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

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to Merleau-Ponty classical thinkers (represented here byDescartes and Voltaire) take it that the only voice worth listeningto is that of an adult rational civilised human being(and, we might add, a male one), since it is the only voice thatmakes sense; the experiences of animals, children, primitivepeoples and madmen can be summarily dismissed as nonsense.Descartes symbolised this exclusion of the experience of madnesswhen, at the start of his Meditations, he simply dismisseswithout argument the hypothesis that, for all he can tell, he ismad. But, it is worth adding, other philosophers of the classicalperiod were not so dismissive: Hume deliberately includesin his Treatise of Human Nature ironic comparisons betweenhumans and animals – where the joke is on the humans.What, however, of the ability of modern thought to makespace for these alien voices? Merleau-Ponty’s main claim isthat where classical thought saw a sharp division between senseand nonsense, modern thought sees only a difference ofdegree, accentuated by recognition of the fact that adult life isprone to illness, prejudice and fantasy. Thus although there isstill a hierarchy in Merleau-Ponty’s position (‘Adult thought,normal or civilized, is better than childish, morbid or barbaricthought’), he allows that there are insights in the alien experiencesthat classical thought excluded, insights which we canourselves understand and use when we think of the ways in23
which our own life has been disturbed by illness, childish fixationsand other complexities that psychoanalysis has taught usto acknowledge. In the lecture Merleau-Ponty then turns to abrief discussion of animals and the status of their experience,but before commenting on this it is worth reflecting a little onMerleau-Ponty’s discussion so far. The most striking point ishis hierarchy, with its valuation of ‘adult thought, normal orcivilized’; for this contrasts very sharply with the romanticvaluation of children (as in Wordsworth), of genius, which isoften conceived as a form of madness, and of the ‘noblesavage’. I find it very odd that Merleau-Ponty does not addressthis line of thought, which will have been very familiar to hisaudience from Rousseau; perhaps the barbarisms of theSecond World War led him to dismiss it. The other point tomake is that in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty frequentlydraws on accounts of the disabilities of those withbrain damage to develop his account of our preobjectivebodily experience of the world. 22 So although he discusses theexistential significance of these disabilities, the basic theme ofhis discussion is one of the continuity between the experienceof the disabled and that of the normal, rather than the hierarchyemphasised here.In the closing pages of this lecture Merleau-Ponty turns (ashis title always suggested) to the case of animals. As ever heintroduction
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 and 32: photograph in which the feet look a
Page 33: intrinsic properties which explain
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
Page 92 and 93:
Thus far we have tried to look at s
Page 94 and 95:
haunts a body and we seem to see a
Page 96 and 97:
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
Page 102:
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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