The Primacy of Perception and Transcendental Philosophy
The project of transcendental philosophy, as announced by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, is "a complete analysis of the whole of human knowledge a priori."(1) The purpose of this analysis is to show how knowledge is possible; the place to begin, according to Kant, is determining whether there are "constituting conditions under which alone objects are given."(2) The constituting conditions of the givenness of objects is necessarily prior to the conditions under which objects are thought, since without given objects, there are no thinkable objects. In contrast to Descartes, Kant's method of epistemology places the rational thinkability of objects second in order of analysis and second in transcendental order, as being subject to the conditions of givenness. In contrast to Hume (and Locke), Kant's critique thematizes, rather than ignores, the givenness of objects, in order to raise the issue of what makes this givenness possible.
These two distinctive traits of Kant's method in the Critique of Pure Reason are carried on in the phenomenological tradition. The familiar phenomenological method of description is a first step in analyzing the givenness of objects; when properly phenomenological, the description does not pertain to empirical data but to structures of givenness. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception(3) attempts precisely such an analysis.(4) Merleau-Ponty does not focus his description on what is perceived, but on how perception occurs and how perception presents the givenness of objects and of the world. In short, Merleau-Ponty's project could be described as a type of transcendental philosophy - an analysis of the a priori (non-empirical, non-objective) conditions of the possibility of knowledge. Moreover, as in Kant's plan, Merleau-Ponty takes the conditions of the possibility of givenness of objects (i.e., the conditions of the possibility of perception as described phenomenologically) to further condition the possibility of the thinkability of objects. What an object is for perception limits what an object can be for thought.
In "The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,"(5) Merleau-Ponty defends his analysis of perception and traces its epistemological implications. That not much attention has been paid to this theme in Merleau-Ponty's work, nor to this brief text,(6) can partly be explained by the problematic nature of basing a transcendental inquiry into knowledge on Merleau-Ponty's analysis of perception. It may even seem out of place to use the word "transcendental" to describe Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. In the first place, in contrast to Kant's presupposition that the a priori conditions of experience must be fixed, determinate, ideal conditions, the models for which were the results of natural science(7) Merleau-Ponty traces perceptual givenness to the open-ended, ambiguous, real structure of perception. In addition, Merleau-Ponty's analysis discovers tension in the very structure of perception, which he refers to as "paradoxes" or even "contradictions." As a result, from the standpoint of traditional transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty's analysis of knowledge seems doomed to draw relativist (and not particularly enlightening) conclusions.(8)
In describing what he claims are the essential paradoxes of perception, and in his own stylistic use of paradox, Merleau-Ponty seems at times to proceed by way of riddles. Philosophical reflection is given the task of clarifying how perception opens onto a rationality that despite the paradox of its birth is no less rational and no less absolute. Philosophy cannot eliminate and must not ignore either rationality or the paradox of perception. If philosophical investigation leads to a set of intractable and incomprehensible(9) paradoxes, what has it achieved? Does philosophical inquiry illuminate knowledge, rationality, and the absolute, or does it render them all the more mysterious?
In pursuit of this question, my first task is to interpret Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a transcendental analytic.(10) Some brief comparisons are drawn between Merleau-Ponty's and Kant's transcendental reflections, as prompted by Merleau-Ponty himself. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology elucidates the conditions of the possibility of objectivity, knowledge and rationality on the basis of the structure of perception.
The second task of this paper is to examine the implications of the structure of perception for Merleau-Ponty's transcendental phenomenological philosophy, along the lines sketched by Merleau-Ponty himself in "The Primacy of Perception." The phenomenological description of perception, taken as the situation of existence as well as the action of a perceiving subject, faces the philosopher with a series of paradoxes. It is my contention that these paradoxes have not been well understood if they are treated as insurmountable obstacles to philosophical clarification, or as leading to a transcendental agnosticism that valorizes equivocation above clarification.(11) In other words, Merleau-Ponty maintains the traditional philosophical view that the clarification of experience and knowledge is possible, and that this clarification is universal and absolute. But Merleau-Ponty's paradoxical exposition of this universal and absolute clarification obscures his position. Transcendental clarification is indeed transcendental and does indeed clarify, though in something other than the ordinary sense.
