Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental Phénoménologie de la perception signaled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenom- enology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. Phenomenology of Perception stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Hus- serl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenom- enal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and “intellectualism” on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Mer- leau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a com- prehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new Foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau- Ponty by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. Drawn to philosophy from a young age, Merleau-Ponty would go on to study alongside Jean- Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil at the famous École Normale Supérieure. He completed a Docteur ès lettres based on two dissertations, La struc- ture du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). After a brief post at the University of Lyon, Merleau-Ponty returned to Paris in 1949 when he was awarded the Chair of Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne. In 1952 he became the youngest philosopher ever appointed to the prestigious Chair of Philoso- phy at the Collège de France. He died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 aged fifty-three, at the height of his career. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Praise for this new edition: “This is an extraordinary accomplishment that will doubtless produce new readers for the remarkable philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. This excellent translation opens up a new set of understandings of what Merleau-Ponty meant in his descriptions of the body, psychology, and the field of perception, and in this way promises to alter the horizon of Merleau-Ponty studies in the English language. The extensive index, the thoughtful annotation, and the guidance given about key problems of translation not only show us the richness of Merleau-Ponty’s language, but track the emergence of a new philo- sophical vocabulary. This translation gives us the text anew and will doubtless spur thoughtful new readings in English.” Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley, USA “This lucid and compelling new translation not only brings one of the great break- through books in phenomenology back to life – it gives to it an entirely new life. Readers will here find original insights on perception and the lived body that will change forever their understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit.” Edward S. Casey, Stony Brook University, USA Review of the original French edition: “It is impossible to define an object in cutting it off from the subject through which and for which it is an object; and the subject reveals itself only through the objects in which it is engaged. Such an affirmation only makes the content of naive experience explicit, but it is rich in consequences. Only in taking it as a basis will one succeed in build- ing an ethics to which man can totally and sincerely adhere. It is therefore of extreme importance to establish it solidly and to give back to man this childish audacity that years of verbal submission have taken away: the audacity to say: ‘I am here.’ This is why Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is not only a remarkable specialist work but a book that is of interest to the whole of man and to every man; the human condition is at stake in this book.” Simone de Beauvoir, reviewing Phénoménologie de la perception on publication in French in 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception Translated by Donald A. Landes This edition published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Phenomenology of Perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception © Éditions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1945 “Maurice Merleau-Ponty”, by Claude Lefort, originally published in Histoire de la philosophie, III. Du XIXe siècle à nos jours, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 174, pp. 692–706 © Éditions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1974. English translation © 2012 Routledge Foreword © 2012 Taylor Carman Translator’s Introduction © 2012 Donald A. Landes All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. [Phénoménologie de la perception. English] Phenomenology of perception / by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. p. cm. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Phenomenology. 2. Perception (Philosophy) I. Landes, Donald A. II. Title. B2430.M3763P4713 2011 142'.7—dc23 2011021920 ISBN: 978–0–415–55869–3 (hbk) Typeset in Joanna By Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon G T C ENERAL ABLE OF ONTENTS Foreword by Taylor Carman vii “Maurice Merleau-Ponty” by Claude Lefort, translated by Donald A. Landes xvii Translator’s Introduction by Donald A. Landes xxx Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, translated by Donald A. Landes Bilingual Table of Contents lii Preface lxx Introduction: Classical Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena 1 PART ONE The Body 67 PART TWO The Perceived World 207 PART THREE Being-for-Itself and Being-in-the-World 385 Endnotes 484 vi general table of contents Bibliography 566 Supplemental Bibliography A: Available English Translations of Works Cited 577 Supplemental Bibliography B: Additional Works Cited in Translator’s Endnotes 583 Index 587 F OREWORD Taylor Carman Phenomenology of Perception is one of the great texts of twentieth-century phil- osophy. Today, a half-century after his death, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are enjoying a renaissance, attracting the renewed attention of scientists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Philosophers in the English- speaking world have over the last fifty years been slow to recognize the significance of his work, which resists easy classification and summary. He had little familiarity or contact with what by the 1950s had come to be called “analytic” philosophy, though his ideas speak