📙 The World of Perception

Merleau-Ponty sets out his main aim for these lectures at the end of the first paragraph of this first lecture: ‘I shall suggest . . . that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy . . . has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget’.

Kant saw clearly that the problem is not how determinate shapes and sizes make their appearance in my experience, since without them there would be no experience, and since any internal experience is possible only against the background of External experience. But Kant’s conclusion from this was that I am a consciousness which embraces and constitutes the world, and this reflection caused him to overlook the phenomenon of the body and that of the thing.

The central theme of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and the Invisible, is precisely the way in which ‘the phenomenon of the body’ is to be integrated into a Kantian philosophy, so that each of us is not so much a ‘consciousness’ as a body which ‘embraces and constitutes the world’.

He puts the point in Phenomenology of Perception in the following way: ‘by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception.’

It is our ‘bodily’ intentionality which brings the possibility of meaning into our experience by ensuring that its content, the things presented in experience, are surrounded with references to the past and future, to other places and other things, to human possibilities and situations.

Merleau-Ponty’s account of the role of the senses in perception is that they make it their business to cover their tracks as they organise experience in such a way that it presents to us a world of things arrayed before us in a three-dimensional objective space within which we are located as just another object.

So as we get on with our life we do not notice the role of the senses in organising experience and ‘constituting’ the physical world; it is precisely their business to make this role invisible to us.

Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.

Merleau-Ponty holds that this conception of space is misleading. In this context he is happy to begin by recruiting natural science to suggest that this conception of space does not even apply to the physical world. Merleau-Ponty is broadly right about this, though he gets the details wrong. It is not, as he suggests, the adoption of a non-Euclidean geometry that marks the downfall of the Newtonian conception of space, but the adoption by Einstein (in his general theory of relativity) of the nineteenth-century Riemann-Clifford hypothesis that geometry and physics are interdependent, in that gravity just expresses the curvature of space which is determined by the local distribution of matter.

It has often been said that modern artists and thinkers are difficult. Picasso is harder to understand, indeed to love, than Poussin or Chardin; the same is said of Giraudoux or Malraux, as opposed to Marivaux or Stendhal. Some, such as Julien Benda, have even drawn the conclusion that modern writers are ‘byzantine’, are difficult simply because they have nothing to say and peddle subtlety in place of art1. Nothing could be further from the truth. If modern thought is difficult and runs counter to common sense, this is because it is concerned with truth; experience no longer allows it to settle for the clear and straightforward notions which common sense cherishes because they bring peace of mind.

When our gaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we are forced to adopt a certain point of view and these successive snapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposed one upon the other.

If many painters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometrical perspective, this is because they have sought to recapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the landscape.

The lazy viewer will see ‘errors of perspective’ here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other, a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.

In the footsteps of science and painting, philosophy and, above all, psychology seem to have woken up to the fact that our relationship to space is not that of a pure disembodied subject to a distant object but rather that of a being which dwells in space relating to its natural habitat.

In psychology as in geometry, the notion of a single unified space entirely open to a disembodied intellect has been replaced by the idea of a space which consists of different regions and has certain privileged directions; these are closely related to our distinctive bodily features and our situation as beings thrown into the world.

If we consult a classical psychology textbook, it will tell us that an object is a system of properties which present themselves to our various senses and which are united by an act of intellectual synthesis. For example, this lemon is a bulging oval shape with two ends plus this yellow colour plus this fresh feel plus this acidic taste . . . This analysis, however, is far from satisfactory: it is not clear how each of these qualities or properties is bound to the others and yet it seems to us that the lemon is a unified entity of which all these various qualities are merely different manifestations.

Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. The living, exploring, hand which thought it could master this thing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky External object.

Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it. To use the language of psychoanalysis, things are complexes. This is what Cézanne meant when he spoke of the particular ‘halo’ of things which it is the task of painting to capture.

These studies have all grown out of the surrealist experiment which, as early as thirty years ago, sought in the objects around us and above all in the found objects to which, on occasions, we become uniquely attached, what André Breton called the ‘catalysts of Desire’: the place where human Desire manifests itself, or ‘crystallises’.