One fine day, several months into the pandemic, I decided that I wanted to read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, so I ordered myself a copy. When it arrived, I started right in with the Preface and then the Introduction. The main point was something about how to properly understand what the real world really is. Apparently, a lot of people have made assertions and/or assumptions about what reality is and, according to Merleau-Ponty, they have all been mostly wrong, which is why we need phenomenology. The mistake that he most objects to is the idea that the world has some sort of real existence apart from us. Why is this a mistake? Don’t we all believe that? Or at least act like we do? And what’s the point anyway? What good does it do to say that the apple tree in my back yard somehow ceases to exist when I’m not looking at it? In the introductory materials, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t say that directly but he does say (I think) that although it is often convenient to think that the tree you are seeing and the tree you remember are equally real, in fact they are not. My memory of my apple tree in the southwest corner of my yard is a pointer to the tree just as an icon on a screen is a pointer to an app or to a file. And pointers, though convenient, are not the same as that to which they point. The connection between the memory image and the tree is perfect in its way and yet also dangerous. The danger comes from thinking, as we all do, that our memory of the tree proves that it is really there.
Remember that thing about if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees or hears it fall, did it really fall? How would a phenomenologist answer this question? By saying, perhaps, that the question is a good example of the confusion Merleau-Ponty is talking about. The fact that this question gives us pause–that we do not just see immediately that it is a nonsense question–points out how sloppy we can be in conflating a perceived object with the mental image of the perceived object. If you imagine a tree falling, did you really imagine it falling? Yes. If you go to the forest and see a tree that has fallen, did it really fall? Yes. Can you imagine seeing it fall? Yes. Did you really see it fall? No. Did you know that it had fallen before you saw that it had fallen? No. The real questions on this topic are all easy-peasy; only nonsense questions are hard.
Anyway, I was more or less able to follow along with the fifteen-page preface and the sixty-three page introduction. So I went on into Part I, which is called “The Body.” I found Part I to be hard going. I could see that old Maurice was really into it–forging constantly ahead and working hard. But it seemed to me that he was spending a lot of effort trying to disprove ideas that hardly anybody believes, not to mention the fact that only forty or fifty people out of eight billion even understand what they are. Is this worth the effort? It seems almost like…almost like…like it was all nothing but words. Words! Words! Words! Who know there were so many? It’s a nightmare. They just keep coming! But wait. Sakinol, as they say in the Turkish movies. Yes, words are a problem, but we need to be calm.
Eventually I found some parts that I liked. The third chapter of Part I, for example, is pretty good. The title–The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility–is not too promising, but this passage from page 136 is pretty interesting once you work through all those darn words. Here is it, followed by my study notes. The topic is what happens when we perceive something.
“…the analogy of the searchlight is inadequate, since it presupposes given objects onto which the beam plays, whereas the nuclear function1 to which we refer, before bringing objects to our sight or knowledge, makes them exist in a more intimate sense, for us. Let us therefore say rather–borrowing a term from other works2–that the life of consciousness–cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life–is subtended3 by an ‘intentional arc4’ which 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.”
1. M-P explains the phrase “nuclear function” earlier in the section, but not in a way that I could understand. It has something to do with the first instant of perceiving an object, the part that happens before you do any thinking about the object.
2. Of the “other works” that M-P mentions, he only cites one: Zeitstruktur und Schizophrenie, 1928, by the German psychologist Franz Fischer.
3. “Subtended” is a word from mathematics that refers to angles whose rays pass through points on an arc. Here’s a Wikipedia diagram:
4. The arc of intention is a way of conceiving of our normal perceptual reality in the world. That is, if I stand and look steadily out at a scene, what I see is a kind of arc. I see that part of the world which is directly ahead of me and also some of the world to my left and right. But I can’t see directly to my right or left or anything behind me. (To visualize this, imagine that arc CD is bowed outward rather than inward and that it goes all the way around to form a circle.) So, out of the whole circle of things that may be out there, I can see–in any one gaze–only a segment of that circle. Whatever arc segment we see at a given moment, that’s our world.
There is another interesting section on page 140.
“Insofar as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness…I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”
And there’s more great stuff on page 142.
