Exploring the World of Perception: Space 47
3 Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects 57
4 Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life 67
5 Man Seen from the Outside 79
6 Art and the World of Perception 91
7 Classical World, Modern World 103
Notes 115 Index 123
Foreword
The seven lectures collected in this volume were commis- sioned by French national radio and broadcast on its National Programme at the end of 1948. Copies have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel for use by researchers and other professionals alike.
These seven talks were written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for a series of radio broadcasts and delivered by him in 1948. 1 According to the official radio listings, six were broadcast on the French national station, one each week, between Saturday 9 October and Saturday 13 November 1948. The lectures were recorded for a programme called 'The French Culture Hour' and were read continuously, without interruption. Copies of the recordings have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA).
vii
On Saturdays, the general theme of this programme was 'The development of ideas'. Merleau-Ponty's lectures were broadcast on the same day as others by Georges Davy (on the psychology of primitive peoples), Emmanuel Mounier (on the psychology of character), Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (on psychoanalysis) and Emile Henriot of the Acade? mie Franc? aise (on psychological themes in literature). The INA's archives suggest that there is no surviving record of the preamble intro- ducing the speakers and specifying the precise topic of each broadcast.
The lectures were devised by Merleau-Ponty to form a series and it was he who decided on their order and individual titles: (1) The World of Perception and the World of Science; (2) Exploring the World of Perception: Space; (3) Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects; (4) Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life; (5) Man Seen from the Outside; (6) Art and the World of Perception; (7) Classical World, Modern World.
This edition is based on the typewritten text prepared by Merleau-Ponty from his written plan. These papers (which are part of a private collection) carry corrections in the author's own hand.
The recording is, for the most part, a faithful rendition by Merleau-Ponty of his written text. Bibliographical references
foreword
are preceded by a number. We have endeavoured to go back to the editions available to Merleau-Ponty and his contempo- raries. Our research reveals just how scrupulously attentive Merleau-Ponty was to recent and newly published work. Books referred to are listed in the bibliography at the end of the volume.
We would like to express our particular thanks to those at the INA who have assisted us in our research into the broad- casting of these lectures.
Ste? phanie Me? nase?
ix
Introduction
THOMAS BALDWIN
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-61)
Merleau-Ponty was one of the most creative philosophers of the twentieth century. He combined a new way of thinking about the basic structures of human life with reflections on art, literature and politics which draw on this new philosophy. These lively radio talks from 1948 show him at the height of his powers, moving easily between philosophical themes and discussions of painting and politics; the emphasis on painting is indeed specially notable here, as is the way in which he uses this to indicate his philosophical themes. The result is a brief text which provides the best possible introduction to his phi- losophy, especially since this is dominated by a larger and more complex text published in 1945 - Phenomenology of Perception. 1 But these talks should also be valued in their own right, for in many respects the contrasts with the past which Merleau-Ponty
1
draws and the anxieties which he articulates are still ours. In my own introduction, after a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and philosophy, I shall say a little about each talk ('lecture'), connecting them with Merleau-Ponty's other writings, and also reflecting briefly on their significance for us.
