Phenomenology of Perception

Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Year: 1945 (this edn. trans. Colin Smith, Routledge 1962)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception.md

Summary

Phenomenology of Perception is Merleau-Ponty's systematic founding statement of an embodied, existential phenomenology: against both empiricism (which treats sensation as passive contents) and intellectualism (which treats perception as the judgement of a pure, constituting consciousness — the two being twin "traditional prejudices" rooted in the same dogmatic "objective attitude"), he returns to the phenomenal field and locates the subject of perception in the lived body (le corps propre). The body is not an object in the world but the "vehicle of being in the world," the general medium for having a world. From the study of pathological cases (Schneider's motor/speech/sexual disorders, the phantom limb, anosognosia) he derives a pre-objective account of motility as basic intentionality — consciousness is first of all an "I can," not an "I think" — and of habit as incorporation by which the body extends its world (the blind man's stick, the organist's organ). The lived body is the sedimented, perceptual ground for space (oriented space, the "spatial level," depth), for the thing and the natural world (perceptual constancy, the structure lighting-thing, perceptual "faith"), for the cultural world and other selves (intersubjectivity, dialogue), and ultimately for a temporal account of subjectivity ("the subject is time") and a situated account of freedom ("we choose our world and the world chooses us"). All problems are "concentric": body, world, thing, others and time are one single structure of presence.

Key Claims

The critique of the "traditional prejudices": empiricism and intellectualism

• Both empiricism and intellectualism treat sensation as a separable, objectifiable content and remain within the "natural or dogmatic attitude," which takes the objective world as given; neither can grasp the phenomenal field — the pre-objective layer of lived experience that precedes the distinction between subject and object.
• Empiricism makes consciousness "too poor" and intellectualism "too rich" for either to understand how an object can appeal to consciousness, i.e., how we learn. Both are "in agreement with that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning."
• The two doctrines converge despite their opposition: "The affinity between intellectualism and empiricism is... much less obvious and much more deeply rooted than is commonly thought. It arises... from the fact that both persist in the natural or dogmatic attitude."

The body is the subject of perception, not an object

• "The body is our general medium for having a world" and "the vehicle of being in the world." My body is never simply an object: I cannot array it before my eyes; it is the unperceived term at the centre of the world, "that by which there are objects."
• The paradox of the phantom limb and anosognosia show that the body is not a mechanism: there is a "habit-body" and a "body at this moment," and the refusal of mutilation expresses "our inherence in a world" rather than a physiological fact or a psychological representation.
• The body schema (image) is a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world" — a system of equivalences, "the laying down of the first co-ordinates," not a residue of associations.

Motility is basic intentionality: "I can" before "I think"

• "Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'." The Schneider case (Gelb & Goldstein) distinguishes grasping (Greifen) from pointing (Zeigen) and concrete from abstract movement, revealing an intentionality that is neither third-person mechanism nor a representation of movement — a "motor intentionality," a "motor project."
• Below perception, intelligence, motility and desire runs the "intentional arc" projecting round us our past, future and situation, which "goes limp" in illness.

Habit is incorporation: the body dilates being-in-the-world

• Habit is "knowledge in the hands": the blind man's stick, the motorist's car, the woman's feathered hat, the typist's keyboard, the organist's organ are incorporated into the body schema. To get used to an instrument "is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body."
• "The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art" — an expressive unity, "a nexus of living meanings," not the law for a set of covariant terms.

Speech and expression

• Speech is not the clothing of a ready-made thought: "the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world." Thought is accomplished in and through expression; an "originating" speech brings meaning into being, against a "constituted" (secondary) speech. Communication is a mutual transformation of existence, not the transmission of representations.
• The "tacit cogito" — a pre-reflective presence of self to self — underlies all explicit reflection and language.

The world as perceived: space, the thing, and the natural world

• Space is not homogeneous spatium but oriented space governed by a "spatial level" constituted by the body's gearing onto its world; depth is "the most 'existential' of all dimensions," the body's hold on the world. Each object has an "optimum distance" from which it requires to be seen.
• Perceptual constancy (size, shape, colour) is not an intellectual construction but grounded in the body's hold on the world and the structure lighting–thing-lighted. The thing is a "style" or "unity of value," a "nexus of living meanings"; perception rests on a "primordial faith" / "primary opinion" in the world that underlies both truth and error, perception and hallucination.
• Sensation is "literally a form of communion": the senses intercommunicate through the body's synergic unity; there is a "primordial layer" of sense experience beneath the division of the senses (synaesthesia is "the rule").

Other selves and the human world

• The cultural world (implements, roads, churches) and, first of all, the body of the other as the vehicle of behaviour, are perceived through co-existence, not by "reasoning by analogy." Dialogue constitutes a "common ground"; the intersubjective world is a permanent field of existence. Solipsism and communication are "two 'moments' of one phenomenon."

Temporality and freedom

• The subject is best understood as time: "We are not saying that time is for someone... We are saying that time is someone." The "field of presence," with its retentions and protentions, is the primary experience of time; subjectivity is "the upsurge of time."
• Freedom is situated, not absolute: motivation does not cancel freedom but grounds it; "we choose our world and the world chooses us." There is "never determinism and never absolute choice."

Connections

Concepts: Lived Body · Embodiment · Dwelling · Atmosphere · Habitus
Authors: Maurice Merleau-Ponty · Martin Heidegger · Juhani Pallasmaa · Christian Norberg-Schulz · Gaston Bachelard
Theme: Phenomenology
Related source notes: borch-2006-architectural-atmospheres · pallasmaa-2009-thinking-hand · heidegger-building-dwelling-thinking · norberg-schulz-genius-loci · wagiri-et-al-2024-embodied-spaces-digital-times

Direct Quotes

"Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'." (Spatiality of One's Own Body and Motility, p. 137)

"The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world... it builds itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world." (The Synthesis of One's Own Body, p. 146)

"The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art." (The Synthesis of One's Own Body, p. 150)

"Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think has always several meanings." (The Body in its Sexual Being, p. 169)

"Man is a historical idea and not a natural species." (The Body in its Sexual Being, p. 170)

"The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world." (The Body as Expression, and Speech, p. 183)

"It is the body's role to transform ideas into things, and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep." (The Body in its Sexual Being, p. 164)

"We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out... We are saying that time is someone." (Temporality, p. 421)

"We choose our world and the world chooses us." (Freedom, p. 454)

"The whole life of consciousness is characterized by the tendency to posit objects... And yet the absolute positing of a single object is the death of consciousness." (The Body as Object, p. 71)

Open Questions

• This is a 1945 text pre-dating Merleau-Ponty's later ontology of the flesh (The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously 1964), which the wiki's Embodiment concept currently uses — does the later "flesh of the world" refine or revise the earlier lived-body phenomenology?
• Merleau-Ponty does not directly address architecture; his account of the "optimum distance" and the body's "gearing" onto the world is implicit in the atmospheric/haptic turn (Pallasmaa, Böhme) — is that appropriation faithful, or does it domesticate a philosophy concerned with existence rather than with designing good buildings?
• The situated account of freedom (against Sartre's absolute freedom) and the account of class-consciousness have political stakes — do they connect to the wiki's Everyday Life and Neoliberalism clusters, or is Merleau-Ponty mainly a resource for the phenomenological/existential-normative pole?