No More Learning

On this account, the perceiving subject is akin to the sci- entist who deliberates, assesses and concludes and the size we perceive is in fact the size we judge. This is not how most of today's psychologists understand the illusion of the moon on the horizon. Systematic experimentation has allowed them to discover that it is generally true of our field of vision that the apparent size of objects on the horizontal plane is remarkably constant, whereas they very quickly get smaller on the vertical
55
plane. This is most likely to be because, for us as beings who walk upon the earth, the horizontal plane is where our most important movements and activities take place. Thus what Malebranche attributed to the activity of a pure intellect, psy- chologists of this school put down to a natural property of our perceptual field, that of embodied beings who are forced to move about upon the surface of the earth. In psychology as in geometry, the notion of a single unified space entirely open to a disembodied intellect has been replaced by the idea of a space which consists of different regions and has certain priv- ileged directions; these are closely related to our distinctive bodily features and our situation as beings thrown into the world. Here, for the first time, we come across the idea that rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things. We shall see in the next lecture that this is not only true of space but, more gen- erally, of all external objects: we can only gain access to them through our body. Clothed in human qualities, they too are a combination of mind and body.
space
LECTURE 3
Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects
Let us turn now from our examination of space to the objects which fill that space. If we consult a classical psychology textbook, it will tell us that an object is a system of properties which present themselves to our various senses and which are united by an act of intellectual synthesis. For example, this lemon is a bulging oval shape with two ends plus this yellow colour plus this fresh feel plus this acidic taste . . . This analysis, however, is far from satisfactory: it is not clear how each of these qualities or properties is bound to the others and yet it seems to us that the lemon is a uni- fied entity of which all these various qualities are merely different manifestations.
The unity of the object will remain a mystery for as long as we think of its various qualities (its colour and taste, for exam- ple) as just so many data belonging to the entirely distinct
59
worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on. Yet modern psy- chology, following Goethe's lead, has observed that, rather than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses. For example, anyone who has had to choose carpets for a flat will know that a particular mood emanates from each colour, making it sad or happy, depressing or fortifying. Because the same is true of sounds and tactile data, it may be said that each colour is the equivalent of a particular sound or temperature. This is why some blind people manage to pic- ture a colour when it is described, by way of an analogy with, for example, a sound. Provided that we restore a par- ticular quality to its place in human experience, the place which gives it a certain emotional meaning, we can begin to understand its relationship to other qualities which have nothing in common with it. Indeed our experience contains numerous qualities that would be almost devoid of meaning if considered separately from the reactions they provoke in our bodies. This is the case with the quality of being hon- eyed. Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a
sensory objects
particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. The living, exploring, hand which thought it could master this thing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky exter- nal object. Sartre, who must take the credit for this elegant analysis, writes:
in one sense it is like the supreme docility of the pos- sessed, the fidelity of a dog who gives himself even when one does not want him any longer, and in another sense there is underneath this docility a surreptitious appro- priation of the possessor by the possessed. 1
So the quality of being honeyed - and this is why this epi- thet can be used to symbolise an entire pattern of human behaviour - can only be understood in the light of the dia- logue between me as an embodied subject and the external object which bears this quality. The only definition of this quality is a human definition.
Viewed in this way, every quality is related to qualities associated with other senses. Honey is sugary. Yet sugariness in the realm of taste, 'an indelible softness that lingers in the mouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing', constitutes the same sticky presence as honey in the realm of
61
touch. 2 To say that honey is viscous is another way of saying that it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationship between us and the object or to indicate that we are moved or compelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a partic- ular way of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subject who stands before us. Honey is a particular way the world has of acting on me and my body. And this is why its various attributes do not simply stand side by side but are identical insofar as they all reveal the same way of being or behaving on the part of the honey. The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Ce? zanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees. 3 In a similar vein, Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that each attribute 'reveals the being' of the object:
The lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its shape and its color to what may be called the alimen- tary intuition . . . . The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish
sensory objects
color, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others. 4
The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolises or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions which are either favourable or unfavourable. This is why people's tastes, character, and the attitude they adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround them- selves, their preferences for certain colours or the places where they like to go for walks. Claudel claims that the Chinese build rock gardens in which everything is entirely bare and dry. 5 This mineralisation of their surroundings must be inter- preted as a rejection of the damp of life, as though expressing a preference for death. The objects which haunt our dreams are meaningful in the same way. Our relationship with things is not a distant one: each speaks to our body and to the way we live. They are clothed in human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely they dwell within us as emblems of forms of life we either love or hate. Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it. To use the language of psychoanalysis, things are
63
complexes. This is what Ce? zanne meant when he spoke of the particular 'halo' of things which it is the task of painting to capture.
This is also the message of the contemporary poet Francis Ponge, whose work I shall now offer by way of example. In a study devoted to him, Sartre wrote that,
Things lived in him for many years. They populated him, they carpeted the furthest recesses of his memory. They were present within him . . . and what he is trying to do now is much more to pluck these monstrous slithering flowers from his inner depths and render them than to fix their qualities on the basis of minute observations. 6
And indeed the essence of water, for example, and of all the elements lies less in their observable properties than in what they say to us. This is what Ponge says of water:
Water is colourless and glistening, formless and cool, passive and determined in its single vice: gravity. With exceptional means at its disposal to gratify the vice: cir- cumvention, perforation, infiltration, erosion.
