PREVIEW-Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge

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0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 48 is something like what's the relationship between perception and knowledge? And we read Maurice Merleau-Ponty's the World of Perception from 1948 and his essay the Primacy of Perception and its philosophical consequences from 1947. For links to these texts and other information, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, deducing the existence of you the audience from Madison, Wisconsin.

1:17 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, resentfully using his air conditioning in Austin, Texas.

1:22 Wes: This is Wes Allan in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:24 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:28 Mark: I want to start off by thanking our big dollar patrons since the last recording, which were Preston Haley, Brent Dahlgren, Bea Boston, Russ Baker, Wilder Ramsey and Michael Rissman. Thanks also to those who bought my close reading file on Sartre.

1:44 Seth: A bargain at twice the price.

1:48 Mark: We have some ground rules that we should probably express, but I would like to west to express them. Do it.

1:56 Wes: I don't think I remember any of them.

1:58 Seth: How many episodes have you been on?

2:01 Wes: No name dropping.

2:02 Mark: I thought you were going to give your modified version of this. I thought you were going to give your interpretation his perspective.

2:07 Wes: Been able to prepare. You told me I'd be prepared. No preparation.

2:13 Mark: Whim, whimsy people. If you look at our iTunes reviews they say we appreciate the whimsy. I think 40 people use those words. The whimsy.

2:22 Wes: That's yes.

2:23 Mark: We will not assume that our audience has read this Merleau-Ponty reading and

2:28 Seth: we will not name drop.

2:29 Mark: Just make your point. Don't say you would understand me if only you had read Orson Welles. Death in the cupcake.

2:35 Seth: That's not bad.

2:36 Wes: I didn't like.

2:39 Mark: All right, Wes, what's the last one?

2:41 Wes: Be clear. Something like that, right? Unless it's more interesting not to be.

2:47 Mark: Yeah, that'll work. So Merleau-Ponty do you want to give a sum up, Seth, what you thought was the major issue we need to discuss here?

2:55 Seth: I can tell you what my understanding from the shorter essay. When he says the primacy of perception, he means that our concept of consciousness should begin with understanding of human perception. Similar, I guess, what Sartre was working on in the Transcendence of the Ego, which we just recently read, but with a little bit of a twist. I hope. I hope there's something more in there than what Sartre had to say.

3:20 Mark: Right. Isn't he normally cast as, well, kind of like Heidegger, But Heidegger didn't pay attention to the body.

3:27 Seth: Yes.

3:27 Mark: And he was friends with Sartre and writing at the same time as Sartre, and they in fact had a similar. They wrote about phenomenology, were highly influenced by Husserl at first, and then they got into Marxism later in their careers. This stuff is all from the pretty early part. The Phenomenology Perception was his big book from 1945. And so both of these works are kind of dumbed down versions of it. Right. The World of Perception is actually a series of radio lectures. So it's really dumbed down for a general audience from 48 and then before that, the Primacy Perception. That essay was from a conference I see in November 46, where he's sort of presenting it to other philosophers. So it's basically a summary of the Primacy perception. And then it has a little like question and answer back and forth with these other guys. That was kind of interesting.

4:11 Seth: I had the same sort of been anxious to read Merleau-Ponty because of that, I guess, cliche positioning of him as expanding or extending Heidegger's phenomenology to the body. But from what I can tell, he must do most of that heavy lifting in something we didn't read.

4:29 Dylan: What would it mean to do that?

4:30 Seth: What it would mean to do that was when Heidegger did the analytic of Dasein and he talked about the three different types of being in the world and what have you. He keeps talking about the Dasein, but he's talking about it in a very abstract way. And he doesn't talk about Dasein's experience of the body and how the body mediates the experience of being in the world.

4:52 Dylan: So when Merleau Ponty calls the primacy of perception, he says that perception is a nascent logos. So would that be the kind of thing that if he had done that, that would have gone in the direction you're talking about?

5:04 Mark: Explain what Those two words mean and how they could fit together, how that phrase could be meaningful.

5:08 Dylan: I'll just point you to the page and I'll expand. It's on page 101 in the Primacy of Perception essay, almost at the. He says right in the middle. By these words, the primacy of perception, we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. That perception is a nascent logos, that it teaches us outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself, that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of being present at the birth of this knowledge to make it as sensible as the sensible to recover the consciousness of rationality.

