Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
Epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge, is in its broadest sense centered on two questions: What can I know? And how can I come to know it? While these questions look simple enough, hidden within them is a form, a specific direction and background from which they have been conceived: the metaphysics of Descartes. The question, “What can I know?” following the skepticism of Descartes, has been the question of knowledge of the world: is it possible to have knowledge of the things of the world? Can I understand its laws? Can I determine my own nature? The question of the knowledge of these things implies a separation, a reaching outwards towards things other than the self, perhaps part of a different sphere altogether. In this view, when one says, “I don’t know the price of tea in China,” it is because one is blocked off from that state of affairs in the world. One is separated from such knowledge. Thus it has been epistemology’s task to ask precisely what one can achieve knowledge of (which question hinges on a definition of what qualifies as knowledge, an issue that is generally left unnoticed).
The second question, “How can I come to know what it is I can know?” is an extension of the first, not only in subject matter but, so to speak, in worldview as well. Asking how one can come to know some fact which one does not have access to is basically asking how one can bridge the gap implied by the first question: how do I arrive from a total separation to the facts of tea prices in China, to a relation to their state which is one of truth? How can I cross the void? (This question, like the last one, hinges upon what the object of knowledge is, and how one relates to it and its content, a subject rarely noticed.)
The image of human existence which this view of epistemology thus generates is one of the self standing alone in a vast space, with “facts” floating somewhere outside. It is the task of truth-seeking to find these facts and bring them into the light; the ultimate goal is to have all of the facts brought forth. Since the time of Descartes, this form of epistemology has been prominent, not only in those who affirm it and seek to bridge the gap (Descartes himself, for example), but in those who deny it and proclaim skepticism as well (Hume, for instance), since they thereby share the same assumptions, only denying the result. Even as problems with the Cartesian worldview emerged, the epistemological model has survived in some form or another; for example, in the “correspondence theory of truth” and both its heralds and detractors. In the most general sense, epistemology has been about finding “the truth” somewhere out there and bringing the self to awareness of it, and in this sense it has remained Cartesian. Dualism of the self may be no longer taken for granted like it used to be, but dualism of truth, where the truth is in its realm, and the self is separated from it when in error, and connected to it when in truth, has been much more stubborn.
Enter phenomenology. Phenomenology, in a few words, is the philosophical study of experience. But more than just a field of study; it is a movement. Phenomenology has a specific viewpoint from which it addresses its questions, one that has its own assumptions and direction. This direction is fundamentally opposed to dualism. In order to give an appropriate account of experience, phenomenology describes the self not as a bare existent who must reach out into a something else in order to establish connections, but as a being connected with what it experiences. The self is not an abstract system of connections tied together, but a whole greater than its parts. The self and the world, therefore, are not distinct existents; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. The thread that ties the self and the world is experience, and thus does phenomenology gain its orientation.
In re-orientating the relationship between the self and the world, phenomenology opens up a new possibility for knowledge; not just a new way of establishing a connection between subject and fact, but an entirely different understanding of what it means to be “in the truth.” In the 500+ page Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phenomenological method, through his special emphasis on the body as the place of lived experience, to determine, among other things, a new sense of epistemology. He directly confronts the Cartesian perspective and all of its spiritual successors, including those that continue to the present day, arguing that they miss the true structure of knowledge. In exchange, he offers what can be called an “embodied” view of knowledge, one that redefines truth itself and how one relates to it.
Merleau-Ponty is part of an evolution of phenomenological thought that began with the “first” phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. Husserl used phenomenology as a method to get to the essences of things, which he thought could be done through proper analysis of experience. Pure experience, he argued, free of our base assumption, allows us access to things themselves. This was supposed to be possible because of what he termed “intentionality:” our thoughts, Husserl argued, are always about something. If we “bracket” the world of assumptions and interfering thoughts, and get to the bare experience, we would find the thing as it really is, as perceived by us. Martin Heidegger, his student, shifted phenomenology’s purpose while maintaining most of its central ideas: the center of experience, for Heidegger, is not found in a bracketing of the world that isolates the self, but rather in “being-in-the-world.” Our basic experience is anything but pure; it is, rather, of ourselves enveloped in the world and its influences. We are tied into it at our most basic level, and any claim otherwise is unjustified abstraction. It is the concept of being-in-the-world that directs Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and with it his epistemology. “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” he says. “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception vii) The study of experience cannot possibly be a study of a “pure experience,” abstracted from the world, as Husserl had claimed, for we are factical; that is, we are in a factual situation. We are in the world, and our intentionality is essentially worldly. Experience, which is the core of the self, comes from the world, which “is there before any possible analysis of mine” (x) and guiding experience. The world is the source of all of my thoughts, directly or indirectly: “man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (xii)
Just taken to this point, phenomenology might not seem particularly interesting. Of course man is in the world; where else could he be? But it is not this simple sense of facticity that Merleau-Ponty has in mind. For, though one readily admits that we are in a world, one also says that we can take ourselves out of it easily enough. We can stop paying attention to what is going on around us. We can space out. Or, like philosophers, we can abstract ourselves out of the world of sensations and enter a world of pure thought, allowing us to go beyond appearances and reach the essences of thing. But when Merleau-Ponty says that we are “worldly,” he is not merely saying that we live in a world: he is saying that we never, ever leave it, and that all of our thoughts are in it and are directly or indirectly affected by it. There is no leaving the world’s influence.
Before we continue, it needs to be clarified what is meant by “world.” The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a physical place in the universe. One has a world; one is already in it. A “world” is essentially a world of meaning, that place where we are where everything has significance and can be identified in relation to the rest. That there is one world, the world and not just a world, means that there is one system within which things fit, rather than a hodge-podge of metaphysical systems in which things have irreconcilable meanings. In this sense “the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as ‘an inalienable presence’” (vii) In terms of experience, this sort of world is always verifiable; things always have a meaning to me, whether it be the purpose to which we put them in a task, their presence as objects in my sphere of sensation, or merely their lack of clearly discernable meaning in a system of useful things or of objects, in which case their meaning is their conspicuousness. Everything has a meaning, and this meaning is “always ‘already there.’” It is from this base that phenomenological study is conducted.
So one is always in a world where things are given to us with meanings. Fine. What consequences does this have? What difference does it make? After all, it’s not as though people assume there are things that exist completely void of any and all meaning. Objects always mean something. But once again, this statement has to be taken in its full import. For the truth is, people for the most part believe that they can and do see things without meaning; it is called objectivity. When one sees an object, like a chair, one assumes that one is seeing a thing, plain and simple. This “plain and simple” is in fact a claim of purity: one believes oneself to be seeing the chair free of interference from meaning or theory; one just sees what’s there. And what, exactly, is there? Well, a thing made of wood, fabric, and cotton padding, with dimensions x by y by z, and with a weight of such and such. Yet this understanding of the chair is, according to Merleau-Ponty, exactly what one does not experience in the initial (and thus original, grounding) perception. What one experiences is a place in the vision, a feeling when one sits there – further, perhaps the memory of a similar chair seen yesterday, or someone who owns a similar chair, and how they always sat in it at certain times, and so on. This experience, recalling, and so on is the actual perceptual experience of the chair, which is anything but objective: according to Merleau-Ponty, “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet determinate being.” (54) The perceptual chair, the chair of experience and memory, exists for us before the determinate chair, that is, before the chair of measurements. We do not, in other words, experience the chair with such and such measurements, but, in fact, a chair that exists before its measurements.
