Merleau-Ponty

n his Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of the body-subject as an alternative to the Cartesian "cogito." This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially, as opposed to the Cartesian idea that the world is merely an extension of our own minds. Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged." The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensorimotor functions. Taking up and coinciding with the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated subjectivity intentionally reconstructs things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its preconscious, prepredicative understanding of the world's makeup. Things are that upon which our body has a "grip" (prise), while the grip itself is a function of our connaturality with the world's things.

The essential partiality of our view of things, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time (v. the Uncertainty Principal of Werner Heisenberg) does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be copresent with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (profiles, adumbrations). The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background--to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style of Leibniz's monads). Through involvement in the world -- being-in-the-world-- the perceiver projects around the object, in a nonthetic manner, all the potential perspectives of that object, and the perspectives of the object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment. Each object is a "mirror of all others." Our perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a thetic, propositional, or clearly delineated perception. Rather, it is an ambiguous perception founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual gestalt. Only after we have been integrated within the environment so as to perceive objects as such can we turn our attention toward particular objects within the landscape so as to define them more clearly. (This attention, however, does not operate by clarifying what is already seen, but by constructing a new Gestalt oriented toward a particular object.) Because our bodily involvement in the world is nonthetic and indeterminate, we encounter meaningful things in a unified though ever open-ended world.

Critics have remarked that while Merleau-Ponty makes a great effort to break away from Cartesian dualism, in the end Phenomenology of Perception still starts out from the opposition of consciousness and its objects. Merleau-Ponty himself also acknowledged this and in his later work attempted to proceed from a standpoint of our existential unity with what he called the "flesh" (chair) of the world.