My Body, My Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th century French philosopher 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, a school of thought that says perception is more than just the sum of its parts. For example, when you’re looking at a tree, you don’t just see a bunch of green and brown dots that you painstakingly piece together. You just… see the tree.

Of course it’s possible you might not realize it’s a tree right away. Suppose you’re taking a walk in the woods at dusk and you see something that might be a bear. Then you realize it’s just a tree stump, so you do get to recognize it as a tree eventually. But was there some stage of perception where you were just misinterpreting a bunch of green and brown dots? Merleau-Ponty would say you’re still seeing it as some kind of object, not just a bunch of disconnected shapes. You may not recognize that it’s a tree at first, but your mind can’t help putting things together into some kind of pattern. But now suppose you’re looking at a beautiful bit of Islamic art, with those gorgeous geometrical patterns,that aren’t meant to be pictures of anything. You see a lovely green triangle next to a really cool blue circle, and not a tree in sight. And yet you’re still seeing a thing: a beautifully painted ceiling. You can’t escape from your mind making meaning.

So does figuring out how our perception tell us anything important about the world we perceive? After all, even if I know everything there is to know about how eyes and ears work, I still haven’t learned anything about the bird I’m looking at, or the melody it’s singing. But 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, then you’ve also learned that the objects in front of you are smaller than you thought.

That’s fine for distortions and mistakes, like forgetting you’re wearing your glasses and imagining things are bigger than they are. But Merleau-Ponty isn’t just talking about mistakes. He’s talking about ordinary perception. And if you care about avoiding mistakes, you have to understand the nature of ordinary perception. If you’re not careful, you’ll start believing that the world just flows into your eyeballs and presents itself directly to your mind, and you can just sit there and drink it in. The reality is you have a whole bunch of work to do: you have to keep track of objects as you move around—and 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.

All of this reminds us just how important our bodies are—that even when we’re doing philosophy in a disembodied blogspace, we still need our eyes and our fingers. It also reminds us that the world is kind of magical. We can get really caught up in meeting our bodies’ needs, but he says the task of philosophy is “to reveal the mystery of the world.” And our guest will have more to say about Merleau-Ponty’s vision—it’s Taylor Carman from Barnard College, author of many books and articles about Merleau-Ponty.