Which sounds pretty dumb. Nevertheless this is actually what Merleau-Ponty is saying. The “chair” is not, according to him, something which is determined by its objective properties. In real experience, he argues, we do not see things which have objective properties; what actually happens is that the things we see are understood to have objective properties when seen in such and such fashion, as part of an act of reflection and objectification. But given that reflection, by definition, comes afterwards, the chair we see is not the chair with reflective qualities such as a determinate height, weight, and so on. It is the chair as perceived that we see. Reflection, and with it objectivity, is taken from its pedestal and thereby loses its primacy. Objectivity, it is argued, is one way of viewing the world, but not the only way. Further, it is not the original way, the way from which other forms of experience and perception derive. Nonobjective perception comes first, and determines the subject of the objective, scientific view of the chair, not the other way around. To think otherwise is to hold as an axiom something, the objective nature of the world, which is not axiomatic. In so far as one maintains this axiom, and believes that one is perceiving things that have objective qualities, that they exist with a determinate size, shape, color, etc. one is in error. “We shall no longer hold that perception is incipient science, but conversely that classical science is a form of perception which loses sight of its origins and believes itself complete.” (71)
It should be noted at this point that Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1946, and not 1800. How can he defend such a position? His basis is psychology. As he was writing, science had long provided plenty of good answers about the way things are, answers that stood up to scrutiny and observation. It offered answers, and even better, predictions. However, there have always been oddball phenomena, places where the explanations don’t quite fit. How does someone develop a phantom limb, for example, feeling pain in a limb that is no longer there? Is it to be explained by saying that the nerve that formerly went to that location is acting up? Perhaps. But then why does this happen in some patients and not others? Why does the phantom limb often go through the feelings that were felt when the patient lost the limb? Why can some patients “lose” the phantom limb and stop feeling anything? In this last case, certainly the cut nerve doesn’t just “turn off” one day. Rather, the phenomena surrounding the phantom limb suggest that the experience of what seems to the patient to be physically there is tied to the patient’s mental states. The patient’s “world,” defined as a world of significance, influences what is there for the patient. What happened in the past influences what is felt in the present, in spite of the testimony of objective reality. The mind affects the objective body, and vice versa. The two are united through meaning, which is the world.
The case of the phantom limb and other phenomena are used to make the case that the world that is experienced is far from objective. It is a world of meaning in which we do not simply take part, but which determines what exists for us, and how it exists. It is there first and foremost, because it is the baseline for all other thought. In psychology, specifically in the cases where the connection between self and world go awry, the depth of this connection and its “subjectivity” present themselves. “To concern oneself with psychology is necessarily to encounter, beneath objective thought which moves among ready-made things, a first opening upon things without which there would be no objective knowledge.” (111) The world of perception, one already infused with meaning, is what we wake up to and go to sleep to. It is the one in which we make our measurements. It cannot be avoided, and it is there before the world ever becomes objective.
But, the question will (and should) immediately be asked: so what? When we measure things, their measurements reveal their objective nature. Just because I don’t know the measurements before hand, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I can measure the dimensions of the object and it will have a measurement, and that measurement will not change if I am one foot or one hundred feet away. The chair is red, and it will always be so, no matter what the lighting conditions are. Merleau-Ponty denies these claims. We say the chair is red; under what lighting conditions is this so? If I use natural light as my baseline, it will appear slightly different than when I use an indoor light. What if the chair is half in light and half in shadow? We may maintain that the chair is one color, but in terms of pure perception, of what we actually experience, it literally is not one color. It is half red and half a darker red. Even if you want to go down to physical terms, the light reaching our eyes really is different; if it was the same, we would see only one color, after all. Why, then, are we always instantly certain, before even judgment comes in, that it is one color? Because we infer it. We infer it instantaneously, but infer it nonetheless. We have a color which is determined by us as “the real color,” whether because that’s the color we see it in a certain lighting condition we usually see it in, or because it is the color we are told it is, or any other reason. Differences are explained away by the mind immediately by the context: the two reds are there because of the lighting; it’s still red, though perception says otherwise. The same goes for size. When I say the chair is three feet tall, what is that height? If I take a yardstick and hold it directly before my eyes, my vision cannot possibly span such a gap. When it is twenty feet away, the yardstick looks tiny. What is, in fact, for me a “yard” is a general measure in a general situation of my choosing. “I run through appearances and reach the real colour or the real shape when my experience is at its maximum of clarity . . . these different appearances are for me appearances of a certain true spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient degree of clarity, reaches its maximum richness.” (370) What one pictures is not a literal red or a literal yard, but one’s baseline perception of it. It can be replied quite quickly that this is nonsense, and that they are all the same: one yard is one yard is one yard, it’s just under different conditions. But that’s conceding the point. The conditions change, the “yard” is interpreted into a new set of conditions based on the position of a yardstick in the world relative to our point of view. We see the yardstick and the chair from different distances, and the world assigns their significance based on their relationship in the world and relative to myself, not based on a measure that exists in eternity. ‘The yardstick is four feet away, the chair is twelve, so I can infer a relation between them where the one is perceived bigger than the other but is not really so:’ what this concedes is that the definition of a yard is not “pure,” but based upon situation. A yard is not a measurement, but a set of circumstances: I can look there, and there, and there, and measure out a yard with my mind in a thousand different places, because I take the situation, the distance I am looking, the apparent size of the objects, the size I know them as when seen close up, and understand them within a total situation. If I took the distances isolated, outside of the situation, I would run into problems: “is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away? He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away.” (304) Everything, the whole situation as well as its relation to the rest of the world and my experience, is already there before I measure a thing. Everything is there, I see this and it is far away, I see the color of the chair and it is half in shadow, with these relationships being based upon my omnipresent place in and interaction with the world. Red is red, even when the perception is not red, because the total meaning of the world includes with light and shadow, and a chair split between the two.
Objectivity is determined after the fact, and can only be made sense of in terms of its relationship to a world of meaning. And, to push the point further, objectivity is, as a simple matter of experience, not our originating perspective of the world: “the perceived circle,” that most perfect shape, “does not have equal diameters because it has no diameter at all: it is conveyed to me, and is recognizable and distinguishable from any other figure by its circular physiognomy, and not by any of the ‘properties’ which positing thought may subsequently discover in it.” (319) The only circle is the worldly circle, the circle as perceived. We do not see the abstract geometrical circle even when we do geometry: it is only understood through the image of the circle, that perfect roundness whose exemplar is the sun.
So much for the defense of Merleau-Ponty, at least without going too far into details (of which the book has plenty). The essential point is this: the objective world is secondary to the perceived world, the noumenon to the phenomenon, to the point that the former relies upon the latter for its existence. If, from here, we return to our original topic, epistemology, we see that the phenomenological viewpoint begs a rather serious question: does this mean that everything is subjective, and that thus there is no knowledge? We have lost, it appears, our means of determining the nature of anything. We cannot even say when red is red anymore, because we already judge it according to the context of a world of meaning in which we find it! Isn’t all pretense to knowledge gone forever, then?
