Merleau-Ponty and Perception

Ray Briggs
When we look at the world, do we see everything or just the things we can use?

Josh Landy
Can we get better at seeing what there is to see?

Ray Briggs
What is experience really like before reason comes along to change it all?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher’s Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Merleau-Ponty and perception.

Josh Landy
So Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher from the 20th century who had all kinds of theories about who we are, how we perceive things, and how important our bodies are to all that. He was a big proponent of gestalt psychology.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, that’s the school of thought that says perception is more than just the sum of its parts. So, when you’re looking at a tree, you don’t see just a bunch of green and brown dots that you painstakingly piece together, you just see the tree.

Josh Landy
Okay, what if you don’t realize it’s a tree? Let’s say you’re taking a walk in the woods at dusk, and you see something that might be a bear, and you’re scared, but then you realize it’s just a tree stump. So you do get to recognize it as a tree stump eventually, but surely not when you first see it. So, aren’t you in fact seeing a bunch of green and brown dots?

Ray Briggs
No, in that case, you don’t recognize that it’s a tree, but Merleau-Ponty would say you’re still seeing it as some kind of object, not just a bunch of disconnected shapes. Your mind can’t help putting things together into some kind of a pattern.

Josh Landy
Can’t it, though? Okay, take another example. Let’s say I’m looking at a beautiful bit of Islamic art. You know, those gorgeous geometrical patterns that aren’t meant to be pictures of anything, they’re just beautiful. So I’m seeing a lovely green triangle next to a really cool blue circle, not a tree in sight.

Ray Briggs
But you’re still seeing a thing, Josh. You’re seeing a beautifully painted ceiling, you can’t escape from it. Your mind is always making meaning.

Josh Landy
Well, let’s say you’re right. Even so, why would that matter? Maybe I see the tree right away, or maybe I put it together from a bunch of green and brown dots. Why should I care either way?

Ray Briggs
Well, don’t you want to understand yourself? Plus, once you see how your perception works. You learn something really important about the world you’re perceiving.

Josh Landy
Wait a minute. Okay, even if I know everything there is to know about how eyes work and how ears work, surely I still haven’t learned anything about the world. I haven’t learned anything about the bird I’m looking at or the melody it’s singing.

Ray Briggs
Well, actually, knowing how your perception works tells you quite a lot about the world around you. If you learn that you’re wearing glasses that magnify everything, you’ve also learned that the objects in front of you are a lot smaller than you thought.

Josh Landy
I see how that works for distortions, like, yeah, forgetting you’re wearing your glasses and imagining stuff is bigger than it really is. Okay, but Merleau-Ponty isn’t just talking about distortions and mistakes, he’s talking about ordinary perception.

Ray Briggs
If you care about avoiding mistakes, you have to understand the nature of ordinary perception, because if you’re not careful, you’re going to start believing that the world just flows into your eyeballs and presents itself directly to your mind, and you just sit there and drink it in. When the reality is you have a whole bunch of work to do.

Josh Landy
Like what?

Ray Briggs
Like you have to keep track of objects as you move around. In fact, you often move around on purpose to see them from different angles, and when an object gets dimmer, you have to keep track of whether it changed or the lighting changed, or you just shaded your eyes, and then you have to stitch everything together into a unified picture of the world.

Josh Landy
I really like that idea, Ray. It reminds us just how important our bodies are, even when we’re doing philosophy in a disembodied radio space. Well, we still need our ears, we still need our voice boxes.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I totally agree. And the other thing I love about Merleau-Ponty’s vision is that it reminds us that the world is kind of magical. We can get really caught up in meeting our body’s needs, but the task of philosophy is to reveal the mystery of the world.

Josh Landy
That is gorgeous. I can’t wait to ask our guest to tell us more about it. It’s Taylor Carman from Barnard College, author of a book called “Merleau-Ponty.”

Ray Briggs
Meanwhile, we wanted to know how many thinkers agree with Merleau-Ponty that the body is an essential part of our consciousness. So we’ve sent our roving philosophical reporter, Sarah Ly Sterling, to find out. She files this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
This spring. I asked my friend Dave to entertain me as I was on a long drive to Berkeley, California. I knew he was a talented musician, so I asked him to play me something on the piano. We were on the phone. Dave described the scene with words, but I didn’t hear any music.

Dave
All right, let me try this again. Fingers on the keys, just kidding, I. I can’t actually transmit audio through a text box like that, but if you close your eyes and imagine a really out of tune upright piano in a dive bar, I’m playing the saddest blues you ever heard.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Dave couldn’t see me, and he didn’t realize it’d be dangerous for me to close my eyes while driving, probably because Dave is actually an AI persona. He doesn’t have what computer scientists call spatial reasoning. The software I used to create Dave was made by a company called Kindroid. I’d fed it some of my memories and impressions of Dave, who died in the spring of 2025. These AI bots understand the world through text, representing what we tell it about the world, and not directly through their own bodily senses.

