Merleau-PontyPhenomenology of Perception

When we come back to phenomena [e.g. seeing an event, reading a page] we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning: not sensations with gaps between them, into which memories may be supposed to slip, but the features, the layout of a landscape or a word, in spontaneous accord with the intentions of the moment (PoP, 21f.)

If my arm is resting on the table I should never think of saying that it is beside the ash-tray in the way in which the ash-tray is beside the telephone. The outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross. This is because its parts are inter-related in a peculiar way: they are not spread out side by side, but enveloped in each other. (PoP, p. 98)

• The spatiality of the body must work downwards from the whole to the parts … must be implied in a comprehensive bodily purpose and it must originate in that purpose (PoP, p. 99)

If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of my body trails behind them like the trail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but these are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to speak in the pressure they exert on the table. (PoP, p. 100)

• The bench, scissors, pieces of leather offer themselves to the subject as poles of action … they delimit a certain situation … which calls for a certain mode of resolution, a certain kind of work. The body is no more than an element in the system of the subject and his world, and the task to be performed elicits the necessary movements from him by a sort of remote attraction, as the phenomenal forces at work in my visual field elicit from me, without any calculation on my part, the motor reactions which establish the most effective balance between them, or as the conventions of our social group, or our set of listeners, immediately elicit from us the words, attitudes and tone which are fitting. (PoP, p. 106)

• When I motion my friend to come nearer, my intention is not a thought prepared within me and I do not perceive the signal in my body. I beckon across the world, I beckon over there, where my friend is; the distance between us, his consent or refusal are immediately read in my gesture; there is not a perception followed by a movement, for both form a system which varies with the whole. (PoP, p. 111)

• When I chat with a friend whom I know well, each of his remarks and each of mine contains, in addition to the meaning it carries for everybody else, a host of references to the main dimensions of his character and mine, without our needing to recall previous conversations with each other. These acquired worlds … (PoP, p. 130)

• the word ‘sediment’ should not lead us astray: this acquired knowledge is not an inert mass in the depths of our consciousness. My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as long as I still have ‘in my hands’ or ‘in my legs’ the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it. (PoP, p. 130)

• When a typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space. (PoP, p. 145)

The organist

• Between the musical essence of the piece as it is shown in the score and the notes which actually sound round the organ, so direct a relation is established that the organist’s body and his instrument are merrely the medium of this relationship. Henceforth the music exists by itself and through it all the rest exists. There is here no place for any ‘memory’ of the position of the stops, and it is not in objective space that the organist in fact is playing. (PoP, p. 145)

The Organist

• In reality his movements during rehearsal are consecratory gestures: they draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a space of expressiveness as the movements of the augur delimit the templum.

TEMPLUM

from the Greek „terminus“: to cut off

templum = any place which was circumscribed and separated by the augurs from the rest of the land by a certain solemn formula

the unity of the body is not simple coordination

• I desire a certain result and the relevant tasks are spontaneously distributed amongst the appropriate segments ..I can continue leaning back in my chair provided that I stretch my arm forward …. All these movements are available to us in virtue of their common meaning. (PoP, 149)

• Here is Peter, I can speak to him or not. But if I lose my power of speech, Peter no longer exists for me as an interlocutor, sought after or rejected; what collapses is the whole field of possibilities. (PoP, p. 162)

The Unconscious

• When I move my eyes, I take account of their movement, without being expressly conscious of the fact … Similarly sexuality, without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. (PoP, p. 169)

Verschmelzung

• There is interfusion between sexuality and existence, which means that existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual or other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or non-sexual’. Thus there is in human existence a principle of indeterminacy … (PoP, 171)

Language

• The speaking subject does not think of the sense of what he is saying, nor does he visualize the words which he is using. To know a word or a language is … not to be able to bring into play any pre-established nervous network. But neither is it to retain some ‘pure recollection’ of the word … (PoP, p. 180)

• I do not need to visualize external space and my own body in order to move one within the other. … In the same way I do not need to visualize the word in order to know and pronounce it. It is enough that I possess is articulatory and acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of the possible uses of my body. (PoP, p. 180)

• I reach back for the word as my hand reaches towards the part of my body which is being pricked; the word has a certain location in my linguistic world, and it is part of my equipment. (PoP, p. 180)

• (Cf. Hayek, Mach …)

The Cultural World

• behavior patterns settle into … nature, being deposited in the form of a cultural world. Not only … do I live in the midst of earth, air and water, I have around me roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe. Eah of the objects is moulded to the human action which it serves. Each one spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity (PoP, p. 348)

Idealism

• Now, although it may not be surprising that the sensory and perceptual functions should lay down a natural world in front of themselves, since they are prepersonal, it may well seem strange that the spontaneous acts through which man has patterned his life should be deposited, like sediment, outside himself and lead an anonymous existence as things. The civilization in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident way in the implements with which it provides itself. (PoP, p. 348)

• one particular cultural object [plays] a crucial role in the perception of other people: language. In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. (PoP, p. 354)

• We have a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other and we co-exist through a common world. (PoP, p. 354)