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

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the bodily contribution to the organisation of perception as aphilosophical theory about the a priori structure of experience.Since Husserl’s phenomenological method was precisely motivatedby a wish to set himself apart from the ‘psychologism’,as he saw it, of his contemporaries, it would be ironic ifMerleau-Ponty’s phenomenology turned out to be a form ofpsychologism after all. But Merleau-Ponty anticipated thisobjection: 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 givesmeaning to things, the ‘psychological’ understanding of man isat the same time a ‘philosophical’ understanding of the meaningof things. The accusation of ‘psychologism’ tacitlyassumes that human psychology is a natural science, a branchof biology, whose ontology and methodology are to bethought of as comparable to other natural sciences. ButMerleau-Ponty rejects this assumption: as he famously puts itin Phenomenology of Perception, perception is not a fact within theworld, since it is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’, the world; 18because perception is the capacity whereby there is a world itcannot be just another fact within the world.This line of thought can be questioned. It is not as clear asMerleau-Ponty assumes it to be that one cannot combine aconception of human perception as a natural fact with an11
acknowledgement of its special status as the root of the humanunderstanding of the world. But this is not the place to take theargument further. Instead I want to return to the starting pointof this discussion, to Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion at the start ofthese lectures that we need to ‘rediscover’ the perceived worldwith 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 weare awake. But we can now begin to see why, for Merleau-Ponty,the ‘natural attitude’ of common sense leads us to overlook thephenomenon of the perceived world. For Merleau-Ponty’saccount of the role of the senses in perception is that they makeit their business to cover their tracks as they organise experiencein such a way that it presents to us a world of things arrayedbefore us in a three-dimensional objective space within which weare located as just another object. So as we get on with our lifewe do not notice the role of the senses in organising experienceand ‘constituting’ the physical world; it is precisely their businessto make this role invisible to us. Hence to rediscover and articulateit, we have somehow to get a detached, ‘sideways’, look atordinary experience, and this is what, for Merleau-Ponty, modernart and phenomenological philosophy make possible. He characterisedthis kind of philosophical reflection in a memorablepassage in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception: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 and 16: shortly before the war. This second
Page 17 and 18: After his death Merleau-Ponty’s r
Page 19 and 20: empiricism is not of this kind. Thi
Page 21: The central theme of Merleau-Ponty
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
Page 66 and 67: In the footsteps of science and pai
Page 68: LECTURE 3Exploring the World of Per
Page 71 and 72: worlds of sight, smell, touch and s
Page 73 and 74:
touch. 2 To say that honey is visco
Page 75 and 76:
complexes. This is what Cézanne me
Page 77 and 78:
us and above all in the found objec
Page 80 and 81:
In the first three lectures, we arg
Page 82 and 83:
children and the sick was held back
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person must remain open to these ab
Page 86 and 87:
flow from the centre of the ‘body
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delegation to identify this monumen
Page 92 and 93:
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
Page 98 and 99:
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
Page 107 and 108:
that the painter takes hold of a fr
Page 109 and 110:
do explain why, hitherto, there hav
Page 111 and 112:
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
Page 119 and 120:
Proust himself who raises them. As
Page 121 and 122:
works of intellectuals, then to see
Page 123 and 124:
with a feeling of completion or per
Page 126 and 127:
NotesFOREWORD1 Merleau-Ponty’s te
Page 128 and 129:
20 Although Merleau-Ponty usually t
Page 130 and 131:
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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