Transcription
Having considered the limitations of traditional interpretations of sensation and the role of Association in memory, Chapter 3 addresses two other cognitive faculties: attention and judgment. And while the previous two chapters mostly critiqued empiricism, this chapter places a critical focus on intellectualism, which is Merleau-Ponty's name for idealism, with Descartes and Kant figuring prominently as exemplars of this philosophy. Each chapter up to this point, while filled with critique, has also put forth a constructive interpretation of perception: perception as ambiguous in Chapter 1, and perception as a unity in Chapter 2. Now, in Chapter 3, Merleau-Ponty will argue for perception as a dynamic, creative activity.
We begin with attention. One of the favored interpretations of this capacity by empiricism, and one that continues to be taught to this day in cognitive science textbooks, is the spotlight theory of attention. According to this approach, attention is a general, unconditioned power of the mind that can be applied to any contents that have entered the perceptual field through sense data. Attention does not create the perception of these objects, but merely shines a light on them, illuminating what are, through a combination of sense data and habitual association, pre-existing objects.
Another approach to attention is put forth by intellectualism, which, as already mentioned, is Merleau-Ponty's name for idealism. Whereas empiricism deploys a bottom-up approach, placing the weight of the perceptual experience on the incoming sense data, intellectualism offers a top-down approach, emphasizing thought's structure and purposeful role in determining the meaning of the objects that fall within perception. According to this approach, and like empiricism, attention merely reveals the intelligible structures already present in the object. However, whereas empiricism claims that this intelligibility derives from sense data, intellectualism claims that this intelligibility derives from the mind's categories and, as we'll soon discuss, its judgments.
Merleau-Ponty is critical of both approaches. He finds the empiricist theory of attention to be too passive, failing to adequately explain the production of objects in perception, wrongly assuming that those objects pre-exist their emergence within the perceptual field. Conversely, he critiques intellectualism for being too active, wrongly assuming that objects are fully determined by thought and thus, like empiricism, fails to explain the production of objects in perception, overlooking the contingency and unpredictability of perception and eliminating an element of discovery and learning that comes from beyond the mind's categories.
We'll next consider the intellectualist approach to judgment. It's helpful to define judgment in the manner Kant uses the term, which is as a fundamental cognitive act that produces knowledge. And like the classical understanding, such judgments are formulated as a proposition that can be evaluated as true or false. Importantly, in the case of Kant, such judgments rely on a priori categories of the mind: mental conditions that precede experience and are imposed upon sensory intuitions to make sense of them. All judgments are grounded in such categories. With this background in mind, we can consider Merleau-Ponty's presentation of judgment as it is represented by intellectualism.
According to this approach, judgment is what transforms raw sensations into coherent perceptions, filling in the gaps of perception for the inevitably insufficient and enigmatic sense data. Notably, Merleau-Ponty claims that the intellectualist approach relies on empiricist assumptions, namely that perception begins with discrete sensory points that must be linked together. The difference being that for the empiricist, it is a matter of association that does the linking, and for the intellectualist, it's judgment that does the linking. Both approaches strip perception of its distinctive role in meaning-making, missing its lived, dynamic nature.
Intellectualism also ignores an important distinction between the act of seeing and the act of reflecting upon what is being seen, instead collapsing direct sense experience into the reflective act of judgment. As such, perception is merely an interpretation of experience, born out of a combination of sensation and judgment, rather than a direct encounter with the world.
Merleau-Ponty puts forth several examples that illustrate the limitations of this approach. First, he critiques Descartes' famous analysis of a piece of wax, which moves from sensory qualities (smell, color, texture) to an abstract notion of wax as capable of infinite transformations. For Merleau-Ponty, this abstraction erases the perceptual richness of the wax as it is experienced, that is, its softness, dull color, and potential sounds when touched.
Second, he asks us to imagine holding two cardboard boxes, one large and one small, made of the same material but constructed in a way that they weigh the same. Nonetheless, one encounters the illusion that the larger box feels heavier, even though you know it isn't. Intellectualism would explain this by claiming that you don't actually feel the larger box is heavier, but instead judge it to be so based on faulty assumptions. In this view, perception is reduced to an interpretation or hypothesis about sensory data, rather than an immediate experience. Merleau-Ponty challenges this idea, instead arguing that such explanations miss the richness of perception as it is happening.
