Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination

TWO. Perceptual Imagining

P e r c e p t u a l I m a g i n i n g 3 3 33 TWO Perceptual Imagining T he seashore is the site for a festival of the senses. The dark, purple waves betray hints of red, green and yellow, a palette that changes each moment as the waves roll into shore. Their translucent surfaces communicate to the eye their syrupy texture and the warmth of the sun that dances in their wake. From the crests of the waves, a dense spray of salt and foam is thrown into the air, creating a scent that is so strong that one can almost taste the salt. The sound of the waves crashing into the sandbar forms a rhythmic ostinato for the melodious cry of gulls overhead. Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by perception. From Phenomenology to Perception to The Visible and the Invisible, his philosophy centers on perception.1 The perceptual image contains a wealth of information about the physical environment and is a source of both pleasure and knowledge of the world around us. Each sense quality not only possesses a depth and hidden dimension of meaning , but is also supported by a context of related qualities. The body reacts to what it discovers in the sensible manifold by interpreting it in terms of what it can do, perhaps in the form of an affective response to the rhythmic sound of the waves, or a surge of energy one might receive from the rays of the sun. In either case, the imagining body is provided with new possibilities by the 3 4 P e r c e p t u a l I m a g i n i n g perceptual scene that it can appropriate as actual modes of being in the world. Between the perceiver’s body and the world of the sensible is a mutual dependence that constitutes the basis of human experience. A major influence on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception was the concept of the perceptual Gestalt that he borrowed from Wolfgang Koehler, K. Koffka and others. Gestalt psychology rejects traditional theories of perception that focused on individual sense qualities as independent bits of information. It was believed that consciousness combined these bits of sensory information into elaborate pictures in the mind that represented the sensible world as it appeared to consciousness. But experiments conducted by Koehler and others suggest that the “building block” approach to understanding sense experience failed to capture many essential aspects of perceptual phenomena. It has been shown, for instance, that a gray figure on a black background reinforces the color of the background, while the same gray on a gray background is made to look darker than the gray in the first example. In another experiment , a ring of gray on a yellow background is shown to appear blue (SB 80–81/SBF 89–90). In each of these cases, the color of the shape is altered by the context, suggesting that we cannot discern colors simply by combining bits of information. A common way to explain the nature of the Gestalt is to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Along with the Gestalt psychologists , Merleau-Ponty concludes that an essential structure of perception is that of a “figure on a background” (PP 4/PPF 10) that cannot be accounted for by traditional theories of perception. To understand the logic of perceptual experience, we must look beyond the mere sum of sense qualities and begin to consider the effect of the entire context on how we perceive colors, shapes and sounds. A problem that arises concerning the study of the perceptual Gestalt is that the Gestalt is by nature ambiguous and resistant to analysis. When we turn to study the background of a particular sense quality, say the purple waves of the seashore, the color of its P e r c e p t u a l I m a g i n i n g 3 5 distant surroundings blurs into a pale blue that, at the margins of our visual field, “tends toward neutrality” (SB 82/SBF 91). If we try to focus on the color of the margin, the margin emerges into the foreground as a figure, such as when one looks into the sun and perceives its yellow center but loses hold of the original figure, the purple...