Preface
Merlaeu Ponty positions phenomenology, specifically Husserl’s contribution, vis a vis other major currents in philosophy. He explains the main concepts and approaches that are unique to phenomenology and which distinguish it from other philosophical approaches. Most significantly he recaps the ideas of essence, intentionality, reduction and subjectivity and the way Husserl theorized them in his writings. These serve as the starting point for the discussions he develops in the book.
Merleau Ponty (MP) also establishes his phenomenological attitude as distinct from Husserl’s in that it denies the neutral stance of the phenomenological observation. He explains Husserl’s notion of reduction as a form of Cartesian observation and claims that the ‘essences’ of things in the world, which Husserl spent much of his time discussing and exploring, should not be the goal of phenomenology but its means of exploration.
Introduction: Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena
In the four introductory chapters MP lays the foundation of his theory through a critic of the two prominent scientific/philosophical approaches to the study of questions of perception, the body and its existence in the world, what he calls – empiricism and intellectualism. Empiricism sees the world as objective facts that can be observed regardless of human subjective experience. It takes a ‘scientific’ approach to observing the body, the sensory system and the way objects and things are in the world. Intellectualism focuses on the representation of the world in the subjective mind or consciousness as the valid interpretation of the world and includes the mainstream psychological and psychoanalytical approaches. It thus puts consciousness in the center of existence and the site of being. As a result of these two approaches “while the living body became an exterior without interior, subjectivity became an interior without exterior, an impartial spectator.” (64-5) MP shows the inadequacy of both approaches to explain perceptual phenomena and proposes his phenomenology as more adequate in that it puts the subject and object in constant contact as part of one world.
1. The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience
In this chapter MP delineates the notion of sensation, which stems from the two predominant classical understandings of the term: sensation as an element of consciousness and as the determinate qualities of things perceived. That is, on the one hand, a representation conceived (i.e. understood and given meaning) in the subject’s consciousness or, on the other hand, an external object’s qualities that exist in themselves regardless of the subject’s observation. MP shows that both approaches cannot account to our experience in life: that they disregard the ambiguity of, and the context in which, the subject perceives an object as well as the inconstancy of our experience of phenomena in life. Instead of the term sensation he suggests ‘sense-experience’ that can only be grasped by exploring our own ‘pre-objective’ experience.
2. ‘Association’ and the ‘Projection of Memories’
In this chapter MP explores and disproves the explanation of knowledge of the world and things in it as arising from ‘association’ and/or ‘projection of memories’. According to him both notions presuppose the knowledge of the present perceptual experience. However, the immediate and present experience, the perceived phenomena, is a whole that holds meaning and can only be experienced in the present and forms the basic layer of experience. It is perception, then, that enables knowledge. A memory is a spatiotemporal experience of an (past) absent phenomena. MP raises the relationships between past and present as a fundamental issue he will explore later in the book.
3. ‘Attention’ and ‘Judgment’
The problem of both empiricism and intellectualism with ‘attention’ is that in their construction of the world the act of attention requires the subject to know what it is looking for before it is captures by her attention. In contrast, attention requires a change in the structure of perception and in the way consciousness is present in the world. It ct is a creative act to which the phenomena as an indeterminate horizon is the motive, not the cause. When it comes to judgment, MP posits that, unlike common theories, it is not similar to perception but rather that perception precedes it and is, in fact, apprehension prior to judgment. Therefore, in order to understand judgment we must first understand perception and the way phenomena exist for us in the world. This can be achieved if we abandon, on the one hand, the notion of objective world that is determinate in its qualities prior to perception and, on the other, the notion of subjective self that exists in itself. MP’s proposal requires the use of a more fluid language that would enable the exploration of perception as the coming together of subject and object.
4. The Phenomenal Field
Following from the previous introductory chapters MP concludes that to uncover human experience in its wholeness requires an ambiguous realm, which he calls the phenomenal field, in which we can examine “the thickness” (61) of subject and object. It is through sense-experience that we perceive the world and grasp its meanings. Therefore, only by retuning to the phenomena, to actual experience that is prior to the objective world, can we start understanding our experience of being-in-the-world. Moreover, there is no objective experience that can be universally understood nor is there subjectivity separate from the world it inhabits. Phenomenology attempts to bring fourth the field where consciousness and world collide through examining individual, not universal, experience.
