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

Merleau-Ponty, following Sartre, brings out the interconnectednessof our experience of things with the examples ofhoney and lemon. These are both foods, and it is the familiarexperience of eating them which gives rise to the tacit gustatoryand tactile expectations that are inherent in ordinary visualexperience, though it is when these expectations are disappointed,as they are by fake foods (e.g. plastic lemons), that theexistence of these expectations is brought to our attention.Merleau-Ponty’s main point, however, concerns the status ofthe properties manifest in ordinary experience. Because theseproperties, such as the sticky sweetness of honey, can be understoodonly in the context of our experience of them there hasbeen a perennial temptation to regard them as superficialappearances, merely ‘secondary’ qualities which need to bebacked up by intrinsic ‘primary’ qualities of things. This is aview which goes back to the Greek atomists, but was influentiallyrevived by Descartes, Galileo and Locke. Against it,Merleau-Ponty holds that we have no good reason to downgradethe manifest properties of things even though theirdefinition includes reference to our experience of them. In oneway this is right: appearances can be entirely objective, and forthat reason there is reason to regard them as appearances of real,genuine, properties, such as colour, taste and the like. But onecan still hold that extrinsic properties of this kind presuppose21