Third, he discusses the Necker Cube, which appears differently depending upon how you look at it. Even if you know the cube can be seen in multiple ways, your knowledge doesn't immediately change how you perceive it. The shift in perception isn't simply a matter of judgment or interpretation; it's tied to the way the figure itself presents meaning through its structure.
Fourth, Merleau-Ponty presents the Zollner illusion, where parallel lines appear to converge because of surrounding auxiliary lines. Intellectualism explains this illusion by saying that we mistakenly compare the whole figure instead of isolating the main lines. In other words, it's an error in judgment. But Merleau-Ponty asks, why is it so difficult to see the lines as parallel in the first place? It's because the auxiliary lines introduce a new meaning into the figure that transforms how we perceive it, and this transformation happens before any judgment occurs; it is part of the perceptual experience itself.
Now, according to Merleau-Ponty, intellectualism relies on a few philosophical dualisms. First, like empiricism, it assumes a world in itself that is an objective reality existing independent of consciousness. As such, both intellectualism and empiricism adhere to what's called the natural attitude, which presupposes an objective world out there that consciousness must correspond to or explain. Intellectualism simply shifts responsibility from the external world to consciousness itself, imagining a universal subject capable of organizing all sense data from the world out there into absolute truth. But according to Merleau-Ponty, this move only replaces one dogma with another.
Second, intellectualism treats the subject as both an object in the world and as the world's organizing principle, wherein the subject is a kind of absolute, transcendental consciousness standing outside of the world. It treats these two perspectives on the subject as somehow complementary truths without questioning their coherence or how it's even possible that both can coexist in the same subject. For Merleau-Ponty, these dualisms speak to the inadequacy of intellectualism as a philosophical approach. Instead, he suggests we have to move beyond such dualities to uncover how perception and meaning emerge through lived experience, whereby a unified subject and world are intertwined rather than separate or opposed.
Now, just a quick aside on this. I found this part particularly interesting in light of my readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis, where we'll see Lacan go in a different route, accepting the idea of a split subject, but showing how this philosophical split in epistemology is in fact a structural feature of language as it intersects with the subject. So, we find here a potentially notable departure between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. If you saw the S.A. videos, you may also recall Sartre's own critique of psychoanalysis concerning the idea of a split subject. He's mostly concerned there about the role of freedom and bad faith, but the arguments are similar to what Merleau-Ponty is presenting here concerning the split subject. And yet, it's also notable that, as we'll see, that most phenomenologists end up reintroducing some notion of the split, but ultimately articulated in a manner different than how we see in Kant and psychoanalysis, and that is thought in such a way as to ultimately preserve the more fundamental unity of the subject.
For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not about assembling isolated sensory impressions or making judgments about them. Instead, perception creates meaning spontaneously and holistically. When we perceive something, whether it's the weight of a box, the shape of a cube, or the convergence of lines in an illusion, we're not passively receiving data or actively interpreting it step by step. Perception is an act that simultaneously brings together sensory elements and infuses them with meaning. Unlike the passivity of empiricism and the activity of intellectualism and their respective approaches to attention, there is, in Merleau-Ponty's understanding of attention, a circumscribed ignorance that involves a balance between knowing and not knowing, and that allows us to engage with the world meaningfully, but without fully predetermining what we'll find.
Attention, then, is a dynamic and active process of learning that reveals objects in their unity and ambiguity. It creates a bridge between distinct perception and clear understanding without reducing one to the other. This function of attention can be demonstrated with specific neurological disorders that show that perception depends on a stable sensory field, which can disintegrate under certain conditions, leading to vague or unstable spatial awareness. For example, in a condition known as hemispatial neglect, there is damage to an area of the brain responsible for allocating spatial attention to one side of the visual field. It's not a disturbance of vision nor perception, but attention. When asked to copy a presented object, the patient will only copy half of the object and yet believe they have copied the entire object. It's only when the tester points this out to the patient that they will even notice what they've done. The fact that the patient can notice the error temporarily suggests that it is possible to perceive the whole object when directed to do so, but without this ongoing capacity for spatial attention, that wholeness will soon dissipate, leading the patient to return to perceiving only half an object, thinking it is the whole.
Such clinical cases suggest that attention has an essential role in perceptual consciousness. It's not some general capacity being directed by either sensation or judgment, but is itself a dynamic process that actively creates a perceptual field where thought can occur without losing any coherence. It steps back from the immediate sensory flux to identify the invariant features amidst changing appearances. Without such a process, or when its underlying physiology is damaged, objects cannot arrive to perceptual consciousness as integrated wholes.