If we take time to understand the problem from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, we will see why he argues that not only is the problem not as bad as one would think it is, but in fact there is no problem at all. Here we must find our way back to the Cartesian model of epistemology. The first question epistemology asks is what one can know. But, as mentioned at the beginning, this question must assume a specific idea of what constitutes knowledge. For Descartes and early modern philosophy, one sought to “know” objects existing outside the self. The great problem for Descartes was not confirming the cogito, but getting outside of that cogito and into the world. Knowledge, for him, required access to something completely separate from the self. If one continues to assume this view of knowledge, then certainly phenomenological subjectivity will lead to total skepticism. But Merleau-Ponty does not follow the Cartesian view. For him there is no outside world to understand; the world is already given, and we are already interacting with it before we can even state the fact. The world, as a horizon of meaning, is what’s always there. The “objective” world with which Descartes wanted to make contact is a purely secondary phenomenon, and one unperceived at that. It is inferred from the original objects of experience, which are those objects that make up the perceived world. What Descartes sought was reality. The problem is that he got reality wrong. “Reality” is not a bunch of timeless things, but the world as perceived; there is no other world to refer to, besides secondarily. In fact, reality is not some other-worldly sphere (for that’s exactly how it is presented in Descartes), but a whole, a world. “The ‘real’ is that environment in which each moment is not only inseparable from the rest, but in some way synonymous with them, in which the ‘aspects’ are mutually significatory and absolutely equivalent . . . . The thing is that manner of being for which the complete definition of one of its attributes demands that of the subject in its entirety.” (376) To most of us today, who are raised on objective science that aims for the concrete and eternal (though the more theoretical areas seem to be moving away from this, interestingly enough), this view appears preposterous. But a simply survey of epistemology, viewed from a new perspective, reveals just how odd the standard view actually is. Descartes separated himself from everything that existed, and then tried to find it all again, all in the name of “certainty.” Even though he admitted that thought remained directed, that he was “that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone,” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85), he denied the worth of those thoughts until he could find a second sphere that was equal with that, and only then would his experiences be justified. For hundreds of years people followed him in either chasing that world or denying we could reach it, and those who denied we could reach it were skeptics, people who said we could have no knowledge. But if we have no knowledge of this second world, why chase after it in the first place? Why believe it could be there: alternatively, why say that one can have no knowledge if one cannot reach such an imaginary (for that is precisely what it is, if we cannot directly experience it) world? That I exist, Descartes said, there can be no doubt. However, he refused to grant such high status to the world, because he had already decided that it was outside of himself, that he was seeing only his own mental states. But if we are embodied, if our experience requires a world, this problem vanishes completely. Instead of the self, the cogito, being the basis of knowledge, the whole world appears as well. Thus the cogito is replaced with: “There is the absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any one thing in particular.” (Phenomenology of Perception 347) For it is true that everything within the world is viewed only within a perspective and a meaning, and thus not “objectively,” and so not with total certainty (which will be addressed presently). But that that world exists, that there is significance, and that I not only think but think of something, in other words, that I think intentionally, is certain. And in that sense the world is already here with me. I am not invalidated if I cannot find the mythical realm of truth. I am already in truth, insofar as I am in a world.
Thus we have solved part of our epistemological problem, namely, the problem of reaching truth. However, there is one towering issue we have not confronted: the total subjectivity of the world, and with it of truth. People do not simply want experience, they want experience of real things. Are we not left, if we follow phenomenology, with nothing but a subjective world and, even worse, solipsism? In all of Merleau-Ponty’s railing against objective thought, it is easy to make this jump if one does not read carefully, despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to separate himself from it. The problem with ascribing solipsism to him is that it posits nothing but the self, and the world then becomes a creation of it. But a question then arises, which Descartes himself asked: if I think, doubt, and judge various things, and if there is not a world that gave them to me, is it then the case that I made all these things up myself? How can I make things up that I am unaware of? How do I decide what I will see in the morning, when it is unexpected? Am I God? “If the cogito reveals to me a new mode of existence owing nothing to time, and if I discover myself as the universal constituent of all being accessible to me, and as a transcendental field with no hidden corners and no outside . . . [i]t must then be said, with no qualification, that my mind is God.” (433) But then how would we be mistaken? For it is certainly true that we can be wrong about things, even within our own thoughts. We hallucinate and have dreams. Some go mad. Are all of these equal realities, instituted by me? If not, how do I create these layers of reality while simultaneously deceiving myself until the last minute, when my head clears and I see I was wrong (or at least, that things are not what they appeared to be)? Can I fool myself, if I am what constitutes everything that is there?
What leads to the above concerns is the forgetting of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to phenomenology, the concept of embodiment, something which I have neglected up until now but that is central to his work. Saying that “we are in the world,” and that by “world” is meant a world of meaning, is not just saying that we are in a scenario where stuff means stuff, and where we designate that stuff as stuff. Such a view is pure intellectualism, which says that the mind dictates the world. The problem is, the world thereby becomes objective in the sense of submitting to the absolute rule of the mind. In fact, we lack that power, and perception teaches us this. “The mistake of intellectualism is to make it [consciousness] self-subsistent, to remove it from the stuff in which it is realized . . . . [E]verything that separates us from the real world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – is reduced to the status of mere appearance.” (143) If Merleau-Ponty were an intellectualist, then it would be true, for him, that one creates one’s own madness. But being-in-the-world is being completely within that world, not just making a world and living in it. We do not stand above it and dictate its contents; it is simply there, as we said before, before we ever think about it. The real position of the individual is a “third term between the psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself . . . which we call existence.” (140) Perception and experience are existential, which is to say, irrevocably tied up with concrete existence. Anyone who told you that “existentialism” is talking about French guys in coffee shops brooding about life doesn’t actually know much about philosophy. “Existential,” which received its significance from Heidegger, places us not in a purely objective world nor an idealistic world of our making, but simply in the world: we are in a world where we perceive things from our own perspective, where we cannot control what comes to us but can control what we think of it, where we are free, but not too much. I am not God who creates the world; I am just a member of it. I live in a world which actually exists and from which I receive my experiences, not one which is created by them; that would be impossible, since the world must first be there in order to give me experiences at all. How, one can ask, could I create a world of my own, a solipsistic universe, from scratch? Certainly I would have to be God. Yet, if I am God, I seem to have an annoying tendency to create boulders which I cannot lift, and I can’t seem to get myself to stop doing it. But if I can’t make my world alone, then it must be there; there must be a world. The truth is that there is a natural world, though it is not the world of science. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life.” (385) When I walk around the red chair, I don’t find an empty space behind it which is empty because nothing was posited by me; I find the continuation of the chair. When I back away from it, the chair shrinks in proportion to the rest of the environment. The world doesn’t throw out pits of non-existence or senseless miracles of physics: it remains the same world, lasting through my perspectives, even when (as often happens) I acquire new beliefs or concepts which alter my view. The background remains, but new details jump out. It is this world that I am in, through the existence of my body. Thus the mind-body connection, though not merely objective, is not intellectual, either; it is, if anything, incarnation into the world. I act, and my body acts; the two are one and the same. But I can lose a fingernail or a leg and still be myself. Because of my embodiment in the world, I can’t let go of the world. I am in it.
Against the charge of solipsism, one of the most dangerous charges set against him, Merleau-Ponty employs his explanation of the embodied self. Solipsism argues that there no others because we see only bodies, not people. Yet that assumes that a body is not a self; in other words, that the self is separate from the world. Against this Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are embodied, and when we see ourselves in the world, we see bodies. I am not a floating consciousness, but one which exists in a world and is defined by my interactions with it. My presence is revealed to the world only by my embodied activity. But this does not mean I exist; I am distinguished by my worldliness, by my acting out of meanings. Others are given in exactly the same way: “if another’s body is not an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifestations of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine.” (411) The other and myself are placed equally in the world, and even though “[i]t is true that the other will never exist for us as we exist ourselves” (503), when one looks to experience, one sees not objects, but others, actors dealing with a world and its meanings. These are people in the same sense that I am a person in the world, and I treat them as such. I could not think otherwise, no matter how hard I might try:
There is one final question we must answer, and it relates directly to the second basic question of epistemology, which is how we can know. As we mentioned when asking it, this question depends upon the first, as well as upon a conception of how one relates to truth. If we accept the embodied mind thesis, an answer emerges. Merleau-Ponty answers it through the engagement of some of the classic anti-knowledge arguments in epistemology: the dream, the madman, the hallucination. These questions appear to be forcefully begged against a phenomenological epistemology: if experience is shaped by meaning, how is my experience any more valid than the madman’s? How can I tell I’m not dreaming? When is my perception of the world real? These questions appear damning, because we have just spent seventeen pages arguing that there is no objective world. If there is no world from which our experiences come, then aren’t all perspectives equal?
