The World of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Oliver Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134381951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.'In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world. Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

LECTURE 1

The World of Perception and the World of Science

The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this is a delusion. In these lectures, I hope to show that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude. I shall suggest that much time and effort, as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.

This temptation is particularly strong in France. It is characteristic not just of French philosophy but also of what is rather loosely termed the French cast of mind to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experience of the world seems by contrast to be of little value. If I want to know what light is, surely I should ask a physicist; is it not he who can tell me what light really is? Is light, as was once thought, a stream of burning projectiles, or, as others have argued, vibrations in the ether? Or is it, as a more recent theory maintains, a phenomenon that can be classed alongside other forms of electromagnetic radiation? What good would it do to consult our senses on this matter? Why should we linger over what our perception tells us about colours, reflections and the objects which bear such properties? For it seems that these are almost certainly no more than appearances: only the methodical investigations of a scientist – his measurements and experiments – can set us free from the delusions of our senses and allow us to gain access to things as they really are. Surely the advancement of knowledge has consisted precisely in our forgetting what our senses tell us when we consult them naïvely. Surely there is no place for such data in a picture of the world as it really is, except insofar as they indicate peculiarities of our human make-up, ones which physiology will, one day, take account of, just as it has already managed to explain the illusions of long- and short-sightedness. The real world is not this world of light and colour; it is not the fleshy spectacle which passes before my eyes. It consists, rather, of the waves and particles which science tells us lie behind these sensory illusions.

Descartes went as far as to say that simply by scrutinising sensory objects and without referring to the results of scientific investigations, I am able to discover that my senses deceive me and I learn accordingly to trust only my intellect.¹ I claim to see a piece of wax. Yet what exactly is this wax? It is by no means its colour, white, nor, if it has retained this, its floral scent, nor its softness to my touch, nor indeed the dull thud which it makes when I drop it. Not one of these properties is constitutive of the wax because it can lose them all without ceasing to exist, for example if I melt it, whereupon it changes into a colourless liquid which has no discernible scent and which is no longer resistant to my touch. Yet I maintain that this is still the same wax. So how should this claim be understood? What persists through this change of state is simply a piece of matter which has no properties, or, at most, a certain capacity to occupy space and take on different shapes, without either the particular space filled or the shape adopted being in any way predetermined. This then is the real and unchanging essence of the wax. It will be clear that the true nature of the wax is not revealed to my senses alone, for they only ever present me with objects of particular sizes and shapes. So I cannot see the wax as it really is with my own eyes; the reality of the wax can only be conceived in the intellect. When I assume I am seeing the wax, all I am really doing is thinking back from the properties which appear before my senses to the wax in its naked reality, the wax which, though it lacks properties in itself, is nonetheless the source of all the properties which manifest themselves to me. Thus for Descartes – and this idea has long held sway in the French philosophical tradition – perception is no more than the confused beginnings of scientific knowledge. The relationship between perception and scientific knowledge is one of appearance to reality. It befits our human dignity to entrust ourselves to the intellect, which alone can reveal to us the reality of the world.

When I said, a moment ago, that modern art and philosophy have rehabilitated perception and the world as we perceive it, I did not, of course, mean to imply that they deny the value of science, either as a means of technological advancement, or insofar as it offers an object lesson in precision and truth. If we wish to learn how to prove something, to conduct a thorough investigation or to be critical of ourselves and our preconceptions, it remains appropriate, now as then, that we turn to science. It was a good thing that we once expected science to provide all the answers at a time when it had still to come into being. The question which modern philosophy asks in relation to science is not intended either to contest its right to exist or to close off any particular avenue to its inquiries. Rather, the question is whether science does, or ever could, present us with a picture of the world which is complete, self-sufficient and somehow closed in upon itself, such that there could no longer be any meaningful questions outside this picture. It is not a matter of denying or limiting the extent of scientific knowledge, but rather of establishing whether it is entitled to deny or rule out as illusory all forms of inquiry that do not start out from measurements and comparisons and, by connecting particular causes with particular consequences, end up with laws such as those of classical physics. This question is asked not out of hostility to science. Far from it: in fact, it is science itself – particularly in its most recent developments – which forces us to ask this question and which encourages us to answer in the negative.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, scientists have got used to the idea that their laws and theories do not provide a perfect image of Nature but must rather be considered ever simpler schematic representations of natural events, destined to be honed by increasingly minute investigations; or, in other words, these laws and theories constitute knowledge by approximation. Science subjects the data of our experience to a form of analysis that we can never expect will be completed since there are no intrinsic limits to the process of observation: we could always envisage that it might be more thorough or more exact than it is at any given moment. The mission of science is to undertake an interminable elucidation of the concrete or sensible, from which it follows that the concrete or sensible can no longer be viewed, as in the classical paradigm, as a mere appearance destined to be surpassed by scientific thought. The data of perception and, more generally, the events which comprise the history of the world, cannot be deduced from a certain number of laws which supposedly make up the unchanging face of the universe. On the contrary, it is the scientific law that is an approximate expression of the physical event and which allows this event to retain its opacity. The scientist of today, unlike his predecessor working within the classical paradigm, no longer cherishes the illusion that he is penetrating to the heart of things, to the object as it is in itself. The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation; it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it. This does not make the need for scientific research any less pressing; in fact, the only thing under attack is the dogmatism of a science that thinks itself capable of absolute and complete knowledge. We are simply doing justice to each of the variety of elements in human experience and, in particular, to sensory perception.