Part I: The Body
Experience and Objective Thought: The Problem of the Body
For MP the “problem of the body” as it exists in objective thought is that our body and the world are always in a specific, temporally defined (i.e. momentary) relationship. Understanding my whole perceptual experience of an object requires taking into account both spatial and temporal relation of the object to my body and to anything within the entire field of perception. Since these relationships are in time, they are constantly changing. Thus, MP speaks of spatial and temporal horizons of a perceived object which are never separate from my experience of it, from the way it is present to me. Moreover, these horizons inhabit both object and subject. In other words, my body is an aspect of space and its present moment (the only moment whose presence I can experience now) is a point among other points in time, a part of the temporal horizon. To fully grasp the experience of a single object in its totality means understanding the multitude of horizons that form my experience. Detaching the object from my body as subject and from its horizons—similar to Husserl’s early transcendental approach—may reveal to me the “idea” of the object but not its presence in my experience. MP goes even further and claims that evading the problem of the body, not acknowledging the fluidity of time and space and my body within them, may lead to an objectification of the body.
1. The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology
In this chapter MP takes the ‘objective’ physiological scientific approach to the body and by exploring it exposes its inconsistency. This approach positions the body as an object in the world of objects, explaining its connection to the world and the objects in it as a causal process of stimulus-response that can be traced separately in each distinct sensory system. In addition, because of the varying perceptions a single stimulus may create in different people (specifically when dealing with people with injuries) scientists attempted to preserve this causality by claiming perception to be a psychophysical event. In the psychophysical perceptual event the brain intervenes in determining the way in which a spontaneous event is perceived by projecting a preconceived image of the body and/or its relation to the world. This explanation, rather than solving the inconsistency, separates the real world event from the body by this predetermined meaning that exists in the psychic world and is projected onto the body.
By taking the examples of injured people, MP exposes the paradoxes inherent to the way perception functions. He explores both phantom limb and anosognosia as examples of perceptual phenomena which science cannot adequately explain. The body’s perceptual knowledge of the absent limb as part of the body’s wholeness creates its presence to the subject/body (the phantom limb), and the knowledge of the present affected limb creates the perception of its absence in anosognosia. These two phenomena, in other word, show the way the gap between the habitual body and the present body is being negotiated through perception. These two phenomena, he claims, show that the psychological and physiological “gear into each other” (89) by exposing perception as a pre-objective being-in-the-world that is not a 1st person or 3rd person knowledge, but is affecting the union of the psychological and physiological as the “middle ground between presence and absence”.
2. The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology
The psychological approach looks at the body from the point of view of the self as a separate detached spectator. It, therefore, creates another way of objectifying the body and separating it from the subject. However, psychologists try to establish the difference between the body and other objects by claiming the body to be a permanent object to me and my means of acting in the world, of carrying out decisions. MP’s stresses that the body’s permanence is characterized by its absence to my senses – I cannot see my self in the same way as I see objects or touch myself as I touch objects. My perspective of my body is that of a given in which, rather than from which, I perceive and sense pain, for example. To the psychologists, my relationship with my body is impersonal and the way it carries out my decisions in the world is detached from the decision itself while the decision is detached from the real world. The body schema, thus, becomes a representation in the psyche. Nevertheless, psychologists did open the way to the examination of experience, though their detached “objective” approach prevented them from pursuing MP’s exploration of the body as its locus.
3. The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility
My body in space is not a collection of related organs but is a whole, enveloped in itself. My body schema is not a sketch of my body in the psyche or the way the brain follows each movement of the body; rather, it is the awareness of the body as directed towards the world. MP’s notion of body schema regards the body as lived body, as experience, and the knowledge of the body in space as stemming from situation, intention and action rather than objective location or spatial relationship. Moreover, our knowledge of the world is always within the “point-horizon” relationship as a dialectic perspective (117). That is, I know an object in the world only from “the here” of my body in relation to the spatial background of the object. The body schema, hence, is not knowledge of the body similar to the knowledge of things in the world, but is a tacit and pre-reflective experience directed towards the world.
If body schema were, as psychologists claim, a pre-existing representation of the body, it would be anterior to the content of present experience; this fails to explain various phenomena of misperception the can be observed in people with brain damage. MP takes the example of Schneider, a patient with brain injury that affected his perceptual abilities in various ways (as describe by Gelb and Goldstein). He thus exposes the ‘normal’ body’s spatiality (perception/experience of space) and motility (the shaping and perception of movement). It is through moving in the world, he claims, that I come to know it and, since every movement is also consciousness of movement, it is also a way I come to know my self.