The answer is a flat no. To make this argument is once again to mistake an embodied phenomenology for a pure intellectualism which independently posits its world. It must be remembered that we do not, we cannot posit the world, because it is already there. Once again, we don’t make the world and then live in it; we find ourselves already in it. We don’t exercise godlike control over the nature of our world; no matter how hard I try, I can’t lift my car. I can decide it’s because I’m not trying, and that if I tried tomorrow I could do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t lift my car right now. When I walk around the chair, its completed structure presents itself, even if I’m unsure what to expect, because I’ve never seen the back of it before. In fact, it may surprise me: there may be a child’s toy behind it that I didn’t expect to see. But surprises like that happen while still maintaining the integrity of the world itself; what won’t happen is that I look behind the chair and suddenly see my first-grade class, and everyone laughing at me.
Being embodied, we exist as part of a world just as much as we exist as selves; therefore, as we have said, we are subject to the natural world as well as the world of our self-made meanings. Try as we might to over-step the world and create our own meanings, there remains a natural world to remind us of our limits. The problem with dreams, illusions, and madness is that they overstep these boundaries: I find myself talking with my mom as she looks today, and with my old grade-school friends as they looked back then, all the while on a reality TV show. I step off the stage, through a door, and into the Wild West. These events break the rules of the natural world, and when we return from our dreams, we recognize it immediately. We cannot find a coherent world-structure in a dream or hallucination, because the dream-world or hallucination-world is made up by ourselves from the scattered fragments of our experience: “the hallucinatory phenomenon is no part of the world, that is to say, it is not accessible, there is no definite path leading from it to all the remaining experiences of the deluded subject, or to the experience of the same.” (395) Thus there is a difference between the two, and we experience that difference when we switch between dream and reality, between hallucinations and normalcy.
But what if we don’t switch? What if we have a dream where the characters are all from my grade school, as is the environment, and when I open the door of the classroom, I enter the hall? What if I never wake from this dream? Am I not fooled then? Absolutely. Even Merleau-Ponty admits that “[t]he all-important point is that the patients, most of the time, discriminate between their hallucinations and their perceptions.” (389, emphasis mine) But let us take the argument further. Let us say that, instead of being a phenomenologist, you only base your world on what exists objectively. What difference is there in the application of the argument? If you never wake up, when will you be able to detect your illusions? Let us go even further, for the form of the argument allows it. What if the evil genius of Descartes exists, and he corrupts even your most basic knowledge? What if two plus two really equals five? What can you know then, huh? As is shown here, the problem with using the example of a “total illusion” is that all epistemological theories that do not guarantee total certitude are equally subject to it. It has been a long time since epistemology has claimed to have Cartesian certitude, and this is the consequence. Even Descartes required God to prove that he could know he wasn’t dreaming, for at the start he had only the cogito. Thus the criticism fails, for (1) it does not reveal a weakness of phenomenological epistemology which is not a weakness to any other epistemology, and (2) the only epistemology that survives such a criticism is one which promises certitude, which is a difficult, if not indefensible, epistemology. Phenomenology, then, leaves us no worse off than standard modern epistemologies do in terms of arguments from illusion.
When I look at my desk, what do I see? I see a desk, I say, with a computer, speakers, and an external hard drive on it. The desk is brown, the speakers black, the hard drive silver. Yet the desk I’m seeing is in fact all shades of brown, and appears at parts nearly white. The hard drive is bright silver on the top, where it catches the light, and a dark, subdued silver on the side. Yet I call the desk “brown” and the hard drive “black” because I do not simply see a world of objective colors which are them composed into objects. What I see first is a world full of things and phenomena in virtue of which the colors are organized and matched with the conditions of the environment. This brown and this brown and this brown are all the same desk; they appear different colors because of the shadows cast by the speakers and the scratches from wear over time. The size, I say, never changes, because, no matter how big or small the desk appears, I see it as part of a world (my room) where the objects remain in the same evolving context with it, and form a situation that maintains the desk’s size. This is the way we experience the world, according to phenomenology. We experience a world loaded with significance, not one composed of scientifically measurable units. This is not to say that science is not deriving bad numbers; it has done much, and gone far. (Note: Merleau-Ponty does not actually spend any time explaining what science gets right in Phenomenology of Perception, though he whole-heartedly believes in its importance, and so has to spend a great amount of time explaining this in The Primacy of Perception, a lecture given in 1948.) But the world of science is different than the world we perceive. We do not perceive this color, and this smell, and this feeling, and put them together; we recognize a chair, and infer that this color belongs to it, but that this smell is wrong, because it smells like a dog has been laying on it, and so on. Our world, for Merleau-Ponty, is the world of perception, and if we are to explain and understand that world, we need to get it right: “I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.” (529)
The second question, “How can I come to know what it is I can know?” is an extension of the first, not only in subject matter but, so to speak, in worldview as well. Asking how one can come to know some fact which one does not have access to is basically asking how one can bridge the gap implied by the first question: how do I arrive from a total separation to the facts of tea prices in China, to a relation to their state which is one of truth? How can I cross the void? (This question, like the last one, hinges upon what the object of knowledge is, and how one relates to it and its content, a subject rarely noticed.)
The image of human existence which this view of epistemology thus generates is one of the self standing alone in a vast space, with “facts” floating somewhere outside. It is the task of truth-seeking to find these facts and bring them into the light; the ultimate goal is to have all of the facts brought forth. Since the time of Descartes, this form of epistemology has been prominent, not only in those who affirm it and seek to bridge the gap (Descartes himself, for example), but in those who deny it and proclaim skepticism as well (Hume, for instance), since they thereby share the same assumptions, only denying the result. Even as problems with the Cartesian worldview emerged, the epistemological model has survived in some form or another; for example, in the “correspondence theory of truth” and both its heralds and detractors. In the most general sense, epistemology has been about finding “the truth” somewhere out there and bringing the self to awareness of it, and in this sense it has remained Cartesian. Dualism of the self may be no longer taken for granted like it used to be, but dualism of truth, where the truth is in its realm, and the self is separated from it when in error, and connected to it when in truth, has been much more stubborn.
Enter phenomenology. Phenomenology, in a few words, is the philosophical study of experience. But more than just a field of study; it is a movement. Phenomenology has a specific viewpoint from which it addresses its questions, one that has its own assumptions and direction. This direction is fundamentally opposed to dualism. In order to give an appropriate account of experience, phenomenology describes the self not as a bare existent who must reach out into a something else in order to establish connections, but as a being connected with what it experiences. The self is not an abstract system of connections tied together, but a whole greater than its parts. The self and the world, therefore, are not distinct existents; in fact, one cannot exist without the other. The thread that ties the self and the world is experience, and thus does phenomenology gain its orientation.
