Perception as Body: Body as Perception

A reflection on the Phenomenology of Perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Herman Josef Suhendra

Abstract

1. Introduction: Rationality and Phenomenology

In his preface of the “Phenomenology of Perception,” Merleau-Ponty

explicitly claims that “[P]henomenology is accessible only through a

phenomenological method.”1 This statement is more than a direction to any

discourse made on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Clearly, it is a

warning that to understand phenomenology—if understanding could suffice to

mean grasping the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty—one has to be acquainted,

primordially, with the phenomenological method. The phenomenological

method, on the one hand, is made accessible only by a thorough

understanding of phenomenology. In a sense, this statement presents a

difficulty in entering the world of Merleau-Ponty because of the enigma of

whether to know the phenomenological method first in order to understand

phenomenology, or to know phenomenology first in order to understand the

phenomenological method. The crisis lies in starting our quest of

understanding Merleau-Ponty.

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 To eliminate the crisis, and thereby faithful to the warning of Merleau-

Ponty, one should be clear of the context of his philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology is a reaction to both extreme subjectivity and objectivity, and

plain subjectivity and objectivity in its notion of the world or of rationality.

Rationality is precisely proportioned to the experiences in which it is

disclosed.2 In his discussion on “The Synthesis on One’s Body”, he calls this

as the problem of intellectualism. “Intellectualism cannot conceive any

passage from the perspective to the thing itself or from sign to significance

otherwise than as an interpretation, an apperception, a cognitive intention.

According to this view sensory data and perspectives are at each level

contents grasped as (aufgefass als) manifestations of one intelligible core.” 3

In a sense, both subjectivity and objectivity suffer from the reduction of reality

to concepts or ideas. Thereby, rationality—consciousness for Husserl—

presents itself as the root and finality of reality. Consequently, Merleau-Ponty

finds himself in the opposite direction with his predecessor Edmund Husserl.

In general Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty belong to the same

boat for championing the return to the things themselves. Edmund Husserl,

reacting from the Cartesian imperialist cogito, claims that the cogito is

cogitationes. It means that the consciousness is always to be conscious of

something. The inseparability of the consciousness from its object removes

the imperialist status of the former, i.e., consciousness. Essentially,

consciousness’ facticity is connected with its object. This is the primordial

phenomenon according to Husserl. It is prior to knowing, hence the ground

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and foundation of knowing. “In The Idea of Phenomenology Lecture IV”, he

claims that “Phenomenology being the rigorous science of pure knowing

affirms that “cogitationes are absolutely given to us in reflective perception in

that we consciously experience them.”4 Though Husserl was successful in

demystifying the pre-eminence of the ego over its object by claiming their

absolute inseparability as a phenomenon, Husserl from the point of view of

Merleau-Ponty, remains trapped in the Cartesian ego, of course in a different

sense. Both Rene Descartes and Edmund Husserl suffer from the fallacy of

intellectualism, that is, that the relation between the perceiver and the object

of perception necessarily results into interpretation or cognitive intention. It is

therefore a cognitive act and apperception. According to Merleau-Ponty,

“[T]hey presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for

myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the act of relating

as the basis of relatedness.”5

Using the scientific method and reflexive method, Merleau-Ponty has

denied consciousness as the consciousness of something else as the very

foundation of philosophy, thus all knowing. Merleau-Ponty sees the

foundation where knowing is not dominant, rather it is where it is at work.

Merleau-Ponty clarifies his stance very well by elucidating the relationship the

thinker has with the world. According to him, “the perceived world is not a

sum of objects (in a sense in which the sciences uses this word), that our

relation to the world is not that of a thinker to an object of thought, and finally

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that the unity of the perceived thing, as perceived by several consciousness,

is not comparable to the unity of proposition.” 6

The return to the things themselves, following the presentation of

Merleau-Ponty, is to approach it phenomenologicaly so as not to commit the

mistake Husserl has committed. The phenomenological approach, Merleau-

Ponty explains that, “the world … is given to the subject because the subject

is given to himself. The real has to be described, not constructed or

formed.”7 In an attempt to explicate phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty simply

but elaborately would describe the phenomenon. Describing the

phenomenon is, in a simple sense, the phenomenological method. Thereby,

“[P]henomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather

provides its own foundation.” 8 By eliminating the consciousness and its

intentional tendencies as the ground of proceeding with the discourse,

Merleau-Ponty is left with nothing but to allow reality, i.e., the phenomenon to

speak for itself, in the Heidegerrian sense, the full disclosure of reality. The

disclosure of reality mediated by the phenomenological approach is a return

to the pre-reflective state. In the pre-reflective state, Merleau-Ponty regards

the body, par excellence, as the situation of the phenomenon.

Phenomenology is the very description of the body-with-the-world.

