Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception

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Merleau-PontyPhenomenology of Perception
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• When we come back to phenomena e.g. seeing an
  event, reading a page we find, as a basic layer
  of experience, a whole already pregnant with an
  irreducible meaning not sensations with gaps
  between them, into which memories may be supposed
  to slip, but the features, the layout of a
  landscape or a word, in spontaneous accord with
  the intentions of the moment (PoP, 21f.)

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• If my arm is resting on the table I should never
  think of saying that it is beside the ash-tray in
  the way in which the ash-tray is beside the
  telephone. The outline of my body is a frontier
  which ordinary spatial relations do not cross.
  This is because its parts are inter-related in a
  peculiar way they are not spread out side by
  side, but enveloped in each other. (PoP, p. 98)

4

• The spatiality of the body must work downwards
  from the whole to the parts must be implied in
  a comprehensive bodily purpose and it must
  originate in that purpose (PoP, p. 99)

5

• If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it
  with both hands, only my hands are stressed and
  the whole of my body trails behind them like the
  trail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of
  the whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but
  these are simply swallowed up in the position of
  my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to
  speak in the pressure they exert on the table.
  (PoP, p. 100)

6

• The bench, scissors, pieces of leather offer
  themselves to the subject as poles of action
  they delimit a certain situation which calls
  for a certain mode of resolution, a certain kind
  of work. The body is no more than an element in
  the system of the subject and his world, and the
  task to be performed elicits the necessary
  movements from him by a sort of remote
  attraction, as the phenomenal forces at work in
  my visual field elicit from me, without any
  calculation on my part, the motor reactions which
  establish the most effective balance between
  them, or as the conventions of our social group,
  or our set of listeners, immediately elicit from
  us the words, attitudes and tone which are
  fitting. (PoP, p. 106)

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• When I motion my friend to come nearer, my
  intention is not a thought prepared within me and
  I do not perceive the signal in my body. I beckon
  across the world, I beckon over there, where my
  friend is the distance between us, his consent
  or refusal are immediately read in my gesture
  there is not a perception followed by a movement,
  for both form a system which varies with the
  whole. (PoP, p. 111)

8

• When I chat with a friend whom I know well, each
  of his remarks and each of mine contains, in
  addition to the meaning it carries for everybody
  else, a host of references to the main dimensions
  of his character and mine, without our needing to
  recall previous conversations with each other.
  These acquired worlds (PoP, p. 130)

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• the word sediment should not lead us astray
  this acquired knowledge is not an inert mass in
  the depths of our consciousness. My flat is, for
  me, not a set of closely associated images. It
  remains a familiar domain round about me only as
  long as I still have in my hands or in my
  legs the main distances and directions involved,
  and as long as from my body intentional threads
  run out towards it. (PoP, p. 130)

10

• When a typist performs the necessary movements on
  the typewriter, these movements are governed by
  an intention, but the intention does not posit
  the keys as objective locations. It is literally
  true that the subject who learns to type
  incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily
  space. (PoP, p. 145)

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The organist

• Between the musical essence of the piece as it is
  shown in the score and the notes which actually
  sound round the organ, so direct a relation is
  established that the organists body and his
  instrument are merrely the medium of this
  relationship. Henceforth the music exists by
  itself and through it all the rest exists. There
  is here no place for any memory of the position
  of the stops, and it is not in objective space
  that the organist in fact is playing. (PoP, p.
  145)

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The Organist

• In reality his movements during rehearsal are
  consecratory gestures they draw affective
  vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a
  space of expressiveness as the movements of the
  augur delimit the templum.

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TEMPLUM

• from the Greek terminus to cut off
• templum any place which was circumscribed and
  separated by the augurs from the rest of the land
  by a certain solemn formula

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the unity of the body is not simple coordination

• I desire a certain result and the relevant tasks
  are spontaneously distributed amongst the
  appropriate segments ..I can continue leaning
  back in my chair provided that I stretch my arm
  forward . All these movements are available to
  us in virtue of their common meaning. (PoP, 149)

15

• Here is Peter, I can speak to him or not. But if
  I lose my power of speech, Peter no longer exists
  for me as an interlocutor, sought after or
  rejected what collapses is the whole field of
  possibilities. (PoP, p. 162)

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The Unconscious

• When I move my eyes, I take account of their
  movement, without being expressly conscious of
  the fact Similarly sexuality, without being the
  object of any intended act of consciousness, can
  underlie and guide specified forms of my
  experience. (PoP, p. 169)

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Verschmelzung

• There is interfusion between sexuality and
  existence, which means that existence permeates
  sexuality and vice versa, so that it is
  impossible to determine, in a given decision or
  action, the proportion of sexual or other
  motivations, impossible to label a decision or
  act sexual or non-sexual. Thus there is in
  human existence a principle of indeterminacy
  (PoP, 171)

18
Language

• The speaking subject does not think of the sense
  of what he is saying, nor does he visualize the
  words which he is using. To know a word or a
  language is not to be able to bring into play
  any pre-established nervous network. But neither
  is it to retain some pure recollection of the
  word (PoP, p. 180)

19

• I do not need to visualize external space and my
  own body in order to move one within the other.
  In the same way I do not need to visualize the
  word in order to know and pronounce it. It is
  enough that I possess is articulatory and
  acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of
  the possible uses of my body. (PoP, p. 180)

20

• I reach back for the word as my hand reaches
  towards the part of my body which is being
  pricked the word has a certain location in my
  linguistic world, and it is part of my equipment.
  (PoP, p. 180)
• (Cf. Hayek, Mach )

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The Cultural World

• behavior patterns settle into nature, being
  deposited in the form of a cultural world. Not
  only do I live in the midst of earth, air and
  water, I have around me roads, plantations,
  villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell,
  a spoon, a pipe. Eah of the objects is moulded to
  the human action which it serves. Each one
  spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity (PoP,
  p. 348)

22
Idealism

• Now, although it may not be surprising that the
  sensory and perceptual functions should lay down
  a natural world in front of themselves, since
  they are prepersonal, it may well seem strange
  that the spontaneous acts through which man has
  patterned his life should be deposited, like
  sediment, outside himself and lead an anonymous
  existence as things. The civilization in which I
  play my part exists for me in a self-evident way
  in the implements with which it provides itself.
  (PoP, p. 348)

23

• one particular cultural object plays a crucial
  role in the perception of other people language.
  In the experience of dialogue, there is
  constituted between the other person and myself a
  common ground my thought and his are interwoven
  into a single fabric, my words and those of my
  interlocutor are called forth by the state of the
  discussion, and they are inserted into a shared
  operation of which neither of us is the creator.
  (PoP, p. 354)

24

• We have a dual being, where the other is for me
  no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my
  transcendental field, nor I in his we are
  collaborators for each other in consummate
  reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each
  other and we co-exist through a common world.
  (PoP, p. 354)