The vice plays an inner role as well: water endlessly ravels in upon itself, constantly refuses to assume any
sensory objects
form, tends only to self-humiliation, prostrating itself, all but a corpse, like the monks of some orders. [. . . ]
You might almost say that water is insane, given this obsession, this fixation, the hysterical need to obey its gravity alone. [. . . ]
By definition, LIQUID is what seeks to obey gravity rather than maintain its form, forgoes all form to obey its gravity. And loses all bearing because of this fixation, these unhealthy qualms. [. . . ]
Water's anxiety: sensitive to the slightest change of incline. Leaping downstairs two steps at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, returning the moment we call it back by tilting the slope this way. 7
The same sort of analysis, extended to take in all the ele- ments, is to be found in the series of works by Gaston Bachelard on air, water, fire and earth. 8 He shows how each element is home to a certain kind of individual of a particu- lar kind, how it constitutes the dominant theme in their dreams and forms the privileged medium of the imagination which lends direction to their life; he shows how it is the sacrament of nature which gives them strength and happiness. These studies have all grown out of the surrealist experiment which, as early as thirty years ago, sought in the objects around
65
us and above all in the found objects to which, on occasions, we become uniquely attached, what Andre? Breton called the 'catalysts of desire': the place where human desire manifests itself, or 'crystallises'. 9
So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intel- lect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes. We shall have occasion to return to this point when, in conclusion, we try to establish how our view of the place of human beings in the world has changed over the course of these lectures.
sensory objects
LECTURE 4
Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life
In the first three lectures, we argued with respect to science, painting and philosophy that the transition from classical to modern was marked by what might be thought of as a reawak- ening of the world of perception. We are once more learning to see the world around us, the same world which we had turned away from in the conviction that our senses had noth- ing worthwhile to tell us, sure as we were that only strictly objective knowledge was worth holding onto. We are redis- covering our interest in the space in which we are situated. Though we see it only from a limited perspective - our per- spective - this space is nevertheless where we reside and we relate to it through our bodies. We are rediscovering in every object a certain style of being that makes it a mirror of human modes of behaviour. So the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying to master an object
69
or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly) but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in which every object displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze.
Yet we are not alone in this transfigured world. In fact, this world is not just open to other human beings but also to ani- mals, children, primitive peoples and madmen who dwell in it after their own fashion; they too coexist in this world. Today we shall see that the rediscovery of the world of perception allows us to find greater meaning and interest in these extreme or aberrant forms of life and consciousness. So much so that the whole spectacle that is the world and human life itself takes on new meaning as a result.
It is well known that classical thought has little time for ani- mals, children, primitive people and madmen. You will recall that Descartes saw animals as no more than collections of wheels, levers and springs1 - in effect, as machines. Those clas- sical thinkers who did not view animals as machines saw them instead as prototypes of human beings: many entomologists were all too keen to project onto animals the principal charac- teristics of human existence. For many years, our knowledge of
animal life
children and the sick was held back, kept at a rudimentary stage, by the same assumptions: the questions which the doctor or researcher asked of them were the questions of an adult or a healthy person. Little attempt was made to understand the way that they themselves lived; instead, the emphasis fell on trying to measure how far their efforts fell short of what the average adult or healthy person was capable of accomplishing. As for primitive people, they were either looked to for a model of a more attractive form of civilisation, or else, as in Voltaire's Essay on Morals, their customs and beliefs were seen as no more than a series of inexplicable absurdities. 2 Which all goes to sug- gest that classical thought was caught in a dilemma: either the being that stands before us may be likened to a human being, in which case it can be given, by analogy, the usual human attrib- utes of the healthy adult. Alternatively, it is no more than a blind mechanism - living chaos - in which case meaning cannot possibly be ascribed to its behaviour.
But why were so many classical authors indifferent to ani- mals, children, madmen and primitive peoples? Because they believed that there is such a thing as a fully-formed man whose vocation it is to be 'lord and master' of nature, as Descartes put it. 3 Such a man can accordingly, in principle, see through to the very being of things and establish a sovereign knowl- edge; he can decipher the meaning of every phenomenon (not
71
just those of nature in its physical aspect but also those of human society and history) and explain them by reference to their causes. Ultimately, such a man can locate the particular bodily flaw in the child, primitive, madman or animal, that accounts for the abnormalities which keep them from the truth. For classical thinkers, this is a question of divine law: for they either see human reason as a reflection of the creator's reason, or, even if they have entirely turned their back on the- ology, they are not alone in continuing to assume that there is an underlying harmony between human reason and the essence of things. From this standpoint, the abnormalities mentioned above can at best be accorded the status of psychological curiosities and consigned condescendingly to a quiet corner of 'normal' sociology and psychology.
