No More Learning

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
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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
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.
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. What is important is 'scientific realism', the belief that the account of the structure of things and forces provided by physics and other sciences does indeed reveal to us things that are really there, even if we cannot observe them, and the further belief that reference to this structure is of fundamental importance when we seek to explain natural phenomena.
15
When Merleau-Ponty says that science offers us only 'approximate expressions' of physical events, it is not clear whether he would reject scientific realism thus understood. For the scientific realist will of course allow that the accounts of structure provided by a science typically involve many approximations and simplifications, especially since the details needed vary from context to context (e. g. sometimes it is important to distinguish between the different isotopes of a molecule, sometimes not). The general implication of Merleau-Ponty's discussion, however, is undoubtedly hostile to scientific realism since, in effect, he seeks to reverse the appli- cation of the appearance/reality distinction to the relationship between the perceived world and the world of science. Unlike Descartes he holds that the perceived world is the 'real' world, as compared with which the world of science is just an approx- imation, i. e. an appearance. It seems to me, however, that these alternatives are not exhaustive. One does better to combine sci- entific realism with an acknowledgement that natural science is far from complete, and thus that there are important aspects of reality which escape science, including those which are mani- fest within the perceived world. These latter aspects are likely to be of fundamental importance for our primary under- standing of things, just as those which are characteristic of the world of science are of fundamental importance when we
introduction
seek to explain natural phenomena. There can also be differ- ent priorities here, and it is simply not necessary to take sides in the way that Merleau-Ponty appears to in order to defend the importance of an inquiry into the structure of the per- ceived world.
Lecture 2: Exploring the World of Perception: Space
Merleau-Ponty begins his 'exploration' of the perceived world with a discussion of space, and his basic theme is a contrast between the 'classical' conception of space and that which actually informs the world as we perceive it. The classical con- ception of space is that of Newtonian physics, which relies on a conception of 'absolute' space within which physical objects have an absolute location at a time and can move about with- out any alteration of their intrinsic physical properties. 20 Merleau-Ponty associates this conception of space with that found in 'classical' art, the kind of painting whereby objects are depicted in accordance with the perspective they would present when viewed under a gaze directed at a point of the horizon, what Merleau-Ponty calls 'a gaze fixed at infinity'. Such paintings, Merleau-Ponty says, 'remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer'; Merleau-Ponty gives no examples but one can perhaps think here of the paintings of the early
17
Florentine Renaissance, or, in a French context, of the works of Nicholas Poussin.
Merleau-Ponty holds that this conception of space is mis- leading. In this context he is happy to begin by recruiting natural science to suggest that this conception of space does not even apply to the physical world. Merleau-Ponty is broadly right about this, though he gets the details wrong. It is not, as he suggests, the adoption of a non-Euclidean geometry that marks the downfall of the Newtonian conception of space, but the adoption by Einstein (in his general theory of relativ- ity) of the nineteenth-century Riemann-Clifford hypothesis that geometry and physics are interdependent, in that gravity just expresses the curvature of space which is determined by the local distribution of matter. But Merleau-Ponty gives most attention to painting, and in particular to the manner in which Ce? zanne attempts to capture the way in which visual experi- ence, through the distribution of colour, gives birth to the outline and shape of objects. Merleau-Ponty notes that in doing this Ce? zanne breaks with the traditional laws of per- spective, using instead local points of view that are not integrated into the classical 'gaze at infinity'. As such, accord- ing to Merleau-Ponty, Ce? zanne's paintings show us the structure of the visual world, in which not all objects are attended to at one time from one point of view; instead our
introduction
perceived world is structured by a plurality of overlapping perspectives within which different aspects are somehow seen together, as aspects of just one world.
Merleau-Ponty's choice here of Ce? zanne is characteristic. In Phenomenology of Perception he often alludes to Ce? zanne's work in order to illustrate his account of the way in which the visual world forms itself through our gaze. 21 One might be inclined to object that there is in fact a great deal more variety and com- plexity in the history of painting: Titian's use of space and colour, for example, does not fit within Merleau-Ponty's classi- cal paradigm, but it is also plainly not of the same kind as Ce? zanne's. But Merleau-Ponty is just using his comparison from the history of painting to illustrate a philosophical theme; he is not offering it as the key to a general account of the depiction of space within painting. So although the cases he discusses are far from exhaustive, the contrast he draws between Ce? zanne and classical art is, I think, fair enough for his purposes.
