IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Wk 5. Merleau-Ponty and Embodiment

There are some useful web sites on Merleau-Ponty

A site with useful links

The Merleau-Ponty circle site - contains a discussion and photographs

Introduction

We have seen from the work of Heidegger how the life-world and an awareness of and analysis of our situatedness has become central to phenomenology. Our next key phenomenologist takes up this and pushes forward the study of how we are in the world and brings out (removes from concealment) that we are embodied. Of course we knew that all along, but what becomes clear from Merleau-Ponty's descriptions is just how much our embodiment is who we are and how the world is. Interestingly M-P saw himself as returning to Husserl's work as much as pushing forward Heidegger's and M-P's reading of the later Husserl highlights the sense in which Husserl never was an idealist and his discussion of essences should not be read in that way. Perhaps because M-P comes to Husserl's work after Husserl's death and can approach it in any order he chooses he draws out much that would fit with the later existentialist style of phenomenology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 and died in 1961of a heart attack; he was at the time of his death engaged on a new work and the few completed sections were posthumously published as The Visible and the Invisible. His major work that brought him philosophical acclaim is Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In this long and wide ranging text he constructs a critique of the two dominant possible approaches to our relationship with the world and shows through a process of phenomenological description of perceiving how they miss crucial dimensions of our experience of the world. (N.B. the term 'perceiving' is used for all our senses not just the visual).

Let's deal with his criticisms of these other approaches first and then get to the really exciting new material where he sets out how we are in the world and how we can 'see it like that' once the misguided assumptions are put to one side.

Problems of empiricism and intellectualism

First target - Realist Empiricism

The success of the physical sciences has helped to promote a view of what we are, what the world is like and how we, therefore, perceive the world and M-P calls this empiricism and spends a long time examining the idea of perception as sensations. The kind of sensations he means are discrete sensations that correspond to the quality of the object causing them. Sensations, then, function in a cumulative manner as the building blocks of our experience of the world and as the means to finding out about the discrete objects that are their cause. We, like the objects in the world, are objects that are subject to cause and effect in just the same way. My emphasis on the disreteness of the sensations and their causes indicates one of the problems that M-P finds with this view. It presents a world as if everything is clearly bounded and separated and the sense experience would mirror this kind of separation and clarity and yet our perceptions are often ambiguous. The empiricist has to make the perceiving subject somehow deficient to cope with this rather than question whether in fact some things are ambiguous. This problem of the clear sensations providing the building blocks also presents us with a problem, because the clarity of each discrete sensation carries no meaning it is just an impulse, so the question arises of how adding instances with no meaning can suddenly produce meaning for us. M-P draws attention to such aspects of perception as figure and ground; the way that perceptions are contextualised in order to begin to break down the empiricist's story of how perception works.

In the opening chapter of PP he gives the empiricist a fair chance by taking a very simple sense impression and then examines whether what is claimed to be happening can be happening.

"Let us imagine a white patch on a homogenous background. All points in the patch have a certain 'function' in common, that of forming themselves into a 'shape'. The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more resistant than that of the background; the edges of the white patch 'belong' to it, and are not part of the background although they adjoin it: the patch appears to be placed on the background and does not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed they may be sensed, one may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its tern can be perceived only as a figure on a background. … The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a field."

If you want to understand perception, you need to start with perception and not objects as construed by the empiricist's framework.

Exercise:
Have a go at describing the perception of something: a coin in your pocket, the smell of a flower, a blank sheet of paper - have a go at something simple - before tackling something like the back of the bus you were rushing to catch as it recedes into the distance.

Second target - Intellectualism

For M-P intellectualism is a form of idealism most closely associated with Descartes and Kant. The emphasis here is not on the objects causing sensations and the human perception being a kind of passive receptor but the human mind as making an active contribution to perception. Here the problem of meaning is solved by placing it the other side of the subject/object relationship; now meaning is created in the mind through an action of synthesis. The sensations that formed the whole of the empiricist's picture of perception are now merely its raw material that is given shape by our reflections, analysis and judgements.

The shared problem of empiricism and intellectualism - objective thought

The really important move that M-P makes is not so much in drawing out these particular criticisms, but in seeing that far from giving us two differently problematic approaches they actually share the same central problem.
He says:

"We started off from a world in itself which acted upon our eyes so as to cause us to see it [empiricism] and we now have consciousness of or thought about the world [intellectualism], but the nature of this world [as modelled by both approaches] remains unchanged: it is still defined by the absolute mutual exteriority of its parts, and is merely duplicated throughout its extent by a thought which sustains it. … The affinity between intellectualism and empiricism is thus much less obvious and much more deeply rooted than is commonly thought" PP p. 39

By making subjects like objects in the world empiricism fails to explain how perception as experienced could be possible. And intellectualism turns perception into an operation of consciousness onto the world, but it is a consciousness that is shaped by the same categories and structures that informed empiricism. Thus the meaning we impose on the world is that which is informed by a picture of ourselves as a separate subject from a world of discrete objects.

Phenomenology of Perception is a long book and these two approaches of empiricism and itellectualism, as entrenched in the psychology of the time, are examined exhaustively with many references to particular studies. The positive contribution that M-P makes is embedded in that framework of critique and it is not always easy to tease out exactly what his position is, but he does offer one and it is to this that we need to turn.

Merleau-Ponty's own view

If we are to avoid both types of objectivist picture of the world and replace them with something new then we need to look afresh at the world to understand it and our place in it and it is this looking afresh that M-P believes can be attained by phenomenology. Note that if those objectivist stances led to an estrangement from the world this could, as is often claimed, foster a lack of care in our relationship to the world. Whether what we discover by looking again will give us a healthy relationship is a separate issue and one which must be put to one side whilst we look.

Being-in-the-world

Like Heidegger, M-P keeps returning in his analysis to our situatedness, we are in the world, but not like an object in a container. Getting past empiricisist notions means that this 'in-the-world' is not a way of spacially placing us as an object, but of expressing a process of engagement with the world. However, unlike Heidegger, for M-P the importance of being-in-the-world is not as a means to reveal Being as such, but to get at a better understanding of the nature of human experience and the world thus experienced. His approach is, in this sense, more concrete or practical. And, perhaps because it is more concrete the key notion that M-P has to put in place to get started at all is that of being embodied. He brings this idea out very well in the discussion of skills or what he calls 'habits'.

In Phenomenology of Perception M-P discusses the way in which we habitually are in the world. You can observe this yourself, although it is often only brought to consciousness when it doesn't work, for example, when you feel for where the light switch was in your previous house rather than where it is now. How much of what we do is bodily rather than some abstractly imagined disconnected consciousness is very striking. And M-P draws out two quite striking examples of where the body is extended, one is a woman who can duck as she enters the room to protect the feather in her hat (not something we see much nowadays) and the other is a blind man using a stick to find his way. He says:

The blind man's stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. ... To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incoporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments. PP. 143

Exercise
two aspects of our experience of the world that M-P brings out are the extension of ourselves into the world (blind man's stick and woman's feather) and the necessity of habitual motions to the practice of a skill. Take one of these observations about our being-in-the-world and find an example from your own experience. Try to engage in the practice and reflect on where you end and the world begins (for the extension one) or where the skill resides for the other one. Remember to send experiences and reflections to the discussion site please.

Now read the chapter 'The Intertwining - The Chiasm', in your reader. Again with this text a quick read through to get the shape of it and then a more careful read is to be recommended.

We shall be exploring this writing further next week.

Web Notes by Isis Brook updated March 2005.