2. The Body:

To construct the theory of the body of Merleau-Ponty is a gigantic and

complicated task. Merleau-Ponty devoted the entire Part One with

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astonishing six (6) sub-chapters to present his discourse on the body. Each

chapter discusses specific characteristics of the body such as space,

sexuality, motion and etc. In these six chapters, Merleau-Ponty proceeded by

extracting and purging the problems and issues related to the corruption of

the body. Minus these issues and problems, he sets out to construct his

theory of perception based on his theory of the body in Part Two.

Interestingly, the sub-title of part Two indicates very much this intention, which

says ‘the theory of the body is already a theory of perception’. Such

approach to phenomenology is indeed phenomenological; an attempt to

describe reality by letting reality describe itself.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body can be discussed in two but

inseparable ways: the body’s relation to itself, and the body’s relation to the

world. In Part One, chapter 1, Merleau-Ponty claims that the body exists

partes extra partes, and that the relationship of these parts is mechanical in

nature. To regard this condition of the body is to posit duality between the

parts and the whole. With mechanistic physiology, it views the parts of the

body as moving only in so far as it is moved by the central organizing system.

And this central organizing system can be regarded as the tendency to

capture the classical notion of psychology, which says that my body is the

external object of my impressions and expressions. The body is merely the

manifestations of the events happening in the mind (psyche) of the person.

Duality renders the body secondary and object of perception. On the one

hand, the world is also seen as another external object, and space and time is

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seen as the distance that divides and estranges the body and the world. So

that, since the body is relatively smaller in space and time than the world, it

follows that the body is in the world. It means that the world is perceived to

be a big continuum with the body dangling around it and such a relation can

only be captured by a mental representation. The body is in the world

implies further that in that big continuum, everything within it is defined by the

bigger reality which is the world.

Both these relations are rejected by Merleau-Ponty and dismiss them

as mental construction of reality. Such understanding is an abridgement of

the reality as presented by the body.

3. My body, I am in it

According to Merleau-Ponty, “[E]ach of us sees himself as it were

through an inner eye which from a few yards away is looking at us from the

head to the knees. Thus the connecting link between the parts of our body

and that between our visual and tactile experience are not forged gradually

and cumulatively. I do not translate the ‘data of touch’ into the language of

seeing’ or vice versa—I do not bring together one by one the parts of my

body; this translation and this unification are performed once and for all within

me: they are my body itself.” 9 The wonder of the body is precisely its unity.

The hand does not have its own interpretation other than the eye in all

experiences. The body does not gather together the different sensations and

from there make judgment as to what the experience is. Rather, the very

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experience of sensation is experienced as the unity of all the senses involve

in the experience. Thereby, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “I am not in front of my

body, I am in it, or rather I am it.” 10 I am the sensations that I experience.

Hence, the body is not merely my extension for me to experience what is

there outside. The body is the medium and the message it is the act and the

actor at the same time. In any event, I am not a spectator of my body waiting

for the sensations such as visual or tactile to come in and then interpret them.

To be a spectator is to assume the presence of a distance within me, as if

there is a distance between my body and the ‘my” that unifies the things that

the body presents. I do not see through my body, I am a seeing body hence

the experience of seeing is my bodily experience, my full experience and not

the experience of the part of my body.

At this juncture, we are reminded of the discourse of Gabriel Marcel in

his book Mystery of Being. In that book, one of the famous precepts of

Marcel is “I am my body but more than my body”. Marcel is reacting against

the objectification of the body as merely possessory in character. Thereby, for

Marcel the I necessarily, essentially is embodied. However, he warns the I is

more than the body. Marcel’s I-body relationship is unacceptable for Merleau-

Ponty. The indication of the beyond points to something in the person that

holds the body-parts together. This view suffers the illness of the classical

psychology because of the need of a unifier, the logical dominance of the ego.

For Merleau-Ponty then, I am my body because I am it is the fundamental

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precept. I am not related to my body. There is no relation in the body. The

self is the body in full, par excellence.

4. The Body and the World

According to Merleau-Ponty “[T]o be a body, is to be tied to a certain

world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in space; it is of it.”11 The

world, as seen by Merleau-Ponty, is not a container which contains different

bodies, whether local or heavenly. The rejection that it is a container removes

the relationship of greater and bigger, dominance and dominated and

controlled and in control. Hence, the world is not a space where the body

moves around or something suspended or placed with somewhere else. It is

wrong therefore to regard that the body is situated somewhere else. Rather,

situation is where the body is, the world is the world of the body, the body is

the body of the world. The congruence between world and body exemplifies

what Merleau-Ponty calls the perceptual field. Although, this will be

discussed later, it simply refers to the experience the body is into which is

impossible without the very world that it is into. Henceforth, at the pre-

reflective state, the body is conconaturally in relation to the world and the

same manner as the world is connatural in relation to the body. In such case,

it appropriates what Husserl understanding of consciousness as always a

consciousness of something. Paraphrase, Merleau-Ponty would say that

body is always a body-world, a situation where the body and world are

intimately connected with each other. Thereby, the body and the world are

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not two distinct things. Merleau-Ponty explains that “[W]e notice for the first

