Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Prelude: Scenes from the Cartesian Theater

Prelude: Scenes from the Cartesian Theater 1. Descartes’s Revolution The philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650) was revolutionary to the core. There is little question that he intended it to be. As he wrote to his close friend, Father Mersenne: “I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. . . . I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.”1 When we recall the nearly exclusive extent to which the Scholastic education of his day was Aristotelian, and that, at one point, Descartes planned to write a volume that would replace the standard textbooks,2 we can see that Descartes was seeking to create a radical paradigm shift. The extraordinary thing is that he succeeded: his philosophy laid down the terms, categories, and problems that shaped—and continue to shape—much western thinking about mind, reality, and knowledge. Indeed, to a significant extent, we remain Cartesians . I realize that this claim may seem flawed or provocative. After all, much late-twentieth-century philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychology begin by criticizing or ridiculing Descartes’s thought. We have heard that the “Cartesian Theater” should be shut down as a model of mind.3 And his quest for secure, certain foundations has been pronounced dead, about as viable as his biological notion of “animal spirits.” All that is true: we are “recovering” Cartesians, to be sure. But I also believe that we have not clearly, decisively rejected a central innovation in Descartes’s thought. I further believe that this innovation, this metaphysical artifact at the heart of his revolution, continues to shape our language, fundamental concepts, and sensibilities. I am speaking here, not of Descartes’s radical skepticism, nor his metaphysical dualism, but rather of his representation theory of perception. This theory of perception is really, finally, Descartes’s legacy. For decades after him, then centuries, and in our own time, the latent ontology and language of his theory of perception has been accepted in the west as axiomatic, or “scientific,” or “just plain fact.” But more vigorously than any other philosopher, Merleau-Ponty argues that the representation theory of perception introduces a schism at the heart of life— 12 Prelude a radical separation of consciousness from the world, of self from others—and rends nature as matter-machine. If post-Cartesian philosophy finds itself wrestling with idealism, relativism, subjectivism, mechanism, and reductive materialism , Merleau-Ponty teaches us that it is because they so naturally follow from Descartes’s representation theory of perception. In any event, MerleauPonty ’s ontology lies on the other side of this theory. It lies on the other side as an alternative through its sustained critique of the theory. In order to appreciate the character and promise of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and then later his account of expressive cognition, I want to elucidate Descartes’s radical innovation of perceptual representation—its context, its bizarre logic, and its curious half-life. Perhaps then, as Merleau-Ponty says, we can better reject “the age-old assumptions that put . . . the world and the body in the seer as in a box.”4 2. The Context and Arguments for Perceptual Representation The emergence of Descartes’s philosophy is best understood at the nexus of two primary influences at work in his life and times, the “naturalphilosophic ” and the Scholastic.5 On one hand, there was a burgeoning micromechanical movement in natural philosophy—a movement into which Descartes was initiated by his formative meeting with Isaac Beeckman in 1618.6 Since the Renaissance, of course, European culture had been gradually adopting quantificational techniques and mechanistic models for practical affairs.7 But at the dawn of the seventeenth century natural philosophers were applying such models and techniques to the workings of the cosmos with remarkable results. Beeckman was an early innovator in this movement. Inspired by his many discussions with Beeckman, Descartes went on to make several breakthroughs in mathematics, optics, and theoretical physics; he wrote the Rules (1619–1620, 1626–1628) and The World (1633) as early attempts to legitimize this “natural-philosophic” enterprise. At the same time, Descartes was deeply infused with the Aristotelian scholasticism of his Jesuit education at La Flèche. In this profoundly theological milieu, the world was not depicted as an aggregation of “corpuscles” or “atoms ” in motion which could be captured numerically. Rather it was extolled, following Aristotle and Aquinas...