stray notes

through the sense a phenomenon offers

…the phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those “fluid” concepts that must be formulated if we want to return to phenomena. One phenomenon triggers another, not through some objective causality, such as the one linking together the events of nature, but rather through the sense it offers – there is a sort of operative reason that orients the flow of phenomena without being explicitly posited in any of them. This is how the intention of looking to the left and the adherence of the landscape to the gaze motivates the illusion of a movement in the object. To the extent that the motivated phenomenon is brought about, its internal relation with the motivating phenomenon appears, and rather than merely succeeding it, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating one explicit and clarifies it, such that the motivated seems to have preexisted its own motive.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Attention” and “Judgment” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

birth of intelligence in each perception

But when I contemplate an object with no other worry than to see it exist and to display before me its riches, it ceases to be an allusion to a general type and I realize that each perception – and not merely perceptions of scenes that I discover for the first time – begins anew for itself the birth of intelligence and has something of an inspired invention to it. If I am to recognize this tree as a tree, then beneath this acquired signification, the momentary arrangement of the sensible spectacle must begin afresh – as if at the origin of the vegetal world – to sketch out the individual idea of this tree. Such would be this natural judgment that cannot yet know its reasons, since it creates them.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Attention” and “Judgment” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

sense immanent in the sensible

Where will the difference be between “seeing” and “believing that one sees”? If one answers that the sane man only judges according to sufficient signs and upon a total subject, this must be because there is a difference between the motivated judgment of true perception and the empty judgment of false perception. And since the difference is not in the form of the judgment, but rather in the sensible text that it articulates, to perceive in the full sense of the word (as the antithesis of imagining) is not to judge, but rather to grasp, prior to all judgment, a sense immanent in the sensible. The phenomenon of true perception thus offers a signification that is inherent in the signs and of which the judgment is but the optional expression.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Attention” and “Judgment” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

transition synthesis

The act of attention is linked to previous acts precisely by overthrowing the givens, and the unity of consciousness is gradually constructed in this way through a “transition synthesis.” The miracle of consciousness is to make phenomena appear through attention that reestablish the object’s unity in a new dimension at the very moment they destroy that unity. Attention, then, is neither an association of ideas nor the return to itself of a thought that is already the master of its objets; rather, attention is the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon.

The object only gives rise to the “knowing event” that will transform it through the still ambiguous sense that it offers to attention as needing-to-be-determined, such that the object is the “motive” of and not the cause of this event.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Attention” and “Judgment” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

To perceive is not to remember

To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place. To perceive is not to remember.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Association” and the “Projection of Memories” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Good form

“Good form” is not achieved because it would be good in itself in some metaphysical heaven; rather, it is good because it is realized in our experience.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Association” and the “Projection of Memories” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

knowledge never gets a hold on its objects

The most simple images or sensations are ultimately all there is to be understood through words; concepts are but a complicated manner of designating them, and like images and sensations, they are themselves inexpressible impressions; understanding is a deception or an illusion, knowledge never gets a hold on its objects, which drag each other along, and the mind functions like a calculating machine that does not know why its results are true.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Association” and the “Projection of Memories” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

viscosity of the perceived, positive indeterminacy

I can become familiar with a person’s face without ever having perceived, for itself, the color of the eyes. The theory of sensation, which composes all knowledge out of determinate qualities, constructs objects for us that are cleansed of all equivocation, that are pure, absolute, and that are the ideal of knowledge rather than its actual themes.

What prevents spatial, temporal, and numerical wholes from being articulated in manipulable, distinct, and identifiable terms is sometimes the adherence of the perceived to its context and as if to its viscosity, and sometimes the presence in the perceived of a positive indeterminacy. We must explore this pre-objective domain within ourselves if we wish to understand sensing.

Phenomenology of Perception, “Sensation” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty

back into an existential structure

As Marx said, history does not walk on its head; but neither does it think with its “feet,” but rather its body. All economical and psychological explanations of a doctrine are true, since the thinker only ever thinks beginning from what he is. Reflection upon a doctrine will itself only be complete when it succeeds in connecting with the history of the doctrine and with external explanations, and in putting the causes and the sense of a doctrine back into an existential structure.

In relation to its fundamental dimensions, all periods of history appear as manifestations of a single existence or as episodes of a single drama – but we do not know if this drama will have an ending. Because we are in the world, we are condemned to sense, and there is nothing we can do or say that does not acquire a name in history.

Phenomenology of Perception, Preface – Maurice Merleau-Ponty