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CHAPTER 3 Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach RENAUD BARBARAS The purpose of the Phenomenology of Perception is to describe the perceived world, as it appears beneath the idealizations of objective thought, whether empiricist or intellectualist. To this end, Merleau-Ponty tries to return to the true meaning of the perceiving subject: it is not an intellectual subject before which the world is spread out in a transparent way, but an embodied subject opening onto a transcendent world. Thus, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, the phenomenological reduction takes the shape of a critique of reflexive thought, relying on the results of Gestalt psychology and Goldstein’s physiology. However, as Merleau-Ponty himself admits in The Visible and the Invisible , the viewpoint of the Phenomenology of Perception turned out to be inadequate. In fact, what is in question is not the results themselves, that is, the discovery of an original layer of experience, but the way in which they are interpreted: “Results of Ph.P.—Necessity of bringing them to ontological explicitation” (VI 237/183). At the time of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty considered being-in-the-world as an embodied consciousness: the perceiving subject is immediately interpreted as a consciousness and therefore , the body is finally understood as the “mediator of the world” for this consciousness. The relevant opposition is between a reflexive, or intellectual consciousness, and an embodied one. Yet, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticizes the use of this category: “The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction” (VI 253/200). There is no doubt that the insufficiency of the interpretation of the Phenomenology of Perception’s results is due to the use of this classical opposition. It appears that the fact of interpreting being-inthe -world and, hence, perception, as the activity of an embodied consciousness , amounts to missing the openness upon the world, the givenness (donation) of a transcendence that characterizes perceptual life. 77 78 RENAUD BARBARAS In other words, Merleau-Ponty realizes little by little that the critique he has addressed to the philosophy of reflection concerns any philosophy that relies on the concept of consciousness, Husserlian phenomenology included, and, therefore, that this kind of philosophy refers to a more general and more concealed ontological position. Since the recourse to the concept of consciousness prevents us from properly interpreting the results of the Phenomenology of Perception, a genuine philosophy of perception requires the disclosure and the uprooting of the ontological prejudice, which governs every philosophy of consciousness. In order to understand the movement, which leads from the Phenomenology of Perception to Merleau-Ponty’s final ontology, I would like to show that this ontological prejudice is rooted in a metaphysical attitude, the characterization and critique of which are borrowed from Bergson. This critique leads to a far more radical interpretation of the phenomenological reduction, a new meaning of the being of the world and, consequently, an original characterization of the essence of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s research after the Phenomenology of Perception leads him to emphasize an essential relation between the philosophy of consciousness , whether empiricist or intellectualist, and a usually implicit ontology, which Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls “ontology of the object.” From that moment, the relevant opposition for him is not the opposition between a philosophy of reflexive consciousness and a philosophy of embodied consciousness , but between an ontology of the object—to which both of these philosophies refer—and a new kind of ontology, which he must delineate. This point arises clearly in the chapter entitled “Interrogation and Intuition ” as well as in the outline entitled “Preobjective Being: the Solipsist World.” This text is particularly illuminating, even if Merleau-Ponty would probably not have kept it. In both of these passages, Merleau-Ponty attempts to define the conditions of a return to perceptual experience, which is required to clarify his own position with regard to phenomenology. This implied a critique of Husserl’s conception of essence, which is developed in “Interrogation and Intuition”: in short, he shows that phenomenology succeeds in overcoming the natural attitude by changing the beings into their meaning but is mistaken in defining the meaning itself as essence, namely, as something fully positive and clearly determined, a plenitude attainable by an intellectual intuition. However, the aim of this passage is not to discuss the first phase of Husserl’s work but to show that the...

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