MP differentiates between concrete movement and abstract movement. In Schneider’s case, he could perform a concrete action such as scratching the arm, recognizing the precise location of the scratch but, when asked to point to the arm he could not easily do it. He could perform concrete tasks but could not translate ideas into action (e.g. draw a circle in the air). Only by exploring through movement could he “find” the way to perform these abstract movements. Thus, abstract movements were for him third person movements that his body as object performs in objective space. The concrete movements he performed, on the other hand, were felt by him as though determined from the outside, by the world perceived as a prefixed given.
The difference between Schneider and a ‘normal’ person is not in the function of the sensory systems or in their psychological or intellectual grasp of the world. Rather, for the normal person, unlike Schneider, the body exists within and is directed towards varying horizons of possibilities. The body of the normal person projects itself into the world and intertwines with it in action as motor intentionality and in perception. Thus, both movement and objects are experiences rather than concepts.
MP goes on to posit that visual and tactile experiences are inseparable and that consciousness of one exists in the other. The collective of the senses and body presents an amalgam of meanings that are the frameworks for experiences and thoughts. These meanings, in which form and content exist in a dialectical relationship, are the works of consciousness and body as one. Therefore, we cannot speak of consciousness that is not in the world and inhabits space and time. The essence of consciousness is “to bring into being its own thoughts before itself, as if they were things, and it demonstrates its vitality indivisibly by outlining these landscapes for itself and then by abandoning them. The world-structure, with its two stages of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the core of consciousness”. (150) By talking of world structure that fluctuates between the layers of the existing (objective) world and the immediacy of life experience (rather than word as representation), MP reminds us of the fluidity and temporality of being-in-the-world. What unites the multitude aspects of life is an intentional arc that “projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses of intelligence of sensibility and motility.” (157)
My experience in the world is the meaning that underlies any signification or ‘symbolic’ meaning and thought. This experience is not of space and time because my body inhabits space and time and is of them. Space and time, however, are always “indeterminate horizons” (163), containing multiple points of view, that are constantly synthesized within experience through motility. The body is, therefore, the ‘pivot’ or core of meanings.
4. The Synthesis of One’s Own Body
In this chapter, MP elaborates on his conclusions from the previous chapters and talks of the way the various aspects of perception come together to form the body’s spatiality. He begins by stressing the unification of the thing and its spatiality, and the perception of the thing and space. Similarly, the body is perceived as body through its spatiality. According to him, perceptual data, including the parts of my body and visual and tactual data, are unified and translate wholly and instantaneously rather than gradually and in parts. This unification and translation is the body and the way the body interprets itself. By comparing the body to a work of art, rather than to an object, MP explains the body’s unification of various perceptual aspects on the one hand and of content and form on the other hand.
The body’s spatiality extends beyond the contours of the physical body through perceptual and motor habits, as in the case of the blind man holding a stick. For the blind man, the stick is not an object but an extension of his perception and, hence, of his body. He does not perceive the stick, but the world through it. Similarly, the gaze functions as an extension of one’s body into the world. “Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived-thorough meanings which moves towards its equilibrium.” (177).
5. The Body in its Sexual Being
In order to further explicate the body’s existence within the world MP turns to explore the attraction of the body to another body. Love and erotic attraction are directed towards another being within the intentional arc and because of their heightened presence in a person’s life can be easily followed. MP claims that sexuality exists in the entire being and not only in the sex organs or as part of a person’s emotional life. By, once again, following Schneider’s case MP shows that the sexual urge cannot be a reflex that is related to the sex organs, since Schneider organs are healthy but his sexual urge is gone. On the other hand, the intellectualist explanation of the phenomena, which associates sexual urges with a representation, is equally inadequate.
It is psychoanalysis that first showed that sexuality takes place in the entire being. However, MP claims that putting sexuality in such a central place as Freud did, makes sexuality almost equal to being and thus distorts its particular nature. Moreover, as we can learn by observing persons with disorders that originate in sexual trauma, like the girl who lost her voice after she was denied contact with her lover, the psychoanalytic appeal to the disembodied consciousness or sub-conscious creates a situation in which the symptoms of the disorder that are present in the body are seen as sign of another process, a mental one. However, the body does not signify its existence in the same way as symbols signify their meanings, but is rather what it signifies. The girl, thus, loses her voice because a part in her existence is withdrawn from her world, because the body has the ability to turn an idea into a thing and a symbol into a situation. The girl’s body (self) takes on this silent as the form of her existence. This ability to withdraw from the world, which is innate to our existence, is the same that opens us up towards the world.