time, with regard to our own body, what is true of all perceived things: that

the perception of space and the perception of thing, the spatiality of a thing

and its being as a thing are not two distinct problems.” 12

The world is the aletheia of the body and vice versa. “Bodily spatiality

is the deployment of one’s bodily being, the way in which the body comes into

being as a body.” 13 Such spatiality refers to the world where the body is

situated—that is taking the world as a container. However, spatiality, in the

real sense, refers to the perceptual field, the field where the body and the

world disclose themselves not as two distinct realities but a singular and

unified reality. The coming into being of the body is not caused by the world

nor is the world’s coming into being effected by the body. To claim this is to

posit a cognitive relation between the two, an abridgement of their relation in

the pre-reflective state. This is the reason why, according to Merleau-Ponty,

“If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s

body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.” The meaning of the body

lies in its creative relation with the world.

It is at this juncture that Merleau-Ponty compares the body to a work of

art. An art is regarded here in matters of its capacity to convey its meaning.

Art comprises the physical object and the meaning that it projects. According

to Merleau-Ponty, “A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that

is, being in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing

expressed, their meaning, accessible only through direct contact, being

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radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation. It is in this

sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living

meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms. 14 There are

two major characteristics of art that appropriates Merleau-Ponty’s

understanding of the body. First, it is its incommunicability and second, that

meaning springs from direct contact. The meaning of art does not lie in the

colours, sound, shape etc. It is not also in the combination of all these parts

in the same manner as one brings together the parts of a machine to work.

Rather the meaning or beauty of an art lies precisely in the very encounter of

the art. Direct contact brings to light the freshness of the encounter where

‘two realities’ become one making possible to coming to be of the being of art.

Just like the body, it is incommunicable. Its meaning lies precisely in its direct

contact with the world. It is this direct contact that would lead Merleau-Ponty

to claim that the Theory of the Body is the Theory of Perception.

5. Theory of Perception

“The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception” 15,

thus says Merleau-Ponty. This assertion brings to equation the discourse on

the body as the discourse on perception. It is no wonder, therefore, that the

whole book on the Phenomenology of Perception is a treatise on the body.

Consequently, the structure of the body is also the structure of perception.

Interestingly also, the answer of Merleau-Ponty to the question what is

perception is inseparably grounded on his discourse on the body. So that his

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theory of perception is actually, to use his own term, a re-creation, a

reconstitution of his theory of the body.

It must be recalled, in this section, that Merleau-Ponty is reacting to the

intellectualist view of the phenomenon. According to this view, the whole

system of experience—world, own body and empirical self—are subordinated

to a universal thinker charged with sustaining the relationships between the

three terms. But since he is not actually involved, these relationships remain

an abstract rendering of what is there. Thus, by proceeding to the pre-

reflective state, Merleau-Ponty has found recourse in the body as that which

is fundamentally there essentially and spatially constituted with the world. In

the words of Merleau-Ponty, “[T]he thing, and the world, are given to me

along with the parts of my body, not by any ‘natural geometry, or rather

identical, with that existing between the parts of my body itself.” Henceforth,

an explication of the meaning of perception is grounded in the meaning of the

body.

What then is perception? Merleau-Ponty explains that “[E]very

external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of

my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language

of external perception. If, then, as we have seen to be the case, the body is

not a transparent object, and is not presented to us in virtue of the law of its

constitution, as the circle is to a geometer, if it is an expressive unity which we

can learn to know only by actively taking it up, this structure will be passed on

to the sensible world.”16 The body is an expressive unity as it encounters the

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world. The expressive unity is the phenomenal field. Consequently, it is also

called the perceptual field. In the perceptual field, perception becomes the

very act by which the expressive unity is manifested between the body and

the world. Perception, therefore, indicates the manifestation of the body, not

as an object of sensation but the very agent of sensation: So that the

sensible experience is the bodily experience too. By agent, I simply refer to

its actuality without any external or internal causality in its relation to the

world. This sensible experience—the body in direct contact with the world—is

the perceptual experience. Hence, perception, according to Merleau-Ponty

is a “re-creation or reconstitution of the world at every moment.” 17

Merleau-Ponty’s retrieval of the root of philosophy, is the capturing of

the “existential structure of reality”. Thus, Merleau-Ponty says, that “in the

final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and

ultimately in the “world.” We experience a perception in its horizon “in action”

rather than by “posing” them or explicity “knowing” them” 18 The unity of

experience, which includes thinking actually perceiving the world is therefore

the originary source, the foundation of phenomenology. It is not the

subjection of the world as the essential intentionality of the consciousness,

which Husserl claimed to be the seat of phenomenology.