1. Merleau-Ponty's Transcendental Analytic
The plan of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology follows Kant's transcendental analytic in as much as the description of perception "teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself" (PriP, 25); but Merleau-Ponty would reject the view that we discover a set of necessary, a priori conditions in Kant's sense. This is not to say that for Merleau-Ponty the conditions of the possibility of objectivity and of knowledge have no definite sense. In fact, it is not even to say that the conditions revealed in a phenomenology of perception are not a priori or necessary - just that they are not so in Kant's sense.(12)
Merleau-Ponty's version of the transcendental analytic is to be found in the famous descriptions of the system of self-others-world in the Phenomenology of Perception. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, the system has not only a personal but also a pre-personal dimension. The self, the others, and the world available to phenomenological study are on one level my own self, my own others and my own world - that is, the elements of my personal experience. But if Merleau-Ponty relied only on the personal level of the system, his phenomenology could only describe the content of experience, not explain how perception opens to a phenomenal field in which experience takes place.
Recall instead Merleau-Ponty's other term for the self: the body-subject. The body-subject is a complex structure comprising anonymous and personalized potencies, and which is never encountered by us in any other way than in its complexity. Inasmuch as his concern is transcendental, Merleau-Ponty's focus is on how this anonymous potentiality is called upon, not by or within personal experience, but precisely in the formation of any experience whatsoever. That potentiality, which is foundational to the experience of a thing, is rooted in the body.
It is not I who touch, it is my body; when I touch I do not think of diversity, but my hands rediscover a certain style which is part of their motor potentiality, and this is what we mean when we speak of a perceptual field. I am able to touch effectively only if the phenomenon finds an echo within me, if it accords with a certain nature of my consciousness, and if the organ which goes out to meet it is synchronized with it. The unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as a synergic totality. (PhP, 316f)
Like Kant, Merleau-Ponty seeks to define the object in terms of its identity throughout a series of acts; also like Kant, Merleau-Ponty defines identity as the result of a synthesis. Notably unlike Kant, Merleau-Ponty does not consider this synthesis conceptual; in fact, in the "Primacy of Perception," Merleau-Ponty names "the synthesis which constitutes the unity of the perceived objects and which gives meaning to the perceptual data" a "synthesis of transition" or "horizonal synthesis." (PriP, 15) Such a synthesis is not only non-conceptual, but is also "passive" in the sense that it is not the act of a pure intellect. Furthermore, while Kant's synthesis depends on a transcendental Ego which enacts it, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that it is the body's anonymous potentiality as a whole that grounds the synthesis of the object: "Each contact of an object with part of our objective body is, therefore, in reality a contact with the whole of the present or possible phenomenal body." (PhP, 317) An object becomes an object through the synthesis carried out by the "objective body," the passive, anonymous body, rather than by the subjective ego.
It is clear that here Merleau-Ponty is not describing the perceptual experience of some particular individual. Although our first sight of perception as a necessary condition for objectivity is in our own particular experience, and the phenomenological investigation of this necessary condition begins with a reflection on one's own perceptual experience, Merleau-Ponty does not reduce the condition of objectivity to private perception. Objectivity is not grounded in a psychobiographical act of perception, but instead founded upon the structure of perception as such.(13) In other words, the objectivity of the object does not depend on my having perceived it, but only on the object's having been perceived. Since the structure of perception itself is a necessary condition of objectivity, the investigation of the structure of perception (where the reflection on perceptual acts serves as a set of phenomenological data) serves as a clarification of objectivity. Objectivity is founded upon perception, which is founded upon the anonymous bodily potentialities we call sensing (including sensing our own bodies). There would be no objectivity without bodies which can perceive. Merleau-Ponty is not claiming that such-and-such bodies are necessary, nor that such-and-such acts of perception are necessary, but only that bodies and the potentialities called upon in perception in general are necessary.(14)
Merleau-Ponty's concept of "perception" is equivocal. On the one hand, "perception" refers to the anonymous potentiality of any body-subject; on the other hand, "perception" also refers to the personal acts of a body-subject in which the anonymous and open potentiality become engaged to things. It is in perceptual acts (actual "looking" or "hearing," etc.) that body-subjects reach objects; and this active reaching is founded upon the open, anonymous, general and underlying structure of perception itself. The relation between the anonymous and ambiguous structure of perception and the personal and disambiguating perceptual acts of some body-subject is a real relation, which means that the structure of perception as a transcendental condition and limit of body-subjective acts of perception is likewise a real condition and limit. For Merleau-Ponty, this fact of our perceptual lives establishes a requirement for phenomenological investigation. The underlying structure of perception only appears as a phenomenon in and through real acts of perception; therefore, the posit of an abstract or ideal set of conditions of objectivity from the description would entirely miss the point that perception is real. Since objectivity exists only for us who really perceive it, objectivity is defined as what is really perceived. Yet the perceived object appears to perception as a thing independent of our own acts of perception, as Merleau-Ponty says:
One cannot, as we have said, conceive any perceived thing without someone to perceive it. But the fact remains that the thing presents itself to the person who perceives it as a thing in itself, and thus poses the problem of a genuine in-itself-for-us (PhP, 322)
The problem of the in-itself-for-us becomes the core of the paradox of objectivity in the "Primacy of Perception," as will be shown below.
