Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology – essentially a critique of Cartesian dualism – demonstrates that our perception of reality is primarily dependent upon bodily experience. Form itself, though ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted for in the terms of traditional realism, in that it is fundamentally perceptual: there is an “immanent signification” underlying reality’s essential mutually-dependent relationship with consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers an interpretation of reality that realigns our understanding of the world with the natural flow of experience: presenting reality as neither as objective and complete in and of itself, or as a mere projection of experiential solipsism.
Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life.” The world as it appears directly to perception, then, should be our starting point for philosophical enquiry, argues Merleau-Ponty: “Perception orients itself toward the truth, placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal. Science extends and amplifies this natural tendency through increasingly precise measurements of the invariants in perception, leading eventually to the theoretical construction of an objective world of determinate things. Once this determinism of the “in itself” is extended universally and applied even to the body and the perceptual relation itself, then its ongoing dependence on the “originary faith” of perception is obscured; perception is reduced to “confused appearances” that require methodical reinterpretation, and the eventual result is dualism, solipsism, and skepticism. The “fundamental philosophical act” would therefore be to “return to the lived world beneath the objective world” (PP: 83/57)” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). In his seminal work “Phenomenology of Perception” Merleau-Ponty begins by asserting the primacy of the body-subject and its pre-objective orientation towards the world. Not only do our pre-cognitive experiences (in which experience is grounded) contain meaning, they underpin it. An extension of this, language should be seen as itself a physiological form of expression, that may appear limited or closed off from the world it seeks to interpret only on account of its having become habitual. At a fundamental level, language is comparable to music in the way that it remains tied to its material embodiment; each language is a distinct and ultimately untranslatable manner of “singing the world”, of extracting and expressing the “emotional essence” of our surroundings and relationships. Whilst a solipsistic incongruence prevents us from discovering the inner worlds of others in as complete a sense as we each experience the world ourselves; our common corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world. Similarly, while we never coincide with the world itself, or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is contingent and revisable. So, somewhat paradoxically, phenomena both transcend us, and are dependent upon us. The tacit pre-reflective form of consciousness becomes explicit only when it finds expression through itself, but always already exists: “The phenomenological reduction, on his interpretation, is not an idealistic method but an existential one, namely, the reflective effort to disclose our pre-reflective engagement with the world.” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). If the nihilism of Samuel Beckett's work was replaced with Merleau-Ponty's flourishing.... "in the destitution of modern man, acquires its elevation.” His philosophy sought transcendence though the expression of the ordinary. In its richness, the very texture of consciousness is revealed; in its intellectual rigor, the true nature of experience is distilled down to its bare elements; in its simplicity enabled readers to "arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot). Becket's secret defence of humanity is, for Merleau-Ponty, a very overt one. Both plumb the depths of the human condition, which is where thought and poetry can work their miracles.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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