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Merleau- Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception” is a work that is intended to fall under many headings but it is undoubtedly, in spite of its limitations, a work of Philosophical Psychology par excellence. The work attempts to synthesise many positions and influences including empirical and rational psychology from a phenomenological/existential point of view. Insofar as its Philosophical credentials are concerned it draws upon the works of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. In these different syntheses we find moments in which we are reminded of Aristotelian and Kantian reflections and this is surprising given the fact that Merleau-Ponty(MP) wishes to distance himself from such rationalistic positions.
MP’s account begins with a basic experience of the world that is formed by consciousness: a consciousness of things-in-themselves which it is the task of phenomenology to describe. He takes Descartes and Kant to task for their “analytical reflections” in which the subject is detached from his experience of the world: in this state of detachment the subject then stands in judgment upon the world, it is argued. This criticism brings to the fore a formidable philosophical problem of human nature, namely, is man fundamentally in his essence an explorer whose task it is to discover new experiences, or a judge whose task it is to explain and justify the proceedings he sees before him in the tribunal of experience.
The judgement in favour of both the explorer and the judge would not be a problem for Aristotle’s Metaphysical theory of Change and Hylomorphic theory simply because, for Aristotle, powers of judgment are constructed upon explorative powers and simultaneously perform the task of regulating and organising explorative activity. MP sees the judge as separated unnecessarily from the tribunal of experience but the kind of separation that actually exists for both Aristotle and Kant reflects the kind of difference there is between a rational law or principle and what they apply to. It is difficult to take MP’s criticism of Kant seriously if one admits the difference between a principle or a law and what it is applied to. The case for the separation of powers (of exploration and judgement) against Descartes, however, is more compelling. Following the example of Descartes, however, we find MP claiming:
“I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications”
Separating perception of a black pen from perceptual judgments such as “This pen is black” does indeed seem a radical move. Descartes and Kant are further accused of separating the inner man from the outer world and it is not entirely clear that this criticism is justified in either case. It certainly is not justified in Kant’s case if one takes into consideration his Anthropological writings and his writings in the realm of Practical Philosophy in which our instrumental and categorical involvements with the world are clearly a result of a type of reflection that is in awe of the world and all its forms and aspects. Kant’s Practical Philosophy is also undoubtedly committed to making the world a better place, however long that process might take for the rational animal capable of discourse.
For MP discourse is an activity that causes essences to exist in a state of separation from consciousness and this to some extent denies the fact of my consciousness which MP argues, without any recourse to discourse, manages to appreciate the difference between what is imaginary and what is real.
Further “separations” are suggested in relation to Perception when MP argues that although there is a truth or self-evidence rooted in Perception there is a fundamental difference between what is lived through and what is thought. This separation is sustained by the claim that there is an active operational intentionality( P.XX) in which the “natural and ante-predicative unity of the world and our life” is constituted. From an Aristotelian hylomorphic point of view this exploration of origins by MP may constitute only one kind of explanation of the relevant changing phenomena: it may that is constitute a preferred phenomenological archeological reduction at the expense of other types of explanation such as the formal and final kinds of explanation we find in hylomorphic theory. Furthermore, if, as we claimed in the earlier chapters to this work, that Kant was indeed a hylomorphic Philosopher then the above criticism of Kant would appear to be exaggerated given the Kantian acceptance of all the types of explanation mentioned above.
The target of MP’s Phenomenology is also Science and the Philosophy of Science. MP argues in this context that the scientific concept of causality or causal explanation is problematic because it does not recognize consciousness as the source of what MP calls “the ante-predicative” world. Instead Science attempts to explain consciousness as a meeting point of a variety of causal agencies in the search for a physic-mathematical law.