In re-orientating the relationship between the self and the world, phenomenology opens up a new possibility for knowledge; not just a new way of establishing a connection between subject and fact, but an entirely different understanding of what it means to be “in the truth.” In the 500+ page Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phenomenological method, through his special emphasis on the body as the place of lived experience, to determine, among other things, a new sense of epistemology. He directly confronts the Cartesian perspective and all of its spiritual successors, including those that continue to the present day, arguing that they miss the true structure of knowledge. In exchange, he offers what can be called an “embodied” view of knowledge, one that redefines truth itself and how one relates to it.
Merleau-Ponty is part of an evolution of phenomenological thought that began with the “first” phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. Husserl used phenomenology as a method to get to the essences of things, which he thought could be done through proper analysis of experience. Pure experience, he argued, free of our base assumption, allows us access to things themselves. This was supposed to be possible because of what he termed “intentionality:” our thoughts, Husserl argued, are always about something. If we “bracket” the world of assumptions and interfering thoughts, and get to the bare experience, we would find the thing as it really is, as perceived by us. Martin Heidegger, his student, shifted phenomenology’s purpose while maintaining most of its central ideas: the center of experience, for Heidegger, is not found in a bracketing of the world that isolates the self, but rather in “being-in-the-world.” Our basic experience is anything but pure; it is, rather, of ourselves enveloped in the world and its influences. We are tied into it at our most basic level, and any claim otherwise is unjustified abstraction. It is the concept of being-in-the-world that directs Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and with it his epistemology. “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” he says. “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception vii) The study of experience cannot possibly be a study of a “pure experience,” abstracted from the world, as Husserl had claimed, for we are factical; that is, we are in a factual situation. We are in the world, and our intentionality is essentially worldly. Experience, which is the core of the self, comes from the world, which “is there before any possible analysis of mine” (x) and guiding experience. The world is the source of all of my thoughts, directly or indirectly: “man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (xii)
Just taken to this point, phenomenology might not seem particularly interesting. Of course man is in the world; where else could he be? But it is not this simple sense of facticity that Merleau-Ponty has in mind. For, though one readily admits that we are in a world, one also says that we can take ourselves out of it easily enough. We can stop paying attention to what is going on around us. We can space out. Or, like philosophers, we can abstract ourselves out of the world of sensations and enter a world of pure thought, allowing us to go beyond appearances and reach the essences of thing. But when Merleau-Ponty says that we are “worldly,” he is not merely saying that we live in a world: he is saying that we never, ever leave it, and that all of our thoughts are in it and are directly or indirectly affected by it. There is no leaving the world’s influence.
Before we continue, it needs to be clarified what is meant by “world.” The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a physical place in the universe. One has a world; one is already in it. A “world” is essentially a world of meaning, that place where we are where everything has significance and can be identified in relation to the rest. That there is one world, the world and not just a world, means that there is one system within which things fit, rather than a hodge-podge of metaphysical systems in which things have irreconcilable meanings. In this sense “the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as ‘an inalienable presence’” (vii) In terms of experience, this sort of world is always verifiable; things always have a meaning to me, whether it be the purpose to which we put them in a task, their presence as objects in my sphere of sensation, or merely their lack of clearly discernable meaning in a system of useful things or of objects, in which case their meaning is their conspicuousness. Everything has a meaning, and this meaning is “always ‘already there.’” It is from this base that phenomenological study is conducted.
So one is always in a world where things are given to us with meanings. Fine. What consequences does this have? What difference does it make? After all, it’s not as though people assume there are things that exist completely void of any and all meaning. Objects always mean something. But once again, this statement has to be taken in its full import. For the truth is, people for the most part believe that they can and do see things without meaning; it is called objectivity. When one sees an object, like a chair, one assumes that one is seeing a thing, plain and simple. This “plain and simple” is in fact a claim of purity: one believes oneself to be seeing the chair free of interference from meaning or theory; one just sees what’s there. And what, exactly, is there? Well, a thing made of wood, fabric, and cotton padding, with dimensions x by y by z, and with a weight of such and such. Yet this understanding of the chair is, according to Merleau-Ponty, exactly what one does not experience in the initial (and thus original, grounding) perception. What one experiences is a place in the vision, a feeling when one sits there – further, perhaps the memory of a similar chair seen yesterday, or someone who owns a similar chair, and how they always sat in it at certain times, and so on. This experience, recalling, and so on is the actual perceptual experience of the chair, which is anything but objective: according to Merleau-Ponty, “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet determinate being.” (54) The perceptual chair, the chair of experience and memory, exists for us before the determinate chair, that is, before the chair of measurements. We do not, in other words, experience the chair with such and such measurements, but, in fact, a chair that exists before its measurements.
Which sounds pretty dumb. Nevertheless this is actually what Merleau-Ponty is saying. The “chair” is not, according to him, something which is determined by its objective properties. In real experience, he argues, we do not see things which have objective properties; what actually happens is that the things we see are understood to have objective properties when seen in such and such fashion, as part of an act of reflection and objectification. But given that reflection, by definition, comes afterwards, the chair we see is not the chair with reflective qualities such as a determinate height, weight, and so on. It is the chair as perceived that we see. Reflection, and with it objectivity, is taken from its pedestal and thereby loses its primacy. Objectivity, it is argued, is one way of viewing the world, but not the only way. Further, it is not the original way, the way from which other forms of experience and perception derive. Nonobjective perception comes first, and determines the subject of the objective, scientific view of the chair, not the other way around. To think otherwise is to hold as an axiom something, the objective nature of the world, which is not axiomatic. In so far as one maintains this axiom, and believes that one is perceiving things that have objective qualities, that they exist with a determinate size, shape, color, etc. one is in error. “We shall no longer hold that perception is incipient science, but conversely that classical science is a form of perception which loses sight of its origins and believes itself complete.” (71)
It should be noted at this point that Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1946, and not 1800. How can he defend such a position? His basis is psychology. As he was writing, science had long provided plenty of good answers about the way things are, answers that stood up to scrutiny and observation. It offered answers, and even better, predictions. However, there have always been oddball phenomena, places where the explanations don’t quite fit. How does someone develop a phantom limb, for example, feeling pain in a limb that is no longer there? Is it to be explained by saying that the nerve that formerly went to that location is acting up? Perhaps. But then why does this happen in some patients and not others? Why does the phantom limb often go through the feelings that were felt when the patient lost the limb? Why can some patients “lose” the phantom limb and stop feeling anything? In this last case, certainly the cut nerve doesn’t just “turn off” one day. Rather, the phenomena surrounding the phantom limb suggest that the experience of what seems to the patient to be physically there is tied to the patient’s mental states. The patient’s “world,” defined as a world of significance, influences what is there for the patient. What happened in the past influences what is felt in the present, in spite of the testimony of objective reality. The mind affects the objective body, and vice versa. The two are united through meaning, which is the world.
The case of the phantom limb and other phenomena are used to make the case that the world that is experienced is far from objective. It is a world of meaning in which we do not simply take part, but which determines what exists for us, and how it exists. It is there first and foremost, because it is the baseline for all other thought. In psychology, specifically in the cases where the connection between self and world go awry, the depth of this connection and its “subjectivity” present themselves. “To concern oneself with psychology is necessarily to encounter, beneath objective thought which moves among ready-made things, a first opening upon things without which there would be no objective knowledge.” (111) The world of perception, one already infused with meaning, is what we wake up to and go to sleep to. It is the one in which we make our measurements. It cannot be avoided, and it is there before the world ever becomes objective.