“(Space)…is already built into my bodily structure, and is its inseparable correlative. ‘Already motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning.’ Even if, subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body…”
The quote within the quote is from A. A. Grunbaum, Aphasie und Motorik, 1930. The word ‘motility’ refers to our ability to move. If we see a friend across the way, we can move our arm and wave a greeting. If we see a piece of pie before us, we can reach for a fork. If we are otherwise paralyzed, we can move our eyelids.
Merleau-Ponty says that it is not our ability to think that makes us sure we exist. Instead he suggests (if I’m getting this right) that it is our ability to make movements that defines the reality of the space in which we have existence. He says we could replace “I think, therefore I am” with “I can, therefore I am.” Thinking comes in later, after we already know we’re there due to a bodily sense that we can move.
So that’s all very well, but boy did I have to work through a lot chaff to get to few edible grains. This continued in Chapter 5 of Part 1,which is titled“The Body in its Sexual Being.” Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But in fact Chapter 5 is not a happy place, eighteen pages of highly abstract generalities in which a single paragraph can go on for more than four pages. Like much of the book, it has a kind of beauty and you could almost say that it has some kind of meaning, but it is hard to read and incredibly boring. Here’s one of the juicier parts:
Understood in this way, the relation of expression to thing expressed, or of sign to meaning, is not a one-way relationship like that between original text and translation. Neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence, and existence is a perpetual incarnation.
Now I think I agree with this, and I would also say that this is language of a very high level, so high, in fact, that there’s hardly any oxygen up there. Consequently, there isn’t one living, breathing word in the whole passage. They’ve all died. So that’s enough of Part 1 of Phenomenology of Perception. Let’s go on the Part II.
On the first page of Chapter I of Part II, I rather liked this passage:
All knowledge takes is place within the horizons opened up by perception. There can be no question of describing perception itself as one of the facts thrown up in the world, since we can never fill up, in the picture of the world, that gap which we ourselves are;…perception is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’.
Note that I did not say I understand this passage; I merely said that I like it. It has a footnote, which explains that the words in single quotes allude to a poem by Paul Valery called “Cemetery by the Sea.” The relevant lines of that poem are these:
Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes
Sont le defaut de ton grand diamant.
My regrets, my doubts, my constraints
Are the flaw in your great diamond
I interpret this allusion to mean that Merleau-Ponty wants to point out that all explanations of the world that depend on certainty and perfection are bogus and that certainty and perfection–the flawless diamond–don’t really play much of a part in our world, no matter how much we might wish that they did. Merleau-Ponty seems to be saying that we need to always keep this in mind when we do philosophy.
He often speaks about the two main traditions of philosophy: empiricism and rationalism. He sees this dichotomy as one which has been bequeathed to him by previous philosophical inquiry. His thoughts on phenomenology are his way of entering into this long running controversy about how truth can be established. To move this along, he and his fellow phenomenologists claim to present a critique of both sides, of empiricism on the one hand and also of rationalism on the other. Put simply, empiricism is the belief that truth about the world comes from direct observation of objects and events. Truth is generally a posteriori; it will be found after the observation has been made and the results noted. If you want more truth, you should do more observations. Thus empiricism is the philosophical basis for science.
Rationalism is the belief that real truth is a priori; it comes before we do any observations. Some truths are self-evident; you don’t need to make observations, you just know what’s true by thinking about things. (See, for example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…”) Rationalism is quite compatible with religion, since religious doctrine reveals a number of basic a priori truths or principles. Rationalists can discover more truths by making logical inferences from the basic truths that they already have.
Empiricism and Rationalism both have long histories, and have often been in conflict. In Europe, the idea that the sun revolved around the earth was a rationalist truth. It was self-evident and it could also be logically inferred from Catholic religious doctrine. When the observations of Galileo and others revealed a different truth, conflict ensued. Since then there have been many more cases where rationalist views have had to be modified on the basis of empirical evidence. Science has become so dominant that it is tempting to think that rationalism is fading away. But that’s not true. For one thing, some rationalist a priori truths are identical to empiricist truths. For example, the principles of mathematics are considered to be truths by both sides. Also, there are many rationalist truths that are impervious to empirical testing–e.g., the idea that all events on this earth are guided by the hand of God, that everything happens for a purpose, or that love is all you need. So there is still plenty of room for conflict. During the pandemic, for example, most empiricists wear masks. For rationalists the issue is more complicated because it depends on which a priori truth system they are being guided by.
Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty seem to take no sides in this long-standing debate; instead they criticize both as inherently insufficient to explain what it means for a human to be alive. In fact, says M-P, empiricism and rationalism (which M-P calls intellectualism) both make the same mistake; they both believe that the world exists independently of the observer. Rationalism says that individual sensory observations are unimportant, often mistaken, and certainly ephemeral; whereas truth is impersonal and eternal. Empiricism demands observation via the five senses, something only an individual human can do, and thus gives much greater importance to the observer. So why aren’t phenomenologists comfortable with empiricism? The way phenomenologists see it, almost as soon as empiricism puts an individual observer into the action, it immediately erases the significance of that individual from the action. For science, only the data matters. Observation reveals data about the external world which the scientist records. Once that is done, the scientist then uses logic to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. That is, once the observation has been made, the empiricist proceeds in the same manner as a rationalist, processing the observed data in the same way that a rationalist processes ‘self-evident” or divinely revealed data. Both sides assume that the reality of the world is a priori in the sense that the world is something outside of us and that we can treat life as if it were a visit to a very large and superbly detailed amusement park that contains both darker and lighter experiences and where there is always something new for us to explore. We have this conception, say the phenomenologists, because of habit and because it is convenient for many practical matters.
The separateness of the observer from the world, says phenomenology, may be a handy concept, but it can’t possibly be accurate. Consider a universe with no observers. We can imagine it–kind of–but we can only imagine it by creating an imaginary observer and that’s cheating. There is no way that we even talk about its existence, let alone make any statements about what it might be like. On the other hand, consider an observer with no universe to observe. Again we can imagine it–loosely speaking–but again we’re cheating. The concept falls apart as soon as we realize that with nothing to observe, the existence of an observer is a logical impossibility.
So what does it mean to say that observer and world can’t really be separated? Does that mean that the world is all in our heads? Not exactly. For phenomenologists, the world is what happens when my body makes a connection to something outside my body. Phenomenologists call this a perception. We sometimes talk about the organs of perception: seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. But the most basic perception is the perception of space by the body. My body senses that it is capable of movement, that it is surrounded by space, and at that instant the universe comes into existence. And it turns out that the space is not empty; my body also senses light, odor, texture, flavor and sound. My perceptions tell me that there is a huge variety of stuff out there. Different kinds of light strike my eyes generating electrical impulses that travel from my eyes to my brain. Certain chemicals in the air get into my nose and cause chemical reactions that send electrical impulses to my brain. I touch the bark of a tree and nerves in my fingers send electrical signals to my brain. My brain processes all this data, in part by comparing it to previous data that it has recorded, and causes me to ‘see’ a tree, smell its blossoms, and feel the texture of its bark. Those sensations are my world. The act of perception shapes the world.
So is there some kind of physical world outside of my perceptions of it? Sure there is. The input to my senses has to come from somewhere. But to describe that world as it is irrespective of our perception of it is impossible. We cannot speak of that to which we have no access, of which we have no awareness. Our world, the ‘real’ world that we have to deal with is the one which is presented to us by our brains in the act of perception.
But doesn’t that put us back into thinking that the world is only in our heads? And if that’s so, how can it be that we all seem to live in the same world? Aren’t we all different? Don’t we all have different perceptions? Well, yes and no. The fact is that in many ways we, by which I mean all the various humans who live on this earth, are not different at all. We’re all the same species and most of the parts of our bodies–livers, arms, legs, tear ducts, lungs, toes–work almost exactly the same in every human. So when we perceive, we all use the same perceptive apparatus. When I look at a thing and you look at the same thing and I see that thing as a tree, I do not, in normal circumstances, feel any need to ask you if you see a tree or not. I know you do. And that’s because I know by experience that other people’s sensors (eyes) and image processors (brains) almost always yield results that are near identical to mine–as far as I can tell. That does NOT mean, however, that there is really a tree out there. There are two trees, one is in your head, one is in my head, and neither of them is anywhere “out there.” Our two trees may be very similar, but we’ll never know exactly how similar because I can’t see yours and you can’t see mine. All we really know is that there is something out there, that light energy at particular wavelengths is reflecting off of something. But whatever those somethings are, we only know the aspects of them that we create for ourselves. The shapes, colors, textures and flavor are things that our internal systems have generated. They do not exist outside of us. All of our perceptions are like that. Space itself is like that. Time is just the name that we give to the fact that our perceptions constantly shift, each one being immediately replaced by the next.