Phenomenology of the perceptual experience of an object reveals, as a second condition for the possibility of objectivity, the requirement that the perceptual object must be constant for others as well as for oneself. Since it is the perception of an object, perception reaches an object that demands to be seen not just as the private perceptual object of a single individual, but precisely an object available to everyone's perception - e.g., a red rose for everyone. This demand is not for a demonstrative proof that the object exists; instead, it is the demand of the object to be perceptible by any and every perceiver who would stand in my place.
In this way, parallel to his analysis of individual perception, Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualism of private experience and universal objectivity found in both intellectualism and empiricism. Contrary to the intellectualist view, which would rely on the posit of an a priori, universal ideal of the unity of objectivity to which we would resort in comparing our experiences, Merleau-Ponty maintains that the object's identity is founded on the horizonal synthesis of all of our experiences of real perception. Contrary to the empiricist solution, which would claim that our individual, private experiences are the sensory effects of "primary qualities" which cause them in determinate, lawful ways, Merleau-Ponty says that even private perception is perception of the object itself. There is no question of resolving our private experiences by means of demonstrative arguments or by recourse to the incoherent theory of sense-data. Yet the object maintains and requires an achieved unity, as Merleau-Ponty says:
I am ... aware of apprehending, through hearing and particularly through sight, a system of phenomena which makes up not only a private spectacle, but which is the only possible one for me and even for others, and this is what is called reality (PhP, 338)
The reality of the object of my perception is founded on this characteristic of its perceptual presence, its reality for others as well as for myself. Thus, to account for our experience of reality, it is necessary to consider its intersubjective achievement. We begin to take account of intersubjectivity, in phenomenological reflection, by way of our own self-presence in perception. It is through my own body's self-presence that I take notice of the body of the other as "a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world." (PhP, 354) This discovery of the other rules out an ego cogito as the absolutely certain grounding of objectivity, truth, and rationality. In the first place, our self-givenness is horizonal like all perception. We note, in our perceiving an object, its openness to other perspective perceivings by us - that is, the object opens upon other perspectives to which we ourselves are open. Neither the object we perceive, nor ourselves as perceivers, have fixed, final positions. We are perceptually aware of our own unfinished, absent, potential movements and positions from within our current and immediate movements and positions. It is this self-openness or self-absence that enables us to perceive others as what they are - other subjects, others who are engaged in a similar encounter with the world. This common engagement presents others as perceivers whose perspectives can meet or fail to meet our own, and whose actions of perceiving and grasping objective reality, as much as our own, found that reality.