Yet it is precisely this conviction, or rather this dogmatic assumption, that science and philosophy of a more mature kind have called into question. In the case of children, primi- tive people, the sick, or more so still, animals, the world which they occupy - insofar as we can reconstruct it from the way they behave - is certainly not a coherent system. By contrast, that of the healthy, civilised, adult human being strives for such coherence. Yet the crucial point here is that he does not attain this coherence: it remains an idea, or limit, which he never actually manages to reach. It follows that the 'normal'
animal life
person must remain open to these abnormalities of which he is never entirely exempt himself; he must take the trouble to understand them. He is invited to look at himself without indulgence, to rediscover within himself the whole host of fantasies, dreams, patterns of magical behaviour and obscure phenomena which remain all-powerful in shaping both his private and public life and his relationships with other people. These leave his knowledge of the natural world riddled with gaps, which is how poetry creeps in. Adult thought, normal and civilised, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought, but only on one condition. It must not masquerade as divine law, but rather should measure itself more honestly, against the darkness and difficulty of human life and without losing sight of the irrational roots of this life. Finally, reason must acknowledge that its world is also unfinished and should not pretend to have overcome that which it has managed simply to conceal. It should not view as beyond challenge the one form of civilisation and knowledge which it is its highest duty to contest.
It is in this spirit that modern art and philosophy have come to reexamine, with renewed interest, those forms of existence which are the most distant from our own. For they bring to light the movement by which all living things, ourselves included, endeavour to give shape to a world that has not been
73
preordained to accommodate our attempts to think it and act upon it. Classical rationalism allowed no middle ground between matter and intellect and ranked living beings without intelligence alongside mere machines; it consigned the very notion of life to the category of confused ideas. Psychologists working today, by contrast, have shown us that there is such a thing as a perception of life and they have tried to describe the various forms this takes. Last year, in an engaging work on the perception of movement, Albert Michotte from Louvain demonstrated that, if lines of light move in certain ways on a screen, they evoke in us, without fail, an impression of living movement. 4 If, for example, two parallel vertical lines are moving further apart and one continues on its course while the other changes direction and returns to its starting position, we cannot help but feel we are witnessing a crawling movement, even though the figure before our eyes looks nothing like a caterpillar and could not have recalled the memory of one. In this instance it is the very structure of the movement that may be interpreted as a 'living' movement. At every moment, the observed movement of the lines appears to be part of the sequence of actions by which one particular being, whose ghost we see on the screen, effects travel through space in furtherance of its own ends. The person watching this 'crawling' will think they see a virtual substance, a sort of fictitious protoplasm,
animal life
flow from the centre of the 'body' to the mobile extremities which it projects ahead of itself. Thus in spite of what mecha- nistic biology might suggest, the world we live in is not made up only of things and space: some of these parcels of matter, which we call living beings, proceed to trace in their environ- ment, by the way they act or behave, their very own vision of things. We will only see this if we lend our attention to the spectacle of the animal world, if we are prepared to live along- side the world of animals instead of rashly denying it any kind of interiority.
In experiments conducted as long as twenty years ago, the German psychologist Ko? hler tried to sketch the structure of the chimpanzee's universe. 5 He rightly observed that the origi- nality of the animal world will remain hidden to us for as long as we continue (as in many classical experiments) to set it tasks that are not its own. The behaviour of a dog may well seem absurd and mechanical if we set it the task of opening a lock or working a lever. Yet this does not mean that if we consider the animal as it lives spontaneously and confronts the questions which lie before it, we will not find that it treats its surroundings in a manner consistent with the laws of a sort of nai? ve physics and grasps certain relationships to exploit them in pursuit of its own particular goals and, finally, that it works upon its environ- mental influences in a way that is characteristic of its species.
75
Centred on the animal is what might be called a process of 'giving shape' to the world; the animal, moreover, has a partic- ular pattern of behaviour. Because it proceeds unsteadily, by trial and error, and has at best a meagre capacity to accumulate knowledge, it displays very clearly the struggle involved in exist- ing in a world into which it has been thrown, a world to which it has no key. In so doing, it reminds us, above all, of our fail- ures and our limitations. It is for all these reasons that the life of animals plays such an important role in the dreams of prim- itive peoples, as indeed it does in the secret reveries of our inner life. Freud has shown that the animal mythology of prim- itive peoples is reborn in young children of every generation, that the child pictures itself, its parents and the conflicts it has with them in the animals it encounters. Thus in the dreams of Little Hans, the horse comes to embody as unchallengeable a malefic power as the animals sacred to primitive peoples. 6 In his study of Lautre? amont, Bachelard observes that there are 185 animal names in the 247 pages of the Chants de Maldoror. 7 Even a poet such as Claudel, who as a Christian might be tempted to underestimate all that is not human, draws inspiration from the Book of Job and exhorts us to 'ask the animals':
There is a Japanese engraving which shows an Elephant surrounded by blind men. They have been sent as a
animal life
delegation to identify this monumental intrusion into our human affairs. The first of them has put his arms round one of the feet and declares, 'It's a tree'. 'True', says the second, who has found the ears, 'and here are the leaves'. 'Absolutely not', says the third, who is running his hand down the animal's side, 'it's a wall'. The fourth, who has grabbed hold of the tail, cries, 'It's a piece of string'. 'It's a pipe', retorts the fifth, who has hold of the trunk . . . .