Merleau-Ponty concludes his discussion by introducing the perceptual constancies noted by the Gestalt psychologists, whereby the perceived size or shape of an object takes account of our implicit beliefs about its real size and shape; thus a tilted round plate normally looks round (and not oval), and the apparent dimensions of a person's feet when viewed from below do not match the real perspective that is captured by a
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photograph in which the feet look absurdly large. Merleau- Ponty connects this with the long-standing puzzle that the moon looks so much larger when it is on the horizon than when it is high in the night sky; somehow its apparent size when viewed on the horizon is affected by this context. Merleau-Ponty suggests that this can be explained by percep- tual constancies in the horizontal plane, but this cannot be the whole story. Still his general point is right: the space of the perceived world is not the unique space of a 'disembodied intellect', but, like physical space, has different regions which are structured by our expectations concerning the things which we find in them.
Lecture 3: Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects
Merleau-Ponty now turns to the things which fill the space of the perceived world. The view he opposes is one which regards these as substances which we experience in a variety of uncon- nected ways, and whose intrinsic properties have no essential relation to our experience of them. By contrast Merleau-Ponty holds that our experiences are interconnected and reveal to us real properties of the thing itself, which is much as it appears and not some hidden substance that lies beneath our experi- ence of its appearance.
introduction
Merleau-Ponty, following Sartre, brings out the intercon- nectedness of our experience of things with the examples of honey and lemon. These are both foods, and it is the familiar experience of eating them which gives rise to the tacit gustatory and tactile expectations that are inherent in ordinary visual experience, though it is when these expectations are disap- pointed, as they are by fake foods (e. g. plastic lemons), that the existence of these expectations is brought to our attention. Merleau-Ponty's main point, however, concerns the status of the properties manifest in ordinary experience. Because these properties, such as the sticky sweetness of honey, can be under- stood only in the context of our experience of them there has been a perennial temptation to regard them as superficial appearances, merely 'secondary' qualities which need to be backed up by intrinsic 'primary' qualities of things. This is a view which goes back to the Greek atomists, but was influen- tially revived by Descartes, Galileo and Locke. Against it, Merleau-Ponty holds that we have no good reason to down- grade the manifest properties of things even though their definition includes reference to our experience of them. In one way this is right: appearances can be entirely objective, and for that reason there is reason to regard them as appearances of real, genuine, properties, such as colour, taste and the like. But one can still hold that extrinsic properties of this kind presuppose
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intrinsic properties which explain why things appear as they do. Merleau-Ponty might regard this as merely a scientific hypoth- esis; but I suspect that it is rather more deeply embedded than that in our ordinary perceived world, since this includes a 'folk science' whereby we presume that it is possible to make sense of why things happen as they do.
Lecture 4: Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life
In the previous lecture Merleau-Ponty emphasised that the perceived world is a human world, a world of things whose character involves a relationship with the human beings who experience them. In this lecture he addresses an anxiety con- cerning this thesis: that this emphasis on humans implies that there is no proper place for the experiences of 'animals, chil- dren, primitive peoples and madmen'.
Merleau-Ponty here anticipates the attention that is now paid to voices that were for long excluded from official histo- ries and philosophies, though he does not recognise the need to include women in his list, and the category 'primitive people' is not one with which we can now feel comfortable. His claim is going to be that it is a characteristic of 'modern' thought, with its rediscovery of the perceived world, that it can accommodate these alien voices better than 'classical' thought did. According
introduction
to Merleau-Ponty classical thinkers (represented here by Descartes and Voltaire) take it that the only voice worth lis- tening to is that of an adult rational civilised human being (and, we might add, a male one), since it is the only voice that makes sense; the experiences of animals, children, primitive peoples and madmen can be summarily dismissed as nonsense. Descartes symbolised this exclusion of the experience of mad- ness when, at the start of his Meditations, he simply dismisses without argument the hypothesis that, for all he can tell, he is mad. But, it is worth adding, other philosophers of the classi- cal period were not so dismissive: Hume deliberately includes in his Treatise of Human Nature ironic comparisons between humans and animals - where the joke is on the humans.