Our body expresses our existence in “a primary process of signification in which the thing expressed does not exist apart from the expression and in which the signs themselves induce their significance externally. In this way the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence realizes itself in the body.” (192) In this process of signification, there is no original that is translated because body and existence presuppose each other. Existence is the “ambiguous setting of the intercommunication” of its own aspects (193). Sexuality is the aspect of our life that pertains to the existence of sex. But, while it is distinct from other aspects of existence, it cannot be seen as separate within our existence.
The sexual gaze that may reduce me into an object of desire cannot truly objectify me because it eventually wants to posses me “as body brought to life by consciousness” (194) and, therefore not as object. Sexuality is a dialectic in which one existence tends towards another existence that rejects it while not being able to exist without the other existence. This stresses, yet again, the ambiguity which is part of our existence of which sexuality is an ever existing aspect.
“Why is our body for us the meaning of our being, unless because it is a natural self, a current of given existence, with the result that we never know whether the force which bear us are its or ours—or with the result rather that they are never either its or ours. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.” (198)
6. The Body as Expression and Speech
In this chapter, MP shows how even speech has its origin in the lived-body experience rather than in internal thoughts. He goes against the common understanding of speech as the translation of thoughts into words in order to communicate the thought’s meaning to another. In contrast, MP claims that words operate similarly to gesture in that they “inhabit things and are the vehicle of meaning.” (207) Expression, and specifically speech, is not the signification of thoughts in the world but their completion, accomplishment and incarnation. MP gives the example of naming an object as constituting the name as meaning. Names, thus, hold the meanings and invoke te thought of the object they name.
In the process of speaking we create our thoughts in the world. Thoughts do not exist outside of the world in the detached psyche or prior to expression. Even ‘inner thoughts’ exist in words, otherwise they become “an empty consciousness” and “a momentary desire”. (213) A word also possesses a certain gestural sense and, like gesture, inhabits this meaning; that is, the significance of a word exists within the word. The gestural sense of the word, according to MP, also expresses its emotional content through which the world’s emotional essence can be extracted. The process of communication and understanding gestures and words, unlike the perception of things in the world, relies on reciprocity of intentions and gesture between bodies. Understanding someone else is a pre-reflective process that takes place through the body.
Speech is an artificial invention of humanity that, by going through our body, becomes pregnant with meanings and thus turns into a natural from of communication. In fact, according to MP, “everything is both manufacture and natural in man [sic]” (220), and this ambiguity is what defines humanity. Moreover, speech is a kind of “coordination of experience [and] a certain modulation of existence.” (225) It appears “like a boiling point of a liquid, when, in the density of being, volumes of empty space are built up and move outwards.” (228) Through speech both the linguistic world and culture come into being. And, language and culture take part in the world of the body that is part of its constitution.
Part II: The World as Perceived
The Theory of the Body is Already a Theory of Perception
In the intro to the second part of the book MP shows how in the previous chapters he established the body as self and the subject fo perception. He stresses the interdependence of the existence of the body and the world. He also reminds the reader that external perception (of the world) and internal perception (of the body) are entangled as two aspects of a single act of being.
1. Sense Experience
In this Chapter MP explores the ways in which senses operate within the constitution of our experience as an integral part of our being-in-the-world. He starts by scrutinizing the prevalent notions of sensations in empiricist science and intellectualist thought.
The empiricist understanding of the senses as physical attributes of the body, each operating individually and mechanically by sensing qualities of objects as stimuli, deny the possibility a consciousness that is part of the subject’s existence in the world and, hence, define the body as object. To this approach, the senses capture the pre-existing qualities of the sensed object inherent to it. Each one of these qualities, like the color of an object, is captured separately by the corresponding sense organism. The color is seen as the stimulus that is captured by the eyes. Experiments with patients with brain diseases that had different physical reactions to different colors led empiricists to the conclusion that each color can be the cause to a specific response in the body. However, this conclusion could not explain the varied responses to the same color when it was put in contrast. The opposite conclusion, of the intellectualists, claimed that colors are mental construction and the response to each color came from a behavior pattern imprinted in the consciousness.
MP’s position is that color is neither a physical quality of an object nor a construction of thought imposed on the representation of the object in our mind. Color, like any sensation, arises in the interrelations between the subject-body and the world. The sense organ and the sensed quality are not separate thing, they act upon each other reciprocally. The body does not know what quality to sense until the actual moment of perception when the subject comes to ‘know’ the object’s qualities. But, the sensed quality is not the cause and origin of that knowledge, i.e. the color is not an inherent quality that is always there, waiting to show itself to the subject. Rather, the color is both anticipated and surprising; within the sequence of sensible moments each sensed moment in unique and, at the same time, familiar. The sensible ‘invites’ my body to sense it as my body gears toward its specific experience.
