Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception.
So the Phenomenology of Perception is a very fat book that purports to give an existential phenomenology, from an analysis of perception (attention, judgment, “the phenomenal field”), to the various aspects of having a body (its spatiality, sexuality, expression, and how mechanistic psychology and classical psychology teat it), to a consequent analysis of time and freedom. …All stated with much less of the horrific made-up terminology of Heidegger or B&T-era Satre than you’d expect.
However, that book is much too long, and takes a long time to get around to saying much, so instead, we chose to read a sort of presentation of that work to a lay audience.World of Perception,
You can even listen to these lectures yourself with subtitles:
Watch on YouTube.
The problem was, for our podcasting purposes, M-P’s presentation here was too high level, too general, with too much gesturing at the general character of his philosophy without giving us much meat. So, we threw in an essay: “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences”, from 1946, which is a presentation in outline of his Phenomenology of Perception at a conference, complete with him taking questions from other academics for around half of the page count. This is what we ended up talking about most of the time.
M-P argues for the phenomenological method over an approach that starts with the premise of scientific naturalism, including the subject-object distinction, and relegates all conscious reports to a tiny domain of psychology. He thinks his position is motivated by the findings of gestalt psychology, which argues against an atomic view of perception: we don’t take in sense data and then assemble them into something, and we don’t “represent” to ourselves, for instance, the parts of an object (its back, its underside) that we can’t at that moment see. Perception is irreducibly of wholes, of meanings. Far from merely alerting us to the presence of physical objects in space, it is rich and complicated, and begs for first-person analysis of its contents. Modern art is one way that we can be reminded of just how cool perception is, enabling us to back away from some of our purposes and theories that everyday life more or less make us ignore perception itself in favor of the information we need for whatever we’re trying to accomplish. He also talks up paying attention to the experiences of animals, children, and those outside of modern civilization: we tend to assume (and even phenomenologists do this) that “the world” is whatever it is that sane people thinking clearly agree that it is, but these cases of difference can help us focus on really how much more there is to it than that. The result is some form of relativism regarding science and ethics that will increase our tolerance for others, but again, given that we are who we are in the bodies we have, this is not a nihilistic type of relativism: it’s just some kind of less human-centered humanism, if that makes sense.
Purchase World of Perception,
Purchase a book with “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences” in it,
or read it online.
Damn! This is coming just a bit too late, just wrapping up a grad course on The Phenomenology of Perception now– wrote my term paper yesterday. Oh well.
Mark L: In addition to doing the “close readings”, you should consider offering to write term papers for a nominal fee (see above comment).
Y’all couldn’t afford me! 🙂
Nice. I have this one in my reading queue.
I am so excited for this episode!
Could you guys maybe cover some Paul RicÅ“ur in the near-future as well? Particularly, I was wondering if you’d be interested in covering one of his last works (if not his last, in fact (i.e. I’m not entirely sure)). The work I’m thinking of here is his “Memory, History, Forgetting”. It is, by what I could derive from it in the brief encounter I was able to manage before my school work-load demanded I set it aside, a work where RicÅ“ur makes the following sort of claims. Essentially, no matter what Time may be (i.e. whatever it objective is regardless of our intuitive incentives purports) we always, necessarily, are confined to experience it in our phenomenologically Human way. Ergo, Time for us is Memory and thus the Past and Future are just modes of presentness internal to us as Memory-and-Hope / Impressions-and-projections. Then, by bringing in his notion of Narrative Identity he makes this move: i.e. the same way that any autobiography (or biography) will always leave out massive amounts of the individuals life and experiences and aspirations etc. What is included are the major, climatic, thematic peaks of the individuals life-span. The book includes a consistent progression of the most important events that are thematically essential to ones Personal Identity. Then, back to the issue of the way we are necessarily bound to experience time (i.e. We should realize that our histories are our memories (to an extent)), from here we can say that we have a great amount of creative control over how our narrative is written. This is obvious if you believe we are free (of course) but he is also saying that considering how our History-as-Memory dictates with such a ruthlessly iron fist our present identities (indexically), we have this power to reflect on and recollect memories and re-interpret things. We can decide if Gesture