LIFE
Merleau-Ponty's father died in 1913 while he was still a small child, and, along with his brother and sister, he was brought up in Paris by his widowed mother. This situation of growing up without a father was one which he shared with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and was indeed common throughout Europe after the First World War. 2 In Merleau-Ponty's case, despite the absence of a father, this period seems to have been one of exceptional happiness and intimacy, and he carried the memory of it throughout his life:
It is at the present time that I realize that the first twenty- five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence. If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained in terms of
introduction
the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating. 3
After attending lyce? e Merleau-Ponty gained admission in 1926 to the E? cole Normale Supe? rieure (where he briefly encountered Sartre, though they were not then friends). He graduated in 1930 and went to teach at a lyce? e in Beauvais; in 1935 he returned to Paris to a junior position at the E? cole Normale. During this period he was working on his first doctoral thesis, a critical survey of psychological theory with special emphasis on Gestalt theory. This was published as The Structure of Behavior in 1942, during the German occupation of France. 4 In 1939-40 Merleau-Ponty had served briefly in the French army as a second lieutenant, but after the German victory he was demobilised and returned to Paris. There he taught at a couple of lyce? es while writing a second, higher, doctoral thesis, as the French academic system then required of anyone who wanted to pursue an aca- demic career in the University system. In this work Merleau-Ponty continued the emphasis on psychology of his previous book, but he now approached the subject with a per- spective informed by 'phenomenology', the philosophical method which had been initiated at the start of the century by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, whose unpublished manuscripts Merleau-Ponty had been able to study at Louvain
3
shortly before the war. This second thesis was published in 1945, soon after the liberation of France, as Phenomenology of Perception. This is Merleau-Ponty's major, and enduring, contribution to philosophy. I say more about it in my discussion below. 5
During the German occupation of France Merleau-Ponty initially joined Sartre, with whom he now became a close friend, in a quixotic attempt during 1941 to constitute an intellectual resistance movement ('Socialism and Freedom') distinct from the forces of the communists and the Gaullists. 6 This move- ment collapsed at the end of the year, largely because of its ineffectiveness; and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre then withdrew to write their major works of philosophy (Sartre's Being and Nothingness dates from this period). 7 Later in the war Sartre and Merleau-Ponty joined Camus in the group which published the resistance paper Combat, though they took little active part in the resistance. Nonetheless, the experience of the German occupation forced Merleau-Ponty to think much harder about politics than he had previously done,8 and at the end of 1944 Merleau-Ponty was one of the group of leading intellectuals, led by Sartre and also including de Beauvoir and Aron, who founded the influential political journal Les Temps Modernes. Merleau-Ponty then helped Sartre edit the journal until 1950 when their different political judgments about communism made continued collaboration impossible. 9
introduction
After the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 Merleau-Ponty's academic career progressed quickly. 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
5
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 . . .
introduction
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
7
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
introduction
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
9
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
introduction
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
11
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:
introduction
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
13
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
introduction
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.
'This is that rare genre, the careful popularisation, done by the original author. In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principal themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science - and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Ce? zanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty's deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes. '
JAMES ELKINS, AUTHOR
STORIES OF ART AND PICTURES AND TEARS
'Merleau-Ponty is one of the seminal thinkers of the post- war period, and these short talks to a radio audience, from a relatively early moment in his writing career, show his humane intelligence at work. '
MICHAEL FRIED, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The World of Perception
TRANSLATED BY OLIVER DAVIS
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in French as Causeries 1948 (C) Editions du Seuil, 2002
First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Translation (C) Routledge 2004 Introduction (C) Thomas Baldwin 2004
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Franc? ais du Royaume-Uni.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 [Causeries 1948. English]
The world of perception / Merleau-Ponty.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Title B828. 45. M47 2004
121! . 34-dc22
2003026843
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ISBN 0-203-33727-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Print Edition)
Contents
Foreword by Ste? phanie Me? nase? vii
Introduction by Thomas Baldwin 1
1 The World of Perception and the World of Science 37
2 Exploring the World of Perception: Space 47
3 Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects 57
4 Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life 67
5 Man Seen from the Outside 79
6 Art and the World of Perception 91
7 Classical World, Modern World 103
Notes 115 Index 123
Foreword
The seven lectures collected in this volume were commis- sioned by French national radio and broadcast on its National Programme at the end of 1948. Copies have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel for use by researchers and other professionals alike.
These seven talks were written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for a series of radio broadcasts and delivered by him in 1948. 1 According to the official radio listings, six were broadcast on the French national station, one each week, between Saturday 9 October and Saturday 13 November 1948. The lectures were recorded for a programme called 'The French Culture Hour' and were read continuously, without interruption. Copies of the recordings have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA).
vii
On Saturdays, the general theme of this programme was 'The development of ideas'. Merleau-Ponty's lectures were broadcast on the same day as others by Georges Davy (on the psychology of primitive peoples), Emmanuel Mounier (on the psychology of character), Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (on psychoanalysis) and Emile Henriot of the Acade? mie Franc? aise (on psychological themes in literature). The INA's archives suggest that there is no surviving record of the preamble intro- ducing the speakers and specifying the precise topic of each broadcast.