... we have learned in individual perception not to conceive our perspective views as independent of each other; we know that they slip into each other and are brought together finally in the thing. In the same way we must learn to find the communication between one consciousness and another in one and the same world. In reality, the other is not shut up inside my perspective of the world, because this perspective itself has no definite limits, because it slips spontaneously into the other's, and because both are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception. (PhP, 353)
This world, which has a unity founded in the perceptual and intersubjective milieu in which we bring others into our perceptual directedness through gestures and language, cannot be an ideal totality in the Kantian sense. In the first place, the ideal totality would not account for the lived experience of perception; in the second place, it is only through perception itself that the totality of the world is founded. The world is the furthest extension of the horizonal structure of perception itself, "the style of all possible styles" (PhP, 330), or "the universal style of all possible perceptions." (PriP, 17)
Phenomenological clarification of perception has revealed the following: In picking out things from their backgrounds, perception reveals not just a set of objects, but tacitly also the background. Objects are not ready-made, reclining in their backgrounds and waiting to be picked out; perception is what brings objects to the fore. Perception is capable of this because it is open to a field of phenomena prior to a set of objects. In this case, "in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere." (PhP, 320) In its communication with an atmosphere from which it picks out sets of things, perception makes contact with the world as transcendental condition of the possibility of objectivity, and as the nascent logos which becomes developed in knowledge and rationality. The foundational contact with the nascent logos in the system of self-others-world is by definition an open and real relation. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this open, unfinished meaning when he describes the course of perceptual life in the following passage:
My hold on the past and the future is precarious, and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment, bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn further developments in order to be understood. My voluntary and rational life, therefore, knows that it merges into another power which stands in the way of its completion, and gives it a permanently tentative look... and since the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself. Such is the lot of a being who is born, that is, who once and for all has been given to himself as something to be understood. (PhP, 346f)
If this is what is revealed by transcendental philosophy, it appears from the point of view of traditional transcendental philosophy that Merleau-Ponty is caught in the absurd position of clarifying that our experience cannot be clarified - that is, that our philosophical inquiry is powerless to explain the fact that we grasp objectivity, that we attain knowledge of it, and that we have access to the world's own rationality. Merleau-Ponty seems to draw the same conclusion as he outlines the contradictions discovered by his transcendental analytic in "The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences."
2. The Paradoxes of Perception
Merleau-Ponty asserts that an "unprejudiced" psychological description of perception leads to a set of paradoxes or contradictions. For instance, since our acquaintance with ideas begins in a perception which can contradict itself, it appears that our ideas are imperfect, perhaps even flawed: "the ideas to which we recur are valid only for a period of our lives or for a period in the history of our culture." (PriP, 13) Yet Merleau-Ponty resists the potentially relativist implications of the primacy of perception thesis, as he asserts:
The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth. (PriP, 13)
What is the phenomenological evidence supporting these apparently conflicting conclusions regarding knowledge, rationality, and the absolute?
One chief discovery of the phenomenology of perception is that "the synthesis which constitutes the unity of the perceived object and which gives meaning to the perceptual data is not an intellectual synthesis." (PriP, 15) Instead, the unity of the object of perception is achieved in the operation of perception; by implication, the unity itself is perceptual. We discover further that perception is always perspectival, and therefore maintains a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectives from which the object is not (yet, by me) perceived. For example, everything that is seen, or present, has a backside which is unseen, or absent. The question is, what relation obtains between the seen and the unseen, or in other words, between the presence and the absence of the perceived thing, or once more between the perspectival grasp I actually have, and the indefinite number of other grasps which I do not have? Merleau-Ponty says that the unseen is not represented or anticipated as necessary, since the unseen is not merely imagined as possibly existing (as in representation), or delivered to thought directly as the consequence of the seen (as in necessary anticipation). Instead, the relation of the seen to the unseen is real.
What Merleau-Ponty means by real is that the unseen is tacitly given in the perception of the seen as a perspectival perception that remains open and available, that is, the really unseen side of the seen thing is perceived as what I could see, were I to change positions. It is not merely possible or imaginable that my typewriter has a back side, nor do I conclude from the existence of the front side (and certain metaphysical notions which I apply to my experience of the typewriter) that there must be a backside. Instead, the unseen rear of the typewriter really exists on the other side of the front.
Two implications of this description provide the two horns of the dilemma of the perceived thing. What is perceived is the thing, rather than a set of qualities which are caused by it, or lawfully organized by the understanding in relation to its phenomenal appearance. In perception, the thing itself is presented, but it is presented only from one side. The object itself is perceived, even while it is incompletely presented. Thus while the structure of perception founds the objectivity of the perceived thing, the perceived thing transcends all real acts of perception - a paradox of immanence and transcendence of the perceived thing.(15)
Merleau-Ponty's description of loving someone illustrates this paradox. Just as what we perceive is the thing or the world, in an analogous way we love the person. Like the perception of the thing, our love of the person is not directed merely at certain qualities; however, the qualities of the thing or of the person do form the data of our perceptual acts. Yet our declarations of love obviously extend beyond the presented qualities. Thus, paradoxically, love "claims to be eternal when a sickness, perhaps an accident, will destroy it." (PriP, 27) Merleau-Ponty insists that this does not make the declaration of love vain, and that "it is true, at the moment of this promise, that our love extends beyond qualities, beyond the body, beyond time, even though we could not love without qualities, bodies, and time." (PriP, 27) This could be misinterpreted to mean that love is fickle or that our (or at least Merleau-Ponty's) declarations of love are disingenuous. But rather than creating doubts about perception and love that could never be satisfied, Merleau-Ponty means to express the paradox of perecption and of love, acts in which we intend more than we can ever make present to ourselves, experiences which transcend themselves. In perceiving the world, just as in loving someone, we commit ourselves to an intended sense which, despite its absolute meaning, despite being true, can nevertheless be overturned by unforeseeable circumstances.