X at Time T was meant in way A or B (or C or D and so on) and always be able to reinterpret it as something new and different given new experiences. So we can do maintenance and edit our memories (i.e. our past) so as to construct the narrative most likely to better ourselves. Also, traumatic experiences or (more probably) unjust/bad experiences which (if we believe Socrates and perhaps Plato) will only make one more unjust and worse–according to RicÅ“ur if I’m not mistaken–do not have to be included in the narrative. We already leave so much of our actual experience and past out of our conscious understandings of who we are (i.e. our narratives) that there is no reason why we can’t just decide that this bad experience C is not something we want to dwell on or have influence / sway over us and so we can forget it. We have the creative control / right to decide what we want to be the major plot-points of our narratives and we may also decide which experience are only going to have a negative impact on our narratives (and thus our selves / personalities as respective individuals) and of by our free will-power let those things go (i.e. forget them). I am very intrigued by this notion. I have incorporated these thoughts into a recent break up where, in doing so, it helped me really put things into a more long-term perspective in the sense of creating my life-story etc and was able to very quickly and successfully come to acceptance of it all by realizing how every possible negative event / experience involved with the relationship can also be justfifiably interpreted as a positive thing. She and I are now great friends and still provide positive influences on one another without any dwelling / left-over feelings from the relationship / break-up. It is a remarkable conceptual model for expansive perspective and can have a powerfully positive impact on ones corollary personal development in relation to his/her personal, actual, phenomenological experiences which are always so caught up and tangled in interpretations and such baggage. Unfortunately, I have no clue (in not getting to really delve into RicÅ“urs work) of (1) how one goes about Forgetting something. It is, arguably, not so easy of a task to consciously just remove a memory in that sense unless there is some sort of ontologically phenomenological distinction he is able to lay out between how we experience the World and how we experience the World-as-Narrative (or something along these lines. (2) / Secondly, It seems like a major issue to address where the line is drawn between “Creative Remembering” and just being “Delusional”. There is, as I can empirically attest to and I’m sure RicÅ“ur gives an argument in support of, a truly effect and successful way to practice this.. but is there also an edge to this plateau of perspective that we might be at risk of stepping over if not careful?
Anyway, Those are some issues that I haven’t been able to find out If (and if so then How) RicÅ“ur addresses them.
I hope you’ll take a look at the work and think it over. It impresses me because it is a work of beautiful abstraction but its most valuable purpose / ability is to be a philosophy that genuinely has positive impacts on peoples lives. It is a philosophy one practices. In this way it is a perfect edition to the line-up of Sartre (in that this is arguably a very existentialist philosophy meant to focus on the “subject” and his/her actual state of Being-in-the-World) and Merleau-Ponty (in its phenomenological orientation and the general concern with questions of “How to we actually Be in the world, and what is most essential to our Being in the World and (in RicÅ“ur case) the ontology of our personal identity as a part of that Being-in-the-World).
Thanks,
-Daniel Moss
I’m looking forward to the discussion. Those without a Scribd account can get the Primacy of Perception here: http://www.arts.rpi.edu/~ruiz/AdvancedIntegratedArts/ReadingsAIA/Merleau-Ponty_The%20Primacy%20of%20Perception.pdf
Also, I haven’t listened to them yet, but Syracuse Prof. Emeritus John Caputo has a series of lectures on M-P that you can listen to or download here: http://trippfuller.com/Caputo/
Loooking forward to this ep. BTW are you guys considering an ep on philosophy of science and philosophy of time?
Yes, we’ve had a phil science survey ep on our list since this summer, but it for sure won’t be one of the next 3.
I have only listened to a few of the podcasts but am enjoying them immensely. I thought you were dancing around what M-P was driving at around the time that one of you could not find the word “convergence” [of an infinite series]. That discussion and the football example that followed resonated reasonably well with what M-P is driving at. I am a neuroscientist focused on perception, decision-making and some larger issues in cognition. M-P’s “Primacy” and “Phenomenology of Perception” continue to influence on my research profoundly. For those of you trying to sort out how M-P distinguishes his own position from Sartre, Kant, Plato, Descartes and others, you might read the preface to PofP. Regrettably the elaboration of this distinction infects (in the pathological sense) the narrative of many otherwise elegant ideas throughout the book. For this reason, I believe, PofP has not had the influence it should have had on neuroscience and psychology. In any case, thank you for a most enjoyable discussion.