The lectures were devised by Merleau-Ponty to form a series and it was he who decided on their order and individual titles: (1) The World of Perception and the World of Science; (2) Exploring the World of Perception: Space; (3) Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects; (4) Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life; (5) Man Seen from the Outside; (6) Art and the World of Perception; (7) Classical World, Modern World.
This edition is based on the typewritten text prepared by Merleau-Ponty from his written plan. These papers (which are part of a private collection) carry corrections in the author's own hand.
The recording is, for the most part, a faithful rendition by Merleau-Ponty of his written text. Bibliographical references
foreword
are preceded by a number. We have endeavoured to go back to the editions available to Merleau-Ponty and his contempo- raries. Our research reveals just how scrupulously attentive Merleau-Ponty was to recent and newly published work. Books referred to are listed in the bibliography at the end of the volume.
We would like to express our particular thanks to those at the INA who have assisted us in our research into the broad- casting of these lectures.
Ste? phanie Me? nase?
ix
Introduction
THOMAS BALDWIN
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-61)
Merleau-Ponty was one of the most creative philosophers of the twentieth century. He combined a new way of thinking about the basic structures of human life with reflections on art, literature and politics which draw on this new philosophy. These lively radio talks from 1948 show him at the height of his powers, moving easily between philosophical themes and discussions of painting and politics; the emphasis on painting is indeed specially notable here, as is the way in which he uses this to indicate his philosophical themes. The result is a brief text which provides the best possible introduction to his phi- losophy, especially since this is dominated by a larger and more complex text published in 1945 - Phenomenology of Perception. 1 But these talks should also be valued in their own right, for in many respects the contrasts with the past which Merleau-Ponty
1
draws and the anxieties which he articulates are still ours. In my own introduction, after a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and philosophy, I shall say a little about each talk ('lecture'), connecting them with Merleau-Ponty's other writings, and also reflecting briefly on their significance for us.
LIFE
Merleau-Ponty's father died in 1913 while he was still a small child, and, along with his brother and sister, he was brought up in Paris by his widowed mother. This situation of growing up without a father was one which he shared with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and was indeed common throughout Europe after the First World War. 2 In Merleau-Ponty's case, despite the absence of a father, this period seems to have been one of exceptional happiness and intimacy, and he carried the memory of it throughout his life:
It is at the present time that I realize that the first twenty- five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence. If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained in terms of
introduction
the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating. 3
After attending lyce? e Merleau-Ponty gained admission in 1926 to the E? cole Normale Supe? rieure (where he briefly encountered Sartre, though they were not then friends). He graduated in 1930 and went to teach at a lyce? e in Beauvais; in 1935 he returned to Paris to a junior position at the E? cole Normale. During this period he was working on his first doctoral thesis, a critical survey of psychological theory with special emphasis on Gestalt theory. This was published as The Structure of Behavior in 1942, during the German occupation of France. 4 In 1939-40 Merleau-Ponty had served briefly in the French army as a second lieutenant, but after the German victory he was demobilised and returned to Paris. There he taught at a couple of lyce? es while writing a second, higher, doctoral thesis, as the French academic system then required of anyone who wanted to pursue an aca- demic career in the University system. In this work Merleau-Ponty continued the emphasis on psychology of his previous book, but he now approached the subject with a per- spective informed by 'phenomenology', the philosophical method which had been initiated at the start of the century by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, whose unpublished manuscripts Merleau-Ponty had been able to study at Louvain
3
shortly before the war. This second thesis was published in 1945, soon after the liberation of France, as Phenomenology of Perception. This is Merleau-Ponty's major, and enduring, contribution to philosophy. I say more about it in my discussion below. 5
During the German occupation of France Merleau-Ponty initially joined Sartre, with whom he now became a close friend, in a quixotic attempt during 1941 to constitute an intellectual resistance movement ('Socialism and Freedom') distinct from the forces of the communists and the Gaullists. 6 This move- ment collapsed at the end of the year, largely because of its ineffectiveness; and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre then withdrew to write their major works of philosophy (Sartre's Being and Nothingness dates from this period). 7 Later in the war Sartre and Merleau-Ponty joined Camus in the group which published the resistance paper Combat, though they took little active part in the resistance. Nonetheless, the experience of the German occupation forced Merleau-Ponty to think much harder about politics than he had previously done,8 and at the end of 1944 Merleau-Ponty was one of the group of leading intellectuals, led by Sartre and also including de Beauvoir and Aron, who founded the influential political journal Les Temps Modernes. Merleau-Ponty then helped Sartre edit the journal until 1950 when their different political judgments about communism made continued collaboration impossible. 9
introduction
After the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 Merleau-Ponty's academic career progressed quickly. 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
5
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 . . .