Regarding judgment, Merleau-Ponty doesn't really provide a different understanding of this mental activity so much as attempt to show how it is secondary to perception itself, and that meaning primarily arises out of perception prior to judgment. This leads to an important point that Merleau-Ponty raises in this chapter: the interplay between reflection and perception. Reflection, which seems to be closely related to judgment, always arises from within a particular context, arising without fully knowing its origin, an origin located in perception. The primary phenomenon of perception is often concealed by reflection, that is, through our habitual or second-order perceptions, the kind we exercise in daily life and which is shaped by prior experiences and operates on what he calls the "surface of being."
For example, when we quickly glance around to locate ourselves among familiar objects, like identifying a door, a window, or a table, we don't truly see these things. Instead, they appear as mere functional references, reduced to their meanings as guides for practical action. And this reminds me of Heidegger's notion of "readiness-to-hand," wherein tools do not appear as objects in themselves, but only in their use-function. It's only when they fail to work that we notice them as objects, that they become "present-at-hand." But unlike Heidegger, for whom readiness-to-hand is a more primordial encounter with the tool, Merleau-Ponty seems to be indicating that this immediate interpretation of the tool in its utility is itself a secondary judgment derived from an even more primordial, sexual encounter with the tool, though perhaps not the tool as present-at-hand, which can be itself an abstracting, reflective relation to the tool as well.
I point this out because one way Merleau-Ponty is trying to differentiate himself not only from intellectualism but also, to some degree, from the preceding phenomenological tradition is the weight he's placing on embodied experiencing, an element that is de-emphasized or at least much less emphasized in someone like Heidegger. And so, to truly understand perception, we must look beyond these surface-level judgments to uncover its deeper, originating structure: a dynamic interplay between unreflective experience and reflective thought.
When we pause to contemplate an object purely for its own sake, something deeper occurs. The object ceases to be just an example of a general type (a tree) and instead reveals itself in its individuality. In this moment, perception becomes a creative act, as if the world is being seen anew, recreating the very idea of the object from its origins. This ability to perceive the unique essence of an object reflects what Merleau-Ponty calls "natural judgment," whereby meaning seems to emanate directly from the object itself. This judgment, unlike the judgment we've been talking about throughout, is not a deliberate weighing of reasons, but a spontaneous act of meaning-making that unfolds as we perceive.
And this idea of unfolding, of meaning-making, suggests that there is included in Merleau-Ponty's thinking and perception a developmental aspect. An example he provides in this chapter is the gradual development of an infant's ability to distinguish colors, from recognizing general contrasts (colored versus colorless) to more nuanced distinctions (warm versus cold shades, for example), and then finally to specific colors.
An implication of the preceding analyses of the actively creative and fundamental nature of perception is Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the importance of finitude, something that the intellectualist approach, in positing an absolute constituting consciousness, fails to do, instead viewing finitude as a deficiency or limitation to overcome. So, how is finitude relevant here? Well, for Merleau-Ponty, embracing finitude as meaningful in itself would allow for a richer understanding of perception because it would shift the focus from abstract, universal concepts to the lived, embodied experience of being in the world. If finitude were embraced positively, that is, as a philosophical concept, perception could be understood as an originating knowledge, a dynamic process in which meaning emerges through our embodied interaction with the world.
For example, when we perceive an object like a tree, we do not simply recognize it as part of a general category (the "tree-ness" of the tree) or apply pre-existing concepts to it. Instead, we encounter it as a unique presence that reveals itself through our specific perspective and context. This act of perception is inherently finite because it's shaped by our particular location in time and space. Yet, this finitude is not a limitation; it is what allows perception to be rich and meaningful.
So, ultimately, Merleau-Ponty calls for a radical rethinking of how we understand perception. He advocates for a phenomenological approach that sets aside traditional categories and focuses on the lived experience of perception as an active, embodied process. Perception is not about passively receiving stimuli or applying intellectual judgments; it's about engaging with the world in a way that continuously creates meaning through our bodily presence and intentionality. This approach reveals perception as a foundational act that shapes how we experience reality itself. Philosophical reflection, then, should awaken us to the unreflective, lived history of consciousness and its role in shaping our experience.
Next time, we'll address the notion of the phenomenal field, elaborating the notion of perception as an embodied, contextual, and intersubjective phenomenon that resists reduction to empiricist or intellectualist terms.
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