But, the question will (and should) immediately be asked: so what? When we measure things, their measurements reveal their objective nature. Just because I don’t know the measurements before hand, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I can measure the dimensions of the object and it will have a measurement, and that measurement will not change if I am one foot or one hundred feet away. The chair is red, and it will always be so, no matter what the lighting conditions are. Merleau-Ponty denies these claims. We say the chair is red; under what lighting conditions is this so? If I use natural light as my baseline, it will appear slightly different than when I use an indoor light. What if the chair is half in light and half in shadow? We may maintain that the chair is one color, but in terms of pure perception, of what we actually experience, it literally is not one color. It is half red and half a darker red. Even if you want to go down to physical terms, the light reaching our eyes really is different; if it was the same, we would see only one color, after all. Why, then, are we always instantly certain, before even judgment comes in, that it is one color? Because we infer it. We infer it instantaneously, but infer it nonetheless. We have a color which is determined by us as “the real color,” whether because that’s the color we see it in a certain lighting condition we usually see it in, or because it is the color we are told it is, or any other reason. Differences are explained away by the mind immediately by the context: the two reds are there because of the lighting; it’s still red, though perception says otherwise. The same goes for size. When I say the chair is three feet tall, what is that height? If I take a yardstick and hold it directly before my eyes, my vision cannot possibly span such a gap. When it is twenty feet away, the yardstick looks tiny. What is, in fact, for me a “yard” is a general measure in a general situation of my choosing. “I run through appearances and reach the real colour or the real shape when my experience is at its maximum of clarity . . . these different appearances are for me appearances of a certain true spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient degree of clarity, reaches its maximum richness.” (370) What one pictures is not a literal red or a literal yard, but one’s baseline perception of it. It can be replied quite quickly that this is nonsense, and that they are all the same: one yard is one yard is one yard, it’s just under different conditions. But that’s conceding the point. The conditions change, the “yard” is interpreted into a new set of conditions based on the position of a yardstick in the world relative to our point of view. We see the yardstick and the chair from different distances, and the world assigns their significance based on their relationship in the world and relative to myself, not based on a measure that exists in eternity. ‘The yardstick is four feet away, the chair is twelve, so I can infer a relation between them where the one is perceived bigger than the other but is not really so:’ what this concedes is that the definition of a yard is not “pure,” but based upon situation. A yard is not a measurement, but a set of circumstances: I can look there, and there, and there, and measure out a yard with my mind in a thousand different places, because I take the situation, the distance I am looking, the apparent size of the objects, the size I know them as when seen close up, and understand them within a total situation. If I took the distances isolated, outside of the situation, I would run into problems: “is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away? He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away.” (304) Everything, the whole situation as well as its relation to the rest of the world and my experience, is already there before I measure a thing. Everything is there, I see this and it is far away, I see the color of the chair and it is half in shadow, with these relationships being based upon my omnipresent place in and interaction with the world. Red is red, even when the perception is not red, because the total meaning of the world includes with light and shadow, and a chair split between the two.
We now begin to see a deeper meaning in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data; it is entirely sustained by the certainty of the world . . . . The constancy of colour is only an abstract component of the constancy of things, which in turn is grounded on the primordial constancy of the world as the horizon of all our experiences. (365)
Objectivity is determined after the fact, and can only be made sense of in terms of its relationship to a world of meaning. And, to push the point further, objectivity is, as a simple matter of experience, not our originating perspective of the world: “the perceived circle,” that most perfect shape, “does not have equal diameters because it has no diameter at all: it is conveyed to me, and is recognizable and distinguishable from any other figure by its circular physiognomy, and not by any of the ‘properties’ which positing thought may subsequently discover in it.” (319) The only circle is the worldly circle, the circle as perceived. We do not see the abstract geometrical circle even when we do geometry: it is only understood through the image of the circle, that perfect roundness whose exemplar is the sun.
So much for the defense of Merleau-Ponty, at least without going too far into details (of which the book has plenty). The essential point is this: the objective world is secondary to the perceived world, the noumenon to the phenomenon, to the point that the former relies upon the latter for its existence. If, from here, we return to our original topic, epistemology, we see that the phenomenological viewpoint begs a rather serious question: does this mean that everything is subjective, and that thus there is no knowledge? We have lost, it appears, our means of determining the nature of anything. We cannot even say when red is red anymore, because we already judge it according to the context of a world of meaning in which we find it! Isn’t all pretense to knowledge gone forever, then?
If we take time to understand the problem from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, we will see why he argues that not only is the problem not as bad as one would think it is, but in fact there is no problem at all. Here we must find our way back to the Cartesian model of epistemology. The first question epistemology asks is what one can know. But, as mentioned at the beginning, this question must assume a specific idea of what constitutes knowledge. For Descartes and early modern philosophy, one sought to “know” objects existing outside the self. The great problem for Descartes was not confirming the cogito, but getting outside of that cogito and into the world. Knowledge, for him, required access to something completely separate from the self. If one continues to assume this view of knowledge, then certainly phenomenological subjectivity will lead to total skepticism. But Merleau-Ponty does not follow the Cartesian view. For him there is no outside world to understand; the world is already given, and we are already interacting with it before we can even state the fact. The world, as a horizon of meaning, is what’s always there. The “objective” world with which Descartes wanted to make contact is a purely secondary phenomenon, and one unperceived at that. It is inferred from the original objects of experience, which are those objects that make up the perceived world. What Descartes sought was reality. The problem is that he got reality wrong. “Reality” is not a bunch of timeless things, but the world as perceived; there is no other world to refer to, besides secondarily. In fact, reality is not some other-worldly sphere (for that’s exactly how it is presented in Descartes), but a whole, a world. “The ‘real’ is that environment in which each moment is not only inseparable from the rest, but in some way synonymous with them, in which the ‘aspects’ are mutually significatory and absolutely equivalent . . . . The thing is that manner of being for which the complete definition of one of its attributes demands that of the subject in its entirety.” (376) To most of us today, who are raised on objective science that aims for the concrete and eternal (though the more theoretical areas seem to be moving away from this, interestingly enough), this view appears preposterous. But a simply survey of epistemology, viewed from a new perspective, reveals just how odd the standard view actually is. Descartes separated himself from everything that existed, and then tried to find it all again, all in the name of “certainty.” Even though he admitted that thought remained directed, that he was “that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone,” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations 85), he denied the worth of those thoughts until he could find a second sphere that was equal with that, and only then would his experiences be justified. For hundreds of years people followed him in either chasing that world or denying we could reach it, and those who denied we could reach it were skeptics, people who said we could have no knowledge. But if we have no knowledge of this second world, why chase after it in the first place? Why believe it could be there: alternatively, why say that one can have no knowledge if one cannot reach such an imaginary (for that is precisely what it is, if we cannot directly experience it) world? That I exist, Descartes said, there can be no doubt. However, he refused to grant such high status to the world, because he had already decided that it was outside of himself, that he was seeing only his own mental states. But if we are embodied, if our experience requires a world, this problem vanishes completely. Instead of the self, the cogito, being the basis of knowledge, the whole world appears as well. Thus the cogito is replaced with: “There is the absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any one thing in particular.” (Phenomenology of Perception 347) For it is true that everything within the world is viewed only within a perspective and a meaning, and thus not “objectively,” and so not with total certainty (which will be addressed presently). But that that world exists, that there is significance, and that I not only think but think of something, in other words, that I think intentionally, is certain. And in that sense the world is already here with me. I am not invalidated if I cannot find the mythical realm of truth. I am already in truth, insofar as I am in a world.