What it is that enables MP to move into a transcendental dimension beyond the interplay of causal agencies operating biologically, is a “lived body”. The life of this body is then defined as the use of this body and this is one of the primary constituting factors of both consciousness and its relation to the world. This body is also a transcendental source of the aforementioned operative intentionality that enables me to transcend myself in the use of humanly constructed concrete instruments, e.g. tools to build houses, villages, and cities. Abstract tools such as Language also enable us to construct an orbis pictus in its “transcendental use”. After his work on Perception, Language shifted more and more into the centre of his Philosophizing. He did not believe as Wittgenstein did that Language is the “final solution” to all philosophical problems, but he did claim the following:
“That linguistics would give us the paradigm model on the basis of which we would be able to elaborate a theory of the human sciences and that establish a universal, philosophical anthropology”(“Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans Silverman H.J. Evanston, North Western University Press, 1973, Foreword by James M Edie P.XX))
The relation between body and language is further condensed from the clouds of earlier works in MP’s final work “The Visible and the Invisible”. In this last work written just before his death an Aristotelian bell tolls when he characterises the body as a potentiality of activity. Furthermore he adds the interesting qualification that this Aristotelian body is structured like a language. This body generates “meaning”, it is claimed. MP had in earlier works characterised meaning in terms of “gestural meaning” and this reminds us of the Evolutionary account of Language presented by Julian Jaynes in Volume one of my work on the History of Psychology. It is highly unlikely, however, that MP would approve of this kind of “scientific “ treatment of gestural origins and attitudes. In Jaynes’ account the gestural attitude is related to fear and the urgent demands of a life in a state of nature whereas for MP this attitude is more related to the awe and wonder in the face of the world that find in the works of Aristotle and Kant. For MP the acquisition of language is obviously then related to a way of using words that is related to fundamental intentions of speech. These form an attitude that is revealed in the pathological condition of aphasia. Patients suffering from aphasia have lost:
“the general ability to subsume sensory given under a category”(P. 204)
These patients are not capable of what MP calls the categorical attitude. This is not solely a thought function because according to MP language and thought are dual aspects of the same underlying phenomenon or attitude. MP specifically argues that thought does not underlie speech:
“The denomination of objects does not follow upon recognition: it is itself recognition. When I fix my eyes on an object in the half light and say: “it is a brush”, there is not in my mind the concept of a brush under which I subsume the object, and which moreover is linked by frequent association with the word “brush” but the word bears the meaning, and, by imposing it on the object, I am conscious of reaching that object.”(P. 206)
Speech does not presuppose thought but rather accomplishes it and this is a consequence of an attitude which Freud relied on in his therapy: a therapy called a “talking cure” by one of his patients. It is almost as if primary process thinking which confines itself to the images of experience requires a secondary process—sublimation of these images—in order for the talking cure to have its effect. We also know from the reports of a number of psychologists that children appear to begin to think when they begin to talk. It seems in these cases that naming something gives the thing a form of existence it did not possess previously. The child in this process of language acquisition appears to acquire an ability or power to think according to others. Here the expression of a word is an action in the context of community activity. MP compares this attitude to the Freudian Imago which manifests this emotional attitudes.
Speech is a modality of Being-in-the-world as is imagination. In the Sartrean example of “seeing”(imagining”?) Pierre to be absent from the café what is present to the senses is not a representation nor Pierre himself in person but rather a power of acting toward Pierre that motivates the negative judgement, “Pierre is not in the café”. What is present, MP argues, is, then, a desire to act accompanied by the lack of an intentional structure to realize the power of acting.
An angry word is as much of a gesture as angry behaviour on this account. There is, according to MP, no process of association leading me from the behaviour or the word to a state of anger—my senses and my movements are mutually implicated in this immediate acknowledgment of meaning. There is a non-observational identity here between the angry gesture I witness and the angry gesture I produce in response to an insult. Moreover, according to MP there is a relativity of the kind of behaviour involved when the Japanese become angry compared to an Italian becoming angry. This suffices for MP to claim that there is a difference in the respective emotions themselves, given the importance of the use of the body at least insofar as this human form of Being-in-the-world is concerned. The use of the body in anger or in discourse, are both transcendent of our biological natures and yet immanent in the process of communication with each other.
MP is not in doubt, in least in his work “Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language”(P. 4) that in language we detect the origins of new kinds of behaviour. This is a work that seeks the laws and principles that pertain to language.