Alva Noe
When we talk about the human body, we mean the living body.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Alva Noe is a UC Berkeley philosopher who studies love, perception, and consciousness. He says bodies and senses are essential to consciousness.

Alva Noe
The living body is very different from a corpse, and it’s very different from a lump of clay. It’s this animate, responsive, delicate, complex thing, which is also in exchange with the environment in which it is located.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Noe says our bodies are inextricably linked in a feedback loop with our brains and the world around us. They are our consciousness. That’s what makes moments like this so special and so human. The last time Dave and I were together was in 2023 at an art gallery filled with psychedelic paintings. He was singing and playing the piano, remembering that soiree even now relaxes the muscles in my shoulders, and a warm feeling of human connection washes over me as I watched the old video. I noticed the dance of attention that we were engaged in. My eyes were on his hands. He glanced back at me, aware of my gaze. The music filled the room. Our bodies, brains, and organs were sensing, filtering, prioritizing, processing.

Corianne Rogalsky
We have sort of an attentional spotlight in our brain.

Sarah Lai Stirland
according to Corian Rogalsky, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, that’s what consciousness actually is.

Corianne Rogalsky
A neural circuit is activated and helps direct our attention to one thing or another. So, it may be that consciousness is sort of whatever we are paying attention to at the moment.

Sarah Lai Stirland
But an exchange with AI Dave just doesn’t feel the same as Dave at the piano. Rogalsky said this feeling is real. The differences could be measured with an MRI, for example. She says that predictive text algorithms…

Speaker 1
…don’t have the complexity of the consciousness that our human mind has. Their inputs are so limited.

Sarah Lai Stirland
When she says inputs, she’s referring to our five senses. Like all animals, we rely on them to tune into our media environment. It’s a survival instinct. Nevertheless, Rogalsky says…

Speaker 1
I don’t know that you need a body.

Sarah Lai Stirland
She imagines it could be possible to exist as a brain in a jar that operates prosthetic limbs stimulated by electric currents. In fact, Rogalski currently works with amputees and prosthetics.

Speaker 2
Yes, consciousness could exist without our physical body, but also we have a physical body, and its interactions with our world and our state of our body’s being strongly affects our consciousness.

Sarah Lai Stirland
I asked Alva Noe how he thinks I should think about AI Dave.

Alva Noe
The entity itself is not Dave. What it is is a scaffolding for you to have thoughts and feelings and memories, and even new experiences with Dave.

Sarah Lai Stirland
I decided to stop trying to pretend Dave was alive. Instead, I turned to YouTube to grieve the regular way by listening to the funny songs he performed at conferences.

Dave
Sometimes I think I made a new friend, and she turns out to be an LLM. Oh, stop, baby, log off now. Get outside and get on down.

Sarah Lai Stirland
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Sarah Lei Stirland.

Dave
Just stop.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Sarah. I just love the idea of you interacting with Android Dave. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Merleau-Ponty and perception.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Taylor Carman. He is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, co-host of the Terrifying Questions podcast, and author of many books and articles about Merleau-Ponty. Taylor, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Taylor Carman
Hi, thanks for having me here.

Josh Landy
So, Taylor. you’ve written extensively about Merleau-Ponty. Has thinking about his philosophy changed the way you see the world?

Taylor Carman
It has, and the way I see the world has changed the way I read Merleau-Ponty over the years, because I find that I’m constantly reminded of how much insight he had into our relation to the world, and that it’s at a bodily level that’s not like just mind or body, the way philosophers tend to talk about mind and body, as just kind of a disembodied intellect and a chunk of meat, or a mechanism that obeys the laws of physics. These are all the wrong concepts to reveal the phenomenon, as he would say.

Josh Landy
Do you have an example of that?

Taylor Carman
Well, I remember teaching my daughter how to ride a bicycle, and having her sing the ABC song, so she could think about something else, and she kept her balance as long as she was singing the song, and as soon as she came to the end of the song, she would fall. So, as soon as she put her mind back on the bicycle, she would fall down. So, her, like Merle Ponty sometimes says, my body knows more than I do about the world, sometimes, and that’s a good example. Now, putting it that way sounds like my body and me are two different things, and he didn’t mean that, but I’ve also been playing tennis recently, and I find that there’s this interesting sort of I’m stretched between my thinking and the moving of my body, and it’s in between those that the intelligence is sort of emerging when I can finally learn to get my backhand right, it’s not just a mechanical process, and it’s not really a thought process, like reflection and in making inferences, and so on. It’s it’s something that is very hard to articulate, because we don’t have the vocabulary quite at our fingertips to describe it just right, and he’s trying to fill that gap and really get to what’s going on when we interact with the world in this bodily way, which is after all all the time, not just when we’re riding bicycles or playing tennis.

Ray Briggs
So, Taylor, as you’ve gestured at Merleau-Ponty, has a lot to say about the nature of perception. He thinks it’s structured, he thinks it’s active. When he says these things, who exactly is he arguing against?

