|
November 4, 2009
Back to a.aaaarg.org This time it is the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty where it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the bodily nature of perception, of the perceptual bedrock of human existence, remains his most profound and original contribution to philosophy.
The picture that held us captive was an epistemology whose understanding of the place of mind in a world such that our only knowledge of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. We know the outer world through the inner representations. Knowledge of things outside the mind/agent/ organism only comes about through certain surface conditions, mental images, or conceptual schemes within the mind/agent/organism.
The input is combined, computed over, or structured by the mind to construct a view of what lies outside. To buy into the picture is to hold that our knowledge is grounded exclusively in representations and that our reasoning involves manipulating representations.
The Introduction says:
Merleau-Ponty thus sought to rescue our understanding of perception from the conceptual oblivion to which traditional psychology and epistemology had consigned it. Perception... is neither brute sensation nor rational thought, but an aspect of the body’s intentional rip on its physical and social environment. Most philosophers today readily dismiss the empiricist notion of brute “sense data” as symptomatic of a more general failure to appreciate the intentionality of perception.
For Merleau Ponty no corner of human life is unmarked by the fact of our situated bodily perspective on the world. His later work marks a break with the residual subjectivism in the Phenomenology of Perception and makes a turn to an ontology of the flesh.
|
Gary the work of Merleau Ponty has been surpassed by the author of this essay who speaks and writes from the all-inclusive perspective of having Realized whole-bodily what he is talking about.
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/touch.htm