University of Luxembourg Department of Philosophy Winter Term 2012/13 Contemporary European Philosophy II: Perception

Professor: Frank Hoffman

Perceiving ones self chez Merleau-Ponty

Handed in on 23rd of January, 2013 by Onur Karamercan

Student ID no: 0110229645

Philosophy (MA), third semester

onur.karamercan.001@student.uni.lu

Table of Contents
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ 2 Introduction....3

1. Body as Perceiver.......3 2.1 Double-Sensations Problem.5 2.2 Reversibility.6 2.3 The status of my Own Body8 3. Merleau-Ponty and the Two Hats of Fish...9 3.1 Phenomenological Hat...............................................................................................................10 3.2 Epistemological Hat...10 4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 10 Bibliography.11

Introduction Merleau-Ponty is one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, especially when it comes to dealing with the problems of philosophy of perception. His non-metaphysical approach to the traditional concepts of modern philosophy and philosophy of perception in specific, distinguished him as a thinker who wanted to fix the problematic aspects of the two main streams of thought. Those two, for Merleau-Ponty, are empiricism and intellectualism. Therefore we should keep in the back of our minds as we run through his ideas that Merleau-Ponty believes that those two philosophical positions have been unsuccessful in dealing with questions concerning perception and in understanding the philosophical concerns about human body in general. Unfortunately I will not be able to discuss this theoretical aspect of the matter which has more to do with the history of philosophy; therefore I want to jump right into the problem that I want to discuss. In this paper my aim is to discuss Merleau-Pontys central arguments in his Phenomenology of Perception1(1945) about ones perceiving2 of the self. As widely known, Merleau-Ponty rejects any subject-object or body-soul dualism. While refuting such dualisms, Merleau-Ponty tries to argue that if we investigate our relation to our bodies on the mark, we would eventually come to see clearly that this subject -object and likewise dualisms undermine themselves automatically. I will try to show that I agree with him for the most part on this matter and why he has a point. In order to be in a position to be able to take a close look at what he has to say, I will run through certain passages from PHP, especially from the first part, The Body. In the last section of my paper I will discuss his theory of perception in its relation to principles of perception that are suggested by Fish. That is to say, in the end of my paper I will try to have shown that Merleau-Ponty would not disagree with either of the hats, namely being Epistemological and phenomenological hats. 1. Body as Perceiver When dealing with Merleau-Pontys unique phenomenology of perception we should revise several novelties that he brings into the picture. First of all, he thinks that it is the body that primarily allows us to connect ourselves to the world, not our consciousness or our mental activities. That is to say, other than primarily being (self)-conscious or being a
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From now on: PHP I use the word Perceiving instead of Perception, because the stress is on the action of touching and not that it is just a theory of self-perception which has a broader sense especially in Psychology. 3

thinking things as Descartes once presumed, first and foremost we are beings in the world that have a body through which we perceive the world. This view tells us that we could not escape being in a body. However that doesnt mean that our mental activities are entirely dependent on what we perceive. Rather, he wants to show that in body, our so called physical and mental capabilities work reciprocally. According to Merleau-Ponty, before the world becomes a matter of understanding, primarily it is something that we perceive and this occurs through our bodies. For the most part of the history of philosophy, perception is taken into account as something mental. His objective is to point out to an indirect ontology of the body. Our bodies for Merleau-Ponty are however not mere mediums that let us perceive the world. As we are living beings, our bodies are vulnerable to the world; they get affected by it as well as they can affect it, since they are also a part of it. Merleau-Ponty simply wants us to move away from understanding our bodies as mere objects. Traditionally, it has been thought that the soul is what is mental and the body is only something physical. Since our bodies belong to the physical sphere of the world, they can only be approached objectively. Trying to overcome such dualisms, Merleau-Ponty would prefer to conceive our bodies as something that exists already there in-the-world among other bodies. Our bodies are already familiar with the things surrounding them, in that they provide the basis upon which we can build our perceptual experiences. Therefore it makes more sense to see our bodies as flesh, that for him meaning a more primordial phenomenon.
As a philosophical expression, flesh includes but means something more than human embodiment or human flesh. Elementally, it is thought as a generalized surface of sensibility, a skin or fabric into which our own enfleshed sensitivitiesthe sight of our eyes, the taste in our tongues, the touch in our handsare indivisibly interwoven or enmeshed 3

Through this concept, Merleau-Ponty wants to indicate us the possibilities of understanding the human perception in a new and undiscovered way. That is to say, putting forward the phenomenology of the body as flesh would allow us to see the more primordial facet of body where the dualistic distinctions between touching/touched, sensing/sensed and feeling/felt would be understood as correlating and reversible aspects. Merleau-Ponty does this, I believe in a very unique way when he talks about ones percept ion of his own body.
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(Suzanne Laba Cataldi:189) in Evans- Lawlor: 2000

If we are to grasp those ideas more clearly, now we should move on to investigating Merleau-Pontys own arguments.

