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

children and the sick was held back, kept at a rudimentarystage, by the same assumptions: the questions which the doctoror researcher asked of them were the questions of an adult ora healthy person. Little attempt was made to understand theway that they themselves lived; instead, the emphasis fell ontrying to measure how far their efforts fell short of what theaverage adult or healthy person was capable of accomplishing.As for primitive people, they were either looked to for a modelof a more attractive form of civilisation, or else, as in Voltaire’sEssay on Morals, their customs and beliefs were seen as no morethan a series of inexplicable absurdities. 2 Which all goes to suggestthat classical thought was caught in a dilemma: either thebeing that stands before us may be likened to a human being, inwhich case it can be given, by analogy, the usual human attributesof the healthy adult. Alternatively, it is no more than ablind mechanism – living chaos – in which case meaning cannotpossibly be ascribed to its behaviour.But why were so many classical authors indifferent to animals,children, madmen and primitive peoples? Because theybelieved that there is such a thing as a fully-formed man whosevocation it is to be ‘lord and master’ of nature, as Descartesput it. 3 Such a man can accordingly, in principle, see throughto the very being of things and establish a sovereign knowledge;he can decipher the meaning of every phenomenon (not71