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The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953
The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France after his election to the chair of philosophy in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career.
In these notes, we see that Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Ponty’s notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism.
Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history.
In these notes, we see that Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Ponty’s notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism.
Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history.
- GenresPhilosophy
320 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2011
51 people want to read
About the author
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
119 books598 followersFrench phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 29, 2020
Useful for being the only text in which M-P gives a clear definition of "level" and "dimension," but not useful for much else.
The course was intended to establish a link between perception and language to show how the body schema's diacritical structuring of the perceptual world already establishes a kind of proto-language before language, but in fact, the majority of the course is spent discussing the perception of movement as treated by Michotte, Bergson, and Wertheimer; and various instances of agnosias and apraxias as treated by Schilder, Head, and Goldstein.
Now that I've read every text of M-P's that has been translated into English, I have a somewhat clearer understanding of his ideas--enough to say that M-P's ideas themselves are not so clear. He is very clear about what perception is *not,* but he often lacks the language to describe it positively. Generally, he proceeds by via negativa, and then by an ambivalent "bad ambiguity" which he will later renounce, and then by metaphor. He fills in the gaps in his descriptions by appealing to the "magic" and the "mystery" of the body and the world, or else with poetic turns of phrases borrowed from Claudel, Valéry, and Stendhal. He can be frustratingly cryptic when I want him to be analytic, and, at other times, can labor down paths that aren't exactly relevant to his central concerns. A significant portion of his writings exist only in notational shorthand, and are therefore fragmentary, obscure, and incomplete. None of his works by themselves present the scope of his interests in a unified form, and it is necessary to read all of his writings to get a clear idea about the "system" he is constructing.
An attempted summary, gleaned from his entire corpus:
M-P describes how language emerges from perception with an argument by analogy: perception is
"like" a language by virtue of being a practical, diacritical system of expression. Perception unites the body's senses into a unified, synaesthetic whole, such that each sensory modality invokes echoes of the others, and establishes a system of coordinates whereby things in the world begin to take value. Moreover, each moment of sensation is accompanied by a motor sensation--an affect--which spurs our body into action to "resolve" the tension the affect brings on and to attempt to maintain an "optimal grip" in its world. The body is continually adjusting and readjusting itself to its milieu, never quite able to come to an absolute mastery of what it is doing, yet nonetheless capable of learning or "incorporating" certain sensorimotor norms and habits. The auto-affective reflexivity of the flesh (its double aspect of touching-touched, sensing-sensed) provides the ground for language's uniquely recursive and reflective aspects to stand upon. The flesh's infinitely creative tendency to transcend the given towards virtual realms whose contours are traced out as "present-absent" potentials for possibilities expressive sensorimotor actions provides the function by which it comes to produce linguistic systems at all. And flesh's double movement of spontaneity and sedimentation provides the bases by which the flesh can install itself in the new forms it produces, take them as its new norm, and use them as a launching pad to throw itself beyond itself into further virtual realms. The flesh's teleology of expression realizes a symmetry of ends and means. Since expression is an infinite task, it is pursued for its own sake. Being infinite by virtue of its incompleteness, expression provides us with an "existential eternity" which we can inhabit in the present, "ever new and always the same."
The course was intended to establish a link between perception and language to show how the body schema's diacritical structuring of the perceptual world already establishes a kind of proto-language before language, but in fact, the majority of the course is spent discussing the perception of movement as treated by Michotte, Bergson, and Wertheimer; and various instances of agnosias and apraxias as treated by Schilder, Head, and Goldstein.
Now that I've read every text of M-P's that has been translated into English, I have a somewhat clearer understanding of his ideas--enough to say that M-P's ideas themselves are not so clear. He is very clear about what perception is *not,* but he often lacks the language to describe it positively. Generally, he proceeds by via negativa, and then by an ambivalent "bad ambiguity" which he will later renounce, and then by metaphor. He fills in the gaps in his descriptions by appealing to the "magic" and the "mystery" of the body and the world, or else with poetic turns of phrases borrowed from Claudel, Valéry, and Stendhal. He can be frustratingly cryptic when I want him to be analytic, and, at other times, can labor down paths that aren't exactly relevant to his central concerns. A significant portion of his writings exist only in notational shorthand, and are therefore fragmentary, obscure, and incomplete. None of his works by themselves present the scope of his interests in a unified form, and it is necessary to read all of his writings to get a clear idea about the "system" he is constructing.
An attempted summary, gleaned from his entire corpus:
M-P describes how language emerges from perception with an argument by analogy: perception is
"like" a language by virtue of being a practical, diacritical system of expression. Perception unites the body's senses into a unified, synaesthetic whole, such that each sensory modality invokes echoes of the others, and establishes a system of coordinates whereby things in the world begin to take value. Moreover, each moment of sensation is accompanied by a motor sensation--an affect--which spurs our body into action to "resolve" the tension the affect brings on and to attempt to maintain an "optimal grip" in its world. The body is continually adjusting and readjusting itself to its milieu, never quite able to come to an absolute mastery of what it is doing, yet nonetheless capable of learning or "incorporating" certain sensorimotor norms and habits. The auto-affective reflexivity of the flesh (its double aspect of touching-touched, sensing-sensed) provides the ground for language's uniquely recursive and reflective aspects to stand upon. The flesh's infinitely creative tendency to transcend the given towards virtual realms whose contours are traced out as "present-absent" potentials for possibilities expressive sensorimotor actions provides the function by which it comes to produce linguistic systems at all. And flesh's double movement of spontaneity and sedimentation provides the bases by which the flesh can install itself in the new forms it produces, take them as its new norm, and use them as a launching pad to throw itself beyond itself into further virtual realms. The flesh's teleology of expression realizes a symmetry of ends and means. Since expression is an infinite task, it is pursued for its own sake. Being infinite by virtue of its incompleteness, expression provides us with an "existential eternity" which we can inhabit in the present, "ever new and always the same."
Displaying 1 of 1 review