What, however, of the ability of modern thought to make space for these alien voices? Merleau-Ponty's main claim is that where classical thought saw a sharp division between sense and nonsense, modern thought sees only a difference of degree, accentuated by recognition of the fact that adult life is prone to illness, prejudice and fantasy. Thus although there is still a hierarchy in Merleau-Ponty's position ('Adult thought, normal or civilized, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought'), he allows that there are insights in the alien experi- ences that classical thought excluded, insights which we can ourselves understand and use when we think of the ways in
23
which our own life has been disturbed by illness, childish fix- ations and other complexities that psychoanalysis has taught us to acknowledge. In the lecture Merleau-Ponty then turns to a brief discussion of animals and the status of their experience, but before commenting on this it is worth reflecting a little on Merleau-Ponty's discussion so far. The most striking point is his hierarchy, with its valuation of 'adult thought, normal or civilized'; for this contrasts very sharply with the romantic valuation of children (as in Wordsworth), of genius, which is often conceived as a form of madness, and of the 'noble savage'. I find it very odd that Merleau-Ponty does not address this line of thought, which will have been very familiar to his audience from Rousseau; perhaps the barbarisms of the Second World War led him to dismiss it. The other point to make is that in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty fre- quently draws on accounts of the disabilities of those with brain damage to develop his account of our preobjective bodily experience of the world. 22 So although he discusses the existential significance of these disabilities, the basic theme of his discussion is one of the continuity between the experience of the disabled and that of the normal, rather than the hier- archy emphasised here.
In the closing pages of this lecture Merleau-Ponty turns (as his title always suggested) to the case of animals. As ever he
introduction
begins by rejecting the Cartesian conception of them as mere machines; instead, drawing on the work of the Gestalt psy- chologist Wolfgang Ko? hler, he briefly sketches the way in which one might try to show how an animal 'gives shape' to its world. Merleau-Ponty had discussed this subject at greater length in The Structure of Behavior, and he shows there how his existential phenomenology, with its emphasis on preobjective perception and organised behaviour, can readily accommodate animal experience alongside that of human beings. 23 But he ends his lecture here by noting a different way in which ani- mals play a part in the spectrum of experiences he has been concerned to revive, through the symbolic role that animals often play in childish, primitive, and even religious thought.
Lecture 5: Man Seen from the Outside
Merleau-Ponty continues his exploration of the perceived world by turning to our understanding of other people. This was already a theme of the previous lecture; but what he is here concerned to discuss is the way in which we can integrate our understanding of others with our understanding of ourselves. He begins, as ever, with Descartes, who famously held that we understand ourselves best when, in self-conscious reflection, we grasp ourselves as just a stream of consciousness that is
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only contingently connected to a physical body located in physical space (in reading Merleau-Ponty's discussion of this, it is important to note that the translation here uses the two words 'mind' and 'spirit' to translate the single French word 'esprit' in order to capture the connotations of the French word as it occurs in different contexts in Merleau-Ponty's text). As Merleau-Ponty explains later, he thinks that there is something importantly right about Descartes' conception of ourselves. But first he explains why it is unsatisfactory as it stands.
He begins by discussing our experience of others. The Cartesian position notoriously alienates us from others, since it implies that we can know them only indirectly via their behaviour, which is only a detached, contingent, expression of their thoughts and feelings, and one whose interpretation we can never validate since we have no other way of finding out about the other's thoughts and feelings. As against this alien- ation from others, which rests on the detachment of their mind from their behaviour, Merleau-Ponty, whose discussion at this point exemplifies the phenomenological appeal to 'lived experience', brings forward our experience of another's anger. In this case, he suggests, we have no temptation to detach the other's anger from their behaviour; their anger is 'here, in this room'. The Cartesian separation of emotion from behaviour
introduction
radically misconstrues our experience of others in this case. Furthermore, he argues, when I reflect on my own anger, I have to recognise that, contrary to Descartes' account of the matter, it too was bound up with my own body, with my gestures, my speech and my behaviour.