2.1 Double- Sensations Problem When Merleau-Ponty mentions the status of an object as an object, he tells us that it is obviously something distanced from/for us. We can only truly attribute objectivity to an object in so far as there is a bodily distance or say gap in between us. It follows that our body is not so. In the permanence of my body, I am aware that I am embodied as a whole unit. The famous example of Merleau-Ponty tells us that when we want to stand up from the couch, our body functions in an entire harmony. We take a lifting force from our legs and the rest of our body reacts to it immediately. In our actions, our body is a whole that we are always together with. We are neither exactly outside nor inside of it, rather we are it. That leads us not being able to have this distancing gap to our own bodies. That is to say, I cannot approach to myself like I do to a chair. Subsequently, I am not a matter of exploration and objective knowing for myself. If our body is the observing subject of experience, then it cannot at the same time be the object of observation. Hence, we cannot really observe our perceiving bodies. (Carman-Hansen, 2004: 173) That being said, our own bodies are not entirely closed off to us, rather we just cannot have the same relation to it as we do to regular everyday objects. This becomes clearer in Merleau-Pontys critique of double-sensations. One should add at this point that due to my motility, the actions of my body are not in the entire control of my consciousness. Since certain abilities and flexibility of my body is limited, my bodily actions are not free to my own body either. For example, I cannot see my own eyes without taking help from mirrors (or mirror effect) and yet the image that I see of myself in the mirror is just an image of me and it is not a first order perception of me just as it is the case when I am observing objects surrounding me. Still, there can be various ways of even having a feel of my eyes. For instance I can close my eyes and touch them with my hands or just by winking or moving my eye balls I can sense them with different perspectives. However, the double sensation question arises when we are to perceive a part of our body that is comparable to the duplicate or to similarly functioning facets of body. Merleau-Ponty argues, when talked about double -sensations what he actually means with that is My body, it was said, is recognized by its power to give me double sensations: when I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, as an object, has the strange property
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of being able to feel too. (PHP, 2002: 106) The so called double sensation that arises here is what occurs when one touches his own hand with the other, as the touching (touchante) hand becomes the subject and the touched (touch) hand becomes the object. However, we see that this relation can be reversible in the very same way, since due to double-sensation which is mentioned by Merleau-Ponty, the subject-object roles defined here are intertwining constantly and are not pre-determined. As Carman puts it, it is not as if I feel two sensations, side by side.
When one hand is actively touching the other, its own localized sensations recede or vanish from consciousness entirely (Carman, 1999: 222)

Merleau-Ponty thinks that this interrelationship of touching and being touched is of an ambiguous nature. It is as if the body is trying to catch itself from the outside, yet cannot ultimately achieve. Since when it tries to be the subject that is about to touch, it immediately turns into an object at the very same moment.
We have just seen that the two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched and touching to each other. When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of touching and being touched. (PHP, 2002: 106)