So we can truly say, in this odd philosophical way, that all of our reality is internally generated by us, and that the world we know–including time and space–has no objective existence outside of our perceptive process. The obvious question, though, is how this can possibly matter. If we all see the same tree with green leaves and red apples, and if we can all go up and touch it and knock our heads against its trunk if we want to, doesn’t that make it real enough for all practical purposes? And with that question we at last come to the crux of the matter.
On the most basic levels of perception, things are pretty much the same for everyone. This sameness makes it almost inevitable that we will forget that there are in fact 7.8 billion worlds on this planet and start thinking that there is only one. As a practical shortcut, the only one world idea is useful and it may seem harmless. But it’s not harmless. It’s a mistake that has dangerous consequences.
And that’s because the basic sensory level is not the only place where we have to function in our lives. Trouble begins when we leave the realm of direct sensory experience–where we all agree about things because we all have the same sensory apparatus–and get into more complex thoughts and perceptions. (We don’t spend all our time standing around looking at trees–although we really should do it more.) The way our lives are, we have to spend a lot time dealing about things like freedom and responsibility, good and evil, love and hate, home decor, loan applications, how much alcohol use is too much, trying to keep teenagers from driving us crazy, how to get along with our co-workers, what we really want from life and a million other complicated matters. Our perceptions about those things have some basis in direct sensory data, but mostly they come from elsewhere. The come from our individual memories and experiences, our emotions, the things we’ve been told, the ways we’ve been treated, the things our friends do, and from all the interpretations we have had to make about all the input we have received throughout our lives. It’s truly a miracle that our brains can deal with it all. At these levels, instead of being the same as everyone else, each of us is different from everyone else. That in itself is not a bad thing. Long live the difference, as the French say.
But if we add this idea–the fact that people see many things very differently–to the previous error, the error of believing that there is only one objective world, then the inevitable result is that people are going to start arguing about what that one “real” world is “really” like. Because they think there’s only one world, they figure that there can be only one right answer. Oh dear. At that point things can go real bad real fast.
It’s not really anybody’s fault. To think that there is only one real objective world is a natural mistake. To believe that there is no world anywhere except the one we create and recreate every second in our minds, well, that’s pretty hard. It seems kind of flaky and undependable. People might be asking, “If we all live in our own fantasy worlds, then nothing would be real. We’d all be totally lost!” The phenomenalist’s answer to that is simply that the world you create in the act of perception is not a fantasy at all. It’s real. It’s the only real thing there is. And partly, it’s much like everyone else’s. In other ways, though, it is yours and yours alone. So everyone else’s world is different from yours. And yes, that means that in a sense we are all lost, we’ll never be able to agree, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. The great diamond has a vast number of flaws and we can’t fix them. The only thing that helps is for us to realize that we are lost and start taking lostness into account when we do our planning. As a practical matter, being lost and knowing you’re lost is a lot better than being lost and thinking you’re not lost.
These ideas also help you understand other people better. Suppose you’re there somewhere in your own world–which is the only place you can ever be–and you see something that seems really obvious, such as the idea that wearing a mask during an epidemic is a good idea. So you go out and get yourself a couple of masks and starting wearing one whenever you’re around other people. So far, so good. You have seen something obvious in your world and have acted accordingly. Later on, when the epidemic is over, you’ll be able to congratulate yourself for having done at least a little to help. That’s okay too. But during the epidemic you see other people who don’t wear masks. What’s wrong with them? Why can’t they see the obvious? Are they stupid or are they willfully evil? Those may seem like reasonable questions and if you want to ask them, ask away. But remember, in that other person’s world wearing a mask is not a good idea. It might be clearly and obviously a bad idea, for a host of very good reasons. Those reasons may not exist in the world that you live in, but they do in that other one. Hell, if you lived in that other world, you’d think masks were a bad idea too. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to convince people, it just means that you might be headed down a long and rocky road.