introduction
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
7
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
introduction
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
9
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
introduction
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
11
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:
introduction
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
13
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
introduction
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.
He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science - and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger. These lectures are slight but not superficial: you can feel the deep consonance with Lacan and the unspoken debt to Heidegger. Breton, Bataille, Blanchot, Ponge, Kafka, Proust, Ce? zanne, and Sartre float through the text, each one impeccably well cited. And it is all posed in a lovely calm tone, which I read as Merleau-Ponty's deep and unacknowledged affinity with his foil, Descartes. '
JAMES ELKINS, AUTHOR
STORIES OF ART AND PICTURES AND TEARS
'Merleau-Ponty is one of the seminal thinkers of the post- war period, and these short talks to a radio audience, from a relatively early moment in his writing career, show his humane intelligence at work. '
MICHAEL FRIED, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
The World of Perception
TRANSLATED BY OLIVER DAVIS
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? First published in French as Causeries 1948 (C) Editions du Seuil, 2002
First published 2004
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Translation (C) Routledge 2004 Introduction (C) Thomas Baldwin 2004
This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Franc? ais du Royaume-Uni.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 [Causeries 1948. English]
The world of perception / Merleau-Ponty.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-31271-X (Hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Title B828. 45. M47 2004
121! . 34-dc22
2003026843
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Contents
Foreword by Ste? phanie Me? nase? vii
Introduction by Thomas Baldwin 1
1 The World of Perception and the World of Science 37
2 Exploring the World of Perception: Space 47
3 Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects 57
4 Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life 67
5 Man Seen from the Outside 79
6 Art and the World of Perception 91
7 Classical World, Modern World 103
Notes 115 Index 123
Foreword
The seven lectures collected in this volume were commis- sioned by French national radio and broadcast on its National Programme at the end of 1948. Copies have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel for use by researchers and other professionals alike.
These seven talks were written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for a series of radio broadcasts and delivered by him in 1948. 1 According to the official radio listings, six were broadcast on the French national station, one each week, between Saturday 9 October and Saturday 13 November 1948. The lectures were recorded for a programme called 'The French Culture Hour' and were read continuously, without interruption. Copies of the recordings have been kept at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA).
vii
On Saturdays, the general theme of this programme was 'The development of ideas'. Merleau-Ponty's lectures were broadcast on the same day as others by Georges Davy (on the psychology of primitive peoples), Emmanuel Mounier (on the psychology of character), Maxime Laignel-Lavastine (on psychoanalysis) and Emile Henriot of the Acade? mie Franc? aise (on psychological themes in literature). The INA's archives suggest that there is no surviving record of the preamble intro- ducing the speakers and specifying the precise topic of each broadcast.
The lectures were devised by Merleau-Ponty to form a series and it was he who decided on their order and individual titles: (1) The World of Perception and the World of Science; (2) Exploring the World of Perception: Space; (3) Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects; (4) Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life; (5) Man Seen from the Outside; (6) Art and the World of Perception; (7) Classical World, Modern World.
This edition is based on the typewritten text prepared by Merleau-Ponty from his written plan. These papers (which are part of a private collection) carry corrections in the author's own hand.
The recording is, for the most part, a faithful rendition by Merleau-Ponty of his written text. Bibliographical references
foreword
are preceded by a number. We have endeavoured to go back to the editions available to Merleau-Ponty and his contempo- raries. Our research reveals just how scrupulously attentive Merleau-Ponty was to recent and newly published work. Books referred to are listed in the bibliography at the end of the volume.