So when I hear that perception is nascent logos, what I take him to be saying is that the way in which we perceive, and I suspect he would say other living things perceive, holds in itself logos. It's not super added. And that would be what it would mean to root rationality in the body is not to talk about it as electrochemical. Exactly. But to say that what logos is, what rationality is, is born out of and held within as a possibility in perception itself. And that by understanding and inquiring into perception authentically, we would understand our own logos better.

6:34 Wes: So he's rejecting a kind of neo Kantian position where we're given these raw sensations and then the logos part of it is given by the mind. Let's say concepts are applied to structure experience. So this goes beyond the typical perceptionist theory laden idea because that seems to be already there in the neo Kantian position. Right. We perceive objects and perception is theory laden in the sense that concepts have already their organizing work on the raw data of sensation. He seems to be trying to go a step further than that. Right. And say what we're given is already laden with logos. And it's not the spontaneity of the mind that adds that it's just there in the world and we are present.

7:16 Dylan: Well, it's there in us, right? It's there in our act of perceiving. I don't think he would say that it's there in.

7:23 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

7:25 Mark: Well, isn't it there in the world as revealed by phenomenological observation? So we saw that in Sartre too, that it seemed like if you're just describing experience, then you just can't unpack what it is the subject is adding and what it is that is the object really it just comes at you as this mass. So you end up pushing all these things like meanings. And even just seeing we were saying last time with Sartre that I could perceive something as sort of objectively hateful, whereas, you know, if you just reflect on it a second, well, isn't it clear that it's just me that's doing the hating? It's not that the thing in itself is hateful, but no, really unreflective experience. Perception just reveals these value terms, all these things. Right. As in the object of perception.

8:09 Wes: Yeah. We expand our notion of what an object is.

8:12 Seth: Yeah. Can I just. From the beginning of the essay, he says we cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception, nor can we conceive the perceiving subject as a consciousness which interprets, deciphers, or orders a sensible matter whose ideal law it would possess. Matter is pregnant with its form, which is to say that in the final analysis, every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the world that both are present to us practically, rather than being explicitly known or posited by us. I can understand sort of by looking at the way the words are put together and what those typically mean, how this might be kind of an anti Kantian move, as Wes suggested, but I suspect it'd take a lot to kind of unpack that.

8:57 Dylan: I think that he would say it might be an anti neo Kantian move, but later on, I think he wants to say that what he's doing is something that Kant himself might have left unfinished, but is directly in line with Kant and in fact, Plato, he would call both those guys in line with what he's saying.

9:17 Mark: How is it in line with Plato? Because Plato seems to be doing exactly the opposite. Merleau Ponty's chief antagonist in this is someone who sharply distinguishes the perceived world from the ideal world, the world as rationality grasps it. And so Plato's position is explicitly that perception is this sort of unreliable, decayed thing, and we have to apply our minds to sort of overcome these errors of perception. And yeah, I mean, we're using some sort of rational intuition, some faculty that we have to get at this. But it's not perception.

9:49 Dylan: I don't want to be an apologist for Merleau Ponty. I'm just saying that the place where he points to Kant and Plato as on page 95, but it is in the context of the question of contradiction. He would say that Plato and Kant hold the possibility of contradiction appears as a very condition for consciousness. And he juxtaposes them with Zeno or Hume, who demand a kind of explicit non contradiction in consciousness as a proper condition for consciousness.

10:21 Wes: Yeah, that contradiction, I think he's talking about the. You know, if you look a little just before that, all of our experience of the world is through a tissue of concepts which lead to irreducible contradictions. The antinomies, if we attempt to take them in the absolute sense.

10:36 Mark: Could we give an example?

10:37 Wes: So, yeah, one of the conditions of the possibility of experience is that I'm able to use the representation, I think, with any given experience. But if we treat that transcendental condition of consciousness as an object within consciousness, then we make the Cartesian move and we treat the ego as this object like substance. And that is the mistake that Kant objects to. So the contradiction here is, on the one hand, we have to posit these sort of transcendental conditions of consciousness, but on the other hand, we can never call them objects and we can never have knowledge of them in the way that we have knowledge of empirical objects.

11:13 Mark: I was thinking that some of the contradictions that he's pointing to are easier to get at or less abstract. Like, he talks about the fact that things look far away, that they're smaller when they're far away. And he says early on in the essay that this is actually something that people didn't realize at first, that it sort of takes savages a while to understand this concept. Right? Because they just grasp, look, there's the buffalo over there. And you have to actually step back and hold your thumb up and compare it to the buffalo to say, wow, it looks like the buffalo's smaller than my thumb.