The same is true of our Holy Mother Church, which shares the weight, gait and carefree disposition of this sacred animal, not to mention the two-fold protection of pure ivory which protrudes from its mouth. I see the Church with its four legs planted in the waters that descend straight from paradise; with its trunk, it draws them up to deliver a copious baptism along the entire length of its enormous body. 8
How amusing to think of Descartes or Malebranche reading this passage and finding that the animals which they saw as mechanisms have become trusted bearers of the emblems of the human and the superhuman. Yet, as we shall see in the next lecture, this rehabilitation of the animal world requires a sar- donic form of humanism and a particular kind of humour which lay well beyond their reach.
77
LECTURE 5
Man Seen from the Outside
Thus far we have tried to look at space and the things which inhabit it, both animate and inanimate, through the eyes of perception and to forget what we find 'entirely nat- ural' about them simply because they have been familiar to us for too long; we have endeavoured to consider them as they are experienced nai? vely. We must now try to do the same with respect to human beings themselves. Over the last thirty or more centuries, many things have undoubtedly been said about human beings. Yet these were often the products of reflection. What I mean by this is that Descartes, when he wanted to know what man is, set about subjecting the ideas which occurred to him to critical examination. One example would be the idea of mind and body. He purified these ideas; he rid them of all trace of obscurity and confusion. Whereas most people understand spirit to be something like very subtle
81
matter, or smoke, or breath (consistent, in this regard, with primitive peoples), Descartes showed admirably that spirit is something altogether different. He demonstrated that its nature is quite other, for smoke and breath are, in their way, things - even if very subtle ones - whereas spirit is not a thing at all, does not occupy space, is not spread over a certain extension as all things are, but on the contrary is entirely com- pact and indivisible - a being - the essence of which is none other than to commune with, collect and know itself. This gave rise to the concepts of pure spirit and pure matter, or things. Yet it is clear that I can only find and, so to speak, touch this absolutely pure spirit in myself. Other human beings are never pure spirit for me: I only know them through their glances, their gestures, their speech - in other words, through their bodies. Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words. These I remember and they go to make up my sketch of their moral character. Yet I cannot detach some- one from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. If I see them for even a moment, I can reconnect with them instantaneously and far more thoroughly than if I were to go through a list of everything I know about them from experience or hearsay. Another person, for us, is a spirit which
man seen from the outside
haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities. So the process of looking at human beings from the outside - that is, at other people - leads us to reassess a number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body.
Let us see what becomes of this distinction by examining a particular case. Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shout- ing. But where is this anger? People will say that it is in the mind of my interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent's looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some other- worldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth. It is in the space between him and me that it unfolds. I would accept that the sense in which the place of my opponent's anger is on his face is not the same as that in which, in a moment, tears may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may harden on his
83
mouth. Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice . . . And if, for one moment, I step out of my own view- point as an external observer of this anger and try to remember what it is like for me when I am angry, I am forced to admit that it is no different. When I reflect on my own anger, I do not come across any element that might be sepa- rated or, so to speak, unstuck, from my own body.
When I recall being angry at Paul, it does not strike me that this anger was in my mind or among my thoughts but rather, that it lay entirely between me who was doing the shouting and that odious Paul who just sat there calmly and listened with an ironic air. My anger is nothing less than an attempt to destroy Paul, one which will remain verbal if I am a pacifist and even courteous, if I am polite. The location of my anger, however, is in the space we both share - in which we exchange argu- ments instead of blows - and not in me. It is only afterwards, when I reflect on what anger is and remark that it involves a certain (negative) evaluation of another person, that I come to the following conclusion. Anger is, after all, a thought; to be angry is to think that the other person is odious and this thought, like all others, cannot - as Descartes has shown - reside in any piece of matter and therefore must belong to the mind. I may very well think in such terms but as soon as I turn
man seen from the outside
back to the real experience of anger, which was the spur to my reflections, I am forced to acknowledge that this anger does not lie beyond my body, directing it from without, but rather that in some inexplicable sense it is bound up with my body.
There is something of everything in Descartes, as in the work of all great philosophers. And so it is that he who draws an absolute distinction between mind and body also manages to say that the soul is not simply like the pilot of a ship, the commander-in-chief of the body, but rather that it is very closely united to the body, so much so that it suffers with it, as is clear to me when I say that I have toothache. 1
Yet this union of mind and body can barely be spoken of, according to Descartes; it can only be experienced in everyday life. As far as Descartes is concerned, whatever the facts of the matter may be - and even if we live what he himself calls a true me? lange of mind and body - this does not take away my right to distinguish absolutely between parts that are united in my experience. I can still posit, by rights, an absolute distinc- tion between mind and body which is denied by the fact of their union. I can still define man without reference to the immediate structure of his being and as he appears to himself in reflection: as thought which is somehow strangely joined to a bodily apparatus without either the mechanics of the body or the transparency of thought being compromised by their
85
being mixed together in this way. It could be said that even Descartes' most faithful disciples have always asked themselves exactly how it is that our reflection, which concerns the human being as given, can free itself from the conditions to which it appears to have been subject at the outset.