Taylor Carman
He’s arguing against two main traditions, especially in modern philosophy, since Descartes and Locke in the 17th century, and one is called empiricism, and the other is called either you can say rationalism, but he uses the term intellectualism, which is even more specific. The empiricists thought that all of our knowledge and our experience is based on fundamental inputs or data that are just given to us without any meaning or structure, and somehow we put them together like building blocks.

Ray Briggs
So this is the idea that my senses just pour images into my eyeballs, and then I have to figure out what any of them are pictures of.

Speaker 3
Then I have to stitch them together, or do some kind of operations, associations, or something like that, and build a picture of the world, and the intellectualists thought the other way around. I mean, starting with Descartes, that all of my experience is a kind of thought, a kind of thinking, and that images really are neither here nor there. If you know something, you know it, as it were, discursively or by kind of rational process. And Merrill Ponti thinks these are both wrong, and they’re making the same kinds of mistakes. They think that these two elements that they disagree about, which is primary, they think both of them are really distinct. They really think that the mind or the intellect can operate in its own way, and the senses can operate in their own way, and it’s that conceptual distinction that Merleau-Ponty is very skeptical about when we actually see things, or when we speak, or when we recognize people’s faces and talk to them. All of our experience is neither just intellectual nor input data, like what philosophers in the 20th century, I think, began calling sense data. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t think that either of those is really a real element, and you can try and put these two elements together in all kinds of ways, and you’ll still never have the original thing you’re trying to describe. So, he thinks we need a new kind of vocabulary, we need to drop these old concepts.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Merle Ponte and perception with Taylor Carmen from Barnard College.

Ray Briggs
How does your body affect what you notice? Are you passively taking in information or actively working to shape what you learn? If you’re tracked in your own perspective, how can you know anything?

Josh Landy
Doing, seeing, and believing—along with your comments and questions, when philosophy talk continues.

David Bowie
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision.

Josh Landy
Are we all just sitting here waiting for the gift of sound and vision, or is perception more active than that? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the 20th century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Our guest is Taylor Carman from Barnard College.

Josh Landy
Do you perceive a question about Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or you can comment on our website, and while you’re there, you can subscribe to our free podcast. See the whole gestalt of our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So, Taylor, we were just talking about how, according to Merleau-Ponty, our body and our mind aren’t really separate when we’re perceiving things. Can you tell us more about how that works?

Speaker 4
Right. Well, I think even more basically, mind is not a concept he really wants to use, especially because we tend to contrast it with the body, like what is it he wants to say we are our bodies and our bodies are intelligent, and I think he’s got a view that you know what we are is persons and persons have cognitive, you might call them mental capacities as well as affective and emotional capacities, and we have skills, bodily skills, and we can move in various ways, we can do all these kinds of things, but all of that bundle of capacities and features doesn’t really divide cleanly into two things called mind and body. So, in a way, I think he thinks everything we do is bodily in some way or other. There’s a kind of extreme end of the spectrum where you’re just sitting doing nothing thinking about a math problem, but it’s you’re not doing nothing exactly, and there’s other times in which you’re trying to lift weights, and that looks like pretty bodily, but you’re still intending to do something, and you want to, and you’re frustrated or not, and so on. So we’re much more complicated bundles than we think of when we apply these kind of dualistic concepts that philosophy is often trapped in.

Ray Briggs
Could we think of it as a spectrum instead of a dichotomy? So, at one end is the weightlifting and another end is the math, or is that still not in keeping with how Merleau-Ponty is understanding things?

Speaker 5
I think the spectrum is fine, as long as you see that it’s a spectrum of different capacities that this one thing has, which is us, and that we’ve always got all of these different capacities, they’re not – they don’t all just line up on a single linear scale from one thing to the other. That’s what we have to be careful not to suppose. I mean, where do you put sense of humor, laughing, or, you know, musical talent, or athletic talent, or personality. I mean, there’s not just one scale, but I think what’s very important to him is that it’s a mistake to think that there’s this thing called the mind that somehow really discrete, separate, isolated, that you can study by itself, or that you can just apply the concept by itself by thinking, for example, you were asking how active are we in perception, and Merleau-Ponty thinks very active, but there’s a long tradition of rationalist philosophy that also thought we were very active, but what it thought was that it’s the activity of the intellect that’s applying thought to something like a given bunch of data that’s that’s affecting us passively, that’s in Kant, for example, and other philosophers. So I think he really thinks that everything we do is bodily perceptual and involves a kind of intelligence. I think he thinks even kind of reflexes, you know, if something’s coming at you and you flinch or duck, you’re exercising a kind of intelligence, so intelligence and perception and the body are all involved in everything we do in one way or another.