Categorical behaviour rests on a foundation of gesture and is built up within an attitude that will also relate to the truth of language. This is as much of a concession to Kantian Philosophy that we will find in MP because he insists that the above attitude is more related to the productive imagination than to the Kantian understanding. Internal to this attitude is a recognition of the role of the other that appears to precede the acknowledgement that without truth, discourse can not function between speakers.
Rousseau pointed to “Amour proper” as a key attitude involved in the recognition of others. Hegel pointed to the master-slave dialectic. MP evokes the other person more neutrally but his evocation while originating in the categorical attitude related to awe and wonder, does not embrace the Kantian categories of the understanding or the Kantian ideas of Reason.
MP insists that Science is merely a second order activity relating to the primary experience we have of Being-in-the-world. It attempts to “objectify” phenomena with its second order methods of observation, resolution-composition, and experimentation. Science has an image of a human being as:
“ a physical system undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their physic-chemical properties” (P. 12)
In its attempts to characterise perception science:
“tried to reconstitute actual perception on this basis and to close the circle of scientific knowledge by discovering the laws governing the production of knowledge itself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity.”(P. 12)
This is obviously a very mechanical and simplistic view of science and it certainly does not serve as criticism of the kind of science we find in the work of Aristotle or Kant. One of the consequences MP wants to draw attention to with this criticism is that it makes my relation to any stimulus a secondary and passive affair—the object impresses itself upon my sensory system in the form of a sensation, and this is in turn then used by the scientist as a unit of experience. This also conflicts with Gestalt Psychology which claims that such a postulated layer of impressions is not to be found in the visual field we perceive. For them the sensory apparatus is not merely a medium of transmission of units of experience but this apparatus is rather something the body uses to transcend its biological condition. The biological meaning of the situation clearly transcends the physical stimuli perceived. MP accepts all of this and he adds to his criticism of the above observationalist form of science by insisting that the “idea” of a sensation is merely a theoretical construction with no real content—a theoretical construction which will, moreover distort any phenomenological analysis of perception. This view of the Scientist asks us to imagine that my visual field is a bundle of sensations, a bundle of particulars. The next problem for such a theory is how to connect this bundle into a whole that is a visual field. This is sometimes attempted with the assistance of a putative law of association. MP rejects this by claiming that the visual field is not formed by association mechanisms but is rather the condition of consciousness associating anything with anything else. Psychologists, he argues, attempt to bolster failing association theory with the claim that the memory facilitates the process by being projected upon the incomplete sense-data of the visual field in order to fill in any theoretical gaps left by the incomplete bundle of sensations. But the problem with this mental-chemistry approach in which sensations plus memory equals visual phenomenon is that there is nothing holding these elements together, no unifying factor for the field of vision.
We also know from history and experience MP argues that this form of mental chemistry will never suffice to describe and explain the psychological contribution to cultural phenomena. We can never import such methods into the cultural world where “atoms” can never replace the meanings of what we experience in this realm. Aristotle too, would have objected to the above logical atomism whether it be in the name of perception, language or culture. For Aristotle it is a mistake to prioritise the contents of perception, language or culture at the expense of the forms or principles that best explain them. MP to some extent agrees with such criticism when he acknowledges that there are pathological conditions of hysteria that support a more holistic approach to phenomena. Patients suffering from hysteria often turn around to see “if the world behind them is still there”(P. 29)
This is his evidence that perception for these patients has lost the structure of normal perception, a structure in which the normal person knows the world continues behind them even if they cannot see it: without the need of visual confirmation or even the confirmation of memory.
Having thus completed his criticism of empiricist theories, MP then turns to rationalism. Attention, it is argued, is the function of consciousness that enables one to come into contact with what MP calls “the truth of an object”. A piece of wax reveals its essence to the exploring attention miraculously because (for the rationalists) the essence of the wax is already thought and projected onto this piece of extended matter. This account, argues MP, does not acknowledge the phenomenological phenomenon of attention, a phenomenon that possesses the power to constitute a new object from an indeterminate horizon of significance. Rationalism, MP argues, uses the rational operation of judgment to fill in the gap between sensation and perception. Descartes was the rationalist par excellence and we recall well how his wax miraculously did not disappear when all its sensory properties were removed, suggesting, of course the presence of something rational enabling the wax to continue existing, revealing thus the truth of the wax. Here again, we encounter a form of mental chemistry helping us to construct the truth, namely sensation and judgment. Of course, conveniently for Descartes the extension of the wax is amenable to quantitative analyses of various kinds and it is thereby rescued from the consuming fires of nihilism.