When they address this issue, today's psychologists empha- sise the fact that we do not start out in life immersed in our own self-consciousness (or even in that of things) but rather from the experience of other people. I never become aware of my own existence until I have already made contact with others; my reflection always brings me back to myself, yet for all that it owes much to my contacts with other people. An infant of a few months is already very good at differentiating between goodwill, anger and fear on the face of another person, at a stage when he could not have learned the physical signs of these emotions by examining his own body. This is because the body of the other and its various movements appear to the infant to have been invested from the outset with an emo- tional significance; this is because the infant learns to know mind as visible behaviour just as much as in familiarity with its own mind. The adult himself will discover in his own life what his culture, education, books and tradition have taught him to find there. The contact I make with myself is always mediated by a particular culture, or at least by a language that
man seen from the outside
we have received from without and which guides us in our self-knowledge. So while ultimately the notion of a pure self, the mind, devoid of instruments and history, may well be useful as a critical ideal to set in opposition to the notion of a mere influx of ideas from the surrounding environment, such a self only develops into a free agent by way of the instrument of language and by taking part in the life of the world.
This leaves us with a very different view of the human being and humanity from the one with which we began. Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind with- out already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dis- pute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of
87
being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are contin- ually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inher- ited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give up on them.
It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it has not necessarily been called to succeed, even in relative terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety and a spur to courage. In fact, these are one and the same thing. For anxiety is vigilance, it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate, then neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their behaviour and their relation- ships that very same spark which makes us recognise them,
man seen from the outside
which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate. It is simply that this modern form of humanism has lost the dogmatic tone of ear- lier centuries. We should no longer pride ourselves in being a community of pure spirits; let us look instead at the real rela- tionships between people in our societies. For the most part, these are master-slave relationships. We should not find excuses for ourselves in our good intentions; let us see what becomes of these once they have escaped from inside us. There is something healthy about this unfamiliar gaze we are suggesting should be brought to bear on our species. Voltaire once imagined, in Microme? gas, that a giant from another planet was confronted with our customs. These could only seem derisory to an intel- ligence higher than our own. Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high, which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below. Kafka imagines a man who has metamor- phosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect. 2 Kafka also imagines a dog that investigates the human world which it rubs up against. 3 He describes societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. In our day, Maurice Blanchot describes a city held fast in the grip of its laws: everyone is so compliant that all lose the sense of their difference and that of others. 4 To look at human beings from the outside is what
89
makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another.
man seen from the outside
LECTURE 6
Art and the World of Perception
The preceding lectures have tried to bring the world of perception back to life, this world hidden from us beneath all the sediment of knowledge and social living. In so doing, we have often had recourse to painting because paint- ing thrusts us once again into the presence of the world of lived experience. In the work of Ce? zanne, Juan Gris, Braque and Picasso, in different ways, we encounter objects - lemons, mandolins, bunches of grapes, pouches of tobacco - that do not pass quickly before our eyes in the guise of objects we 'know well' but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it, convey to it in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance, the very mode of their material existence and which, so to speak, stand 'bleeding' before us. This was how painting led us back to a vision of things themselves. Reciprocally, a philosophy of perception which aspires to learn to see the
93
world once more, as if in an exchange of services rendered, will restore painting and the arts in general to their rightful place, will allow them to recover their dignity and will incline us to accept them in their purity.
What then have we learned from our examination of the world of perception? We have discovered that it is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing. Of course, when I give a dictionary definition of a table - a horizontal flat surface supported by three or four legs, which can be used for eating off, reading a book on, and so forth - I may feel that I have got, as it were, to the essence of the table; I withdraw my interest from all the accidental properties which may accompany that essence, such as the shape of the feet, the style of the moulding and so on. In this example, however, I am not perceiving but rather defining. By contrast, when I perceive a table, I do not withdraw my interest from the par- ticular way it has of performing its function as a table: how is the top supported, for this is different with every table? What interests me is the unique movement from the feet to the table top with which it resists gravity; this is what makes each table different from the next. No detail is insignificant: the grain, the shape of the feet, the colour and age of the wood, as well as the scratches or graffiti which show that age. The meaning, 'table', will only interest me insofar as it arises out of all the
art and the world of perception
'details' which embody its present mode of being. If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details, which reveal it to me. Thus the work of art resem- bles the object of perception: its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyse it, however valuable that may be afterwards as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience.
