- Length
- 544 pagesLandes, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2012
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Phenomenology of Perception
The book that put the body at the centre of philosophy, using neurological case studies to show that neither the mechanical nor the intellectual account of perception describes what actually happens. It has become the most used work of continental philosophy in cognitive science and in the arts.
- Date
- 1945
- Author
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1962 English, Colin Smith Standard for fifty years and criticised for errors; in copyright Attested
- 2012 English, Donald Landes The preferred version, with Merleau-Ponty's own marginal notes; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 45 years
Overshadowed by Sartre in its own time and now the more widely used of the two, particularly outside philosophy.
What the book says
A book arguing that perception is not a matter of a mind interpreting sensations but of a body inhabiting a world, and that both the empiricist and the intellectualist accounts miss this by starting too late. Merleau-Ponty's evidence is largely clinical: patients with brain injuries whose deficits do not fit either theory, and above all the phantom limb, which cannot be explained as a physiological trace or as a belief, because the patient both knows the arm is gone and continues to reach with it. What the cases show is a bodily knowledge that is neither mechanical reflex nor conscious judgement. The body has its own understanding of space - I do not calculate where my hand is, and a skilled driver feels the width of the car rather than inferring it - and this bodily intentionality is the ground on which reflective thought is later built. From this follows the treatment of perception as inherently perspectival and incomplete, of other people as encountered through their gestures rather than inferred behind them, and of freedom as always situated, since a body that is nowhere in particular could do nothing at all.
What it argues
That the perceiving body is a third term the tradition has no place for - neither an object among objects nor a consciousness surveying them, but the point from which there is a world at all. Empiricism explains perception as sensations caused in a receiver and cannot account for the organisation we always already find; intellectualism explains it as judgement applied to raw data and cannot account for the cases where judgement is intact and perception is not. What both miss is that the body understands its situation before anything is thought about it. Space is not a container in which I locate myself but a system of possible actions radiating from where I stand; a thing is what it affords doing. Perception is therefore never complete, always from somewhere, and the demand for a view from nowhere is not a high standard but a misunderstanding of what seeing is.
What it answered
Husserl on the reduction, and the psychology of his day on both flanks. His use of pathological cases is a method rather than illustration: he holds that a breakdown reveals a structure that works invisibly when intact, which is why the phantom limb and the patient who can grasp but not point do more argumentative work than any thought experiment. He is also answering Sartre, more gently and more damagingly, on whether freedom can be as absolute as Being and Nothingness requires.
How it argues
By case study and by description, with a patience the other French phenomenologists lack. Merleau-Ponty takes an experimental result or a clinical report, shows that neither standard theory predicts it, and describes what the case actually presents - and the argument accumulates over five hundred pages without ever stating a thesis in a sentence. The prose is difficult in a different way from Sartre's or Heidegger's: not because of invented vocabulary but because the descriptions are trying to catch something that ordinary language has already interpreted.
The moment
Paris in 1945, immediately after the liberation. Merleau-Ponty had served as an army officer, worked with Sartre and Beauvoir on the resistance-era group Socialisme et Liberté, and co-founded Les Temps Modernes with them; he broke with Sartre in 1953 over the Communist Party and Korea. He was elected to the Collège de France in 1952, the youngest ever appointed to the chair of philosophy, and died suddenly in 1961 at fifty-three with a manuscript on his desk.
How it travelled
Quietly at first and then into fields far from philosophy. Sartre's fame overshadowed him for two decades; the structuralist turn then swept both aside in France. The recovery came from outside: cognitive scientists working on embodiment and enactivism took him up from the 1990s, as did researchers in dance, sport, architecture, robotics and medicine, and the phrase embodied cognition is now used constantly by people who reached it through this book. Hubert Dreyfus used him against artificial intelligence research in the 1970s, an argument that looked eccentric then and looks less so now.
The strongest objection
That the descriptions are compelling and it is unclear what they establish. Merleau-Ponty shows that empiricism and intellectualism both fail on the cases, and offers a third description - but a description is not an explanation, and when cognitive scientists ask what mechanism realises bodily intentionality, the answer has to come from outside the book. There is also a real question whether the third term is coherent: the body-subject is said to be neither object nor consciousness, and it is not obvious that this is a genuine third option rather than a refusal to choose. Sympathetic critics reply that the demand for a mechanism is exactly the demand he is refusing; unsympathetic ones say that a philosophy which cannot be tested cannot be corrected either.
Why read it
The preface, which sets out what phenomenology is and is the best short statement anyone has written, and the chapters on the body - the phantom limb, motility, spatiality. Those hundred and fifty pages are what the world uses. The later parts on time and freedom are harder and less read. Landes' translation is the one to buy.
- First printed
- 1945
- First in English
- 1962
- Digitised
- No
Colin Smith's 1962 English was standard for fifty years and was criticised for errors; Donald Landes' 2012 translation is now preferred and includes the notes Merleau-Ponty made in his own copy.
Both English translations are in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and rising. Merleau-Ponty is the continental philosopher most often cited in empirical cognitive science, and the account of bodily know-how is a working reference in philosophy of mind as well as in the practical fields that adopted it.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and in both English translations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether he is completing Husserl or breaking with him is argued, and the answer turns partly on how the unpublished late manuscripts are read. Whether the body-subject is a stable notion or an unresolved tension is a standing question. Whether the cognitive-science appropriation is faithful or takes the descriptions while discarding the philosophy is disputed by both sides. And how far his late unfinished work on flesh and the visible represents a change of position cannot be settled, since he died with it half-written.