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?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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).¹²³

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.⁴⁵

Sources

1. "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.

   Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 28–29

2. 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.

   Phenomenology of Perception, p. 41

3. 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].

   Phenomenology of Perception, p. 42

4. 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.

   Phenomenology of Perception, p. 215

5. 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.

   Phenomenology of Perception, p. 366

Where the argument is made

• 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

How the argument was received

settled-as-articulated