This is not immediately all that obvious. In most cases, a painting, so it is said, represents objects; a portrait often rep- resents someone whose name we are given by the painter. Is painting not, after all, comparable to the arrows in stations which serve no other purpose than to point us towards the exit or the platform? Indeed, does it not resemble those exact pho- tographic reproductions which retain all the essential features of the object and allow us to examine that object in its absence? If this were the case then the purpose of painting as such would be to serve as a trompe l'oeil and its meaning would lie entirely beyond the canvas, in the objects it signifies: in its subject. Yet all painting of any worth has come into being in opposition to precisely this conception of its role, one which painters of the last one hundred years at least have quite con- sciously resisted. According to Joachim Gasquet, Ce? zanne said
95
that the painter takes hold of a fragment of nature and 'makes it entirely painting'. 1 Braque put it even more clearly when, thirty years ago, he wrote that painting does not strive to 'reconstitute an anecdote' but rather 'to constitute a pictorial event'. 2 So painting does not imitate the world but is a world of its own. This means that, in our encounter with a painting, at no stage are we sent back to the natural object; similarly, when we experience a portrait aesthetically, its 'resemblance' to the model is of no importance (those who commission por- traits often want them to be good likenesses, but this is because their vanity is greater than their love of painting). It would take us too long to investigate here why, under the cir- cumstances, painters in general tend not to fabricate the kind of non-existent poetic objects that some have produced on occasion. Suffice it to say that even when painters are working with real objects, their aim is never to evoke the object itself, but to create on the canvas a spectacle which is sufficient unto itself. The distinction which is often made between the subject of the painting and the manner of the painter is untenable because, as far as aesthetic experience is concerned, the subject consists entirely in the manner in which the grape, pipe or pouch of tobacco is constituted by the painter on the canvas. Does this mean that, in art, form alone matters and not what is said? Not in the slightest. I mean that form and content -
art and the world of perception
what is said and the way in which it is said - cannot exist sep- arately from one another. Indeed I am doing no more than taking note of an obvious truth: if I can get a sufficiently clear idea of an object or tool that I have never seen from a description of its function, at least in general terms, by con- trast, no analysis - however good - can give me even the vaguest idea of a painting I have never seen in any form. So in the presence of a painting, it is not a question of my making ever more references to the subject, to the historical event (if there is one) which gave rise to the painting. Rather, as in the perception of things themselves, it is a matter of contemplat- ing, of perceiving the painting by way of the silent signals which come at me from its every part, which emanate from the traces of paint set down on the canvas, until such time as all, in the absence of reason and discourse, come to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary, even if one is unable to give a rational explanation of this.
Cinema has yet to provide us with many films that are works of art from start to finish: its infatuation with stars, the sensa- tionalism of the zoom, the twists and turns of plot and the intrusion of pretty pictures and witty dialogue, are all tempting pitfalls for films which chase success and, in so doing, eschew properly cinematic means of expression. While these reasons
97
do explain why, hitherto, there have scarcely been any films that are entirely filmic, we can nevertheless get a glimpse of how such a work would look. We shall see that, like all works of art, such a film would also be something that one would perceive. Beauty, when it manifests itself in cinematography, lies not in the story itself, which could quite easily be recounted in prose and still less in the ideas which this story may evoke; nor indeed does it lie in the tics, mannerisms and devices that serve to iden- tify a director, for their influence is no more decisive than that of a writer's favourite words. What matters is the selection of episodes to be represented and, in each one, the choice of shots that will be featured in the film, the length of time allotted to these elements, the order in which they are to be presented, the sound or words with which they are or are not to be accompa- nied. Taken together, all these factors contribute to form a particular overall cinematographical rhythm. When cinema has become a longer-established facet of our experience, we will be able to devise a sort of logic, grammar, or stylistics, of the cinema which will tell us - on the basis of our knowledge of existing works - the precise weight to accord to each element in a typical structural grouping, in order that it can take its place there harmoniously. But as is the case with all such rule-books where art is concerned, it could only ever serve to make explicit the relationships which already exist in successful completed
art and the world of perception
works and to inspire other reasonable attempts. So the cre- ators of the future, just like those of today, will still have to discover new relationships without being guided to them; then, as now, the viewer will experience the unity and necessity of the temporal progression in a work of beauty without ever form- ing a clear idea of it. Then, as now, this viewer will be left not with a store of recipes but a radiant image, a particular rhythm. Then, as now, the way we experience works of cinema will be through perception.
Music offers too straightforward an example and, for this reason, we shall not dwell on it for long here. It is quite clearly impossible in this case to make out that the work of art refers to anything other than itself; programmatic music, which describes a storm or even an occasion of sadness, is the exception. Here we are unquestionably in the presence of an art form that does not speak. And yet a piece of music comes very close to being no more than a medley of sound sensations: from among these sounds we discern the appear- ance of a phrase and, as phrase follows phrase, a whole and, finally, as Proust put it, a world. This world exists in the uni- verse of possible music, whether in the district of Debussy or the kingdom of Bach. All I have to do here is listen with- out soul-searching, ignoring my memories and feelings and indeed the composer of the work, to listen just as perception
99
looks at the things themselves without bringing my dreams into the picture.