Merleau-Ponty generalizes the results of the analysis of perception to the sphere of ideas, claiming to find there "the same fundamental structures, the same synthesis of transition, the same kind of horizons." (PriP, 19) Take, for example, the Pythagorean theorem. Since this idea is open to the same sort of horizonal structure as perception, it must be considered only one perspective on the truth about triangles. The theorem is true, of course, but it is a limited, partial, abstract truth. It is always open to further development, to the horizon of the future of the idea.
We must say that at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain it at that given moment. Skepticism begins if we conclude from this that our ideas are always false. But this can only happen with reference to some idol of absolute knowledge. We must say, on the contrary, that out ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment - since they always express our contact with being and with culture - are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. (PriP, 21)
The paradoxes of perception are essential as descriptions of our situation, and also of our ideas about the world.
Objective reality is paradoxical in another sense due to its foundation upon the common world constituted with others. Merleau-Ponty writes repeatedly of the "private history" of one's experience. We can never lay bare our individual experiences of a red rose to compare how each of us encounters it. Yet the perception of an object makes a demand on our perception which transcends private experience. The reality of the perceived object is founded on its being perceived by anyone who would stand where I stand. But this is an indefinitely open requirement that can never really be met, since in the first place our private perceptions are never comparable, and in the second place no set of ratifying perceptions by others would exhaust the openness of the object to further perspectival graspings.
Additionally, the world which is our common context for perception must also be defined as what is always incompletely given in every perceptual grasp. The paradoxical tension of immanence and transcendence discovered at the basis of perception is therefore to be found in the world as well:
... belief in the thing and the world must entail the presumption of a completed synthesis - and yet this completion is made impossible by the very nature of the perspectives which have to be inter-related, since each one of them, by virtue of its horizons, refers to other perspectives, and so on indefinitely. (PhP, 330)(16)
The risks we take in falling in love or in perceiving are not avoidable, so we cannot speak in a Cartesian manner of errors in perception. Nevertheless, what we perceive may always prove later to be unlike our initial grasp. There are two reasons for this. First is the structure of perception itself, which is anticipatory and "goes ahead of itself" in taking up its object. (PriP, 36) Second is that (as Merleau-Ponty points out in his extensive criticism of Descartes) perception can only be corrected by perception. Merleau-Ponty's position reminds one of the advice of Epicurus: "If you quarrel with all your sense-perceptions you will have nothing to refer to in judging even those sense-perceptions which you claim are false."(17) Because we give up the Cartesian appeal to certainty, we give up as well any external criterion against which to judge the results of perception. Perception is unimpeachable, yet it is not incorrigible.
Phenomenology clarifies experience by revealing this inherent paradox of unimpeachable corrigibility. The lesson derived from the description is one taught to us be our perception itself, in the course of our learning to perceive. Other than reminding us of the facts of our perceptual lives, phenomenology does nothing to secure for us a clearer or richer perception, a perecption of greater objectivity. Objectivity remains an unfixed focal point of our perception and our intersubjective relation; knowledge is our agreement for the moment concerning the best grasp of the object, since there can never be a final grasp of the object; rationality is our impermanently settled arrangements for dialogue about the world and objectivity. None of these terms can be defined in its finality, since none of them are capable of being really finalized.
There are two ways of interpreting Merleau-Ponty's paradoxes. One is to claim that phenomenology is paradoxical in the literal sense of the word - apart from (common) opinion, in this case, the common opinion of perception and its fixed object expressed in Modern empiricism and intellectualism. In this view, the paradox is relative to the tradition Merleau-Ponty helps to overcome.(18) It is surely the case that phenomenological clarification is paradoxical in this sense; but if this were the only paradox at play here, then once the Modern tradition has been thoroughly criticized, the paradox of phenomenology should subside. If this view is correct, then the paradox remains in Merleau-Ponty's thought only as a conceptual or terminological hangover, in effect, an accident.(19) With different terminological or conceptual resources, it would appear, Merleau-Ponty would not need to write in such puzzling phrases.
