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

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