We would like to express our particular thanks to those at the INA who have assisted us in our research into the broad- casting of these lectures.
Ste? phanie Me? nase?
ix
Introduction
THOMAS BALDWIN
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-61)
Merleau-Ponty was one of the most creative philosophers of the twentieth century. He combined a new way of thinking about the basic structures of human life with reflections on art, literature and politics which draw on this new philosophy. These lively radio talks from 1948 show him at the height of his powers, moving easily between philosophical themes and discussions of painting and politics; the emphasis on painting is indeed specially notable here, as is the way in which he uses this to indicate his philosophical themes. The result is a brief text which provides the best possible introduction to his phi- losophy, especially since this is dominated by a larger and more complex text published in 1945 - Phenomenology of Perception. 1 But these talks should also be valued in their own right, for in many respects the contrasts with the past which Merleau-Ponty
1
draws and the anxieties which he articulates are still ours. In my own introduction, after a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and philosophy, I shall say a little about each talk ('lecture'), connecting them with Merleau-Ponty's other writings, and also reflecting briefly on their significance for us.
LIFE
Merleau-Ponty's father died in 1913 while he was still a small child, and, along with his brother and sister, he was brought up in Paris by his widowed mother. This situation of growing up without a father was one which he shared with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and was indeed common throughout Europe after the First World War. 2 In Merleau-Ponty's case, despite the absence of a father, this period seems to have been one of exceptional happiness and intimacy, and he carried the memory of it throughout his life:
It is at the present time that I realize that the first twenty- five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence. If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained in terms of
introduction
the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating. 3
After attending lyce? e Merleau-Ponty gained admission in 1926 to the E? cole Normale Supe? rieure (where he briefly encountered Sartre, though they were not then friends). He graduated in 1930 and went to teach at a lyce? e in Beauvais; in 1935 he returned to Paris to a junior position at the E? cole Normale. During this period he was working on his first doctoral thesis, a critical survey of psychological theory with special emphasis on Gestalt theory. This was published as The Structure of Behavior in 1942, during the German occupation of France. 4 In 1939-40 Merleau-Ponty had served briefly in the French army as a second lieutenant, but after the German victory he was demobilised and returned to Paris. There he taught at a couple of lyce? es while writing a second, higher, doctoral thesis, as the French academic system then required of anyone who wanted to pursue an aca- demic career in the University system. In this work Merleau-Ponty continued the emphasis on psychology of his previous book, but he now approached the subject with a per- spective informed by 'phenomenology', the philosophical method which had been initiated at the start of the century by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, whose unpublished manuscripts Merleau-Ponty had been able to study at Louvain
3
shortly before the war. This second thesis was published in 1945, soon after the liberation of France, as Phenomenology of Perception. This is Merleau-Ponty's major, and enduring, contribution to philosophy. I say more about it in my discussion below. 5
During the German occupation of France Merleau-Ponty initially joined Sartre, with whom he now became a close friend, in a quixotic attempt during 1941 to constitute an intellectual resistance movement ('Socialism and Freedom') distinct from the forces of the communists and the Gaullists. 6 This move- ment collapsed at the end of the year, largely because of its ineffectiveness; and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre then withdrew to write their major works of philosophy (Sartre's Being and Nothingness dates from this period). 7 Later in the war Sartre and Merleau-Ponty joined Camus in the group which published the resistance paper Combat, though they took little active part in the resistance. Nonetheless, the experience of the German occupation forced Merleau-Ponty to think much harder about politics than he had previously done,8 and at the end of 1944 Merleau-Ponty was one of the group of leading intellectuals, led by Sartre and also including de Beauvoir and Aron, who founded the influential political journal Les Temps Modernes. Merleau-Ponty then helped Sartre edit the journal until 1950 when their different political judgments about communism made continued collaboration impossible. 9
introduction
After the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 Merleau-Ponty's academic career progressed quickly. 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
5
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 . . .
introduction
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
7
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
introduction
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
9
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
introduction
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
11
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:
introduction
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
13
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
introduction
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.