On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty does not blame the philosophical tradition for obscuring the essence of perception, but says that perception hides its own workings. In fact, any obscurity in the history of philosophy would seem to be produced by the difficulty of reflecting on perception without clinging to its objective results. Paradox is essential, hence Merleau-Ponty's use of the term relies on its more figurative meaning - a set of indecidables, a fundamental inconclusiveness.
The paradox at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy is that philosophy's task is to make clear and explicit the way in which clarity and explicitness arise from ambiguity or contradiction. There is no one unfamiliar with this origin of truth in perception, yet it is an aspect of existence we constantly ignore. Moreover, it is an aspect of existence which holds us all equally in thrall. It is difficult to specify how philosophical reflection would make this situation clear, especially since, as Merleau-Ponty expresses the philosophical urge, "I would ask nothing better than to see more clearly, but it seems to me that no one sees more clearly." (PriP, p. 36)
This ambiguous statement embodies Merleau-Ponty's philosophical position. On the one hand, he says, it would certainly be nice to arrive at a set of laws or principles that provide perfect comprehension of things - a direct means of access to reality, a privileged perspective. But this access is no one's, its perspective is from nowhere. On the other hand, phenomenology has revealed something hidden by perception - precisely the fact that the essence of perception makes this privileged access impossible. But phenomenology's success in showing that it is the case that perception is paradoxical does not mean that the phenomenologist perceives more or more clearly. So, "no one sees more clearly," not even Merleau-Ponty. My perceptual experience demands your ratification, and yours demands mine, regardless of how clear or unclear this is to our reflection.
When viewed as the conditions of the possibility of objectivity, knowledge, and rationality, the positive senses of Merleau-Ponty's paradoxical conclusions are revealed: "The idea of going straight to the essence of things is an inconsistent idea if one thinks about it. What is given is a route, an experience which gradually clarifies itself, which gradually rectifies itself and proceeds by dialogue with itself and with others." (PriP, 21) The tension, the paradox, the contradiction lived through in perception produces objects, a rationality, a world, an absolute, that call for continuous efforts of determination. To perceive is to reach towards but never entirely to capture these objects, this rationality, this world, this absolute, the real transcendental conditions of that very perceptual reach.
1. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by F. Max M�ller (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 17
2. Ibid., p. 18
3. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). Cited in the text as PhP.
4. Studies of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy generally emphasize his contributions to the phenomenological study of the experience of perception, especially in relation to ontology. Decidedly less common are examinations of the epistemological implications of Merleau-Ponty's work. Two notable efforts in this regard are Thomas Langan, Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason and Henry Pietersma, "Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Knowledge." One difficulty of interpreting Merleau-Ponty in this vein is that he does not offer a cohseive set of doctrinal statements concerning knowledge. Yet it remains clear that his thesis of the primacy of perception entails a claim about epistemology that should be assessed in terms of its power to eluminate knowledge.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Le primat de la perception et ses cons�quences philosophiques," Bulletin de la soci�t� fran�aise de philosophie, December, 1947, pp. 119-153. English translation by James M. Edie, in The Primacy of Perception, edited by Edie (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1964), pp. 12-42. (Cited in the text as PriP) This document contains the text of an address given by Merleau-Ponty to the Soci�t� on November 23, 1946. It is preceded by a very brief "Preliminary Summary of the Argument" and followed by the record of the questions of members of the Soci�t� and Merleau-Ponty's responses.
6. M.C. Dillon, for instance, devotes less than ten pages to "The Primacy of Perception" in his Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1988). Gary B. Madison spends still less time on the text, despite recognizing both the fact that Merleau-Ponty's work was directed by a transcendental philosophical interest, and that the Phenomenology "is in fact not a dogmatic work, a collection of theses and propositions... but the proposition, analysis, and explication of a way of thought." See Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens: Ohio U. Press, 1981), p. 145 Thomas Langan, in the commentary most directed towards the transcendental philosophical importance of Merleau-Ponty's thought, also spends little time on the essay. See Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1966). See also Th�odore Geraets, "Le retour � l'exp�rience perceptive et le sens du primat de la perception," Dialogue 15 (1976), pp. 595-607.