Merleau-Ponty then generalises this last point. He suggests that self-consciousness is always dependent upon our con- sciousness of others, which is inextricably linked to our experience of their behaviour, especially their speech. In this lecture he just cites child psychologists in support of this claim; in Phenomenology of Perception he had invoked Husserl's thesis that 'transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity' and argued in detail that there is no coherent conception of self- consciousness which is not regulated by the consciousness that others have of us. 24 So our self-consciousness is always 'medi- ated' by a language that we have learnt from others and which is dependent upon their use of it. Hence, although Descartes was right to posit the conception of a self that is detached from physical circumstances, this is a 'critical ideal' which expresses the idea of freedom as detachment, and not a meta- physical truth about human beings.
In the last part of the lecture Merleau-Ponty points to the ethical implications of this new picture of human life. It is one in which we can neither escape personal responsibility by
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imagining that our dependence upon others determines how we are to act, nor escape this dependence upon others by imagining that our freedom enables us to shape our future inalienably. Instead, and this, for Merleau-Ponty, is the 'modern form of humanism', we have to accept that there is an inescapable 'ambiguity' in human life, whereby we have to accept responsibility for our actions even though the signifi- cance of everything we try to do is dependent upon the meaning others give to it. It is here that Merleau-Ponty's idiom is recognisably 'existentialist', as he acknowledges the 'anxiety' inherent in this situation and calls for 'courage' in accepting both the inescapability of our responsibility and the impossi- bility of guaranteeing what our responsibilities will turn out to be. 25 But he disavows the conclusion that human life is there- fore inherently absurd, even though it may often appear so. Instead, he urges, we should use humour to prepare 'for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another'.
Lecture 6: Art and the World of Perception
Merleau-Ponty's aim here is to use the account he has given of the perceived world as the springboard for an aesthetic theory. In doing so he builds on the earlier discussion in Lecture 2 of
introduction
the way in which modern art (or, at any rate, Ce? zanne's paint- ings) helps us to rediscover the creation of the perceived world that we are all too prone to pass over as our attention is drawn to the things that it makes manifest to us. Reciprocally, then, having learnt that the things of the per- ceived world are manifest to us in experience, and not substances hidden behind a veil of appearances, he wants us to see that much the same is true of works of art. Their meaning is what is given in our experience of them; it does not reside in their relationship to something else, something not perceived but represented.
While it is easy to see how this applies to abstract painting, it is less clear how it applies to representational paintings, such as portraits; for a portrait is clearly intended to be a por- trait of someone (Ce? zanne, perhaps). Yet the portrait is not, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, simply intended to evoke the person portrayed; that would be better achieved by a biography. Instead, the portrait has to be 'a spectacle which is sufficient unto itself ', something which cannot be appreciated without seeing it, and which, in the seeing of it, enables us to see the person portrayed in the painting. The meaning must be accomplished within the painting itself, and cannot depend upon a relationship to something extrinsic to the painting, even the person portrayed.
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Merleau-Ponty now extends this aesthetic approach to other art forms. Interestingly, he looks forward to applying it to film, and his remarks here are suggestive of the features we do indeed look for in the films we value. In the case of music it is almost too easy to apply his approach, since music is not rep- resentational. But the difficulty in this case lies in knowing how to add to formal descriptions of music, for example how to characterise the expressive aspects of music, and Merleau- Ponty does not really contribute to this. In the case of literature, Merleau-Ponty's approach is problematic for the opposite reason. Our appreciation of literature seems to depend on our understanding of the language used, and thus on our grasp of the relationships between the words used and their worldly meanings. So it does not seem that the ideal of the self-sufficiency of a work of art can have application here. Merleau-Ponty's response is brief: poetry, or at least the kind of poetry Mallarme? wrote, does not draw on any antecedent meanings: instead here too, the meaning is supposed to be inherent in the poem itself. While there is obviously something right about this - prose commentaries cannot substitute for a poem - the poet has to rely on the fact that the reader brings certain expectations and understandings to their reading of a poem, even if these are not straightforwardly endorsed in the poem. So only a qualified version of the self-sufficiency thesis
introduction
is tenable; but the issue is clearly more complicated than Merleau-Ponty's discussion here allows for. 26
Lecture 7: Classical World, Modern World
In this final lecture Merleau-Ponty looks back over the con- trast he has been drawing between the classical and modern worlds; while acknowledging that it can be seen as a tale of decline that would justify only pessimism, he suggests that the fact that the modern consciousness is more truthful to the ambiguities of the human condition makes it possible to be optimistic, to look forward without illusion to the creation of something whose value is 'solid and lasting' even if it lacks the rational clarity of the classical ideal.
