Phenomenology of Perception
Author
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), French phenomenologist, professor at the Sorbonne and then, from 1952, the youngest person appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. He co-founded Les Temps modernes with Sartre and Beauvoir, and broke with Sartre over politics in the 1950s.
Publication Details
Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. English translation by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; new translation by Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012.
Description
The book's target is a dichotomy it treats as the founding error of modern philosophy: the division of the world into a thinking subject and an extended object, with the body assigned to the second category. Merleau-Ponty's argument is that perception is not the mind's interpretation of sensory data delivered by a body it inhabits. Perception is something the body does, and the body is not an object among objects but the point of view from which there are objects at all.
His method is to work through the clinical and experimental literature — Gestalt psychology, and above all the neurological case studies of Schneider, a patient with brain damage from a shell splinter — to show where both empiricist and intellectualist accounts fail.
Key Ideas
- The body-subject. The body is not something a person has but something they are. It is not, in Merleau-Ponty's phrase, "in space" the way a chair is; it inhabits space, and organises it into near and far, reachable and out of reach.
- Motor intentionality. The body understands the world in terms of what it can do, prior to and independently of conceptual thought. A person reaching for a glass does not calculate; the arm knows. This is a form of knowledge that is neither reflex nor deliberation.
- The body schema. A pre-reflective, continuously updated sense of one's own posture, extent and capacity for movement — distinct from the body image, which is a representation one has of oneself. The schema is what one moves with, and it is not consciously accessible.
- Incorporation. The most transferable idea in the book. The blind person's cane is Merleau-Ponty's example: once mastered, it ceases to be an object being used and becomes an extension of the body schema, an instrument of touch rather than a thing touched. "The cane is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives." The same happens with a car's dimensions, a hat's height, a musician's instrument, a typist's keyboard.
- Habit as bodily knowledge. Skill is sedimented in the body rather than stored as propositions, which is why it can be exercised and not explained.
- The primacy of perception. All reflection begins from a perceptual situation one is already inside; there is no view from nowhere to reason from.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Merleau-Ponty's account of incorporation is the philosophical foundation for the whole idea of a technology becoming part of a person. It states the criterion precisely, and it is a phenomenological criterion rather than a technical one: a tool has been incorporated when it is no longer perceived but perceived with. That is the same threshold Andy Clark calls transparency and Pallasmaa appeals to in architecture, and it is what Mark Hansen builds on directly.
It also supplies the strongest argument against the disembodiment thesis in early writing about virtual environments: if perception is bodily all the way down, then there is no going anywhere without the body, and immersion works by recruiting the body schema rather than by escaping it.