7. Husserl makes this criticism in a text constantly referred to by Merleau-Ponty, the Crisis of European Sciences, translated by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 103.
8. See Pietersma, Henry, "Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Knowledge," in Welton, Donn and Silverman, Hugh J., Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), pp. 176-201.
9. See Madison, pp. 159ff.
10. Cf. Theodore Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcedentale (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). Geraets' study shows the transcendental philosophical concern of Merleau-Ponty's early Structure of Behavior, as a propadeutic to the Phenomenology.
11. Such a resignation is implied, I believe, when it is averred that Merleau-Ponty's is a "philosophy of ambiguity." Certainly his work was an effort to understand ambiguity, even to show that our experience is always ambiguous, but we often miss the point that our experience is also always already in the process of disambiguating. Our perceptual lives aim towards the development of meaning along the twin axes of clarity and richness in the context of this ambiguous background, but not simply by resting in it. Cf. R. Hudson and H. Pollard, "La question ontologique et la Ph�nomenologie de la perception," Man and World 24, 4 (1991), pp. 373-393; Heidsieck, Fran�ois, L'Ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: P.U.F., 1971), p. 107; Melle, Ullrich, Das Wahrnehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in ph�nomenogischer Einstellung (Boston: Kluwer, 1983), p. 122-130.
12. Cf. M.C. Dillon, "Apriority in Kant and Merleau-Ponty," Kant-Studien 78, 4 (1978), pp. 403-423.
13. Merleau-Ponty is sometimes criticized for reducing transcendental clarification to psychobiographical description, but in my opinion this criticism makes two mistakes. First, it follows the scholarship on Merleau-Ponty in overemphasizing the description at the cost of losing sight of Merleau-Ponty's attempt to draw transcendental conclusions from the descriptions. Second, it mistakes the level at which Merleau-Ponty treats perception in his phenomenology, which is easy to do, given that Merleau-Ponty equivocates. I believe it is important to interpret "perception" in the primary sense as the structure of openness, rather than the act of a historically, physically specifiable individual. It is then easier to see why Merleau-Ponty would claim that perception is the sine qua non of objectivity, knowledge, and rationality. Not some person's perception, but the structure of perception, is required.
14. We should avoid the mistake made by E.T. Gendolin, who writes: "To begin philosophy by considering perception makes it seem that living things can contact reality only through perception. But plants are in contact with reality. They are interactions, quite without perception. Our own living bodies also are interactions with their environments, and that is not lost just because ours also have perception. Animal bodies - including ours - sense themselves, and thereby we sense the interactional living we are. In sensing themselves, our bodies sense our physical environment and our human situations. The perception of colors, smells, and sounds is only a small part of this." What Gendolin fails to appreciate in Merleau-Ponty's account is that perception is not an additional power of the body aside from its "interactions," but is instead a certain organization and complexity of interaction, directed towards the phenomenal field which appeals to it. Cf. Gendolin, E. T., "The Primacy of the Body, not the Primacy of Perception," Man and World 25 (3&4), October 1992,p. 344.
15. See Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, pp. 35-50.
16. Merleau-Ponty claims that this "contradiction disappears (cesse), or rather is generalized, being linked up with the ultimate conditions of our experience and becoming one with the possibility of living and thinking, if we operate in time, and if we manage to understand time as the measure of being." (PhP, 330) But subsequently this understanding of being is made likewise paradoxical, so that the initial contradiction is not so much resolved as deepened, Merleau-Ponty finally resorting to the language of mystery and of miracle - "At the level of being it will never be intelligible that the subject should be both naturans and naturatus, infinite and finite. But if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and others, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand." (PhP, 365)
17. Principal Doctrines, translated by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, in Cahn, Steven M., ed., Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 331, Paragraph XXIII.
18. Cf. M.C. Dillon, "Merleau-Ponty and the Transcendence of Immanence: Overcoming the Ontology of Consciousness," Man and World 19 (1986), pp. 395-412.
19. Both Dillon and Madison make versions of this claim. Dillon leans more towards terminology; Madison towards concepts. It is true that Merleau-Ponty continues to use terms like "subject," "object," "consciousness," and so forth, but in senses diverging from their traditional or usual meanings.