Phenomenology of Perception

• 1. Introduction

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  Phenomenology of Perception arrived in 1945 with a claim that cut against centuries of philosophical habit: that the body, not the mind, is where understanding begins. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who believed that before we think, before we reason, we already inhabit a world through our flesh. This book staked that belief as a thesis and gave it a name: "the primacy of perception." What followed was a work that would establish Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body and mark a major turning point in French existentialism. The questions this documentary will trace are not small ones. What is wrong with the way we have always thought about sensation? Why does Merleau-Ponty reject Descartes? And what does the human body have to do with the deepest questions about consciousness, sexuality, and the nature of the world we share?

• 2. The Problem with Sensation

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  Merleau-Ponty opened by going after an assumption so familiar it seemed invisible. The concept of sensation, he wrote, "seems immediate and obvious." It does not. He argued that traditional analyses had accepted sensation uncritically, and in doing so had "missed the phenomenon of perception" entirely. His target was the idea that perception could be built up from raw sensory atoms. Sensation might be understood, he allowed, as "the way in which I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself." But there is nothing in actual experience that corresponds to "pure sensation" or "an atom of feeling." What we take to be bedrock turns out to be a philosophical prejudice. "The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness," he wrote, "but on widely held prejudice." A. J. Ayer, the British philosopher, later criticized Merleau-Ponty's arguments against the sense datum theory of perception, finding them inconclusive. But the thrust of the attack mattered: Merleau-Ponty was clearing ground for a different starting point, one that would put the living, perceiving body at the center.

• 3. Rejecting Descartes

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  The Cartesian formula "cogito ergo sum" placed thinking at the foundation of existence. Merleau-Ponty rejected that foundation. Cartesian dualism, which splits mind from body, is called into question throughout Phenomenology of Perception as the primary way of existing in the world, and ultimately rejected in favor of what Merleau-Ponty called an intersubjective, dialectical, and intentional conception of consciousness. Central to this move is his account of the body. Where the Cartesian tradition treats the body as an object the mind inhabits, Merleau-Ponty argued that the ability to reflect comes from a pre-reflective ground. That ground, he insisted, is not in the mind. It lies in the body's prior engagement with the world. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, had structured much of French existentialism around the distinction between the for-itself, or subject, and the in-itself, or object. Merleau-Ponty's body stands between those two poles, ambiguously existing as both at once. That ambiguity is not a flaw to be resolved. It is, for him, the truth of how we live.

• 4. Phenomenology and Its Contradictions

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  Before Merleau-Ponty could argue his thesis, he had to define his method. Phenomenology, he wrote, had not yet received a proper definition. He identified a series of apparent contradictions at its core: the ambition to make philosophy into a rigorous science while also capturing space, time, and the world as people actually live them. Other thinkers had tried to dissolve this tension by separating the contributions of Edmund Husserl from those of Martin Heidegger. Merleau-Ponty refused that escape. He argued that Heidegger's Being and Time, published in 1927, "springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the 'natürlicher Weltbegriff' or the 'Lebenswelt'." Husserl himself, toward the end of his life, had identified the Lebenswelt, or life-world, as phenomenology's central theme. So the contradiction, Merleau-Ponty concluded, appears already within Husserl's own philosophy. Resolving it by drawing a line between the two thinkers simply does not work. The philosopher David Abram later noted that in the pages that followed, Merleau-Ponty consistently described sensible things in the active voice, writing "of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers," to underscore their dynamic role in perceptual experience.

• 5. The Body, Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis

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  A. J. Ayer called Merleau-Ponty's inclusion of a chapter on sexuality surprising. Ayer read it as an occasion for Merleau-Ponty to revisit the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, and compared Merleau-Ponty's views on sex to those of Sartre in Being and Nothingness. The chapter was, in Merleau-Ponty's own terms, an extension of his account of the body. He suggested that the body "can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes it." Psychoanalysis enters the discussion because Merleau-Ponty saw parallels between his own approach and certain psychoanalytic ideas, particularly the attribution of meaning to all human actions and the diffusion of sexuality throughout the whole of human existence. The sociologist Murray S. Davis noted that this parallel is controversial. Other readers, Davis observed, would view psychoanalysis as "materialistic and mechanical," and would resist the comparison. The chapter extended well beyond what the book's title promised. Rhiannon Goldthorpe later noted that the discussion of the body's relationship to spatial experience, and the treatment of sexuality, went beyond "the nominal range of his title."

• 6. Reception and Reputation

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  Helmut R. Wagner described Phenomenology of Perception as an important contribution to phenomenology. Robert Bernasconi, writing later, observed that the book established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and that his writings found a more receptive audience among analytic philosophers than the works of other phenomenologists. That is an unusual distinction for a thinker often grouped with continental existentialism. G. B. Madison recorded that the book was recognized as a major statement of French existentialism, best known for the thesis of "the primacy of perception." American vice president Al Gore, in a 1998 interview with the critic Louis Menand published in The New Yorker, named Phenomenology of Perception as an inspiration. Merleau-Ponty himself eventually grew dissatisfied with the book. The philosopher Stephen Priest noted that after publication Merleau-Ponty concluded he had taken "subject-object dualism as phenomenologically primitive" and had used "a comparatively superficial psychologistic vocabulary" that he wished to replace. Some commentators believed his thought shifted significantly in his late, unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, edited by the philosopher Claude Lefort. Others emphasized the continuity of his thinking across all his work. Madison noted that the question received "much scholarly discussion" and was never settled.

• 7. The Publishing Record

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  Éditions Gallimard published the first edition in Paris in 1945. English-language readers had to wait until 1962, when Routledge and Kegan Paul released a translation by Colin Smith. A second English translation, by Donald Landes, appeared from Routledge in 2013. The gap between those two translations spans more than half a century of scholarship, and the arrival of the Landes version suggests the book remained actively taught and debated well into the twenty-first century. Madison's observation that by the late twentieth century Merleau-Ponty's later critics accused him of promoting reductionism and anti-intellectualism points to one reason the translation was still needed: the argument was alive enough to still provoke.