Usually it's just I just see the buffalo. So this was given as an example of people who say, look, we get all this sort of raw sense data where one of those would be small buffalo thing, small colored thing. And then we interpret it, oh, that must be a buffalo. And I interpret it as being close to me. He says, no, that's not actually how it works. We just see the buffalo as a buffalo. Because whatever's going on with this depth perception is just so internalized. It's not something we have to think about.

12:10 Wes: This seems to me to be one of the things I found odd about Merleau Ponty, because no one's claiming that we go through some consciousness induction, you know, that we have to consciously prove to ourselves the size of the buffalo. All of that happens before anything is even experienced. And, you know, and brain scientists will talk about the same sort of thing, what the brain has to do to some raw data in order to interpret it in that way. It happens unconsciously, but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

12:35 Seth: I don't think that's what he's objecting to, Wes. I don't think it's a question of consciousness versus unconsciousness.

12:41 Wes: Well, he's objecting to the idea that there's this inference from sign to signified that there's this inference from the raw data to the result resulting object of perception.

12:51 Seth: I think his objection is more one about the way in which consciousness functions. He's definitely wanting to make a point against that. Consciousness is some kind of subjectivity that represents the world. And that perception is really a structured representation of this subject. Instead, he wants to say that perception is prior to the formation of the subject. In the sense that perception is the precondition for consciousness. Consciousness. And that somehow that makes it more primitive. And you don't go through whatever that move is that requires you to represent and do that move, whether it's conscious or unconscious. That's how I was seeing it.

13:32 Wes: So at this level, it sounds like perception is sort of this area of subject object fusion. He's not objecting to the distinction ultimately between subject and object or to the sciences, at least that's what he says. Right. And to that, at one level, yes, you treat subject and object as distinct. And you go about the business of science and all of that. So the idea seems to be here that prior to all that, prior to that reflective distinction, there's this collapse of subject and object. He doesn't explicitly say that, but that's the way I thought about this concept of perception. When he's talking about the primacy of perception. Seems like it's a very unique conception of what perception is. It's not your everyday subject perceives object where the subject object distinction is intact. It's a more primary level out of which those distinctions come later.

14:18 Dylan: By perception, he doesn't seem to mean the acquisition of sense information at extraordinarily raw level, right?

14:28 Seth: Definitely not.

14:29 Dylan: One way that you could understand the activity of perception. Would be that you have extraordinarily raw data coming into your mind and processing unit. The colors that aren't even identified as colors. The lights and the sounds and the smells that aren't even identified with names. They're not even objects. That they're just literally electrical signals coming into some processing unit that then acts on them and creates objects out of them.

14:58 Wes: Right.

14:58 Dylan: And my impression is that he wouldn't say that there is a distinction Properly speaking, between that raw sense data and the activity of consciousness, certainly nothing within

15:10 Mark: phenomenological experience, you can't distinguish those.

15:13 Seth: Yeah, no, that's a good point, Dylan. There's a kind of good part on page 92, bleeding into 93, which texts primacy of perception. What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary, but in perception, it is quote unquote, real. It is given. Right. As this sum of a series of views. Right. And so he then says, perception is a paradox in the sense that you can't have a perceived object without a perceiver. But at the same time, perception always involves, he says, a beyond of what is actually given.

15:51 Mark: Yeah. Transcendent is what we talked about last time.

15:54 Seth: Right. Immanent versus transcendent. So the closest I can think, Dylan, to kind of characterize what he's saying when he talks about perception is what Sartre called unreflected consciousness, which we argued about at length in that episode.

16:08 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

16:08 Wes: And just when he's talking about on the same page, the perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of the intellect, it looks like he's responding to both the Cartesian view and the phenomenological view. So where the Cartesian view, Descartes famous example of the wax, it can take on any number of different appearances or shapes. And so what constitutes an object isn't an object of our senses per se, but an object of some faculty of the intellectual. And in the same way, for the phenomenologist, what we call the object isn't just the current perspective, you know, of my Ottoman, the particular shape that's facing me.

