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

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The world of perception, or in other words the worldwhich is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life,seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For weneed neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain accessto this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simplyby opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this isa delusion. In these lectures, I hope to show that the world ofperception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long aswe remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude. I shall suggestthat much time and effort, as well as culture, have been neededin order to lay this world bare and that one of the greatachievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the artand philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been toallow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which weare always prone to forget.39
This temptation is particularly strong in France. It is characteristicnot just of French philosophy but also of what israther loosely termed the French cast of mind to hold scienceand knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experienceof the world seems by contrast to be of little value. If Iwant to know what light is, surely I should ask a physicist; isit not he who can tell me what light really is? Is light, as wasonce thought, a stream of burning projectiles, or, as othershave argued, vibrations in the ether? Or is it, as a more recenttheory maintains, a phenomenon that can be classed alongsideother forms of electromagnetic radiation? What good wouldit do to consult our senses on this matter? Why should welinger over what our perception tells us about colours, reflectionsand the objects which bear such properties? For it seemsthat these are almost certainly no more than appearances: onlythe methodical investigations of a scientist – his measurementsand experiments – can set us free from the delusions ofour senses and allow us to gain access to things as they reallyare. Surely the advancement of knowledge has consisted preciselyin our forgetting what our senses tell us when we consultthem naïvely. Surely there is no place for such data in a pictureof the world as it really is, except insofar as they indicatepeculiarities of our human make-up, ones which physiologywill, one day, take account of, just as it has already managed tothe world of perception
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 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 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
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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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