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

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particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles bygrasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. Theliving, exploring, hand which thought it could master thisthing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky externalobject. Sartre, who must take the credit for this elegantanalysis, writes:in one sense it is like the supreme docility of the possessed,the fidelity of a dog who gives himself even whenone does not want him any longer, and in another sensethere is underneath this docility a surreptitious appropriationof the possessor by the possessed. 1So the quality of being honeyed – and this is why this epithetcan be used to symbolise an entire pattern of humanbehaviour – can only be understood in the light of the dialoguebetween me as an embodied subject and the externalobject which bears this quality. The only definition of thisquality is a human definition.Viewed in this way, every quality is related to qualitiesassociated with other senses. Honey is sugary. Yet sugarinessin the realm of taste, ‘an indelible softness that lingers in themouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing’,constitutes the same sticky presence as honey in the realm of61
touch. 2 To say that honey is viscous is another way of sayingthat it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationshipbetween us and the object or to indicate that we are moved orcompelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a particularway of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subjectwho stands before us. Honey is a particular way the world hasof acting on me and my body. And this is why its variousattributes do not simply stand side by side but are identicalinsofar as they all reveal the same way of being or behaving onthe part of the honey. The unity of the object does not liebehind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them:each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that youshould be able to paint the smell of trees. 3 In a similar vein,Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that each attribute ‘revealsthe being’ of the object:The lemon is extended throughout its qualities, andeach of its qualities is extended throughout each ofthe others. It is the sourness of the lemon which isyellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. Weeat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake, andthe taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals itsshape and its color to what may be called the alimentaryintuition . . . . The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluishsensory objects
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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
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shortly before the war. This second
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After his death Merleau-Ponty’s r
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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 66 and 67: In the footsteps of science and pai
Page 68: LECTURE 3Exploring the World of Per
Page 71: worlds of sight, smell, touch and s
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
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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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