As part of MP’s critique of Husserl, in this chapter, the transcendental ego and transcendental deduction are particularly put to the test. There are some similarities between MP’s account of the intellectualist approach and Husserl’s. More specifically, in his debate of the synthesis of the senses and the whole body as the organ of perception, Husserl’s account of the touch as a separate sense constitutive of the body image is rejected.
The synthesis of the senses means that they do not perceive the qualities of things in the world individually and only then send the perceived stimulus to the brain to be put together with the rest of the sensed stimuli. The senses are interrelated: their synthesis occurs each time anew and is thus never complete. One example of that is the use of the drug mescalin, which makes changes patients sight through sound. That is, it makes people see sound. “Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear, and feel.” (266)
In the act of perception there is a unification of the senses (not a unity) that enables the “presumptive unity” of both subject and object “at the horizon of experience”. (255) What this means is that both the subject and his or her world come into being through perception, which arises in the constant negotiation of senses. The unification of the senses, body and world depends on the body schema and “potential movement” (272). This process, which includes the constitution of subjectivity and the knowledge of the object, depends on temporality, on the unfolding of time in each sensed present moment. Through it, the body takes possession of time and constitutes its subjectivity.
The meanings of things are sensed by the body and only later interpreted. This relates not only to sensed ‘qualities’ but also to words. In an experiment, in which words were shown to people too briefly for them to be able to read them, they summoned physical responses that corresponded to the words shown.
2. Space
At the beginning of this chapter, MP raises the need for definitions of intentionality and experience different from Husserl’s – which are not acts of a constituting consciousness and are their content are not detached from being. Through the discussion of space, MP shows that the content of experience is not the translation of experience into thoughts or significations but is a non-thetic (non-posited) and pre-objective knowledge of space.
There are two prevalent notions of space. The first, the empiricist, defines space as the sum of its parts and their relations. In this definition, the body is an object among other objects and space is merely the dynamic relationships among all objects including one’s body. The second prevalent notion of space sees it as a singular field, unified by constant properties that define everything in it. This pertains, for example, to the laws of geometry and physics that sees space as one field in which everything is constituted by the field’s homogenous system of laws. However, since we have already established that the body is not like other things in the world and that experience does not operate under the laws of scientific observation, we need to find another constellation in which body space and things can be analyzed as part of our understanding of experience and perception.
Experimentation with space orientation—the perception of up-down, left-right, and front-back—in which special glasses inverted the perceived image of the world and turned it upside down serve to elucidate this aspect of our experience of space. From this experiment, as well as one in which the visual image of the world was tilted in 45 degrees, scientists concluded that the visual image of the world can be conceived and learned so that the wrong image is ‘righted’. However, MP claims that in this experiment the tactile body image gave room to the visual body image and the body leqarned how to live in its perceived world. It is not the mind that corrected the body, since the mind does not exist in space and does not perceive it. Furthermore, he claims, the scientific explanation separates the visual image from the rest of experience as content without form, while in reality there is a single experience of content and form that holds our non thetic knowledge of the world. The body learns to operate and act within its inverted space because it lives in it as a system of possible actions that become orientated to its perceived space. Thus, a pact is created between the body and the (inverted) spectacle, which creates a virtual body that inhabits the spectacle and through this virtual body, the actual body understands the inverted space created by the spectacle. This means that for my body the inverted image of space is not a wrong representation of actual visual space, but rather it becomes part of the space my body occupies and enters into my lived experience.
“Space has its basis in our facticity. It is neither an object nor an act of unification on the subject’s part; it can neither be observed, since it is presupposed in every observation, nor seen to emerge from a constituting operation, since it is of its essence that it be already constituted, for thus it can, by its magic, confer its own spatial particularizations upon the landscape without ever appearing itself.” (296) The subject, hence, does not constitute space in his/her mind or through perception; space is always already constituted and being is always already being situated in the sequence of orientated space. The body, according to MP, stands in front of the world like a mirror, reflecting it in its own constitution and being. This metaphoric reflection, it should be noted, is not caused by the world and cannot be traced and understood as thetic knowledge; rather, it is experience itself, which is motivated, not caused. This means, in other words, that the motivation and its result are reciprocal and intertwined – a circular dialectic rather than a linear progression.
When dealing with the question of perception of and object’s depth, size and distance, MP asserts that our experience of is not related to their objective measures. Our experience of these aspects of an object depends on our position and the surrounding of the object (the background). In addition, each one of the ‘objective’ aspects of the object’s spatial perception—size, depth and distance—implies the other two aspects and is implied by them reciprocally. Visual perception of space, thus, is motivated rather than signified; that is, the object’s visual perception is motivated rather than caused by each one of the aspects of the object’s perception in space and is not thematized by the subject.