Finally, something similar may be said of literature, even though the analogy has often been disputed because literature uses words which also serve to designate natural objects. Many years have already elapsed since Mallarme? made a distinction between the poetic use of language and everyday chatter. 3 The chatterer only names things sufficiently to point them out quickly, to indicate 'what he is talking about'. The poet, by con- trast, according to Mallarme? , replaces the usual way of referring to things, which presents them as 'well known', with a mode of expression that describes the essential structure of the thing and accordingly forces us to enter into that thing. To speak of the world poetically is almost to remain silent, if speech is under- stood in everyday terms, and Mallarme? wrote notoriously little. Yet in the little he left us, we at least find the most acute sense of a poetry which is carried entirely by language and which refers neither directly to the world as such, nor to prosaic truth, nor to reason. This is consequently poetry as a creation of lan- guage, one which cannot be fully translated into ideas. It is because poetry's first function, as Henri Bremond4 and Paul Vale? ry5 would later remark, is not to designate ideas, to signify, that Mallarme? and subsequently Vale? ry6 always refused either to endorse or reject prosaic commentaries on their poems. In
art and the world of perception
the poem, as in the perceived object, form cannot be separated from content; what is being presented cannot be separated from the way in which it presents itself to the gaze. And some of today's authors, such as Maurice Blanchot,7 have been asking themselves whether what Mallarme? said of poetry should not be extended to the novel and literature in general: a successful novel would thus consist not in a succession of ideas or theses but would have the same kind of existence as an object of the senses or a thing in motion, which must be perceived in its tem- poral progression by embracing its particular rhythm and which leaves in the memory not a set of ideas but rather the emblem and the monogram of those ideas.
If these observations are correct and if we have succeeded in showing that a work of art is something we perceive, the philo- sophy of perception is thereby freed at a stroke from certain misunderstandings that might be held against it as objections. The world of perception consists not just of all natural objects but also of paintings, pieces of music, books and all that the Germans call the 'world of culture'. Far from having narrowed our horizons by immersing ourselves in the world of percep- tion, far from being limited to water and stone, we have rediscovered a way of looking at works of art, language and cul- ture, which respects their autonomy and their original richness.
101
LECTURE 7
Classical World, Modern World
In this, the last lecture, I would like to assess the develop- ment of modern thought as I have characterised it, more or less well, in the preceding ones. Could the return to the world of perception - which we have observed in the work of painters and writers alike, as well as that of certain philoso- phers and the pioneers of modern physics - when compared with the ambitions of classical science, art and philosophy, be seen as evidence of decline? On the one hand we have the self-assurance of a system of thought which is unfailingly convinced of its mission both to know nature through and through and to purge its knowledge of man of all mystery. In modernity, on the other hand, this rational universe which is open in principle to human endeavours to know it and act within it, is replaced by a kind of knowledge and art that is characterised by difficulty and reserve, one full of restrictions.
105
In modernity, we have a representation of the world which excludes neither fissures nor lacunae, a form of action which is unsure of itself, or, at any rate, no longer blithely assumes it can obtain universal assent.
We must indeed acknowledge that, in the modern world (and I have already apologised once and for all for the degree of vagueness which this sort of expression entails), we lack the dogmatism and self-assurance of the classical world-view, whether in art, knowledge or action. Modern thought dis- plays the dual characteristics of being unfinished and ambiguous: this allows us, should we be so inclined, to speak of decline and decadence. We think of all scientific work as provisional and approximate, whereas Descartes believed he could deduce, once and for all time, the laws governing the collision of bodies from the divine attributes. 1 Museums are full of works to which it seems that nothing could be added, whereas our painters display works to the public which some- times seem to be no more than preparatory sketches. And these are the very works that get subjected to interminable analysis because their meaning is not univocal. Look at the number of studies of Rimbaud's silence after publishing the one and only book that he personally was to offer to his con- temporaries. By contrast, how few problems seem to arise from Racine's silence after Phe`dre! It seems as though today's artists
classical world, modern world
seek to add to the enigmas which already surround them, to send yet more sparks flying. Even in the case of an author such as Proust, who in many respects is as clear as his classical predecessors, the world he describes for us is neither complete nor univocal. In Andromaque, we know that Hermione loves Pyrrhus and, at the very moment when she sends Oreste to kill him, no member of the audience is left in any doubt: the ambiguity of love and hate, which makes the lover prefer to lose the one she loves rather than leave him to another, is not fundamental. For it is quite clear that, if Pyrrhus were to turn his attentions from Andromaque to Hermione, she would be all sweetness and light and fall at his feet. By contrast, who can say whether the narrator of Proust's work really loves Albertine? 2 He observes that he only wants to be close to her when she is moving away from him and concludes from this that he does not love her. Then once she has disappeared, when he hears of her death and is faced with the certainty of a departure with no hope of return, he thinks that he both needed and loved her. 3 But the reader continues to wonder whether, if Albertine were restored to him, as he sometimes dreams is the case, Proust's narrator would still love her? Must we conclude that love is this jealous need, or that there is never love but only jealousy and the feeling of being excluded? These questions do not arise from some probing analysis; it is
107
Proust himself who raises them. As far as he is concerned, they are constitutive of this thing called love. So the modern heart is intermittent and does not even succeed in knowing itself. In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added. Where human beings are concerned, rather than merely nature, the unfinished quality to knowledge, which is born of the complexity of its objects, is redoubled by a principle of incompletion. For example, one philosopher demonstrated ten years ago that absolutely objective historical knowledge is inconceivable, because the act of interpreting the past and placing it in perspective is conditioned by the moral and political choices which the historian has made in his own life - and vice versa. Trapped in this circle, human exis- tence can never abstract from itself in order to gain access to the naked truth; it merely has the capacity to progress towards the objective and does not possess objectivity in fully- fledged form.