It's an infinite series of all the possible interactions I can have with the object, all the different perspectives I can take on it. The object is more than just this perspective. Anyway, I thought that was worth summarizing for people who haven't listened to previous episodes. So Merleau Ponty is saying, actually there is a sense in which the object is present in perception in the full sense that perception isn't just the domain of this perspective and that perspective. And then the object is sort of this inferred ideal unity, but the object really is there.

I don't really understand that. Exactly.

17:18 Mark: Yeah, that was what we were arguing about Wes, a little last time, is what this word transcendent, when applied to objects, means. Because the historical meaning of the word is. It is at least in part, it is beyond what we experience. Right. Whereas the way I interpreted Sartre and the way I think Merleau-Ponty is explicitly saying here is that the world of perception, you might say, has the object in it. Whereas for Kant, there's an appearance and then there's what is the real object that's causing the appearance? Who knows? But we wouldn't consider it the world of perception, the world that science ends up describing, so that it really, truly is transcendent for Kant. But for these guys, they mean something else. And it is unclear.

17:57 Wes: There's the thing in itself. And then the object becomes a content of one's private experience. It's been constructed by the mind. And of course, the phenomenologists objected to this idea of objects being the contents of Seth's experience or Dylan's experience. It doesn't make sense. You get psychologism and mathematics. You need these entities to be public in some sense, to be available to everyone. So the object transcends experience in that sense, but it's still immediately available. Of course, the phenomenologist wants to say there's some sense in which, for Husserl, it's intuitively available.

Right. You can still intuit the object. It's just important that the object is not some content of some particular person's experience. It's transcendent in that sense. And I don't know if Merleau Ponty is exactly responding to Husserl and saying, well, that's still an ideal. Such and such. You know, you're intuiting this ideal mathematic. I think he is, because when he talks of geometry and mathematics, I think when Husserl, even though we have intuitive access to that transcendent object, this ideal unity of the infinite series of perspectives, that's sort of like a mathematical notion of what an object is.

And Merleau Ponty is saying, no, it's not like a mathematical object to which we have access through the intellect. We actually, through our body, through what we call perception, with our body, have access to the object.

19:17 Dylan: And isn't it that he's saying that the world that any perceiver has access to is the same world? Always all perceivers have access to the same world. Their perceiving might be different because there's an infinite possibility of their perceptions. And he would also deny, along the lines of what west says is that infinity is not such that you can sum it up and get hold of the object. It's not an infinite series that collapses

19:45 Mark: like an infinite number series. You can describe the natural number series.

19:47 Dylan: Yeah, collapses isn't the right word. There's a different mathematical word, which is crazy that I can't remember it right now, but that all perceivers are accessing the same world out there. He would say, that's all you can do. That's all that any perceiver can do. They all have access to one and the same world. So whenever anybody is talking about their perceptions or talking about anything, they're always talking about the world. Then you get into this discussion about, well, at the very least, you're going to want to say that some of those renditions are more like knowledge or more like true than others. Right. You want to want to make distinctions on those perceptions.

20:23 Wes: Yeah, that becomes the problem.

20:24 Dylan: Yep. You're going to want to make distinctions that are more than the perceptual distinction, say, between the way a dog looks at the world and the way a human looks at the world.

20:34 Seth: How does a dog look at the world?

20:36 Dylan: He wants to just say, look, whatever a dog sees is exactly the same world that I see and the same world that a madman sees.

20:42 Wes: The dog is just a little more excited.

20:46 Dylan: And that obesity. All those perceptions are available from one world to things that perceive. There will be a range of distinctions to be made. And I haven't read his big book, but I imagine you would say, well, look, one of those almost numerical distinctions that. Look, dogs can hear in a different range of perceptions than human beings can hear, or certain animals can see at different wavelengths than human beings can see at, and that those are all still perceptions of the world.

21:13 Seth: Yes. Okay, I see what you're saying now. The world is this giant horizon.

21:19 Dylan: Yes.

21:19 Seth: I think he uses the word of possible, of things or objects, and there are lots of different possible perceptions of those things and objects.

21:29 Dylan: Can we have to deny that there are objects to be perceived themselves, that the very making of the objects is a function of our logos, is a function of our individual perceptions. The particular objects we make, that the distinction of this and that is a result of the way our perception works. And that might change from perceiver to perceiver.

21:49 Seth: I think that's one of the objections that can be raised because I don't think he doesn't get to that level of granularity in this particular essay that I recall.

