PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION: Some of its initial words

자료: http://www.archive.org/stream/phenomenologyofp00merl/phenomenologyofp00merl_djvu.txt

by M. Merleau-Ponty.

Some of initial words in its introduction:

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THE 'SENSATION' AS A UNIT OF EXPERIENCE 

AT the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon of perception. 

I might in the first place understand by sensation the way in which I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself. The greyness which, when I close my eyes, surrounds me, leaving no distance between me and it, the sounds that encroach on my drowsiness and hum 'in my head' perhaps give some indication of what pure sensation might be. I might be said to have sense-experience (sentir) precisely to the extent that I coincide with the sensed, that the latter 

ceases to have any place in the objective world, and that it signifies nothing for me. This entails recognizing that sensation should be sought on the hither side of any qualified content, since red and blue, in order to be distinguishable as two colours, must already form some picture before me, even though no precise place be assigned to them, and thus cease to be part of myself. Pute sensation[Pure sensation: this reader's guess] will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. 

It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this  notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms.^[footnote] But this does not dispose of the question as to why we feel justified in theory in distinguishing within experience a layer of 'impressions'. Let us imagine a white patch on a homogeneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain 'function' in common, that of forming themselves into a 'shape'. The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more resistent than that of the background ; the edges of the white patch 'belong' to it, and are not part of the background although they adjoin it : the patch appears to be placed on the background and does not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sensed, one may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a 'field'. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception.The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable,  but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of attending to the experience of perception, we overlook it in favour of the object perceived. A visual field is not made up of limited views. But an object seen is made up of bits of matter, and spatial points are external to each other. An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable, at least if we do the mental experiment of attempting to perceive such a thing. But in the world there are either isolated objects or a physical void. 

I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure impression. Rather, to see is to have colours or lights, to hear is to have sounds, to sense (sentir) is to have qualities. To know what sense-experience is, then, is it not enough to have seen a red or to have heard an A ? But red and green are not sensations, they are the sensed (sensibles), and quality is not an element of consciousness, but a property of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensations, if we consider it in the experience itself which evinces it, the quality is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived. This red patch which I see on 

the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an element in a spatial configuration. Moreover the colour can be said to be there only if it occupies an area of a certain size, too small an area not being describable in these terms. Finally this red would literally not be the same if it were not the 'woolly red' of a carpet.* Analysis, then, discovers in each quality meanings which reside in it. It may be objected that this is true only of the qualities which form part of our actual experience, which are overlaid with a body of knowledge, and that we are still justified in conceiving a 'pure quality' which would set limits to a pure sensation. But as we have just seen, this pure sensation would amount to no sensation, and thus to not feeling at all. The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what 'seeing', 'hearing','^' 'feeling' are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, 

we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call 'the experience error', which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither. 

We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. If we did we should see that the quality is never experienced immediately, and that all consciousness is consciousness of something. Nor is this 'something' necessarily an identifiable object. 

There are two ways of being mistaken about quality: one is to make it into an element of consciousness, when in fact it is an object for consciousness, to treat it as ah[an] incommunicable impression, whereas it always has a meaning; the other is to think that this meaning and this object, at the level of quality, are fully developed and determinate. The second error, like the first, springs from our prejudice about the world. Suppose we construct, by the use of optics and geometry, that bit of the world which can at any moment throw its image on our retina. Everything outside its perimeter, since it does not reflect upon any sensitive area, no more affects our vision than does light falling on our closed eyes. We ought, then, to perceive a segment of the world precisely delimited, surrounded by a zone of blackness, packed full of qualities with no interval between them, held together by definite relationships of size similar to those lying on the retina. 

The fact is that experience offers nothing like this, and we shall never, using the world as our starting-point, understand what a field of vision is. Even if it is possible to trace out a perimeter of vision by gradually approaching the centre of the lateral stimuli, the results of such measurement vary from one moment to another, and one never manages to determine the instant when a stimulus .........

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목차: 

Preface page vii

INTRODUCTION: TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA     1 The 'Sensation' as a Unit of Experience 3    2 'Association' and the 'Projection of Memories' 13    3 'Attention' and 'Judgement' 26    4 The Phenomenal Field 52 

PART ONE: THE BODY     Experience and objective thought. The problem of the body 67     1 The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology 73    2 The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology 90    3 The Spatiality of One's own Body and Motility[Mobility??] 98    4 The Synthesis of One's own Body 148    5 The Body in its Sexual Being 1 54    6 The Body as Expression, and Speech 174   PART TWO: THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED     The theory of the body is already a theory of perception 203     1 Sense Experience 207    2 Space 243    3 The Thing and the Natural World 299    4 Other Selves and the Human World 346   PART THREE: BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND     BEING-IN-THE-WORLD     1 The Cogito 369    2 Temporality 410     3 Freedom 434  

Bibliographv 457  Index 463