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

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explain the illusions of long- and short-sightedness. The realworld is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshyspectacle which passes before my eyes. It consists, rather, of thewaves and particles which science tells us lie behind these sensoryillusions.Descartes went as far as to say that simply by scrutinisingsensory objects and without referring to the results of scientificinvestigations, I am able to discover that my senses deceiveme and I learn accordingly to trust only my intellect. 1 I claimto see a piece of wax. Yet what exactly is this wax? It is by nomeans its colour, white, nor, if it has retained this, its floralscent, nor its softness to my touch, nor indeed the dull thudwhich it makes when I drop it. Not one of these properties isconstitutive of the wax because it can lose them all withoutceasing to exist, for example if I melt it, whereupon it changesinto a colourless liquid which has no discernible scent andwhich is no longer resistant to my touch. Yet I maintain thatthis is still the same wax. So how should this claim be understood?What persists through this change of state is simply apiece of matter which has no properties, or, at most, a certaincapacity to occupy space and take on different shapes, withouteither the particular space filled or the shape adopted being inany way predetermined. This then is the real and unchangingessence of the wax. It will be clear that the true nature of the41
wax is not revealed to my senses alone, for they only ever presentme with objects of particular sizes and shapes. So I cannotsee the wax as it really is with my own eyes; the reality of thewax can only be conceived in the intellect. When I assume Iam seeing the wax, all I am really doing is thinking back fromthe properties which appear before my senses to the wax in itsnaked reality, the wax which, though it lacks properties initself, is nonetheless the source of all the properties whichmanifest themselves to me. Thus for Descartes – and this ideahas long held sway in the French philosophical tradition – perceptionis no more than the confused beginnings of scientificknowledge. The relationship between perception and scientificknowledge is one of appearance to reality. It befits our humandignity to entrust ourselves to the intellect, which alone canreveal to us the reality of the world.When I said, a moment ago, that modern art and philosophyhave rehabilitated perception and the world as we perceiveit, I did not, of course, mean to imply that they deny the valueof science, either as a means of technological advancement, orinsofar as it offers an object lesson in precision and truth. If wewish to learn how to prove something, to conduct a thoroughinvestigation or to be critical of ourselves and our preconceptions,it remains appropriate, now as then, that we turn toscience. It was a good thing that we once expected science 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 50 and 51: The world of perception, or in othe
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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