Thus we have solved part of our epistemological problem, namely, the problem of reaching truth. However, there is one towering issue we have not confronted: the total subjectivity of the world, and with it of truth. People do not simply want experience, they want experience of real things. Are we not left, if we follow phenomenology, with nothing but a subjective world and, even worse, solipsism? In all of Merleau-Ponty’s railing against objective thought, it is easy to make this jump if one does not read carefully, despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to separate himself from it. The problem with ascribing solipsism to him is that it posits nothing but the self, and the world then becomes a creation of it. But a question then arises, which Descartes himself asked: if I think, doubt, and judge various things, and if there is not a world that gave them to me, is it then the case that I made all these things up myself? How can I make things up that I am unaware of? How do I decide what I will see in the morning, when it is unexpected? Am I God? “If the cogito reveals to me a new mode of existence owing nothing to time, and if I discover myself as the universal constituent of all being accessible to me, and as a transcendental field with no hidden corners and no outside . . . [i]t must then be said, with no qualification, that my mind is God.” (433) But then how would we be mistaken? For it is certainly true that we can be wrong about things, even within our own thoughts. We hallucinate and have dreams. Some go mad. Are all of these equal realities, instituted by me? If not, how do I create these layers of reality while simultaneously deceiving myself until the last minute, when my head clears and I see I was wrong (or at least, that things are not what they appeared to be)? Can I fool myself, if I am what constitutes everything that is there?
What leads to the above concerns is the forgetting of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to phenomenology, the concept of embodiment, something which I have neglected up until now but that is central to his work. Saying that “we are in the world,” and that by “world” is meant a world of meaning, is not just saying that we are in a scenario where stuff means stuff, and where we designate that stuff as stuff. Such a view is pure intellectualism, which says that the mind dictates the world. The problem is, the world thereby becomes objective in the sense of submitting to the absolute rule of the mind. In fact, we lack that power, and perception teaches us this. “The mistake of intellectualism is to make it [consciousness] self-subsistent, to remove it from the stuff in which it is realized . . . . [E]verything that separates us from the real world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – is reduced to the status of mere appearance.” (143) If Merleau-Ponty were an intellectualist, then it would be true, for him, that one creates one’s own madness. But being-in-the-world is being completely within that world, not just making a world and living in it. We do not stand above it and dictate its contents; it is simply there, as we said before, before we ever think about it. The real position of the individual is a “third term between the psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself . . . which we call existence.” (140) Perception and experience are existential, which is to say, irrevocably tied up with concrete existence. Anyone who told you that “existentialism” is talking about French guys in coffee shops brooding about life doesn’t actually know much about philosophy. “Existential,” which received its significance from Heidegger, places us not in a purely objective world nor an idealistic world of our making, but simply in the world: we are in a world where we perceive things from our own perspective, where we cannot control what comes to us but can control what we think of it, where we are free, but not too much. I am not God who creates the world; I am just a member of it. I live in a world which actually exists and from which I receive my experiences, not one which is created by them; that would be impossible, since the world must first be there in order to give me experiences at all. How, one can ask, could I create a world of my own, a solipsistic universe, from scratch? Certainly I would have to be God. Yet, if I am God, I seem to have an annoying tendency to create boulders which I cannot lift, and I can’t seem to get myself to stop doing it. But if I can’t make my world alone, then it must be there; there must be a world. The truth is that there is a natural world, though it is not the world of science. “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life.” (385) When I walk around the red chair, I don’t find an empty space behind it which is empty because nothing was posited by me; I find the continuation of the chair. When I back away from it, the chair shrinks in proportion to the rest of the environment. The world doesn’t throw out pits of non-existence or senseless miracles of physics: it remains the same world, lasting through my perspectives, even when (as often happens) I acquire new beliefs or concepts which alter my view. The background remains, but new details jump out. It is this world that I am in, through the existence of my body. Thus the mind-body connection, though not merely objective, is not intellectual, either; it is, if anything, incarnation into the world. I act, and my body acts; the two are one and the same. But I can lose a fingernail or a leg and still be myself. Because of my embodiment in the world, I can’t let go of the world. I am in it.
Against the charge of solipsism, one of the most dangerous charges set against him, Merleau-Ponty employs his explanation of the embodied self. Solipsism argues that there no others because we see only bodies, not people. Yet that assumes that a body is not a self; in other words, that the self is separate from the world. Against this Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are embodied, and when we see ourselves in the world, we see bodies. I am not a floating consciousness, but one which exists in a world and is defined by my interactions with it. My presence is revealed to the world only by my embodied activity. But this does not mean I exist; I am distinguished by my worldliness, by my acting out of meanings. Others are given in exactly the same way: “if another’s body is not an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifestations of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine.” (411) The other and myself are placed equally in the world, and even though “[i]t is true that the other will never exist for us as we exist ourselves” (503), when one looks to experience, one sees not objects, but others, actors dealing with a world and its meanings. These are people in the same sense that I am a person in the world, and I treat them as such. I could not think otherwise, no matter how hard I might try:
Solipsism would be strictly true only of someone who managed to be tacitly aware of his existence without being or doing anything, which is impossible, since existing is being in and of the world. The philosopher cannot fail to draw others with him into his reflective retreat, because in the uncertainty of the world, he has for ever learned to treat them as consorts, and because all his knowledge is built on this datum of opinion. (421)
There is one final question we must answer, and it relates directly to the second basic question of epistemology, which is how we can know. As we mentioned when asking it, this question depends upon the first, as well as upon a conception of how one relates to truth. If we accept the embodied mind thesis, an answer emerges. Merleau-Ponty answers it through the engagement of some of the classic anti-knowledge arguments in epistemology: the dream, the madman, the hallucination. These questions appear to be forcefully begged against a phenomenological epistemology: if experience is shaped by meaning, how is my experience any more valid than the madman’s? How can I tell I’m not dreaming? When is my perception of the world real? These questions appear damning, because we have just spent seventeen pages arguing that there is no objective world. If there is no world from which our experiences come, then aren’t all perspectives equal?
The answer is a flat no. To make this argument is once again to mistake an embodied phenomenology for a pure intellectualism which independently posits its world. It must be remembered that we do not, we cannot posit the world, because it is already there. Once again, we don’t make the world and then live in it; we find ourselves already in it. We don’t exercise godlike control over the nature of our world; no matter how hard I try, I can’t lift my car. I can decide it’s because I’m not trying, and that if I tried tomorrow I could do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t lift my car right now. When I walk around the chair, its completed structure presents itself, even if I’m unsure what to expect, because I’ve never seen the back of it before. In fact, it may surprise me: there may be a child’s toy behind it that I didn’t expect to see. But surprises like that happen while still maintaining the integrity of the world itself; what won’t happen is that I look behind the chair and suddenly see my first-grade class, and everyone laughing at me.
The perceived world is not only my world, but the one in which I see the behaviour of other people take shape, for their behaviour equally aims at this world, which is correlative not only of my consciousness, but of any conscious which I can possibly encounter . . . . [O]ther spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the reverse or underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-exists in relation to the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it . . . . My perception brings into co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. (394)
Being embodied, we exist as part of a world just as much as we exist as selves; therefore, as we have said, we are subject to the natural world as well as the world of our self-made meanings. Try as we might to over-step the world and create our own meanings, there remains a natural world to remind us of our limits. The problem with dreams, illusions, and madness is that they overstep these boundaries: I find myself talking with my mom as she looks today, and with my old grade-school friends as they looked back then, all the while on a reality TV show. I step off the stage, through a door, and into the Wild West. These events break the rules of the natural world, and when we return from our dreams, we recognize it immediately. We cannot find a coherent world-structure in a dream or hallucination, because the dream-world or hallucination-world is made up by ourselves from the scattered fragments of our experience: “the hallucinatory phenomenon is no part of the world, that is to say, it is not accessible, there is no definite path leading from it to all the remaining experiences of the deluded subject, or to the experience of the same.” (395) Thus there is a difference between the two, and we experience that difference when we switch between dream and reality, between hallucinations and normalcy.