What we are witnessing here is a radical confusion between two contexts: the context of exploration/discovery and the context of explanation/justification: contexts that require very different logical characterisations.
MP criticises another rationalist, Spinoza, and his notion of “adequate idea”, by claiming that perception, memory, and the existence of others are required to establish the truth of an idea. MP further claims that beginning at the level of the truth of an adequate idea will obscure the phenomena of the World and Others. According to MP, Spinoza has lost the ideas of perception and observation in his account and thereby lost all possibility of describing phenomena. MP would accordingly, balk at our earlier characterisation in volume one of Spinoza as a “proto-phenomenologist”. There is in Spinoza, however, a clear distinction between our mental activity in the context of exploration/discovery where nature rises to the concept and our mental activity in the context of explanation/justification where the concept gravitates toward nature (P.48). There is, for Spinoza, a clear difference between the self that analyses perception in search for an adequate idea, and the self which perceives, perhaps in the process of explaining the adequate idea.
Interestingly MP notes that Rationalism (intellectualism) also chooses to characterise our relation to the world in terms of Sensation thus blocking the path to a phenomenological analysis of Perception. He also seems to suggest that abandoning this notion of Sensation is necessary if one is in search of a new type of reflection and a more sustainable Psychological view of Man. Gestalt Psychology having been praised for its philosophical assertion “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is then questionably criticised for being the hostage of Scientific concepts such as Reason and Cause when it is engaged upon the task of describing and explaining phenomena that are meaningful and motivated.
MP then refers to the Gestalt commitment to Naturalism and this at least sounds justified when one remembers the role the Gestalt psychologists thought the brain played in Perception and Thought. MP is certainly justified in his claim that there is no space for the category of motivation in the naturalistic tendency to describe and explain the role of the brain in our relations with the World and Others. One phenomenon does not “cause” another in the same way in which one neurone causes another to fire. Phenomena are, rather linked by the meaning they have in relation to one another, a meaning that dwells in them in the way in which “operative reason” dwells in the phenomena of Perception. It is this notion of “operative reason” that MP mysteriously appeals to when he finds himself in contexts of explanation/justification.
MP is at his best when he is describing simple perceptual phenomena such as that of a wooden wheel bearing a load or a flame that has burned a child’s fingers. Here, he claims, we have phenomena that are “invested with value”(P. 61). Vital meanings are here expressed. Sensations, MP argues might be able to transmit qualities in sensory experience but they cannot transmit these vital meanings or values. His conclusion here is however questionable. He refers in this context to jettisoning Kant’s work on the categories of judgment that he insists is the connective tissue for phenomena in the Kantian account. This connective tissue, he argues, does not suffice to distinguish phenomena of perception. This is not a correct characterisation of the Kantian position, especially in the light of our earlier characterisation of Kant as a hylomorphic philosopher. If this latter claim is correct then Aristotle’s theory of the emotions (defined by the pleasure-pain principle and related to the imagination) would provide Kant with an account that does not involve the faculty of the understanding(where the categories of judgment are located) but rather involves the faculty of Sensibility. Truth, for Kant is not located at the level of Sensibility but the concept of Aletheia may be. It should also be pointed out that besides these two primary faculties there is a third, that of Reason, which also assists us in the formation of Transcendental and Metaphysical Judgments. It is at this abstract level that we encounter higher level Principles such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Principle of Non-contradiction. Both of these Principles place limits on what can be said at all levels of description and explanation.