What Merleau-Ponty here wants to explain is the fact that it is not that we should totally overlook and hence neglect the differences between object and subject. It is rather, this interplay of the two is so unique and apparent in this example when one is also the touching subject and the one being touched simultaneously. This uniqueness derives from the fact that our body, either when out there in the world as it is or as in this example being touched by ones own hands, is not an object that can be only taken into account per means of objectivity. If I can, with my left hand, feel my right hand as it touches an object, the right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches: the first is a syst em of bones, muscles and flesh( PHP, 2002: 105). Flesh, as the primary element of the nature, is the location that allows such interplay to take place. 2.2 Reversibility The reversibility of the double sensations will be another important stage of our investigation here. If the action of touching and being touched are not the same and yet they do not constitute mere dualisms, then what is their nature? What is really taking place when one is touching ones self?
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It is Merleau-Pontys one of ostentatious claims in his later writings that it would not be possible for a subject to simultaneously touch one of his hands while this very hand is holding another object that is external to the body. That doesnt mean that the person wouldnt feel or contact that he is grabbing both the object and his hand, but rather the argument is that my hand is either touching my other hand or my touch on my hand is interrupted via my touching of the object. The distance of this object from my hand puts a kind of liminal space in between. When I concentrate on thinking whether I primarily touch my left hand or my left hand touches the object, I realize that the relation is entirely reversible, just as it is the case when there are two mirrors facing each other. The action of touching never ceases and the roles are never fully defined. The way Merleau-Ponty puts forward the problem may seem simple and even unsurprising. However when the results of the aspect of reversibility is well considered, we may realize that it is actually something we do often yet not pay full attention thinking about it. When we touch somebody elses hand, since we are more or less aware that we are about to happen to touch another subject. Since s/he is another subject, it is fairly expectable and normal that my touching may be answered with a counter action, in this case his or her touching me. Reversibility in this case is expected, even anticipated to a certain extent. If we would close our eyes and touch the hand of our friend, in case we do not receive any correspondence, we could easily think that something is wrong. However it is odd to think that when I touch myself, I may react to myself in a similar way, as if each of my hands could be, if I didnt know for a second, conceived of as someone elses hands. This is the effect of being fleshly of my hand, in the bigger picture, of my body. This reversible nature of my body shows us the both sides of our existence, namely sentient and sensible. He called this common ground that identifies incompossiblesflesh. The in-sensible places in Flesh where these crossovers or reversibilities, as he called them, are thought to take pla ce are conceived as chiasms. (Cataldi, 2000: 189). This chiasmic relation can be carried further to certain aspects of philosophical matters, Merleau-Ponty argues. Since, according to him, we see a similar structure exists on the relationship between body and mind, mental and physical, inside and outside and likewise metaphysical dualisms. We should now note that our perception of our own body does not necessarily have to be connected to our touching/being touched of ourselves. We may find a similar yet more difficult to investigate context where we can take another look at how we perceive ourselves through our bodies, which we will deal with now.
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2.3 Status of my Own Body Merleau-Pontys critique of the status of my own body is mainly directed against the reducing nature of biology and psychology with regards to objectivity. However the same objection can be made against philosophy itself too. Any of these three in so far as they desire a certain objectivity concerning what the status of body is, that is to say, only accepting objectively laid out knowledge as the superior one, are in the danger of not doing justice to the matter in a comprehensive way. Because, my own body, first and foremost is something directly and immediately real for me before it becomes a matter of scientific/objective knowledge. We can call it phenomenal body. That is the localization where my bodily being-in-the-world occurs.
It was postulated that our experience, already besieged by physics and biology, was destined to be completely absorbed into objective knowledge, with the consummation of the system of the sciences. Thenceforth the experience of the body degenerated into a representation of the body; it was not a phenomenon but a fact of the psyche (PHP, 2002: 108)

According to Merleau-Ponty, when we feel pain in our bodies, the body is not only some kind of a medium through which we feel pain caused by an external object. When I am hit on my foot by a hard object and when I say that my foot hurts it is not that my foot is the source of pain. It rather means that my foot is in pain, or my foot has pain. That is to say, I dont have a gap between me and my foot, in that it cannot be rendered as a part outside of parts, like an object. Another example given by Merleau-Ponty is as follows: (w)hen stung by a mosquito, (he) does not need to look for the place where he has been stung. He finds it straight away, because for him there is no question of locating it in relation to axes of co-ordinates in objective space (PHP, 2002: 121). That is to say, I do not have to know where my pain is, since it is directly given to me. In that way even our relation to everyday objects can be similar. When a carpenter who has mastered his work for many years, does not need to know how to hold a hammer nor he thinks where his hands are. It is almost as if the hammer and his hands become one whole unit. When human beings are able to use tools in such intimate ways so that they can even deprive the objects of their objectivity, it would be absurd to think that our body can be only seen objectively. Our perception of ourselves can indicate that the status of our bodies is primarily of a direct relationship. That means, perceptual experience does not have to be conscious experience. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the perception of our own body and the perception of external things provide an example of nonpositing consciousness
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(PHP, 2002: 57) or with a more Heideggerian and late-Wittgensteinian tone Our perception, in the context of our everyday concerns, alights on things sufficiently attentively to discover in them their familiar presence. (PHP, 2002: 375)

3. Merleau-Ponty and the Two Hats of Fish After haven considered Merleau-Pontys reflections on the matter we have just discussed, it might be helpful to take a brined look at how his ideas could fit to more contemporary outlines that are drawn by William Fish. He suggested in his book4 that there could be at least two considerations according to which we can situate philosophical theories on perception. Those two considerations are considered as hats which we can see as the ordinary moulds for a philosopher of perception.

