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

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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
intrinsic properties which explain why things appear as they do.Merleau-Ponty might regard this as merely a scientific hypothesis;but I suspect that it is rather more deeply embedded thanthat in our ordinary perceived world, since this includes a ‘folkscience’ whereby we presume that it is possible to make sense ofwhy things happen as they do.Lecture 4: Exploring the World of Perception: Animal LifeIn the previous lecture Merleau-Ponty emphasised that theperceived world is a human world, a world of things whosecharacter involves a relationship with the human beings whoexperience them. In this lecture he addresses an anxiety concerningthis thesis: that this emphasis on humans implies thatthere is no proper place for the experiences of ‘animals, children,primitive peoples and madmen’.Merleau-Ponty here anticipates the attention that is nowpaid to voices that were for long excluded from official historiesand philosophies, though he does not recognise the need toinclude women in his list, and the category ‘primitive people’ isnot one with which we can now feel comfortable. His claim isgoing to be that it is a characteristic of ‘modern’ thought, withits rediscovery of the perceived world, that it can accommodatethese alien voices better than ‘classical’ thought did. Accordingintroduction
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 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: photograph in which the feet look a
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
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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
Page 107 and 108:
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
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
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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
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freedom 27-8Freud 76Galileo 21geome
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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