Describing through the discourse on sense experience, Merleau-Ponty

presents two dynamics of perception. Here he distinguishes perceptual

consciousness against intellectual consciousness. Intellectual consciousness

appropriates that of the Husserlian cogito. While the perceptual

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consciousness is fundamentally pre-reflective, that is by which consciousness

is grounded or without which consciousness is impossible. “So, if I wanted to

render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives

in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation carries within it the germ of a

dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to

which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.”

At the very root of perception is the reality that existence of the

perceiver is completely immersed with the world. It is within this landscape

that Douglas Low, distinguishes the pre-reflective and reflective character of

perception. According to him, “The reflective experience always experiences

the pre-reflective as occurring prior to it. Therefore, there can be no complete

presence of self to self. Self-presence occurs only across an absence or

delay. I am aware of my pre-reflective consciousness only as it slips ahead of

me into the world. Moreover, if pre-reflective consciousness is primarily

perceptual, and the perceptual is primarily the body’s openness upon the

world, it is lived through bodily perception that remains prior to reflection and

that escapes being represented as an object in reflective intellectual

consciousness. Lived through bodily perception always remains in front of or

prior to the reflection, which subsequently cannot grasp the perception as an

intellectual object without distorting it as a process that is lived through.” 19

The two dynamics are: First, every perception takes place in an

atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously. 20 Second

perception can be anonymous only because it is incomplete. 21 He explains

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the first, again through the meaning of sensation as: ‘Between my sensation

and myself there stands always the thickness of some primal acquisition

which prevents my experience from being clear of itself. I experience the

sensation as a modality of a general existence, one already destined for a

physical world and which runs through me without my being the cause of it.’

While that of the second, he says that ‘the person who sees and the one who

touches is not exactly myself, because the visible and the tangible worlds are

not the world in its entirety. When I see an object, I always feel that there is a

portion of being beyond what I see at this moment; not only as regards visible

being, but also regards what is tangible and audible. And not only sensible

being, but a depth of the object that no progressive sensory deduction will

ever exhaust. In a corresponding way, I am not wholly in these operations,

they remain marginal. They occur out in front of me, for the self which sees

or the self which hears is in some way a specialized self, familiar with only

one sector of being, and it is precisely for this reason that eye and hand are

able to guess the movement which will fix the perception, thus displaying that

foreknowledge which gives them an involuntary appearance.’

6. Conclusion

Using the following related concepts: pre-reflective consciousness,

perceptual experience, lived through, embodied perception and etc, brings us

to the conclusion that phenomenology, in the long run, is the fruitful

appreciation of the landscape of the structure of the body where thinking is

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happening. Embodied perception, or perceptual experience is the original

unity of nature and reflection which lies in the body. Neither one of them is on

top or below the other. Perception, through the body, existence becomes fully

and creatively immersed in the world that it collapses the distinction between

object and subject, reflection and meaning, and preferentiality. At the height

of perceptual experience is the dissolution of any references because

perceptual experience carries with it the multifarious facades and interlink

relations of the embodied perception in the world indeed an unlimited

possibilities of meaning.

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1
NOTES:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated from the French by Colin Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. viii.
2
Ibid., p. xix.
3
Ibid., p. 152.
4
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, translation and introduction by Lee Hardy: London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 46.
5
Merleau-Ponty, p. ix.
6
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences, translated by James M.
Edie: Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 12.
7
Phenomenology of Perception, p. x (italics mine)
8
Ibid., p. xx-xxi.
9
Ibid., p. 149-150.
10
Ibid., p. 150.
11
Ibid., p. 148.
12
Ibid., p. 148.
13
Ibid. p. 149.
14
Ibid., p. 151.
15
Ibid., p. 206.
16
Ibid., p. 206.
17
Ibid., p. 207.
18
The Primacy of Perception, p. 12.
19
See Douglas Low, “Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Philosophy Today, Vol 46/1,
(Spring 2002), p. 60. The task of Douglas Low in this article was to situate the position of Merleau-Ponty between the
rationalist such as Descartes, Kant and at times even Husserl, and place this position vis-à-vis his nascent criticisms of
postmodernism such as Derrida. The central argument Low is using to clarify the position of Merleau-Ponty is the
perceptual experience preserving the immanence of experience and the world, at the same time transcends it.
20
Phenomenology of Perception., p. 215.
21
Ibid, p. 216.

REFERENCES

Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, translation and introduction by Lee Hardy:

London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999)

Douglas Low, “Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Philosophy

Today, Vol 46/1, (Spring 2002)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated from the French by Colin

Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,

translated by James M. Edie: Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964)