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

flow from the centre of the ‘body’ to the mobile extremitieswhich it projects ahead of itself. Thus in spite of what mechanisticbiology might suggest, the world we live in is not made uponly of things and space: some of these parcels of matter,which we call living beings, proceed to trace in their environment,by the way they act or behave, their very own vision ofthings. We will only see this if we lend our attention to thespectacle of the animal world, if we are prepared to live alongsidethe world of animals instead of rashly denying it any kindof interiority.In experiments conducted as long as twenty years ago, theGerman psychologist Köhler tried to sketch the structure ofthe chimpanzee’s universe. 5 He rightly observed that the originalityof the animal world will remain hidden to us for as longas we continue (as in many classical experiments) to set it tasksthat are not its own. The behaviour of a dog may well seemabsurd and mechanical if we set it the task of opening a lock orworking a lever. Yet this does not mean that if we consider theanimal as it lives spontaneously and confronts the questionswhich lie before it, we will not find that it treats its surroundingsin a manner consistent with the laws of a sort of naïve physicsand grasps certain relationships to exploit them in pursuit of itsown particular goals and, finally, that it works upon its environmentalinfluences in a way that is characteristic of its species.75