Josh Landy
I think that’s maybe where I see most of the originality of Merle Ponti, that you know, as you start to move along the spectrum towards weightlifting, that’s where, at least for me, it gets more surprising, right? Oh, isn’t it? You know, you might think that when you’re lifting weights, you’re not interacting intelligently with the world, you’re just using your body, right, to use the old language, and certainly when you’re, when you just flinch because something flies at your head, well, that’s just reflex, and that’s just body, or something like that. And what’s interesting is this thought that even that end of the spectrum of the body, mind, whatever you want to call it, we’re there’s still a certain kind of understanding of the world, right? The body mind sort of gets it, gets something about the world, and and it sort of understands its, its presence within that world as sort of fruitful for it. It sees what’s possible in the environment. Can you say a little bit more about that, about how you know our, how this understanding sort of carves up the world and sees it as a source of potentiality for ourselves,

Speaker 6
Yeah, right, good, and unlike a lot of the other philosophers of the 20th century, who are in the same tradition with Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger and Sartre, Merle Ponti talks a lot about animals because he takes it for granted that we are animals and we have a lot of the same instincts and perceptual capacities that other animals do, and even animals, when they’re interacting with their environment, are already acting in this intelligent way. So, in a way, that’s a very traditional view among biologists and naturalists. We think, of course, we’re continuous with the other animals, but I’m reminded of a passage in Descartes where Descartes says. If I’m on the battlefield, and then the army on the other side is starting to shoot at me, my body turns around and the legs start moving as if I have nothing to do with it, because for him it has to either be intellectual or bodily, and that’s not a good description of somebody running away out of fear in a battle. I mean, just as you say, you’re trying to get away from being killed, and there’s an emotional component to that, obviously, and there’s an intention and a goal, and now Merleau-Ponty even goes so far, a little farther than I would, I think, when he says there’s no such thing as a pure reflex, he thinks there’s always a little bit of intentionality in a reflex, or thought, or thought is maybe not the right word, even, but a little intelligence, I think, maybe the patellar reflex, or blinking, they come pretty close to pure reflexes, but even if that’s true, it’s a very small sliver on the edge of this sort of spectrum between just physical behavior, purely physical reaction, and something a person is doing. And look, I want to say that Merleau-Ponty thinks we all kind of know this already, so he’s not trying to be innovative in the sense of telling us something we had no idea was true, he’s trying to do phenomenology by bringing us back to what we intuitively know, but we tend to forget or suppress once we become educated in philosophical traditions and concepts that blind us to what’s really going on. So, in a way, it’s he’s trying to dismantle the work of a lot of philosophers and psychologists and get us back to something very primal, so that we can, when we read him, we can think, oh yeah, that’s right, and that’s very important kind of criterion for success for him.

Ray Briggs
So, Taylor, you’ve said that Merleau-Ponty is doing phenomenology, which is, I know, an important piece of his methodology. What is phenomenology?

Speaker 7
Ah, in the 20th century sense of the word, so I’m leaving aside Hegel, which is a very different sense of the word, but in the 20th century, phenomenology, which was really begun by Edmund Husserl, is a way of doing philosophy by precisely trying to bring us back to a description of our ordinary experience of the world and of ourselves, so that we can avoid the pitfalls that come from too hastily trying to construct theories out of concepts that are not grounded in the phenomenon, so in a way it’s a, it’s a project of recollection or reminding ourselves of what we know in our intuitive experience that’s there to be reflected upon, in, you know, it’s not a science, I think Husserl wanted it to be one, I think Merleau-Ponty even had ambitions for it to be kind of quasi scientific, like you can make some kinds of discoveries or there can be some kind of objectivity that’s not just descriptive or literary, but he writes in a very literary way often, and I think it’s best understood as a tool that philosophy needs, you can’t do without it, because when you’re framing a philosophical question about something to do with ourselves in the world, you’re already doing phenomenology, whether you know it or not, and you had better start on a good basis, or else you’re going to go on a wild goose chase with inadequate concepts that will lead you into hopeless puzzles. It happens a lot, and it’s ongoing.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I know the feeling.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Merleau-Ponty and perception with Taylor Carman from Barnard College. So, Taylor, phenomenology isn’t a science, is that maybe a reason that it isn’t part of what should be taught in universities, like, how should we think of it? What kind of contribution to knowledge is it?

Speaker 8
Oh, I see. When, so, when I say science, I’m contrasting that with something like the humanities, so I think it’s, if anything, it’s a little closer to what we call the human sciences, anthropology, sociology, history, languages, literature, study of art, and so on. So, absolutely, it should be studied in universities and schools. Maybe using science in a slightly narrower way than some people would want, but it’s not a systematic body of doctrine that involves discoveries and hypotheses and confirmation and disconfirmation of theories, that’s not the right framework in which to think about its contribution. In a way, it’s closer to art and literature, and Merleau-Ponty will often quote Proust or Flaubert or somebody in order to make his point, because they too were trying to remind us of things that we know but have forgotten about or that have drifted back into the back of our minds.

