In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

43 N A T U R E A S G E S T A L T A N D M E L O D Y find the dialectical ferment that gives rise to intellectual consciousness already at the level of the lived perception of the thing. The interplay between perceptual structure and signification also appears in the constitution of one’s own body. My body is given to my perceptual inspection through profiles, like other things, but with the difference that it is, in principle, never entirely accessible to me. Since it always presents itself to me from the same side, I can never have the actual experience of it as one thing among many. Nevertheless, my “objective ” body, my body as it would be seen by another, presents itself through “virtual” significations that supplement my body’s direct perceptual givenness. We can distinguish, therefore, three different modes of the body’s givenness: first, it is perceived through particular profiles from a given angle at a particular moment; second, it is experienced as the lived unity of these profiles, though never completely, since some profiles always remain outside the range of perceptual experience; lastly, it is known as a complete and objective body, as a fully constituted thing in space. Thus, the perceptual hole or blind spot of my lived body, required by my perceiving from some point that I cannot perceive, is filled by knowledge from others or from science, just as the non-experienced profiles of the thing may be known even though they are not lived. This last stage in the constitution of the body is given only as an object of thought, as it requires virtual significations contributed by others or the study of anatomy to supplement actual perceptual experiences. Such significations will never, however, be equivalent in my experience to actually experienced perceptions. Physiological explanations of my body, such as neurological accounts of perception, are therefore never more than significations for me; they can never explain my lived experience, since they are derivative from it. Lastly, the steps in the constitution of the body also illustrate an interplay of structure and signification in our experience of others. It is only at the level of intellectual consciousness, when we have passed from the actual to the virtual, that the other becomes for me a problem in principle and raises the specter of solipsism. At the level of perceptual experience, others exist for me unproblematically as embodied existents. Just as my mind coexists with nature and my body, so also the mind of the other coexists within the world that I perceive. The mental, considered as a structure of behavior, is visible from the outside, so that “another person is in principle accessible to me as I am to myself” (SC 238/222). On the other hand, just as I have no guarantees, in any given case, of having understood myself correctly, so also I may misunderstand the other, since true understanding must sink deeper than mere signifi- 44 M E R L E A U - P O N T Y ’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F N A T U R E cations and capture the specificity of the full structure of the other’s being or my own (SC 238–39/222). In fact, this task of understanding can never be carried entirely through to completion, either in the case of knowing myself or the other, since our knowing is never adequate to our being, and the transformation of structures into significations can never be accomplished without residue. From Merleau-Ponty’s description of the interplay of structure and signification in our perceptual life, several conclusions follow concerning the relation between life and thought. First, a perception stripped of significations would lose its claim to attain the “thing itself,” since each profile would remain strictly individual and isolated. The transition from perceptual consciousness to intellectual consciousness does not befall perception after the fact and from the outside, then, but arises already within perception’s tendency to complete itself virtually and to link profiles spatially and temporally into a coherent experience. But, second, the “original text” of perception can never be exhaustively captured in significations. The “thing itself” is not the concatenation of significations but rather the inexhaustible perceptual plenitude from which they spring. Consequently, it is impossible to ever effect a pure passage from structure to signification, from the melody of perceptual structures to their virtual score. Lastly...

Share