Conversely, suppose some friend or acquaintance of yours is trying to convince you of something that you know is crap. They won’t leave you alone and they can’t believe you won’t accept something that is so obviously true. If you believe that there is only one real objective world, your only recourse is to fight back, either by whopping the person upside the head or by trying to come up with various rational or irrational arguments to convince the other person that their deeply held belief is crap. Neither of these options is good. The phenomenological response is to say. “I understand what you mean and I know you’re right. In your world, what you’re saying is absolutely true. If I lived in your world, I’d believe it too. But I don’t live in your world. I live in my world and in my world it’s actually not true. It’s not true at all. It’s not even close. I don’t know why exactly; that’s just the way it is.”
Fortunately, you don’t actually need to read phenomenology to figure this out, thank goodness.
But let’s get back to Phenomenology of Perception anyway. We’ve covered a few fragments from Part One. Now let’s move on to Part Two. The title of Part Two is “The World As Perceived” and in it, Merleau-Ponty gets even more serious. You know that matters have gotten more serious because instead of four-page paragraphs you start seeing paragraphs that are five or even six pages long. Nevertheless, it does have some interesting stuff. Here’s a passage near the beginning of Part Two Chapter 2.
Space is not the setting…in which things are arranged but the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float or…as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as a universal power enabling them to be connected.
This is okay, but it is vague and general and it is something that Merleau-Ponty has already said (more or less) several times before in this book. Ah, but here in Part Two Chapter 2 he also tries to provide some evidence for his ideas by citing some psychology experiments that were conducted 120 odd years ago. One series of experiments that he mentions was the work George M. Stratton, an American who studied with Wilhem Wundt in Leipzig and later became the founding director of the Experimental Psychology Lab at UC Berkeley in 1899. To investigate visual perception, Stratton devised some special glasses with unusual lenses.
The Stratton experiment that Merleau-Ponty focuses on is one in which the lenses in the glasses inverted the visual image, which is to say, the glasses turned everything upside down. Stratton made himself wear these glasses for a week. On the first day he felt nauseous and disoriented. He had trouble doing physical tasks. He says that, in general, what he saw through the glasses was that the world was upside down. The next day, his ability to perform tasks noticeably improved. He also began to have the sense that the world that was right side up, but that he himself was upside down. Yo! By the seventh day, he says, the world looked completely normal. Double yo! Then, on the eighth day, with the glasses off, the world still looked normal but for a while he had a problem with left and right. When he went to reach for something with his right hand, his left hand moved. Presumably this soon passed.
Well, you can see why Merleau-Ponty is all over this. The experiment suggests that what we perceive is a product of our brains more than of our eyes. The overriding priority of our brains is to translate nerve impulses received from the eyes into a coherent vision, a world in which we can most easily do the things that we need to do, a world, in other words, in which we can survive.
After that Merleau-Ponty goes into a long disquisition on the topic of “depth” and depth perception. He thinks that George Berkeley, an Irish philosopher who died in 1753, had some good ideas about depth, but he also got part of it wrong. What I remember most from this rather long section of Part Two Chapter 2 is the question of width versus depth. Merleau-Ponty is very concerned about people who think of depth as if it were merely width viewed from the side. Over the course of many pages he makes very good case showing that this idea is mistaken. I agree that depth is not at all like width viewed from the side. So I am quite okay with M-P when he implies that anyone who goes around saying “You know, depth is just width viewed from the side” has never really thought deeply about the matter. In fact, I believe that anyone who makes a habit of saying “Depth is just width viewed from the side” is probably out of their goddamned mind. And just think, if I hadn’t read Phenomenology of Perception, I might never have figured that out. But now, whenever anyone does say it to me, I’ll know exactly how to respond. Don’t tell me reading philosophy isn’t useful.
End of Part 1