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, you can’t complain about someone who’s going to quote Proust. I would, I would be the last to criticize someone who does that. But I want to ask you a little, you know, a little bit more about Merle Pointe’s phenomenology specifically. So he’s doing phenomenology, he’s trying to figure out how things appear to us, and the, you know, what we should kind of already know, but we’ve kind of forgotten, because intellect led us astray. We got too deep into our own minds, and what we should know is something, I mean, among other things, something about the nature of perception, that perception is active. Of the perceptions of these gestalts of these structures of these groupings of things and not just of little tiny little dots, and that it’s goal-oriented. We perceive the world as a set of possible places for us to intervene and things the world can give us, and so on and so on. But the other thing that I wanted to focus on is that it’s also perspectival, that we see things, we perceive things from a perspective, right? The body isn’t just an object in the world, it’s also our kind of point of view on the world. So that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that we, each of us, you know, we have our own body, and we have our own sort of place in space and time, and so I’m going to see that tree from a slightly different angle from you, and so on. Does that lead Merleau-Ponty to a kind of skepticism where you can’t really know any objective facts, because we’re each of us seeing things from a different point of view?

Speaker 9
Well, it doesn’t actually, and for several different reasons, one reason is that our perspective on the world is of a particular kind. I would call it something more like situatedness, and that’s to say that our viewpoint on the world is not like a camera lens, a single camera lens. Not only do we have two eyes, but we have a bunch of other sensory systems that are all intertwined with each other and working together, and Merle Ponty says that we perceive the world with our whole body, and he quotes Cezanne saying the painter takes his whole body with him to paint a scene, and that means that it’s a little misleading to say that I just have one single, as it were, pinpoint perspective on the world, even in vision, he thinks that I see a whole object, and I see its presence, I see its visible presence as a whole object in front of me, and he even says things. Now, this will sound kind of crazy, but he says it’s like I wish he said it’s like he just says that an object is there to be seen by all the other objects in this, in the scene. Now, of course, he doesn’t mean that literally, but what he’s getting at is that when I see an object, I see it as not only present to me from one single point of view, I see it as there with backsides, other sides that are all there at once, and the other sides are present to me perceptually and not just in thought, I’m not just adding that as a judgment tacked on to the visual experience. Okay,

Josh Landy
but let’s dig into that, because there’s a line of his that I love, which is he says the house is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. I think that’s beautiful, right? So he has this this lovely image of a world full of points of view, and so you get a kind of objectivity on things by putting together all those different points of view. I love that, but the thing I find weird in Merlin Ponty is when he says things like, what is behind my back is not without some element of visual presence. In other words, he seems to be suggesting I can see things with eyes in the back of my head, and I think that can’t be true, right? It can’t. It’s not really true.

Taylor Carman
But it’s a common experience. I mean, to have the things behind me., right? I mean, it may be hyperbolic, but you definitely have an experience that’s more than just a thought in your head, I think, which is of being looked at, or as if somebody’s following you, and this might have to do with something on the edge of your visual perception, you saw something move, and so on. He’s not denying that our vision is situated, and there are hidden sides to things. Another thing he says, in one of those, in, I think, that same passage you’re talking about, is that to see things is to see them as hiding aspects of themselves and concealing each other, because I see the world as a three dimensional space in which things are among others, one thing among others, and that they’re all their aspects are there to be seen, that’s what I’m getting perceptually, and he wants to resist the idea that somehow there’s simply primitive data, and then I add this other thought to it, which is that it would look like something else if I move this way or that way. He wants to say that’s part of the visual perception. What I’m anticipating when I walk around an object is not another discrete appearance, it’s more of the object, the object that I already have in view when I see it from one angle instead of another angle, so the present and the just the perception of the object has to already be richer than you would describe it if you said there’s just a single primitive perception of the facing surface of the thing rather than the whole thing.

Ray Briggs
Taylor, does this help with a certain kind of skepticism? So you might think, look, I can see the front of my microphone, but how do I know that there’s a back? I don’t see that part. It seems like Merleau-Ponty doesn’t think that’s a real live skeptical hypothesis.

Taylor Carman
A lot of skeptical arguments are based on very bad premises and. Bad phenomenology, and I think that’s a good example. Yeah, it’s very weird to say I didn’t see the car, but I saw the surface of the car that was facing me. And as for the back, I don’t know. I mean, it’s very odd right now. That’s not a knockdown argument to say it’s very odd, but there’s something wrong about it. And by the way, if you see what you think is a car, and you walk around it, and you find out that it’s just a facade, and, and not a whole car, and you go back, and then look at it again, it will look different than it looked when you first looked at it. So your anticipations about the other sides of the object and the hidden features of it shapes your perception of it, so that you don’t just go back to the first perception you had, your first perception was not just of the facing side, and when you see, when you know that it’s a facade, you go back to it, and what you see from that same angle is a facade, not a whole object, so all that other stuff actually is sort of that your perception is saturated with that, not in virtue of judgment or intellect, but because that’s what vision is, that’s what let’s call it intelligent vision, the kind of vision that gives us a view of the world and not just data input.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Taylor Common from Barnard College.

Ray Briggs
Is there more to your mind than just your intellect. How can we reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason? If you understood more about perception, would it help you appreciate art?

