Philosophy notes25

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) (1)Introduction (2)Relation to Husserl (3)Perception and Body (4)Ambiguity/Art Bibliography: (1)”At the Limits of Phenomenology: Merleau Ponty” Galen A. Johnson in The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy ed. Simon Glendinning ( Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) (2) “Merleau-Ponty, Maurice” Galen Johnson in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (vol 3)ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) (3) “Merleau-Ponty” Bernard Waldenfels in A Companion to Continental Philosophy ed.

Simon Critchley (Malden MA: Blackwell 1998/1999) (4)Merleau Ponty: Key Concepts Ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield Acumen 2008) (5)The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau Ponty (6)”The Visible and the Invisible” by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Continental Philosophy An Anthology ed. William McNeill and Karen S.Feldman (Malden Blackwell 1998 Introduction: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work aims at an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and difficulties of human existence. However, he never propounded the extreme accounts of being-towards-death, anguished responsibility and conflicting relations with others characteristic of Sartrean phenomenology.

He sought to develop a radical re-description of embodied experience (studies of perception) and argued that these phenomena could not be suitably understood by the philosophical tradition because of its tendency to drift between the flawed alternatives of empiricism and rationalism.

Relation to Husserl Husserl’s notions of phenomenological description, reduction, essential intuition and intentionality are redefined by Merleau Ponty from an existentialist point of view. He articulates the concept of intentional arc to capture the human being’s prereflective relation to the world.

The body and perception: He aims at defining philosophy in terms of the intentional life of perception. Perception is the act through which existence is known. Therefore it is the primary relation to the world

2 and all the problems that we touch upon become the problem of perception. Lived experience shows that beneath the cogito lies the intentional arc of perception.

As a phenomenologist Merleau Ponty turns to a study of the human sciences and in particular the science of psychology. He attempts to avoid both mechanistic and intellectualistic approaches to behavior. Form is comprehended in terms of physical, vital and human aspects.

A typical view of the body in philosophical canon is that it is a prison. Proposition - a docile body that can be used instrumentally is preferable to its decaying alternative--a body that prevents us acting as we might wish to-literal adherence to the mind-body duality, and the subordination of the body. This denigration of embodiment governs most metaphysical thought, and perhaps even most philosophical thought, until at least Nietzsche. Ponty problematizes it and states "In the first case consciousness is too poor, in the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching" (Phenomenology of Perception). Thus for Merleau Ponty “The theory of the body is already a theory of perception” "…the demand for a pure description excludes equally the procedure of analytical reflection on the one hand, and that of scientific explanation on the other" (PP) Only by avoiding these tendencies, according to him, can we "rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent object, that primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being." (PP) The Phenomenology of Perception is united by the claim that we are our bodies, and that our lived experience of this body denies the detachment of subject from object, mind from body. 'I am my body' cannot simply be interpreted as advocating a materialist, behaviorist type position. He does not want to deny or ignore those aspects of our life which are commonly called the 'mental' - but he does want to suggest that the use of this mind is inseparable from our bodily, situated, and physical nature. This means simply that the perceiving mind is an incarnated body, or to put the problem in another way, he enriches the concept of the body to allow it to both think and perceive. It is also for these reasons that we are best served by referring to the individual as not simply a body, but as a body-subject.

The lived body has the dimensions of incarnation, reflexivity and affectivity from the subjective point of view- unlike Descartes it is a locus of the primitive union of the mind and the body. From the point of view of its milieu or noetic side the body has spatiality, sexuality and affectivity. These envelope into each other.

This ensures that there is no lived distinction between the act of perceiving and the thing perceived.

3 For Merleau-Ponty, perception cannot be characterized as a type of thought in a classical, reflective sense, it is also far from being a third person process where we attain access to some rarefied, pure object. Just as for Heidegger we cannot hear pure noise but always a noise of some activity, the objects that we encounter in the world are always of a particular kind and relevant to certain human intentions (explicit or otherwise), and we cannot step outside this instrumentality to some realm of purified objects or, thought.

Perception then, is not merely passive before sensory stimulation, but as Merleau-Ponty suggests, is a "creative receptivity".

For Merleau-Ponty, this inseparability of inner and outer ensures that a study of the perceived ends up revealing the subject perceiving. As he puts it, "the body will draw to itself the intentional threads which bind it to its surroundings and finally will reveal to us the perceiving subject as the perceived world" (PP). It is precisely this ambiguous intertwining of inner and outer, as it is revealed in a phenomenological analysis of the body, which the intellectualism of philosophy cannot appreciate. According to MerleauPonty, philosophers of reflection ignore the paradoxical condition of all human subjectivity: that is, the fact that we are both a part of the world and coextensive with it, constituting but also constituted.

Habit - We move directly and in union with our bodies. As he points out, "I do not need to lead it (the body) towards a movement's completion, it is in contact with it from the start and propels itself towards that end" (PP). In other words, we do not need to check to see if we have two legs before we stand up, since we are necessarily with our bodies. (driving, game analogy) Through reference to embodied activity, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that our actions, and the perceptions involved in those actions, are largely habitual; learnt through imitation, and responsiveness within an environment and to a community. MerleauPonty defines understanding as a harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between intention and performance, thus consciousness is primarily not a matter of "I think that", but of "I can" (PP). Action in this paradigm is spontaneous and practical, and it is clear that we move phenomenally in a manner somewhat antithetical to the mindbody distinction (PP). Habit and the tendency to seek an equilibrium might help us adjust to the circumstances of our world.

Ambiguity/Art: Merleau-Ponty does not intend to suggest that the complicity of body and mind that we see in habit and the mastery of a certain technique, implies an absolute awareness of one's own 'subjectivity'. According to him, "there is the absolute certitude of the world in general, but not of anything in particular" (PP). Knowing an individual person in a particular manifestation may presuppose an understanding of humanity in its totality, but certainly not any singular motivation for a particular act. Lived relations can never be

4 grasped perfectly by consciousness, since the body-subject is never entirely present-toitself. Meaningful behavior is lived through, rather than thematized and reflected upon, and this ensures that the actions of particular individuals “may be meaningful without them being fully or reflectively aware of the meaning that their action creates or embodies.”

According to Merleau-Ponty, ambiguity prevails both in my perception of things, and in the knowledge I have of myself, primarily because of our temporal situation which he insists cannot but be ambiguous. He suggests that: "My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood" (PP).

In such sentiments Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that the relationship that we have to ourselves is one that is always typified by alterity.

The phenomenologist has to express the same mystery before the world that is expressed in works of art. “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning”. Thus for Merleau-Ponty the living body is “essentially an expressive space”