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

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it is in itself ’. Instead, he holds, science provides only abstractrepresentations of aspects of the world that are of technologicalvalue, but which do not constitute ‘absolute and completeknowledge’. It seems to me that Merleau-Ponty runs togetherdifferent points here, in the closing paragraphs of his lecture.The thesis that the natural sciences might provide ‘absoluteand complete knowledge’ of the world is an extreme viewsince there are many activities and interests, – sport, for example– such that facts about them are not, on the face of it,accessible to the natural sciences. To bring them within thecompass of the natural sciences would require the hypothesisthat the thoughts and movements of all those engaged in sportcan somehow be brought within the compass of a scientificpsychology that can be integrated into natural science. Nogreat degree of scepticism is required to dismiss this hypothesis.But this gives too easy a triumph to the critic of science,since this kind of aspiration for absolute and complete knowledgeis not essential to scientific inquiry. What is important is‘scientific realism’, the belief that the account of the structureof things and forces provided by physics and other sciencesdoes indeed reveal to us things that are really there, even if wecannot observe them, and the further belief that reference tothis structure is of fundamental importance when we seek toexplain natural phenomena.15
When Merleau-Ponty says that science offers us only‘approximate expressions’ of physical events, it is not clearwhether he would reject scientific realism thus understood.For the scientific realist will of course allow that the accountsof structure provided by a science typically involve manyapproximations and simplifications, especially since the detailsneeded vary from context to context (e.g. sometimes it isimportant to distinguish between the different isotopes of amolecule, sometimes not). The general implication ofMerleau-Ponty’s discussion, however, is undoubtedly hostile toscientific realism since, in effect, he seeks to reverse the applicationof the appearance/reality distinction to the relationshipbetween the perceived world and the world of science. UnlikeDescartes he holds that the perceived world is the ‘real’ world,as compared with which the world of science is just an approximation,i.e. an appearance. It seems to me, however, that thesealternatives are not exhaustive. One does better to combine scientificrealism with an acknowledgement that natural science isfar from complete, and thus that there are important aspects ofreality which escape science, including those which are manifestwithin the perceived world. These latter aspects are likelyto be of fundamental importance for our primary understandingof things, just as those which are characteristic of theworld of science are of fundamental importance when weintroduction
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 and 22: The central theme of Merleau-Ponty
Page 23 and 24: acknowledgement of its special stat
Page 25: world of perception can be dismisse
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
Page 84 and 85:
person must remain open to these ab
Page 86 and 87:
flow from the centre of the ‘body
Page 88:
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
Page 98 and 99:
we have received from without and w
Page 100 and 101:
which makes us crave their assent o
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LECTURE 6Art and the World of Perce
Page 105 and 106:
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
Page 114:
LECTURE 7Classical World, Modern Wo
Page 117 and 118:
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
Page 132:
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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