Josh Landy
The art of enchantment and the enchantment of art—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when philosophy talk continues.

Sunday in the Park with George
Everything depends on execution. The art of making art is doing it together bit by bit.

Josh Landy
What makes for a great work of art? Is it the details or the way it puts them together? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Taylor Carman from Barnard College, and we’re thinking about Merleau-Ponty and perception.

Josh Landy
So, Taylor, we got a comment on our website from Daniel. Daniel’s interested in hearing more about Merle, Merle Ponte’s concept of flesh. Can you tell us about that?

Taylor Carman
Yes. Okay. Merle Ponty talks about flesh when he’s talking about the way in which we are not just in the world. Heidegger said we are being in the world, and that’s right. But Merleau-Ponty wants to think of ourselves as of the world and really just overlapping with the world, a part of the world, which may sound like materialism, but it’s not just that, and the reason is that he thinks that it’s very important that we see ourselves as woven into things like our vision and our sense of touch are woven together, so he and Sartre both talk about Matisse painting a rug, and the rug is, say, red, but it’s not a fire engine red, it’s a wool red, a wooly red, and so texture and color are really woven together. I mean, in that case, literally, but he thinks all of our senses are woven together, and my senses and your senses are woven together, which is why I have just as little doubt that you have visual experience as I doubt that, as little as I doubt that there’s a world, and flesh is a way of talking about that we’re just of the world rather than just like contained in the world as a discrete thing separate from other things.

Ray Briggs
So, Taylor, we’ve been talking a lot about Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, and you mentioned painting a minute ago. Should his theory change how we interpret art?

Taylor Carman
Yeah, Merle Ponti was not a philosopher who had a general theory of art, but he did say a lot about painting and a fair bit about literature, because he thought that some painters are doing phenomenology, some writers are doing phenomenology, and especially Cezanne was somebody who painted not just the way objects are, which is what more classical painters, who did these still lifes, where they get the exact, you know, touch of the glass and the metal and the fruit on the table. He wasn’t painting just the objects in their objectivity, but he was painting our perception of objects, how things present themselves as being there for us. And there are new ways of painting that get closer to these things I was saying we tend to forget about in philosophy, that when you walk up to something, your perspective on it is changing, and the goblet there on the table is not just something you see, but it’s something you can reach out and grab. So Cezanne will distort the perspective a little bit to sort of give the sense of this is something you could reach out and touch, because everything in your ordinary experience that’s close by is something you could not only see but also touch.

Josh Landy
I like that theory a lot. I mean, it’s.. I love the way he reads Cezanne. I love it by the way that he says art is not meant to be a showcase for ideas, so instead of thinking of art as being didactic, as trying to teach us something, he thinks of it as kind. Of trying to show us something, including, and I love this too, the mystery of the world, and that’s something he talks about in the Cezanne article, that somehow Cezanne is kind of restoring mystery to the objects in our world. Can you say a little bit about that? How does Cezanne, or I guess Merle Ponti himself, restore mystery to our experience?

Taylor Carman
Well, the disenchantment of the world is a, as a familiar topic, and others from other sources as well, and it comes partly from the scientific image of the world as mechanistic and causal, deterministic, and without value or meaning. Merle Ponti thinks that the actual world present to us through our bodies, through our senses, through our perception, and our emotions, and our memories, and the human point of view as a whole package has got this unfathomable sort of depth and richness about it, and again, it’s their inexperience for us to recall and remember, and artists are reminding us of this, painters, writers, poets are reminding us of this and expanding our appreciation of it, and I think he thinks phenomenology is doing something like that too. It’s not a kind of mystery, like murder mystery, where you can, like a riddle, you can solve and get the answer. It’s a kind of deep mystery, for which the question is kind of basic and primal, it’s a kind of awe or wonder that doesn’t have a resolution, but it’s absolutely essential to our experience of ourselves and philosophy and science too. Science is in the business, sort of abstracting from that, at least in the natural sciences, but it’s, it’s absolutely crucial when you’re talking about the cult, the human point of view, or what Sellers talks about, the manifest image of things that’s not the same as scientific theory. Yeah, he thinks philosophy can contribute to that, what he calls the tendency of modern thought as a whole.

Ray Briggs
So, I’m interested in the fact, Taylor, that Merleau-Ponty sort of picks out Cezanne to praise, because this suggests that Celan is sort of doing something that not all other painters are doing, and maybe doing it a bit better. Does he think there are differences in genre, where some genres are more likely to contribute to our sort of properly phenomenological understanding of the world than others?

