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

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In the footsteps of science and painting, philosophy and,above all, psychology seem to have woken up to the fact thatour relationship to space is not that of a pure disembodiedsubject to a distant object but rather that of a being whichdwells in space relating to its natural habitat. This helps us tounderstand the famous optical illusion noted by Malebranche:when the moon is still on the horizon, it appears to be muchlarger than at its zenith. 5 Malebranche assumed that humanperception, by some process of reasoning, overestimates thesize of the planet. If we look at it through a cardboard tube orthe cover of a matchbox, the illusion disappears; so it is causedby the fact that, when the moon first appears, we glimpse itabove the fields, walls and trees. This vast array of interveningobjects makes us aware of being at so great a distance, fromwhich we conclude that, in order to look as big as it does,notwithstanding this distance, the moon must indeed be verylarge. On this account, the perceiving subject is akin to the scientistwho deliberates, assesses and concludes and the size weperceive is in fact the size we judge. This is not how most oftoday’s psychologists understand the illusion of the moon onthe horizon. Systematic experimentation has allowed them todiscover that it is generally true of our field of vision that theapparent size of objects on the horizontal plane is remarkablyconstant, whereas they very quickly get smaller on the vertical55
plane. This is most likely to be because, for us as beings whowalk upon the earth, the horizontal plane is where our mostimportant movements and activities take place. Thus whatMalebranche attributed to the activity of a pure intellect, psychologistsof this school put down to a natural property ofour perceptual field, that of embodied beings who are forcedto move about upon the surface of the earth. In psychology asin geometry, the notion of a single unified space entirely opento a disembodied intellect has been replaced by the idea of aspace which consists of different regions and has certain privilegeddirections; these are closely related to our distinctivebodily features and our situation as beings thrown into theworld. Here, for the first time, we come across the idea thatrather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, abeing who can only get to the truth of things because its bodyis, as it were, embedded in those things. We shall see in thenext lecture that this is not only true of space but, more generally,of all external objects: we can only gain access to themthrough our body. Clothed in human qualities, they too are acombination of mind and body.space
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First published in French as Causer
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ForewordThe seven lectures collecte
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are preceded by a number. We have e
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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 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 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
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In modernity, we have a representat
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Proust himself who raises them. As
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works of intellectuals, then to see
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with a feeling of completion or per
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NotesFOREWORD1 Merleau-Ponty’s te
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20 Although Merleau-Ponty usually t
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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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