When looking at drawings of objects in perspective, like a cube for example, both our gaze and the object itself participate in constructing the experience of the drawing as having depth. Our gaze does not see the three dimensional perspective of depth, nor does our mind conceive the image of the cube out of its memories or logic. Through the co-existence of the parts of the drawing and “the investing of the object by my gaze which animates it” (308) we experience the drawing of the cube as having depth, which is the dimension in which things envelop each other. Similarly to depth, distance and size are experienced not conceived. And all these dimensions of our spatial experience co-exist in space and time. That is, “the ‘order of coexistence’ is inseparable from the ‘order of sequences’, or rather time is not only the consciousness of a sequence. Perception provides me with a field of presence in the broad sense, extending in two dimensions: the here-there dimension and the past-present-future dimension.” (309)
When dealing with movement, MP once again raises the problems in the prevalent definitions which, generally speaking, separate movement from object and make it into an object in itself. Movement, however, does not exist in space independently from a moving object. Moreover, in our perception of movement the object’s identity is often undefined in itself; thus, we can talk of a mobile entity rather than a moving object: the object becomes one with the movement. Perceiving the moving object requires an anchorage or a background that is perceived as not moving. While the anchorage is presupposed, the relationship between the moving object and the static anchorage is constituted by our habitual perception, and only when we actively disengage from the habitual flow of daily experience may we manipulate our perception and experience the background as moving and the object as static. In addition to the presupposition of a spatial background, perception presupposes the past of the object which tails behind it like the tail of a comet. Space, then, is always already there, including in its past in its present.
My own movement, as we have already seen, is not perceived in the same way as the movement of objects. Rather, it is the movement towards the world, our connection with things in space through time.
In order to talk of space, it is not enough to speak of actual, visual space. MP’s discussion touches upon the space of dreams, hallucinations and mythical space. By treating all these spaces as part of the human space rather than phenomena different from ‘normally’ perceived space, MP shows that the structure of their experience is, in fact, similar to the structure of ‘normal’ experience. In other words, myths, dreams and hallucinations are all lived spaces whose meanings are implicit and non-thetic – they are all expressive spaces, experiences anterior to any sense giving act. “We must contrive to understand how, at a stroke, existence projects round itself worlds which hide objectivity from me, at the same time fastening upon it as the aim of the teleology of consciousness, by picking out these ‘worlds’ against the background of one singular natural world.” By the very existence of dreams, myths and hallucinations as real experiences, MP concludes, “the apparent and real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object.” (343)
3. The Thing and the Natural World
In this chapter MP explore the perception of things and the natural world as phenomena, which he contrasts to the objective world on the one hand and the world as representation on the other hand, both describe our experience of things in the world as having constant features. The discussion begins by exploring, as a continuation of the previous chapter, the perception of distance from things in the world. MP claims that there is a norm, a range of habitual distances in which things can be perceived given to experience without distortion and with enough details. Looking at things from either too close or too far away may distort the image and, in any case, does not allow for the full experience of the object to unfold. My distance from a thing, hence, is not an objective fact but a “tension” built around that norm and which affect my experience. Distance, as an aspect of my perspective of things in the world, participates in determining the point of view in which I am involved and through which things reveal themselves to me. The object exists within a world and the distance between the object and my body is always in relation to the world as background and as horizon of possibilities of other distances and other points of view.
When we explore colors as, arguably, qualities of things in the world, we encounter contradicting definitions. The empiricists claim they are qualities of objects and light, fixed wave lengths that can be measured. Intellectualists claim colors are fixes constructs of experience, conceived in our consciousness. MP claims that color cannot be perceived separately from the object it is a part of. Color is a way into the thing but in our daily existence perception by-passes it, does not perceive it as a thing in itself, and goes directly to the thing. My perception of the brown color of a wooded table, then, is not separate from my perception of its grain, the particular lamp light and the table’s massive presence in the room; and I cannot perceive this particular color otherwise. When discussing light, as a particularly determining factor in the perception of colors, things get even less defined. Perception of color and light affect each other and are both affected by the organization of the field of vision. The gaze, as the apparatus of vision, is particularly affected by light as a directing factor more than as a thing in itself. Light is mostly taken for granted--it is what makes me see rather than something I see.