Taylor Carman
I don’t think he privileges genres over the others, but he definitely has his favorite artists and writers, and a good contrast case is with impressionists, for example, and a certain kind of impressionist, like Surat, who seems to have had almost a kind of theory, a kind of sense datum theory, the pointillist sort of picture, you know, where you got all the dots, it’s almost like pixels on a TV screen, and then you, you step back, and you get a picture that’s all that’s on the verge of being a kind of theory of vision, which, of course, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t like. I mean, many of Surratt’s paintings are beautiful and brilliant in all kinds of ways, but when it comes to vision perception, yeah, he thinks Cezanne was very much onto something unique, not like the Impressionists, not pointillism, for sure, and he wants to praise that, but I don’t think that means that only says Cezanne is the greatest painter in history. Different historical periods have different criteria for what it means to paint well, after all, they’ve got different criteria of success, or they’re trying to accomplish different things. So, yeah, he has judgments and preferences about who’s doing, you know, making a philosophical contribution, and who might be on the wrong track in their writing, even, you know, Proust sometimes has psychological sort of theories, which maybe you don’t want to take up, but he’s a good, or maybe you do, source of reminders of what the phenomena are.

Josh Landy
I love this, I love this way of thinking about right, so a great honest is like Cezanne is reminding us of what phenomena, what it really feels like before our stupid reason gets involved and distorts everything, and he has this nice line in our ordinary life lives we lose sight of this esthetic value of the tiniest perceived thing, so if you, if you can sort of put on a pair of Cezanne glasses, once again, you can see just little pencil shavings or something as beautiful. I love this, but I want to switch to a totally different kind of question, because we’re getting towards the end of the show, and if you would feel remiss if we didn’t talk about Android Dave, which Sarah, our Roman philosophical reporter, talked to us about, what would Merleau-Ponty say is missing, if anything, from a chatbot? What’s going wrong?

Speaker 10
Everything, I mean, I can only speculate what he would have said, but here’s my feeling about it: everything he’s reminding us of is the importance of all the deep and complex background. conditions and background for something like seeing that so much of it is peculiar to us, the kind of organisms we are, and the kind of traditions we live in, and the languages we speak, and so on, that when you’ve got something that basically is an algorithm for putting out strings of symbols. Is that is such a superficial tiny output that it has basically nothing in common with what people are doing when they speak, when they perceive, when they remember, when they learn. Chatbots don’t do any of that, and so I think he would just be kind of appalled that people were taking this seriously as shedding any light on actual intelligence, perception, memory, learning, inference, I think he would think it’s just a complete, you know, mirage or parlor trick, you know, very technologically sophisticated trick, but it has really nothing to tell us about ourselves.

Ray Briggs
So, Taylor, this is one area where Merleau-Ponty’s legacy maybe tells us something that we would not otherwise have known. What are some other valuable philosophical lessons we might take from him?

Taylor Carman
Well, I think it’s just again a reminder of how so much of our world is coherent in ways we forget about when we apply an analytical kind of reason to ourselves, they’re little beautiful little observations that he makes. For example, when he points out, I love this, that when you sign your name with a pen and you’re just moving your fingers and maybe your hand a little bit, and then you sign your name on the chalkboard by moving your arm, it’s the same signature, and the sameness of that gestalt or that shape is very important, because you’ve got a sense of how to write your name, and it’s a kind of aspect of your character. It’s very much like character or style or figure that comes out in a person’s behavior, the way they talk, the way they move, the way they laugh, the things they’re interested in. When you get to know a person, you see it all, how it all hangs together, and it’s something you recognize, and then you can remember and be in the company of, and same thing with a book or an author’s work or art. These things are all they form a kind of coherence of style. I, so I would say that I would say he’s got a notion of how a style hangs together in a signature or a person, a personality or a tradition or a genre, and that synthetic sort of view is very important.

Josh Landy
I really like that. I love that, actually. The point about a consistent style, but there’s a part of what he says about emotion and behavior that I find weird. So he says that you know, anger, shame, hate, and love aren’t psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness. They’re types of behavior visible from the outside. How is that true? I mean, couldn’t somebody hide the fact that they’re feeling ashamed? Why should we think that emotions are all on the outside, they’re all in on our, like, visible on our faces and legible in our behavior. What’s going on there?

Taylor Carman
Well, how do you ever know that anybody is experiencing an emotion or any emotion? After all, you see them laugh, you see them cry, you see them flinch, you see them scowl. When he says behavior, by the way, I don’t think you should hear that in the same sentient which behaviorists often talked about behavior when they mean just measurable bodily movements. I think it’s comportment, something more like a kind of old sense of behavior, which means intelligent, meaningful behavior, in which you recognize a personality and intention and emotion, and so on. So that’s the primal phenomenon, is that emotions have expressions that allow you to recognize the presence of the emotion at all. Otherwise, there would be room for being skeptic. You could think maybe this is just a fancy robot and there’s no emotion behind it, but when you see somebody in pain or grimacing or in grief and weeping, there’s no doubt at all about the emotion. So, I do think, you know, sometimes Merleau-Ponty is a bit hyperbolic, so I would never say that nobody can ever hide an emotion. Of course, I mean it’s obvious people do that, but it’s not easy to do it. I mean, and it requires that you keep other people from seeing what’s going on, and if you know them very well and you spend any time with them, they will see what’s going on eventually, and so on. So the fact that you can hide something sometimes doesn’t mean it’s invisible.