While science and the philosophy of science have, as we have seen, been preparing the ground for an exploration of the world as we perceive it, painting, poetry and philosophy have forged ahead boldly by presenting us with a very new and characteristically contemporary vision of objects, space, animals and even of human beings seen from the outside, just as they appear in our perceptual field. In forthcoming lectures I shall describe some of what we have learned in the course of these investigations.

LECTURE 2

Exploring the World of Perception: Space

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 art.¹ 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.

Thus modern thinkers seek to render obscure even the simplest of ideas and to revise classical concepts in the light of our experience. Today I would like to consider, as an example of this approach, an idea which seems at first sight to be the clearest of all: the concept of space. Classical science is based on a clear distinction between space and the physical world. Thus space is the uniform medium in which things are arranged in three dimensions and in which they remain the same regardless of the position they occupy. In many cases, the properties of an object are seen to change when the object is moved. If an object is moved from the pole to the equator, its weight and perhaps even its shape will change, on account of the rise in temperature. Yet neither of these changes – of weight and shape – can be attributed to the movement as such: space is the same at the pole as at the equator. The variation which occurs from one place to the other is one of physical conditions, of temperature. Thus the fields of geometry and physics remain entirely distinct: the form and content of the world do not mix. The geometrical properties of the object would remain the same after the move, were it not for the variation in physical conditions to which it is also subject. Or so it was assumed in classical science. Everything changes if, with the advent of so-called non-Euclidean geometry, we come to think of space itself as curved and use this to explain how things can change simply by being moved. Thus space is composed of a variety of different regions and dimensions, which can no longer be thought of as interchangeable and which effect certain changes in the bodies which move around within them. Instead of a world in which the distinction between identity and change is clearly defined, with each being attributed to a different principle, we have a world in which objects cannot be considered to be entirely self-identical, one in which it seems as though form and content are mixed, the boundary between them blurred. Such a world lacks the rigid framework once provided by the uniform space of Euclid. We can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space and the things which occupy it, nor indeed between the pure idea of space and the concrete spectacle it presents to our senses.

It is intriguing that the findings of science should coincide with those of modern painting. Classical doctrine distinguishes between outline and colour: the artist draws the spatial pattern of the object before filling it with colour. Cézanne, by contrast, remarked that ‘as soon as you paint you draw’, by which he meant that neither in the world as we perceive it nor in the picture which is an expression of that world can we distinguish absolutely between, on the one hand, the outline or shape of the object and, on the other, the point where colours end or fade, that play of colour which must necessarily encompass all that there is: the object’s shape, its particular colour, its physiognomy and its relation to neighbouring objects.² Cézanne strives to give birth to the outline and shape of objects in the same way that nature does when we look at them: through the arrangement of colours. This is why, when he paints an apple and renders its coloured texture with unfailing patience, it ends up swelling and bursting free from the confines of well-behaved draughtsmanship.

In this drive to rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience, all the precautions of classical art fall by the wayside. According to classical doctrine, painting is based on perspective. This means that when a painter is confronted by, for example, a landscape, he chooses to depict on his canvas an entirely conventional representation of what he sees. He sees the tree nearby, then he directs his gaze further into the distance, to the ro...