However, “our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal any stray data; it is entirely sustained by the certainty of the world. In this way we finally see the true significance of perceptual constancies. The constancy of colour is only an abstract component of the constancy of things, which in turn is grounded in the primordial constancy of the world as the horizon of all our experiences. It is not, then, because I perceive constant colours beneath the variety of lightings that I believe in the existence of things, nor is the thing a collection of constant characteristics. It is, on the contrary, in so far as my perception is in itself open upon a world and on things that I discover constant colours.” (365)
MP goes on to discuss tactile experience of things in the world. According to him, any perception through any part of our body correlates to a certain “I can” of the entire body (366). Tactile experience depends on movement which affects touch similarly to the way light affects vision: it directs and reveals the object to the senses and takes part in creating the perceptual perspective. In addition, through the unity of the body as an organ of perception, “each contact of an object with a part of our objective body is, therefore, in reality a contact with the whole of the present or possible phenomenal body.” (369)
Things in the world are perceived as inter-sensory entities, they are never perceived by only one sense organ and their perception resonates throughout the sensory system. The constancy of the senses and of properties are understood “not preeminently as sensory contents, but as certain kinds of symbiosis, certain ways the outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meeting this invasion.” (370) An object becomes real—that is, it co-exists in my world—only when it touches the entire body and affects it inter-sensorialy. The thing is inseparable from the perceiver and nothing exists for us that have not been perceived. And each sensible quality of an object is linked to the rest and all of them as the presence of the object itself, form the significance of the object; a significance which is embodied in it and which animates it. The thing, then, does not signify or is represented but expresses itself – it is its expression.
The difference between natural things and made objects lies in their relation to their significance. To any “human-made” object, and particularly a work of art, there is an anterior underlying significance that exists in it. The pre-objective significance of natural thing, in contrast, always already exists in it and cannot be separate from the thing. In addition, any part of a natural object signifies and contains the significance of the original whole object. A piece of rock, for example, still bears the significance of a rock. A painting, on the other hand, cannot have the same significance when torn to pieces. In other words, in the natural world existence and significance are one.
The relationship between the thing and our body is filled with contradictions. Our body knows itself and its unity only through the perception of the thing and its unity but, at the same time, the thing confronts the body and rejects it, the two are always separate. Moreover, when perceiving things I reach out to them, not knowing what they are and how they shall be perceived but, at the same time, I am opening up to them and bringing them in. I connect my existence, in other words, with the existence of “an absolute Other” (380). The object, thus, is both part of my living experience and transcendent from my life. I know the object not in its determinate constancy but in its style, and it is through style, not constant properties, that I recognize the unity of the object and the world. The world is not the collection of things around me, or the outline of experience; rather, it is the one thing I am in communication and communion with. Like the unity of the two monocular images of each eye into one binocular image, which is not the combination of the two but their merging into one visual experience, so do my experiences of the world with all their spatial and temporal perspectives merge into one world. “In the inner and outer horizons of the things or the landscapes, there is a co-presence and co-existence of outlines which is brought into existence through space and time. The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life. Its counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory functions which we have discovered is the definition of the body.” (385)
In temporality the contradictions of our experience and the problem of the never complete synthesis of perception is solved: experience is always moving towards its horizon because there is always something to be perceived beyond the present moment. The significance of the thing, therefore, can never be fully grasped. That is why consciousness, rather than being the locus of clarity, is “the abode of ambiguity” (387).
Examining hallucinations can help explain this ambiguity and put consciousness, once again, in the realm of experience. According to MP, hallucinations are quasi-realities that maintain the pre-logical basis of our knowledge of the world. However, the patients do not believe they are seeing or hearing things, since most of them attest that they can distinguish between real perception and their hallucinations. Hallucination, then, is not the belief in a representation of things that are not there, nor is it perception of those things. In fact, the distinguishing characteristics between the patients’ real perception and their hallucination suggest that they do not correspond to the patients’ bodies in the same way as perception. Hallucinations lack the facticity of perception, it exists as experience outside of the chain of experiences of the perceived inter-subjective world, and is entirely isolated inside the patient but not as part of his or her perceived world. What happens in hallucinations is that the phenomenal body creates an alternative environment, reproduces the ways in which reality strikes the patient in his being and creates “an artificial world answering to the total intention of his being” (398). But hallucination must exist in the patient in a higher degree than perception.
