Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Literature review Example

According to Marleau-Ponty, the human body is in itself an expressive space. It could mainly contribute to the significance that attributes to personal actions. It can also be said to be the origin of the expressive movement and therefore a medium for the perception of the world. Hence he argued the bodily experiences were the sole provider of meaning to the perception that went beyond the things that had been established merely by thoughts. Merleau-Ponty further assumed that substance and existence were in away related. He argued that substance expressed existence and that further the existence only realized itself through substance. He, however, put a break on any thought that substance could only be merely a form of signification or rather expression of existence and as such, existence could not be ruled as anything that was expressed through substance, and they both give each other shoulder in that they help explain each other.

Marleau-Ponty posited that in a way speech is thought-making and therefore, speech was a way that people used to express their thoughts. Thus the thoughts that could not be expressed through speech or any other means was temporarily absent to the conscious mind. Those thoughts that could be expressed could thus become conscious. And therefore according to him; it was that the consciousness of human thoughts depended heavily on whether or not they could be expressed. He, however, put it to rest by stating that there is a chance human body could become conscious of thought even in the event that they had not been previously expressed. He again compounded the idea of perception here that existence was solely on a condition of things that unconscious and beings that were conscious. He argued that the bodily experience was in itself an ambiguous mode of existence. In that, there was no way the idea of the body could in any way be separated from the experience of the body, and this could be attributed to the fact that when it came to mind and body, there is not a way that they could be separated as object and subject. Because the mind and body were capable of becoming their own being and as such the perceptions that are taken by the body did influence in a big way the perceptions of the mind.

Perceptions, as brought by Marleau-Ponty, express themselves as what could be referred to as determinate objects. Therefore culminating in a very objective interpretation of the body, his argument showed the very limits of this account that gave a sketch of an alternative understanding of the body across a big number of domains. This was inclusive of the experience that was gotten from one’s own body and lived space. Lived space differs from space as extension because it is the personal experience of our spatial dimensions. Even in his study and contrasts with the pathological aspects like the limb, he goes ahead to describe the bodily mode of existence as one that is “being toward the world.” The worldly tendency comes at a price of objective gear towards a vital situation. This was explainable not regarding third-person causal interactions and still was not by either explicit judgments or representations. Therefore the reaction of the body toward the world could be described as ideally temporal and that it involved a debate that was between not only the present body and also the habit body.

While it was true that the body’s reaction to the world was an essential background for the experience of anything in particular, because indeed the body in itself is experienced in ways that it’s different from any other thing altogether. There are both inner and outer horizons; the inner horizon in one’s consciousness while the inner horizon in the external environment. He attributed this to the fact that it was a permanent part of any person’s field of perception even though a person could not get to experience all of it directly; it had what could be referred to as double sensations. And an example lied in the act of people touching hands; this could result in them enacting some form of reflexivity. This showed that it had in some way effective experiences that were not just representations. Kinaesthetic senses that were its movements were gotten straightforwardly.

He also opined that every sense is spatial. The kinaesthetic awareness were made possible by the preconscious movements of the body. They were also of equal spatial equivalences which was what he referred to as “The body subjects.” This was when he introduced the issues of situational spatiality. He stated that the aspect of being toward the world was just as a projection towards the lived goals and as such got its expression through its spatiality and this should have been known as what formed the background against which objective space was consequently constituted. He then introduced the Schneider case, which by fact was very popular. Schneider had suffered from brain injuries and had perception impairment leading to poor ability to project his virtual space. Merleau-Ponty had this reliance on pathological substitutions for spatial abilities in a way that helped bring the relationship the body had with lived space to light. He therefore argued that the body-space relationship was intentional. To the extent that he interestingly asserted that body space was, in fact, a multi-layered manner in its way of relating to things and therefore that the body did not in just live space but lived in fact to inhibit that space. From here he pointed that just as the way bodily space reflected a form of intentionality that was in itself ordinary, which was in some way encounter with the world in the way it was meaningfully structured.

In one of the many ways he talked about perception in his book, turned to the phenomenology of the perceived world. Moreover, his aim here was to show the pre-reflective unity coexistence that could characterize the body as it correlated with the synthesis of matter and the world itself. With a statement that stated, “The body is made of one substance, matter, and the mind of another substance.”

Conclusion

This paper, therefore, showed the fact that Marleau-Ponty had the belief that the study of perception would open up a lot of avenues including the Cartesian problem that assumed the divergence of the soul and body. Further, he noted that whenever there is a perception of a particular behavior then the world that there becomes one that was intended by this very behavior. He thus pointed out throughout the discussion that the world had held to be his world alone and that this shared world was one of fundamental communication. Hence, he talked about the general problem of transcendence among many vital aspects that he sought to discuss. To the extent that he left more questions that he did answer.