But what if we don’t switch? What if we have a dream where the characters are all from my grade school, as is the environment, and when I open the door of the classroom, I enter the hall? What if I never wake from this dream? Am I not fooled then? Absolutely. Even Merleau-Ponty admits that “[t]he all-important point is that the patients, most of the time, discriminate between their hallucinations and their perceptions.” (389, emphasis mine) But let us take the argument further. Let us say that, instead of being a phenomenologist, you only base your world on what exists objectively. What difference is there in the application of the argument? If you never wake up, when will you be able to detect your illusions? Let us go even further, for the form of the argument allows it. What if the evil genius of Descartes exists, and he corrupts even your most basic knowledge? What if two plus two really equals five? What can you know then, huh? As is shown here, the problem with using the example of a “total illusion” is that all epistemological theories that do not guarantee total certitude are equally subject to it. It has been a long time since epistemology has claimed to have Cartesian certitude, and this is the consequence. Even Descartes required God to prove that he could know he wasn’t dreaming, for at the start he had only the cogito. Thus the criticism fails, for (1) it does not reveal a weakness of phenomenological epistemology which is not a weakness to any other epistemology, and (2) the only epistemology that survives such a criticism is one which promises certitude, which is a difficult, if not indefensible, epistemology. Phenomenology, then, leaves us no worse off than standard modern epistemologies do in terms of arguments from illusion.
When I look at my desk, what do I see? I see a desk, I say, with a computer, speakers, and an external hard drive on it. The desk is brown, the speakers black, the hard drive silver. Yet the desk I’m seeing is in fact all shades of brown, and appears at parts nearly white. The hard drive is bright silver on the top, where it catches the light, and a dark, subdued silver on the side. Yet I call the desk “brown” and the hard drive “black” because I do not simply see a world of objective colors which are them composed into objects. What I see first is a world full of things and phenomena in virtue of which the colors are organized and matched with the conditions of the environment. This brown and this brown and this brown are all the same desk; they appear different colors because of the shadows cast by the speakers and the scratches from wear over time. The size, I say, never changes, because, no matter how big or small the desk appears, I see it as part of a world (my room) where the objects remain in the same evolving context with it, and form a situation that maintains the desk’s size. This is the way we experience the world, according to phenomenology. We experience a world loaded with significance, not one composed of scientifically measurable units. This is not to say that science is not deriving bad numbers; it has done much, and gone far. (Note: Merleau-Ponty does not actually spend any time explaining what science gets right in Phenomenology of Perception, though he whole-heartedly believes in its importance, and so has to spend a great amount of time explaining this in The Primacy of Perception, a lecture given in 1948.) But the world of science is different than the world we perceive. We do not perceive this color, and this smell, and this feeling, and put them together; we recognize a chair, and infer that this color belongs to it, but that this smell is wrong, because it smells like a dog has been laying on it, and so on. Our world, for Merleau-Ponty, is the world of perception, and if we are to explain and understand that world, we need to get it right: “I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.” (529)
posted by Derek at 8:25 PM
3 Comments:
I've gotten through half the post and it smells strongly of George Barkley, except Merleau-Ponty seems to admit that we have the ability to form abstract ideas.
So far, I fail to see how this is significant. The fact that objectivity comes after direct experience isn't surprising. This does nothing to hinder our ability to abstract from experience and find objectivity.
What I also wonder is how Merleau-Ponty would explain how it is that two or more people with independent experiences of the same chair can find agreement about the color and dimensions of the chair Surely the similarity of experiences must have a unified cause external to each individual perceptions?
Perhaps you address this later in the post. But as happens all to often when reading this blog, I don't have the time to finish reading it just now.
What Merleau-Ponty writes is similar to Berkeley in many ways, the main difference being that Merleau-Ponty doesn't draw the epistemological conclusions Berkeley does, because he has a different idea of what "truth," "fact," "real," and so on are supposed to mean.
"The fact that objectivity comes after direct experience isn't surprising. This does nothing to hinder our ability to abstract from experience and find objectivity."
The importance depends on what one means by objectivity. The last half-century of philosophy and cognitive science have done a lot to incorporate the consequences of these ideas as they appear in one form or another. In the 1940s, however, you still had people who thought that you could build a theory of the "real" world by way of the logical analysis of language. If, following that, you take "objective" as meaning belonging to a reality that exists independently of the self, Merleau-Ponty is saying that such objectivity simply does not exist. There is no such thing as an "objective world" at all. No world outside of my experience (the Berkeley parallels are blindingly obvious). As such, it's a direct attack on any and all representationalist theories of perception, on any sort of correspondence theory of truth, and any philosophy generally that talks about the nature of things away from myself. Logic, nor physics, nor any sort of system describes "reality" as it is, if "as it is" means something that could exist outside of my own perception, which is itself (to use a common philosophical term) theory-laden, and thus not pure. (Of course, if you're a skeptic by nature, then this wouldn't be terribly upsetting anyway.)
"What I also wonder is how Merleau-Ponty would explain how it is that two or more people with independent experiences of the same chair can find agreement about the color and dimensions of the chair Surely the similarity of experiences must have a unified cause external to each individual perceptions?"
Since I'm not sure how directly I answered this in the main post (and I, too, have little time to go back to read it ;) ), I'll offer an answer to this here, just in case.
MP says that we are embodied. Our world and existence is, basically, involvement in an environment. At the same time it imposes on us and we on it; there is no original. We perceive the existence of other people in the same manner as we perceive ourselves, as a relationship to the world without which there would be no other to perceive (he does say there is a difference between perception of self and other, which I address near the end of the original post).
Now imagine myself and an other. The other sees "reversed colors;" what looks red to him is actually blue, what looks blue is actually red, and so on for green and yellow, orange and purple, etc. So when he sees what is "actually" blue (i.e., what the rest of the world sees as blue), what he is really seeing is what we call red. Yet he's been taught that -that- is blue. So, the two of us look at a cube. It is blue. I see blue, and when asked, call it blue. He sees red, and when asked, calls it blue without hesitation. So whatever the cause of the blue is, it's not just an object.
The answer of what it is is obvious: it's the object of perception, plus our means of perceiving it (in the other's case, his eyes or brain). But that's the thing: we don't see things, we see things as determined by a theory-laden mind. The object of perception includes our means of perceiving it. What distinguishes a gray object on an identically gray background at a distance from us? Nothing, and so by sight alone (if we look at the object head-on) we see no object at all. The problem here isn't that there's no cause of our perception, it's saying what that cause is, because we can't identify an objective "thing" that causes. Assuming the theory-ladenness of the mind (which phenomenology assumes, as does much of philosophy today in some form or another), you cannot talk about any reality that causes perceptions, because nothing is known about it. It exists only as an inference, and the justifiability of that assumes that your inferences somehow touch reality itself. But how? Thus we fall into a correspondence theory of truth and skepticism.
So how do we interact in the same world, then? For MP, the answer is that there's no separation to begin with. Other people experience the same things that we do. Why? Look around - they are in the very same world as we are. If the person is given to us in experience, and the object is too, that's all there is to say. Now, we can actually experience different things (as the color example above demonstrated), and we can get it wrong, but to use such cases as a refutation is to require certitude and thus something which guarantees certitude beyond perceptions, i.e. an objective world which MP explicitly rejects. Part of the consequences of his theory is that certitude about anything except the fact of existence itself is impossible. But he accepts that.
Post a Comment
<< Home