Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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After the publication of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945Merleau-Ponty’s academic career progressed quickly. In 1945he was appointed a Professor at Lyon; in 1950 he becameProfessor of Psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris; and then in1952 he was appointed to the most prestigious position for aFrench philosopher, the chair in philosophy at the Collège deFrance, a position which he held until his unexpected earlydeath in 1961. During this period he published three collectionsof essays: Sense and Non-Sense (1948) which bringstogether his early post-1945 essays, of which most are aboutMarxism and politics; 10 The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955)which deals with his break with Sartre and includes his laterthoughts about ‘Western’ Marxism; 11 finally, Signs (1960)which contains some new philosophical work, mainly on language,together with further political essays. 12 After his deathit became apparent that Merleau-Ponty had been working ona major new monograph. This had originally been intended asa study of language and truth which would develop themesfrom the earlier writings under the title ‘The Origin of Truth’;but as the work progressed Merleau-Ponty found himselfdrawn back to some of the themes concerning perception thathe had addressed in his earlier philosophy, and the manuscriptthat 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 Francedeclined quickly as French philosophers turned away fromFrench existential phenomenology to the study of Germanphilosophy, especially to the works of Heidegger and the ‘mastersof suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Elsewhere,however, and especially in the United States, his former pupilspreserved his reputation and ensured the translation intoEnglish of all his major works. More recently, within the analytictradition, there has been a growth of interest in hiswritings: his discussions of the ‘intentionality’ of consciousness(especially of the ways in which things are presented inperception) and of the role of the body in perception arerecognised as important contributions to the understanding ofthese difficult topics. It is to be hoped that these radio talkswill help to make his ideas available to a wider public here, justas their publication in France in 2002 is evidence of a longoverdue revival of interest there in his work.MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHILOSOPHY:PERCEPTION AND THE BODYMerleau-Ponty sets out his main aim for these lectures at the endof the first paragraph of this first lecture: ‘I shall suggest . . . thatone of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy . . .introduction
Page 5 and 6: First published in French as Causer
Page 8 and 9: ForewordThe seven lectures collecte
Page 10: are preceded by a number. We have e
Page 13 and 14: draws and the anxieties which he ar
Page 15: shortly before the war. This second
Page 19 and 20: empiricism is not of this kind. Thi
Page 21 and 22: The central theme of Merleau-Ponty
Page 23 and 24: acknowledgement of its special stat
Page 25 and 26: world of perception can be dismisse
Page 27 and 28: When Merleau-Ponty says that scienc
Page 29 and 30: Florentine Renaissance, or, in a Fr
Page 31 and 32: photograph in which the feet look a
Page 33 and 34: intrinsic properties which explain
Page 35 and 36: which our own life has been disturb
Page 37 and 38: only contingently connected to a ph
Page 39 and 40: imagining that our dependence upon
Page 41 and 42: Merleau-Ponty now extends this aest
Page 43 and 44: etter conception of reason (e.g. di
Page 46: The World of Perception
Page 50 and 51: The world of perception, or in othe
Page 52 and 53: explain the illusions of long- and
Page 54 and 55: provide all the answers at a time w
Page 56: exercise of a pure and unsituated i
Page 60 and 61: It has often been said that modern
Page 62 and 63: which effect certain changes in the
Page 64 and 65: along lines running from the painte
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In the footsteps of science and pai
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LECTURE 3Exploring the World of Per
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worlds of sight, smell, touch and s
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touch. 2 To say that honey is visco
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complexes. This is what Cézanne me
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us and above all in the found objec
Page 80 and 81:
In the first three lectures, we arg
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children and the sick was held back
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person must remain open to these ab
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flow from the centre of the ‘body
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delegation to identify this monumen
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Thus far we have tried to look at s
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haunts a body and we seem to see a
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ack to the real experience of anger
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we have received from without and w
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which makes us crave their assent o
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LECTURE 6Art and the World of Perce
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world once more, as if in an exchan
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that the painter takes hold of a fr
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do explain why, hitherto, there hav
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looks at the things themselves with
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LECTURE 7Classical World, Modern Wo
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In modernity, we have a representat
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Proust himself who raises them. As
Page 121 and 122:
works of intellectuals, then to see
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with a feeling of completion or per
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NotesFOREWORD1 Merleau-Ponty’s te
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20 Although Merleau-Ponty usually t
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6 Sartre, ‘L’Homme et les Chose
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5 Paul Valéry, passim. See, for ex
Page 135 and 136:
freedom 27-8Freud 76Galileo 21geome
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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