21:57 Wes: But I think you're right though, Dylan. I mean, those sorts of distinctions, like the cognitive science distinctions between a bee's perception. Right. Which is going to be very different from a human being's perception and the scientific perspective on cognition. I think he sees his position as compatible with all of that. I don't know how it ends up being compatible. Exactly.

22:17 Seth: Yeah. So he says, I'm on page 93 of the primacy. He says, the world itself is not an object in the sense that the mathematician or the physicist would give this word, but it is the universal style of all possible perceptions. And he says that this aligns with what Kant agrees with. He says, we can only think the world because we have already experienced it. It is through the experience that we have the idea of being, and it's through this experience that the words rational and real receive a sense. And then he goes on to talk about simple sensations.

And he uses the example of looking at a landscape, standing side by side with somebody in a landscape, where he says, if I attempt to show my friend something which I see and which he does not see, we cannot account for the situation by saying that I see something in my own world and that I attempt by sending verbal messages to give rise to an analogous perception of the world in my friend. There are not two numerically distinct worlds plus a mediating language. There's a kind of demand that what is seen by me be seen by him also. That's actually, I think, an interesting example, you know, where you're trying to point something out to somebody.

What he's saying is that if you're in a situation where you're with somebody and you're trying to point out something that you are experiencing to them, you are experiencing that thing as actually being there, and you are experiencing the world in such a way that this other person could be having the same experience, could be having the same perception that you are, and you're trying to just basically communicate and make them aware. If you think about it at that level of what's happening in that situation where Wes and I are watching a football game and I make a point prior to the snap to point out to Wes what the safety is backing off the line of scrimmage.

He may be looking at the quarterback right at that point in time, at the raw level of being in the world of experience in the world. I'm assuming that Wes and I are looking at exactly the same football game, just that his attention may not be directed at the same place that my attention is directed. And I'm trying to get him to put his attention in a different place, which is to say, perceive the thing that I'm perceiving.

24:22 Dylan: Can I give a more extreme example?

24:25 Seth: On one condition. And you know what my one condition is?

24:28 Dylan: What?

24:29 Mark: No Nazis.

24:29 Seth: No Nazis.

24:31 Dylan: No, I was not going to invoke Nazis at all. No.

24:34 Wes: Wes and Dylan are watching the History Channel together.

24:39 Dylan: I was going to say, trying to explain looking at a right triangle and having myself or any of the four of us looking at that right triangle and having a two year old look at that right triangle and trying to explain to that two year old or the dog or the flower the Pythagorean theorem. And so you would say that you're both looking at the same thing. One thing that would be interesting in this context for me is to articulate the difference of how Merleau Ponty would articulate the failure of communication between the two year old and the mathematician.

25:16 Seth: So wait, wait, wait. I don't think that's the same kind of example.

25:19 Dylan: You don't? No, I think it's exactly the same kind of example.

25:23 Seth: I don't. Let me tell you why.

25:24 Dylan: Please do.

25:25 Seth: So in the section that I just cited right before that, it says if you and I are talking about the same world and the communication is in principle between us because the world has become an ideal existence and is the same for all of us, just like the Pythagorean theorem. So there's perceptual experience, so to speak. And then he talks about ideal experience and he mentions in another place where he's talking about the physical laws of nature. We don't experience physical laws of nature. They are this idealized description that is validated by our experience, so to speak, when we set up test conditions and whatever. But our experience of the world, would

26:01 Dylan: you say it structures our experience once we know about them?

26:05 Seth: He does not say that. I think what he says is that. Not that it structures, but that it's descriptive of experience. And because he wants experience to be primary. So he says, well, experience comes first. The description of experience through universal laws comes second. I'm just saying that the landscape example and the example of mathematics or geometry are different examples for him. So I would be careful about talking about trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem versus maybe something much more perceptually immediate about the triangle itself. Like if you were trying to point out that this particular triangle we were both looking at had a right angle, then you might have to. Actually, that's a pretty good example. Then do you have to explain the concept of what is a right angle or do we experience, like how do we get that experience of right angleness?

26:53 Wes: What does it mean to be a thing? I think is the question we're asking for Husserl and for the phenomenologist. There's also this element. Yes, we have access to the same world that's already there in phenomenology. What Merleau Ponty is adding is he's changing this concept of synthesis. He's using this word style now, the universal style of all possible perceptions instead of the ideal synthesis. So in looking at this landscape, it's not a thing in virtue of its intellectual role, it's a more practical. I think on page 94, that paragraph you were reading said the last sentence is important.