Leaving the sphere of knowledge for that of life and action, we find modern man coming to grips with ambiguities which are perhaps more striking still. There is no longer a single word in our political vocabulary that has not been used to refer to the most different, even opposed, real situations:
classical world, modern world
consider freedom, socialism, democracy, reconstruction, ren- aissance, union rights. The most widely divergent of today's largest political parties have all at some time claimed each of these for their own. And this is not a ruse on the part of their leaders: the ruse lies in the things themselves. In one sense it is true that there is no sympathy for socialism in America and that, if socialism involves or implies radical reform of rela- tions of property ownership, then there is no chance whatsoever of its being able to settle under the aegis of that country; rather, subject to certain conditions, it can draw support from the Soviet side. Yet it is also true that the socio- economic system which operates in the USSR - with its extreme social differences and its use of forced labour - nei- ther conforms to our understanding of what a socialist regime is nor could develop, of its own accord, in order to so conform. Lastly, it is true that a form of socialism which did not seek support from beyond French national borders would be impossible and, therefore, would lack human meaning. We truly are in what Hegel called a diplomatic situation, or in other words a situation in which words have (at least) two dif- ferent meanings and things do not allow themselves to be named by a single word.
Yet if ambiguity and incompletion are indeed written into the very fabric of our collective existence rather than just the
109
works of intellectuals, then to seek the restoration of reason (in the sense in which one speaks of restoration in the context of the regime of 1815), would be a derisory response. We can and must analyse the ambiguities of our time and strive to plot a course through them which we can follow truthfully and in all conscience. But we know too much about the rationalism of our fathers to simply readopt it wholesale. We know, for example, that liberal regimes should not be taken at their word, that they may well have equality and fraternity as their motto without this being reflected in their actions; we know that noble ideologies can sometimes be convenient excuses. Moreover, we know that in order to create equality, it is not enough merely to transfer ownership of the means of production to the state. Thus neither our examination of socialism nor our analysis of liberalism can be free of reser- vations and limitations and we shall remain in this precarious position for as long as the course of events and human con- sciousness continue to offer no possibility of moving beyond these two ambiguous systems. To decide the matter from on high by opting for one of the two, on the pretext that reason can get to the bottom of things, would be to show that we care less about reason as it operates - reason in action - than the spectre of a reason which hides its confusion under a peremptory tone. To love reason as Julien Benda does - to
classical world, modern world
crave the eternal when we are beginning to know ever more about the reality of our time, to want the clearest concept when the thing itself is ambiguous - this is to prefer the word 'reason' to the exercise of reason. To restore is never to reestab- lish; it is to mask.
There is more. We have to wonder whether the image of the classical world with which we are often presented is any more than a legend. Was that world also acquainted with the lack of completion and the ambiguity in which we live? Was it merely content to refuse official recognition to their exis- tence? If so, then far from being evidence of decline, would not the uncertainty of our culture rather be the most acute and honest awareness of something that has always been true and accordingly something we have gained? When we are told that the classical work is a finished one, we should remind ourselves that Leonardo da Vinci and many others left unfin- ished works, that Balzac thought there was, in fact, no way of saying when a work of art has reached the fabled point of maturity: he even went as far as to admit that the artist's labours, which could always continue, are only ever inter- rupted in order to leave the work with a little clarity. We should also remind ourselves that Ce? zanne, who thought of his entire oeuvre as an approximation of what he had been looking for, nevertheless leaves us, on more than one occasion,
111
with a feeling of completion or perfection. Perhaps our feel- ing that some paintings possess an unsurpassable plenitude is a retrospective illusion: the work is at too great a distance from us, is too different from us to enable us to take hold of it once more and pursue it. Perhaps the painter responsible saw it as merely a first attempt or indeed as a failure. I spoke a moment ago of the ambiguities inherent in our political sit- uation as if no past political situation, when in the present, ever bore the traces of contradiction, or enigma, which might make it comparable with our own. Consider, for example, the French Revolution and even the Russian Revolution in its 'classical' phase, until the death of Lenin. If this is true, then 'modern' consciousness has not discovered a modern truth but rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible - supremely acute - in today's world. This greater clarity of vision and this more complete experience of contestation are not the products of a humanity that is debasing itself but rather of a human race which no longer lives, as it did for a long time, on a few archipelagos and promontories. Human life confronts itself from one side of the globe to the other and speaks to itself in its entirety through books and culture. In the short term, the loss in quality is evident, yet this cannot be remedied by restoring the narrow humanism of the classi- cal period. The truth of the matter is that the problem we
classical world, modern world
face is how, in our time and with our own experience, to do what was done in the classical period, just as the problem facing Ce? zanne was, as he put it, how 'to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums'. 4
113
Notes
FOREWORD
1 Merleau-Ponty's term throughout for these talks is causeries, which con- notes a communication serious in subject-matter but less formal in tone than a lecture. (Translator's note)
INTRODUCTION
1 Phe? nome? nologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); translated by Colin Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962). Page ref- erences are to the new 2002 edition of this English translation.
2 Sartre's account of his childhood is set out in his autobiographical sketch Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964; trans. I. Clephane, Words, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Camus tells his very different story in his posthumously published incomplete novel Le Premier Homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994; trans. D. Hapgood, The First Man, London: Penguin, 1996).