3.1 Phenomenological Hat The first hat according to Fish is the phenomenological one. He borrows the way concept is used from Nagel as it is widely accepted. Accordingly, the phenomenological hat suggests that perceptual experiences are paradigmatically conscious experiences 5. That is to say, if there is something like to perceive, then we should be able to ask what it is like to perceive this specific phenomenon. Fish underlines that the important feature of this hat is to treat perception or perceptual experience as conscious experience. Now, we have already seen and talked about that even though Merleau-Ponty does talk about perception, and in more specific perceiving of ones self in a phenomenological way, this does not entail that all our perceptions should be conscious for him. Instead, given the embodiment of our being-in-world it is the least plausible thing to say that perceptual experience should amount to conscious experience. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty doesnt deny that there is something like to perceive about which we can do a phenomenological questioning. However this is always bound to stay in the sphere of theoretical concerns and if we think about how we really perceive in our everyday life, such conscious experiences can occur time to time, but not necessarily. Primarily, we are directed towards the world and we directly perceive it. When I perceive my own body which allows me to orientate myself in the world in my approach to other things, for traditionally accepted subject-object relationship is disrupted, there is not
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Fish: 2010
Fish, 2010: 2

enough space for flesh-subject to take a phenomenological distance to the world. We are our bodies and it would even sound odd to say we have bodies.

3.2 Epistemological Hat

Fish argues that the second consideration we can consider, namely the epistemological hat, tells us that perception is the primary source of knowledge in our lives. It follows that philosopher of perception who wants to come to good terms with that hat should have epistemic concerns. In that, he should be able to indicate the epistemic and scientific importance of perception. Merleau-Ponty would not disagree with the fact that perception is the primary source of knowledge in the world we live for bodily entities like us. However, it is doubtful whether this knowledge is necessarily of an epistemic/epistemological nature. I suggest that for Merleau-Ponty, the knowledge we acquire through our perceptual experiences have more existential and pragmatic concerns. When Merleau-Ponty talks about this matter, he expressively underlines his views in the preface of his PHP:
Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the worlds, are always both nave and at the same time dishonest (PHP, 2002: IX)

To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is. (PHP, 2002: X, italics are my emphasis)

I think Merleau-Pontys position doesnt fit to either hat. Therefore we cannot say whether his position results in contradiction according to Fish. 6 We may try to decide, if it is possible, what his position is in our conclusion now.

4. Conclusion It may be well asked whether Merleau-Ponty has a rigid theory of perception at all. On the one hand, his stance is a reflection of his overall skeptical attitude towards the intellectualist and empiricist point of views that dominated the history of philosophy. As a result of that, he definitely rejects the idea that ones personal relationship with ones own
Fish argues that if one hat fits for one theory of perception, it is highly possible that the latter wont fit.
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body cannot be laid out objectively. That has two reasons: 1- The metaphysical understanding of object and subject/object relationship itself is flawed. So, any theory of perception that has such metaphysical and dualistic presuppositions will lack the required attentive thinking that one needs when thinking about his/her body. 2- The fact that body is seen as a mere object doesnt allow us to see our body concrete enough. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty suggests a new and more primary way of thinking when it comes to deal with the perceptual questions concerning ones own body. His concept of flesh is the more primordial and joint corporation for making the direct relation between our bodily existence and the world. We change our roles of being touched and being the one who is touching constantly. The reversible structure of perceiving ones own has shown that the fact that we are always in-the-world being a one unit with our bodies. We are so embodied in our bodies that we move with it, rather than directing our body in objective space. Finally, as we have compared Merleau-Pontys philosophical position to Fishs two hats, we saw that his stance doesnt really fit to either of the hats. First of all, Merleau -Ponty understands something different than Fish does when it comes to decide what phenomenology is, however this is not the place to discuss it. One could briefly say, Merleau-Ponty seem rather to be on the continental side as his ties with Husserl and Heidegger are clearer. If we had to make one hat that fits Merleau-Ponty that might have been an existential one, for his philosophical concerns dont totally satisfy what contemporary phenomenology,

epistemology, metaphysics or cognitive sciences desire. Even though they could be reconciliated in a certainly limited way, this has the danger of doing harm to what MerleauPonty wanted to describe. Still, the question stays as an open one that needs to be dealt with on another paper.

Bibliography CARMAN, Taylor (1999) The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty Philosophical
Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, FALL 1999

CARMAN, Taylor- HANSEN, Mark B. N. (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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EVANS, Fred- LAWLOR, Leonard (2000) Chiasms: Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh, State University of New York Press, Albany

FISH, William (2010) Philosophy of Perception: A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, New York&London

LANGER, M. Monika (1989) Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide and Commentary, The MacMillan Press, London

MAURICE, Merleau-Ponty (2002) Phenomenology of Perception (Translated by: Colin Smith), Routledge, New York&London

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