For Merleau-Ponty, empiricism’s conception of consciousness is too poor, and intellectualism’s too rich: “Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again, we should not be searching” (PP, 28). As perceptual “illusions” indicate, perception cannot be limited to a sensory activity (whether combined with memory or otherwise), nor can it be reduced, as the example of the photograph held upside down makes clear, to a mental processing of neutral and determinate elements. How, then, are we to understand perception?
Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Perception
Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not understand perception as a construction based on neutral, determinate elements.3 In his account, it is more as if the subject always immediately sees what it perceives, as if the meaning of what is perceived is already present in the world to be perceived. The perceiver seems to have a direct access to the world: “I have in perception the thing itself, and not a representation”; “the thing is at the end of my gaze and, in general, at the end of my exploration” (VI, 7). How is this possible? Let’s illustrate with an example.
When we perceive a mountain as high, we do not compare the perceived size of the mountain with the perceived size of the house at the foot of the mountain and then estimate the size of the mountain on the basis of our knowledge of the average size of a house. We perceive the mountain as high because it occupies a lot of space in our visual field, because it overwhelms us. Something is high because our body cannot reach it, because it towers above our body. Similarly, we describe an object as being far away because it presents fewer, and less identifiable, points on which our eyes can fasten. It is less variegated, less strictly geared to my powers of exploration. My gaze cannot get a grip on it. In other words: the position, the size, and the shape of a perceived object are not determined by the interpretative comparison and synthesis of various determinate, perceptual qualities, but, respectively, by the orientation, scope, and hold that the body has on the object (PP, 266, 261).
However, sometimes objects can occupy a lot of space in our field of vision, as when an object is held right in front of our eyes (PP, 300), and we still do not describe them as being big. If that is so, it is because the context of perception is always included in the perception itself. However, this context can never be identified in terms of angles, or of distances between body and perceived object; this context has to be identified, instead, in terms of the kind of hold upon the object it allows. I perceive a line as horizontal, not because it is perpendicular in relation to the verticality of my standing body, but because it forms, with my body, a unity that is perfectly balanced. The tension between my body and the line is distributed in such a way that it gives rise to a certain stability. Similarly, “the distance from me to the object is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm” (PP, 302). In Merleau-Ponty, consequently, the hold our body takes upon the world does not involve neutral elements but qualities. The right distance from which to look at a painting, for example, is not determined by the relation between the size of the canvas, the size of the perceiver, and how good or bad the eyes of the perceiver are, but by the perceiver’s grip on the painted spectacle: the right distance is the distance from which the perceiver has the best grip on the painting (PP, 267). Moreover, this distance is not a neutral and measurable quantity—it is not determinate—but a quality that forces itself upon the perceiver.
It is clear that describing perception in terms of the hold our body takes upon the object differs from the empiricist description of the perceiver as merely passive. And it also differs from an intellectualist, as well as from a Husserlian, account in the sense that it does not imply that the hold is constituted by the body or, more generally, by the perceiver. Merleau-Ponty (PP, 216–17) argues that perception takes place within a field, which means that the perceiving activity is distributed over all the elements of the field.4 How so? A field is a structure—for more on the notion of “structure,” I refer the reader to chapters 2 and 7—in which each element owes its significance to the general configuration of the other elements of the field (PP, 313). In the case of perception, this field consists, first, of all the sensual qualities of one object. This implies that a sensual quality of an object is determined by the other sensual qualities attributable to the same object. The color of a carpet, for example, is determined not only by the color of the yarn, but also by the woolly touch of the carpet, its dusty smell, the way it absorbs sounds, and so on.
Second, the perceptual field also comprises the sensual qualities of things related to the perceived object. Our sensation of the blue of the carpet, for example, is also determined by our sensation of the blue of the sky we see when we look out the window of the room, and by the blue of the ocean of our dream from the night before. Our sensations always take place against the background of other actual or virtual (past or future sensations, fantasies, etc.) sensations. One consequence of this intertwinement is that sensual qualities imply one another. When I see and touch the floor covering, I can imagine what it will sound like. Also, my perception of the carpet can already imply the perception of a room with a certain intimacy and coziness. The coziness is “perceived” through sight. In other words, every sense leaves its proper domain as it seizes onto qualities it cannot theoretically access.
For Merleau-Ponty, this intertwinement of sensations is the result not of an intellectual correlation constructed over time, but of an intertwinement that is built into our very body. Were we to appeal to an intellectual correlation, we would have to explain how the mind produced this correlation, and that would lead straight back to the sensations and confront us anew with the question of how something in one sensation can possibly refer to another one. Therefore, 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 synergic totality” (PP, 316–17). The fact that the color of a thing is codetermined by what is actually and virtually heard, smelled, and felt at that same moment presupposes an exchange between the different senses: it presupposes the body as a synergic system. And so, for sensual qualities to determine one another, the senses themselves also need to form a field (PP, 406).
This conception of the body as a synergic system or field allows Merleau-Ponty to distance himself from a mechanistic view of the body. The body is not a complicated machine in which organs are functionally attuned to one another, directed by chemical and electric stimuli. On the contrary, the senses are constantly transgressing their own domain. They are intertwined, but, strictly speaking, this intertwinement does not serve a specific goal. In contrast to the functionalist view, which distinguishes the instrument from the goal that can be reached with it, Merleau-Ponty’s body cannot be separated from the “purpose” it serves, which is to act upon and move within the world. The body is the subject that acts in the world, and not simply the instrument that allows for actions to be taken. Hence, the intertwinement of the senses is grounded not in functionality but in the participation of the lived subject in the world, in existence. The body is fundamentally being-to-the-world (être-au-monde), and the world is always a world perceived by our body. And so, in the end, perception can also be said to presuppose a field formed by body and world: “Our body as a point of view