MP claims that it has long been an article of faith insofar as both Science and Philosophy is concerned that Perception somehow puts us in touch with the world and relates us somehow to the Truth about the world. MP prefers to avoid where he can such abstract notions and prefers to speak in terms of phenomenal fields. The role of consciousness in this process is quasi-teleological and quasi-archeological: Every instant of the phenomenal field, he claims, is coordinated with future and previous instants as well as Other consciousnesses. He returns to his criticism of Science and insists that scientific concepts relating to theoretical states of bodies, equal and opposite forces, chemical properties of bodies, and geometrical space are based on materialistic and formal presuppositions which seek a Being that only the scientific methods of resolution-composition, observation, and experimentation can reveal. On such accounts consciousness is a mere suburb of a more extensive empire. In these accounts the transcendental use of the body are lost in the translation of Being into substantial Being. Expression was resolved into a system of causal relations. Both the values in the world and the Being-in-the world of expressive beings were resolved and recomposed of parts cleansed of all trace of consciousness and agency: parts which functioned like the parts of a machine. First person processes were replaced by third person observations and reports and the activity of experimentation. Both emotional and practical attitudes were subsumed by psycho-physiological mechanisms. In the context of this discussion MP, in spite of his arguments against the Sartrean position discussed earlier in this volume uses the Sartrean ideas of en soi (Being-in-itself) and pour soi (Being-for-itself) to accuse the Scientists of locating the realm of their investigations solely in the realm of Being-in-itself. In this discussion he also accuses the scientist of a form of dualism when they separate the form of their thought from the content of their thinking. This is problematic, MP argues because the empirical concrete self is a mixture of en soi and por soi. He also predicts that the unholy scientific alliance of naturalism and spiritualism is on the verge of collapsing as a form of Philosophy. In this cauldron of resulting chaos both the physical object and the spiritual rational self are disappearing:
“ Nature is not in itself geometrical, and it appears so only to a careful observer who contents himself with macrocosmic data. Human society is not a community of reasonable minds, and only in fortunate countries where a biological and economic balance has locally and temporarily been struck has such a conception of it been possible. The experience of chaos both on the speculative ad the other level, prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective which it sets itself on principle to avoid, to seek a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason in a world not of its making and prepare the substructure of living experience without which reason and liberty are emptied of their content and wither away.”(P. 65)
The above quote is interesting insofar as its historical perspective is concerned. Both the good Berkeley and Kant pointed out the reasons why nature could not be conceived of as essentially geometrical and Kant further pointed out that practical rationality in the realm of ethical action is best characterised in terms of a context of explanation/justification in which the reasoning precedes from universal ought premises (promises ought to be kept) to a particular ought-conclusion (Jack ought to keep his promise to Jill and pay the money back he owes her). This is perfectly consistent, Kant argues with the “possibility” of no one in a society being rational and keeping promises. Explanation in a theoretical context of explanation/justification might conceivably concern itself with whether or not we can call ourselves, or our societies rational. After an initial process of exploration we might discover, come to the conclusion that neither we nor our societies are in-themselves rational but are rather created in the spirit of rationality (with the hope that they can become rational—realize their potentiality). All this for-the-sake of leading a rational life in the future. Ethical reasoning on this account is not irrational—it is not irrational in these circumstances to claim that both we, and our societies ought to be rational. Such an investigation might also confirm that it is true that we are animals capable of discourse who as a matter of fact engage in discourse in the agora occasionally demonstrating the power of rationality. The story about Socrates’s exploits in the agora and his subsequent fate is of course a story about the fate of rationality in a society not exactly in chaos but certainly an object of concern in the light of the oracular prophecy that “everything created by man is destined to ruin and destruction”. Plato’s concern with just this state of affairs resulted in him writing “The Republic” in which rationality in the form of Philosophers is installed in a government brought about by 3 very theoretical, fanciful waves of change. Aristotle, who acknowledged the animal in us, was not so optimistic and felt that the laws of the city would have to be the vehicle of our rationality. Kant, we should also recall, in the spirit of Aristotle, admitted that man as a matter of fact is not rational but he also clearly, in hylomorphic spirit, claimed that we have considerable potential for rationality if the actualisation of various powers of the mind occur. He also bravely predicted a time scale for this event to occur for our societies, ca one hundred thousand years in the future.