directly to the theories of perception and mind that have grown out of that tradi- tion. Nor was he a structuralist, though he saw sooner and more deeply than his contemporaries the importance of Saussurian linguistics and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose good friend he was and remained until his death in 1961. Merleau-Ponty also departed sharply from his predecessors in the phenomenological tradition: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. For whereas they proceeded at a very general level of description and argument, Merleau-Ponty regularly drew from the empirical findings and theoretical innovations of the behavioral, biologi- cal, and social sciences. He was a phenomenologist first and foremost, though, and one cannot understand Phenomenology of Perception without understanding phenomenology. viii foreword Phenomenology is an attempt to describe the basic structures of human experience and understanding from a first person point of view, in contrast to the reflective, third person perspective that tends to domi- nate scientific knowledge and common sense. Phenomenology calls us to return, as Husserl put it, “to the things themselves.” By “things” (Sachen) Husserl meant not real (concrete) objects, but the ideal (abstract) forms and contents of experience as we live them, not as we have learned to conceive and describe them according to the categories of science and received opinion. Phenomenology is thus a descriptive, not an explana- tory or deductive enterprise, for it aims to reveal experience as such, rather than frame hypotheses or speculate beyond its bounds. Chief among the phenomena, the “things themselves,” is what Husserl’s teacher, Franz Brentano, called intentionality, that is, the directedness of consciousness, its of-ness or “aboutness.” A perception or memory, for example, is not just a mental state, but a perception or memory of some- thing. To think or dream is to think or dream about something. That might sound trivial, and yet (astonishingly) this humble, seemingly obvious fact managed to elude early modern (and some more recent) theories of mind thanks to the representationalism and dualism of such seminal thinkers as René Descartes and John Locke. The Cartesian–Lockean conception of thought and experience – a conception that in many ways still figures prominently in contemporary psychology and cognitive science – tries to give an account of percep- tion, imagination, intellect, and will in terms of the presence of “ideas,” or what Kant called “representations” (Vorstellungen), in the mind. Ideas or representations were thought to be something like inner mental tokens, conceived sometimes discursively on the model of thoughts or the sen- tences expressing them, sometimes pictorially on analogy with nondis- cursive images or, as Hume said, “impressions.” But the “way of ideas,” as Locke’s version of the theory came to be known, was problematic from the outset. For ideas are meant to be objects of consciousness; we are aware of them; they are what our attitudes are aimed at. But this begs the ques- tion of intentionality, namely, How do we manage to be aware of anything? Simply positing ideas in the mind sheds no light on that question, for then our awareness of our own ideas itself remains mysterious. Do we need a further, intermediate layer of ideas in order to be aware of the ideas that afford us an awareness of the external world? But this generates an infinite regress. foreword ix Husserl’s solution to this problem was to distinguish between the objects and the contents of consciousness. There is a difference between the things we are aware of and the contents of our awareness of them. An inten- tional attitude is therefore not a relation, but a mental act with intrinsic con- tent. Perception is not of something, if the “of ” in that formula indicates a causal relation to something in the external world, for there might be no such thing – indeed, as far as phenomenology is concerned, Husserl insisted, there might be no external world at all. Perception is instead as if of something; it identifies or describes a merely putative object, whether the object exists or not. Husserl’s distinction between the contents and the objects of con- sciousness parallels Frege’s distinction between linguistic sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). To use Frege’s own example, the expressions “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” have different senses, since they involve different descriptive contents and stand in different inferential relations to other terms, but they have one and the same referent, namely the planet Venus. Similarly, for Husserl, my perception of an apple tree in a garden has what he calls a “perceptual sense” (Wahrnehmungssinn), namely the content of my sensory experience, including not just what directly meets my eye, but also a vast background of assumptions, memories, associa- tions, and anticipations that make my experience – like the world itself – inexhaustibly rich. For example, I see the tree not just as a physical surface facing me, but as a three-dimensional object with an interior and an exterior, a back and sides, and indefinitely many hidden features, which I can examine further by looking more closely. Similarly, in addi- tion to their apparent size, shape, and color, the trunk looks strong and solid, the branches supple, the leaves smooth, the apples ripe or unripe, and so on. The fact that I have seen trees like this many times in the past also lends my experience a sense of familiarity, which is no less part of my perceptual awareness. That horizon of significance, which saturates every experience, distin- guishing it from every other in its descriptive content, even when they pick out one and the same object, is what Husserl calls the noema of an intentional state, as distinct from its noesis, or the concrete psychological episode that has or instantiates that content. Noesis and noema are, respec- tively, the mental act and its content: the act of thinking and the thought as such, the act of judging and the judgment, the act of remembering and the memory itself. Similarly, on analogy with language, the noesis is to the