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1. The Sensation Fallacy: Toward a Phenomenology of Perception
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1 The Sensation Fallacy: Toward a Phenomenology of Perception You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a . . . movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which you are observing. (Think for example of the question: “Are sense-data the material of which the universe is made?”)1 —Ludwig Wittgenstein Don’t think, look! —Ludwig Wittgenstein2 1. Looking Beyond “Sensation” After Descartes, wherever one looks—in science, psychology, and philosophy—one finds the sensation. While the word “sensation” appears only sparingly in Aristotle and Scholastic philosophy, after Descartes it becomes a master concept. It is not hard to understand why: the sensation is the key element that permits Descartes’s synthesis between the subjective, ideal domain of immaterial Mind (theology) and the objective, mechanistic world of Matter (natural philosophy). Res cogitans and res extensa: two distinct worlds linked through the sensation. In the prelude, I discussed the legacy of the Cartesian project, the weird way its flawed ontology has continued to shape the thinking of philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. This influence is still evident in the way we freely wield the language of “subjective” and “objective” in our pursuits of knowledge. It is evident in our continuing efforts to understand the “objective reality” of our human nature through machines. (Descartes’s favorite analogy was the clock; ours is the computer.) And it is evident in the widespread way in which thinkers, teachers, and textbooks treat sensations as the basic matter or substratum of perception. Indeed, far and wide, inside and outside intellectual culture, sensations are treated as the fundamental objective material, rooted in “sensory mechanisms,” and perceptions are viewed as unreliable subjective representations. It is weird but true: four hundred years later, Descartes’s “sensation” has come to seem like common sense. But at the outset of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues “that nothing could in fact be more confused.”3 Noth- The Sensation Fallacy 27 ing, he says, is more confused than our notion of the sensation and because we “accept it readily,” we overlook “the phenomenon of perception” (PP 3). In the first four chapters of Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty argues , in extraordinary detail, that the widespread, post-Cartesian commitment to the sensation causes substantial difficulties: it blocks our ability to recognize the character and features of perceptual experience, and it smuggles along the terms and categories of Descartes’s dualistic ontology. Without reconceiving the sensation (and the representation theory of perception that goes with it), we remain trapped in the Cartesian Theater, haunted by the specters of idealism, solipsism, and relativism. In my view, these arguments by Merleau-Ponty are immensely important, even though still widely unrecognized by philosophers, for what is at stake in them is a liberating new paradigm for understanding our perceptual life, embodied being, and relation to the natural world. To be sure, what is at stake is a new perceptual ontology that finally supersedes the idealistic and subjectivistic categories of Cartesian metaphysics . My goal in this chapter is to reconstruct the central thrust of these important arguments by Merleau-Ponty, to show that this basic ontology of the sensation , for all its familiarity, keeps us blind to our own perceptual experience. Now, to be precise, I believe that the philosophy and sciences of perception have yielded not one, but two main operative meanings for “the sensation”: (1) as an apparent sense quality, that is, a “sense-datum,” and (2) as nerve function. With this distinction in mind, there is little question that most post-Cartesian thinkers use “sensation” in the first sense. On this view, while there is corresponding nervous excitation, “sensation” refers to basic sense-impressions or data in conscious awareness that are treated as the building blocks of internal perceptual representations. However, in recent years a number of thinkers in the philosophy of mind/cognitive science tradition have tried to put it all on the “outside,” arguing for the second view: a strictly neurophysiological account of sensation (and perception). Here, then, we encounter a difficulty, for throughout his early books, Merleau-Ponty employs a strategic distinction between what he calls the “empiricist” and “intellectualist” traditions: criticizing first one, then the other, and then staking out his own position against them both. But on the subject of the sensation, dividing the views in terms of “empiricism-intellectualism” is not correct (as we will see), and it certainly doesn’t fit the terms of the contemporary discussion. Thus, in what follows I...