MP’s response to the fact that we are not rational was to appeal to a phenomenal field, an “operative reason”, and a conscious body using Perception to reveal a relation to Being. This disclosure of Being, however, is not a self evident result of the phenomenological method since perception dialectically hides its teleology. In the scientific context of exploration Consciousness becomes a psychic fact amongst many others and the phenomenological nature of perception is overlooked in favour of the objects in the world that perception “discovers” when sensations fortuitously come together and form an object. The transcendental framework that MP proposes of “Self-Others-World” ought in his view, to replace the above scientific “objective framework”. The Self, in this framework is a transcendental self—a transcendental ego which:
“is not a Being but a Unity or a Value.”(P.71)
The body is a mixed psycho-physical system for MP and physiology is the discipline we look to for an account its physical nature. Some physiologists, MP argues, have begun to see that there is a complex relation between the physical and the psychological. In the case of certain kinds of physical insults to certain parts of the brain responsible for colour vision we do not see as a consequence any disappearance of “content”: we see rather a disappearance of “form”. This is reminiscent of Aristotle who reminded us that it was the essence, or form or principle of the eye to see—he knew a major insult to the eye would remove the principle of seeing thus confirming the importance of the matter the body is composed of. Similarly, MP points out that in the case of injuries to the certain parts of the brain and sensory conductors what we “discover” is not a disappearance of one colour as in some forms of colour blindness: what occurs is rather a loss of differentiation in the perception of all colours. First it is the level of saturation of all colours that is effected and the intensity of the colour is diminished. Thereafter the colour-spectrum is reduced to four colours and finally a monochrome grey is all that can be seen. These psycho-physical phenomena do not operate with reference to single sensations but rather to a patterning of these sensations. Here, MP claims, no causality is operating in relation to sensations. Spinoza would describe this patterning activity in terms of the body attempting to sustain itself in existence. In MP’s account however, we have no scientific relation of the in-itself with the for-itself but rather a for-itself that constitutes a meaning or value for the physiological organism. Or better, the perspective of Being-in-the-world is what is needed to explain psycho-physical phenomena such as a reduction in the perception of colour caused by brain injury. This latter, would be the preferred platform of explanation because both the physiological and psychological phenomena are neither in-itself nor for-itself but rather phenomena that are intentionally assimilated in our Being and directed towards the world of facts, values and other persons. In this Being my body is “knowingly” but non observationally inserted into the world in a way that imposes upon me a view of the world which in turn may allow me to factually see the Church from my window.
One advantage of the above account is that it reserves the integrity of the ontological distinctions related to persons that we find in Kant’s “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”: a dualistic ontology namely of what it is I bring about with the use of my body and what it is that happens to my body. As an infant with limited use of my body it is probably true to claim that the world largely happens to me. As the infant’s powers increase, however, it becomes truer to say that the body is being put to uses that in turn bring about the happening of events in the world. Of course, on a Kantian account both Understanding and Reason are involved in this latter form of transaction with the world. My purely sensational transactions with the world, on the other hand, must stand on the side of passive transaction. Sensations are what happens to the body—e.g. the pain at being burned by the live flame of a candle. Explorative perception appears, on the contrary, to be that something that someone is doing, namely using their body to explore their Umwelt or environment. Sensations, as far as Science is concerned, is obviously in some way used in explorative processes. They are used as signs of something. In such use the sensation of pain, for example, in Spinoza´s language, expresses or asserts the sensation of pain and in the case of the burned fingers in the flame the sensation rapidly becomes a part of a sensory-motor complex in which a reflexive withdrawing of the hand rapidly occurs. The question that a Kantian would ask in this context is the following: Is “withdrawing the hand” something that one does or something that happens to one. For a Kantian this is probably something that one does.
MP’s account would probably side with the Kantian but for different reasons that have to do with his idea of the spatiality of the body-image that according to MP is a matter of an existential non observational form of awareness of the body. Body image is not in this context to be construed in terms of the association of sensations or images. Rather the parts of the body are determined by a whole that encompasses the transcendental purpose of the body. There is, MP would argue, a sensory-motor unity of the body that would explain the intentional withdrawing of the hand in pain from the candle flame.