The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real for every subject who shares my situation. He's trying to replace the sort of intellectual access to the object with some other sort of access, which is more primal, let's say, and practical, I think. Then he talks about the body founding the unity.

27:51 Mark: Right. So the body founding the Pythagorean theorem. And why? The Pythagorean theorem is something that we find a priori is somehow determined by the body. And I wasn't quite clear on what that means.

28:01 Wes: It's on 94. Just as my body is a system of all my holds on the world founds the unity of the objects which I perceive instead of the intellect, it's the body which is founding the unity of objects and our shared access to objects. And does that include the Pythagorean theorem? Is it the Pythagorean theorem just like the landscape? Is that what you're asking, Mark?

28:21 Mark: No, it's a different level. He makes it clear that in making perception privileged, he's not saying something like the only objects in our ontology should be the ones that are just in the obvious everyday world that we see and hear. He acknowledges social reality as being sort of a more complicated. He even says it's appropriate that man should think of God. I think is something he says in here, even the concept of God. He's definitely not one of those logical positivists that says anything that we can't reduce to some particular sensory account, then we can't talk about.

28:55 Wes: Right.

28:56 Mark: So, yeah, the Pythagorean theorem is something that can be a legitimate object of thought and somehow that's affected. The only way I could make sense of this was to compare him to William James talking about these things, to say that he's some sort of pragmatist, that for William James, even the most abstract apparently a priori truths, the truths of logic somehow are things that we've posited because they fit in with our experience somehow. And so for Merleau-Ponty, when he's talking about geometry, Say, and maybe this is why the Pythagorean theorem in particular might be contingent upon our situation is that he oh, once we move to non Euclidean geometries, then we see that we are getting at an aspect of experience.

The fact that it looks like we're standing on a flat surface and that planes are flat and that the things that underlie not only Euclidean geometry but just right. The assumption that the world is flat and can be treated as a Euclidean plane. But once we can sort of take a different perspective, then we can arrive at some different conclusions. In other words, even logical truths we could eventually come to reject for one reason or another.

30:00 Wes: The Pythagorean theorem isn't like a logical truth because it depends on the parallel postulate. The parallel postulate which says that parallel lines don't meet no matter how far you extend them. That intuitively feels right. But in an axiomatic system you can still use the opposite as a postulate and have a nice coherent little system. With this talk of non Euclidean geometry, you bet. Basically alter one of your assumptions and then get a different result. So the Pythagorean theorem is not a logical truth in the same way that if A then B and A then B is a logical truth.

30:35 Seth: Yeah, he sort of addresses that on page 95. I don't really want to go into it, but he talks about contradiction and how we describe the perceived world. We arrive at this contradiction of immanence and transcendence. And you have what west just was talking about. And he said, well, I'm not talking here about the sterile non contradiction of formal logic and the justified contradictions of transcendental logic. He says, let's just put that aside for a second. But it's okay for us to be in this position, but we're not satisfied with that description of the world. We just kind of have to at this point acknowledge it and then move to the discussion of what is the relation between intellectual consciousness and perceptual consciousness, which I hope or I think parallels to some extent reflected and unreflected.

31:20 Wes: So what is that relation?

31:23 Mark: So I'm still not completely clear on what it is to say that perception or the world as revealed by perception is paradoxical. Is it just that there are these different aspects that seem very different from each other and so at first blush there appear to be contradictions. I can make a sentence that is diametrically opposed to another sentence you make. The buffalo is very small. No, the buffalo is very big. Those are both true. From a certain point of view, right? If I'm describing the size of it on my retina or something, yes, it's very small because it's across that field from me, but I know that it's in fact very big.

So there you go. There's the easiest kind of and that perception is just replete with that kind of seeming paradox. You know, in that case, it's extremely easily unraveled. But that seems to extend to all these different systems of description. So like science and I think mathematics, these are for Merleau-Ponty. These are sort of like maps that we've drawn of perception. They're always just going to pick out some aspect of the perceived world. They even could be one of these higher level aspects, right? Not just, again, the brute colors and shapes, but they're never going to be the whole thing.

And we have to keep in mind that these are all just what science is doing and what the arts are doing. And all this stuff are just maps or descriptions or something of this more fundamental experience.

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