The contrast is drawn in familiar terms: where the classical world believed in the possibility of a rational final under- standing of the world that will obtain for all time, and created works of art whose meaning is unequivocal, the modern the- orist accepts that we are inescapably fallible, and that we should not hope for final solutions in physics any more than in politics. We must learn to live with contestable theories and principles that are inherently provisional; and, equally, be con- tent with works of art that leave open the possibility for a variety of interpretations. It is no good looking for some
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better conception of reason (e. g. discursive reason) that will definitively show us how to live. We must learn to live not only after the death of God, but also without the dream of reason (these are perhaps the same thing).
Merleau-Ponty does not, however, prescribe a conservative reaction to the failure of the classical ideal of reason, in the manner of, say, Hume and Burke. Instead he affirms the exis- tential ambiguity ('tension' might be a better word) of human life, whereby there is no escape from the requirement to justify our actions, but, equally, no escape from the fact that as we locate our justifications in a space of reasons whose dimen- sions are set by others, we have to accept that they are bound to be found wanting in some ways. This very affirmation, however, he proclaims to be not just a 'modern truth', but 'a truth of all time', a truth which captures the human condition as it is. As such, he suggests, it should be possible for us to do things which are genuinely worth doing even if they are not informed by the classical ideal; by internalising the ambiguity of human life we should be able to create something as 'solid and lasting' as the paintings of Ce? zanne.
It is an attractive conclusion. But one cannot help thinking, in a post-modern way, that Merleau-Ponty betrays himself here. If he had really internalised the fallibilism and provi- sionality of modern thought from which he starts, he should
introduction
not have allowed himself to present, at the end, his existen- tialism as a truth that is 'a truth of all time'. A fallibilist does not undermine his fallibilism by taking a fallibilist attitude to it; for fallibilism is inconsistent with dogmatism, not confi- dence. So we see Merleau-Ponty, at the end of these lectures, poised to move beyond 'modern' thought to post- modernism - but not quite taking the step. But to say this is not to say that these lectures do not present, in the incomplete and sketchy way of modern art, a sketch of a philosophy whose value is 'solid and lasting'.
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The World of Perception
LECTURE 1
The World of Perception and the World of Science
The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this is a delusion. In these lectures, I hope to show that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude. I shall suggest that much time and effort, as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.
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This temptation is particularly strong in France. It is char- acteristic not just of French philosophy but also of what is rather loosely termed the French cast of mind to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experi- ence of the world seems by contrast to be of little value. If I want to know what light is, surely I should ask a physicist; is it not he who can tell me what light really is? Is light, as was once thought, a stream of burning projectiles, or, as others have argued, vibrations in the ether? Or is it, as a more recent theory maintains, a phenomenon that can be classed alongside other forms of electromagnetic radiation? What good would it do to consult our senses on this matter? Why should we linger over what our perception tells us about colours, reflec- tions and the objects which bear such properties? For it seems that these are almost certainly no more than appearances: only the methodical investigations of a scientist - his measure- ments and experiments - can set us free from the delusions of our senses and allow us to gain access to things as they really are. Surely the advancement of knowledge has consisted pre- cisely in our forgetting what our senses tell us when we consult them nai? vely. Surely there is no place for such data in a picture of the world as it really is, except insofar as they indicate peculiarities of our human make-up, ones which physiology will, one day, take account of, just as it has already managed to
the world of perception
explain the illusions of long- and short-sightedness. The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes. It consists, rather, of the waves and particles which science tells us lie behind these sen- sory illusions.
Descartes went as far as to say that simply by scrutinising sensory objects and without referring to the results of scien- tific investigations, I am able to discover that my senses deceive me and I learn accordingly to trust only my intellect. 1 I claim to see a piece of wax. Yet what exactly is this wax? It is by no means its colour, white, nor, if it has retained this, its floral scent, nor its softness to my touch, nor indeed the dull thud which it makes when I drop it. Not one of these properties is constitutive of the wax because it can lose them all without ceasing to exist, for example if I melt it, whereupon it changes into a colourless liquid which has no discernible scent and which is no longer resistant to my touch. Yet I maintain that this is still the same wax. So how should this claim be under- stood?