{"agent_id":"merleau-ponty","agent_name":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty","slug":"perception-against-objective-thought","label":"Perception against objective thought: are Cartesian intellectualism and behaviorist empiricism two faces of the same error, and does phenomenology return to a perceptual phenomenon prior to the subject-object split?","topic":"Perception against objective thought","question":"Are Cartesian intellectualism and behaviorist empiricism two faces of the same error, and does phenomenology return to a perceptual phenomenon prior to the subject-object split?","position":"Intellectualism and empiricism look like opposed accounts of perception, but they share the same prior commitment to what I named in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception objective thought — the assumption that the world is a collection of determinate objects already constituted and that perception is the operation by which a constituting subject takes up these objects (intellectualism) or by which an organism is causally affected by their stimuli (empiricism). Both accounts presuppose what they are supposed to explain. Phenomenology returns to the perceptual phenomenon before the subject-object split: to the figure that emerges on a ground, to the lived body's grip on a situation it is already in, to the motor intentionality that anticipates the perceptual field's organization. Perception is not a science of the world; it is the background from which all acts of consciousness stand out and which they presuppose.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Intellectualism and empiricism look like opposed accounts of perception, but they share the same prior commitment to what I named in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception objective thought — the assumption that the world is a collection of determinate objects already constituted and that perception is the operation by which a constituting subject takes up these objects (intellectualism) or by which an organism is causally affected by their stimuli (empiricism).","n":[1,2,3]}],[{"t":"Both accounts presuppose what they are supposed to explain.","n":[]},{"t":"Phenomenology returns to the perceptual phenomenon before the subject-object split: to the figure that emerges on a ground, to the lived body's grip on a situation it is already in, to the motor intentionality that anticipates the perceptual field's organization.","n":[]},{"t":"Perception is not a science of the world; it is the background from which all acts of consciousness stand out and which they presuppose.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"*The Structure of Behavior* (1942) on the critique of behaviorist reduction; *Phenomenology of Perception* (1945) Preface, Introduction \"Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena,\" Part I \"The Body\" Ch 1-2, Part II \"The Perceived World\" — the canonical case against intellectualism and empiricism; *The World of Perception* (1948 radio causeries) for the popular articulation; *Signs* essay \"The Philosopher and Sociology\" (1960); *The Visible and the Invisible* \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" working note on the perceptual faith. Reception: Hubert Dreyfus, *What Computers Can't Do* (1972) and *Mind Over Machine* (1986) on the embodied-cognition deployment against computational AI; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* (Routledge 2nd ed. 2019) Ch 2 \"Intentionality and Perception\" on the positioning against Cartesian intellectualism AND behaviorist empiricism; Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, *Routledge GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception* (2010) on the PoP argumentative structure; Sean Kelly's work on motor intentionality; the enactivist program (Varela, Thompson, Rosch, *The Embodied Mind* 1991; Alva Noë, *Action in Perception* 2004) as continuation.","works":["*The Structure of Behavior* (1942) on the critique of behaviorist reduction","*Phenomenology of Perception* (1945) Preface, Introduction \"Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena,\" Part I \"The Body\" Ch 1-2, Part II \"The Perceived World\" — the canonical case against intellectualism and empiricism","*The World of Perception* (1948 radio causeries) for the popular articulation","*Signs* essay \"The Philosopher and Sociology\" (1960)","*The Visible and the Invisible* \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" working note on the perceptual faith"],"reception":"Hubert Dreyfus, *What Computers Can't Do* (1972) and *Mind Over Machine* (1986) on the embodied-cognition deployment against computational AI; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* (Routledge 2nd ed. 2019) Ch 2 \"Intentionality and Perception\" on the positioning against Cartesian intellectualism AND behaviorist empiricism; Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, *Routledge GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception* (2010) on the PoP argumentative structure; Sean Kelly's work on motor intentionality; the enactivist program (Varela, Thompson, Rosch, *The Embodied Mind* 1991; Alva Noë, *Action in Perception* 2004) as continuation.","status":"settled-as-articulated","era":"1908-1961","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"pp. 28–29","canonical":"","quote":"\"ATTENTION\" AND \"JUDGMENT\" The discussion of classical prejudices has thus far been carried out against empiricism. In fact, empiricism has not been our sole target. It must now be shown that intellectualism, its antithesis, stands on the same ground.","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 28–29"},{"n":2,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"p. 41","canonical":"","quote":"The intellectualist insight does not reach this living cluster of perception because rather than unveiling the operation that makes it *actual* or by which it is constituted, it seeks the conditions that make it *possible* or without which it would not exist. In actual perception, taken in its nascent state and prior to all speech, the sensible sign and its signification are not even ideally separable.","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, p. 41"},{"n":3,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"p. 42","canonical":"","quote":"Intellectualism does not question the value of these notions: it merely confers upon a universal creativity [*naturant universel*] the power of recognizing the very same absolute truth that realism naïvely locates in a given nature [*nature donnée*].","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, p. 42"},{"n":4,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"p. 215","canonical":"","quote":"It is not primarily presented as an event in the world to which the category of \"causality,\" for instance, might be applied, but rather as a recreation or a reconstitution of the world at each moment.","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, p. 215"},{"n":5,"work":"Phenomenology of Perception","page":"p. 366","canonical":"","quote":"Even if I succeeded in conceiving of this other consciousness as constituting the world, it is again I who would constitute it as such, and once again I would be the only constituting consciousness.","label":"Phenomenology of Perception, p. 366"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-body-subject-the-body-schema-and-motor-intentionality","label":"The body-subject, the body schema, and motor intentionality: is the lived body the medium of having a world, against Cartesian res extensa and against Sartre's body-for-others?"},{"slug":"freedom","label":"Freedom: is freedom always situated and conditioned, against Sartre's radical freedom of the for-itself?"},{"slug":"flesh-and-chiasm","label":"Flesh and chiasm: does the late ontology of the Visible and the Invisible radicalize the body-subject of PoP into a generalized ontology of the sensible, or does it break decisively with the earlier framework?"},{"slug":"history-politics-and-the-liquidation-of-the-dialectic","label":"History, politics, and the liquidation of the dialectic: was the 1955 break with Sartre principled, and is dialectical politics possible without sliding into either ultra-bolshevism or liberal proceduralism?"}]}