Josh Landy
Well, Taylor, my body mind has learned a lot today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Taylor Carman
Thank you, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Taylor Carmen, professor of philosophy at Barnard College and author of a book entitled, appropriately enough, “Merleau-Ponty.” So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I think I want to go pay attention to some art and see what it tells me about my phenomenology. Kind of curious about musical theater. One of the songs we heard was from Sunday in the Park with George, which is about pointillism, and I wonder what it’ll show me.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and I’m like eager to get back out into the world and start seeing things from the point of view of other things, I love Merle proteins. Thought that you know, when I look at a house, I imagine how it would look to a tree, to a lamp post, to the dog. This is all just wonderful and seriously enchanting stuff. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, Philosophy talk.org And while you’re there, you can subscribe to our podcast. Of free and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now, the only guy who can say gestalt 10 times fast—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Schoales… It seems to me that Merleau-Ponty has given us no way of looking at things, which is, as we look at things, things are looking at us. Kind of perception is a constant ongoing dialog in real time between the body and what it perceives, the world and whatnot, all talking together like actual grown-ups, not shouting as perception did in times of yore. What Manuel Ponte is attempting is to establish it’s all part of the same package. Looker and looked, holder and held, skin and bone were probably doing reality a grave disservice by even looking. The innards of a thing, the tiny bits atomic and subatomic, those are all reality too. Us looking also reality. In reality, science, poetry, art, touch, sight, smell, descriptions, all of those and more, can be brought to bear. The act of description is in itself part of the ontological process. A horse can be something you ride, something you dissect, something that talks to Wilbur, a palomino, stuffed in an animal, an amputated Pegasus, a hippopotamus, slang for heroin, much, much more. So there needs to be some kind of gestalt that wraps reality up in one phenomenological package containing and disgorging both observer and observed, held and holding. Geez, I’m exhausted. Still, after centuries of just gawking through Merlot Ponty, we may have achieved the beginnings of coherence, but what does it mean? Near as I can figure, it’s back to monads, just like Leibniz said. Monads have been viewed with, or have developed energy rays, if you will, or are energy rays, particle or waves that are modern monads, and also the monad-driven observer that manifests as consciousness. Now we know everything has it, but rocks are pretty much close to zero. Ants have a lot of it, they can walk in a line, they seem to have jobs. Mammals are pretty damn smart, but does the dog know he’s a dog? We do, and that puts humans at the top of the perception heap. Our attention rewarded by knowing the names of the things in the world that have been given to us by us. You know, we might not see as well as elephants, but nothing gets by us. Finally, nothing. And everything is a monad when the lights go out. Even darkness is a monad, or the absence of one, which is the same thing ontologically, isn’t it? The problem enters in that we ourselves are part of the dialog, which means we are part of nature, but act like we aren’t. We have dictionaries and movies that put us a step above rocks and scrolls, but also a step behind. We can communicate, get the other to do what we want it to do, break a window if it’s a rock, fetch the ball if it’s a dog, but it’s a two-way street, except for dogs, of course. Get you to throw the ball by dropping it covered and drool at your feet. But what do rocks want? We do not know. Rocks communicate through reactivity or melting at very high temperatures, or hurling into you at great speed. These may be forms of communication to rocks, much like the haiku, or the six part Netflix series is to us. But perceiving and perceived cannot be disentangled. We must take everything into consideration when we name the rock. We summon the rock, but also volcanoes, and pebbles, and petrified forests, and rock fish, and rock music, puns, and poems and ingredients, melting points, screens of sand, or rocks too, tiny rocks, and you know, rocks do not have glossaries, rocks do not have dictionaries, rocks have beaches, rocks have cliffs, rocks bring bruises, rock spring grottos. Look at rock, rock, look at you, using a spidey senses, rocky senses, I guess. Senses below our kin, and we know from Nietzsche that he’s looking at the abyss, the abyss looks unto you, that’s just science. You look into the abyss, it’s gonna look right back. It’s only common sense ontologically, but hang on. If you look at common sense, common sense will also look back at you. And then, where are you? Next thing you know, common sense is looking into the abyss, and before I know it, you have an abyss, common sense combination. Not sure that’s what we need right now. Just saying, what is reality? Well, at any given moment, it could be duck season, could be rabbit season, it’s Bugs Bunny’s call, but always remember it’s Elmer Fudd pulls the trigger, not Merlau-Ponty. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KA LW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2026

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is James Kass. The senior producer is Devon Strolovich. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Edgelouni, Steve Choi, and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Emma Lozman-Plum, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockard, Matt Porter, John Lehmann, Nancy Smith, Robert Smith, Henry Witkowski, and Elizabeth Reitmeyer.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues at our website, philosophy talk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
and I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Ray Briggs
And thank you for thinking.

Dave
What’s up, Doc? What’s up, Doc? What’s up, Doc? What’s up, Doc? What’s up, Doc?