Illusion can enter the world of the normal persons since they too have the same structure of experience and are exposed to the contradictions of existence. Hallucination is possible “because we are still in the antepredicative world, and because the connection between appearance and total experience is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception.” (400) For this reason, and because perception is never complete and hides as much as it reveals, doubt is a part of existence. Nevertheless, perception cannot be erroneous because it is based on reality and facticity rather than on truth and necessity
4. Other Selves and the Human World
The problem of the subject existing among other subjects arises in both the philosophical objective (Cartesian) thought and the empiricist physiological approach. For the Cartesian understanding of the world subjectivity is totally whole, the subject is a complete being-for-itself and the world is a constructed representation for/of it. Hence, other subjects do not share my world but, rather, they are part of my construction of the world. The Other, in other words, cannot be a subjective person to this transcendent subjectivity. For the empiricist understanding of my relationship with others in the world, the body of the Other and of myself are equally objectified. All bodies perceive the world and others in it through the biological mechanisms of the physical body and, once again, subjectivity is not in the world or in contact with other subjects. Both approaches cannot account to inter-consciousness which is at the basis of the human world and of culture.
According to MP, our phenomenal and visible bodies, which are distinguished from the physical bodies, inhabit our consciousness, and behaviors are outlined and "appear on them, but are not really contained in them." Only to a perceptual consciousness which is a "subject of a pattern of behavior [and] a being-in-the-world or existence [...] can another appear at the top of his phenomenal body, and be endowed with a sort of 'locality'." (409) Our co-existence in the world is a completion of myself in the other through the implication of our perception in one and the same world. The ambiguity of my existence in the world enables the Other to penetrate as both our perspectives of the world, which have no definite limits, slip into one another. The Other, therefore, cannot be what my gaze makes of it because it is not a fragment of the world but a point of view of the world. The interchange of perspectives can occur because of the similarity in the structure of our bodies, in the way we are-in-the-world, in our intentions.
Through language, which is a cultural object, not only our bodies but our thoughts too are interwoven. "We are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world." (413) This communication forms the basis of culture and society, which are not artificial constructions but are (together with things like nation and class) modes of co-existence and part of the world we live in.
Part III: Being-for-Itself and the Being-in-the-World
1. The Cogito
This chapter is dedicated to Descartes’ cogito, taking into account the previous chapters in the book. MP shows that neither the Cartesian cogito, which describes human existence as completely disembodied and mental, nor its opposite, in which existence is solely in the physical body, can account to our experience of living in the world. In spite of the fact the there is some value in Descartes return to the subject through the discussion of the cogito, what it eventually depicts is a subject completely detached from the world and even from its own actions and past. Since the cogito is isolated from anything that is not itself, it cannot acknowledge any other consciousness and is hence, a solipsistic existence. This absolute cogito, therefore, can only be God.
MP offers a new kind of cogito: The phenomenological cogito, which recognizes our constant contact with the world with all its ambiguity. The phenomenological cogito exists through transcendence of actions in the world and its self knowledge comes from its knowledge of itself as being-in-the-world. Moreover, “pure ideas”, which Descartes claims have no hold in reality outside of the mind, can only spring from the pre-objective perception of phenomena. The thought of a triangle as an idea which is complete and perfectly conceived within the rules of Euclidean geometry can only rely on perceived triangles and its completeness cannot be deemed universally true, as non-Euclidean geometry shows. In addition, our changing perspectives creates new views of the world and any “truth”, such as the truth of Euclidean geometrical laws, arises within a historical, geographical, cultural perspective. Hence, there is no absolute truth or certainty.
2. Temporality
In this chapter MP elaborates on the intimate relationships between time and subjectivity, which he started to develop in the previous chapters. His point of departure is that any talk of temporality necessarily touches upon subjectivity (as is the case with space and sexuality) since the subject is a temporal being in the sense that time is an element of being. The problem that we face when dealing with time and temporality is that the discussion presupposes a view of time, a perspective towards time—in the spatial sense—that we don’t really have. “The problem is how to make time explicit as it comes into being and makes itself evident, time at all times underlying the notion of time, not as an object of our knowledge, but as a dimension of our being.” (482-3) In other words, we do not perceive time and we cannot know it, neither in thought nor as non-thetic knowledge of experience, because it is what enables experience and perception.
Time is the “transition-synthesis” (491) of being: transition from one moment of being to another as well as their synthesis, and it enables the synthesis of space and body. Time is not a sequence of present moments, but is the single phenomena of past, present and future coming together in a single moment of being which we call subjectivity. And this present moment is the occasion for being and consciousness to coincide. Each present moment anticipates its successor, the immediate future moment, and itself as a past moment. It is, hence, changed by its successor and shapes its predecessor. Moreover, in subjectivity, the present moment’s thickness may include this minute, this hour, this day or year.
3. Freedom
