Abstract
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception comprises two main levels of analysis: the description of the general foundation upon which all human perception occurs and that of the lived, situated aspects of perception, as experienced by individuals. These ‘structural’ and ‘situated’ accounts of perception assume, respectively, the existence of a pre-personal body, which all human beings possess in principle, and of a historical body, which is the product of an individual’s ‘synchronization’ with the world. A comprehensive and faithful description of human perceptual experience must contain, simultaneously, the general, structural, individual, and situational elements involved in perception. It has also to show the ways in which these elements impact each other, leading to distinct outcomes. I propose, here, a situated account of perception that fulfills these requisites while confirming Merleau-Ponty’s insights and descriptions empirically, through cases of perceptual skill and learning in a large industrial plant near the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
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Notes
Notes regarding Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Oxon: Routledge, 2012), will heretofore be referred to as ‘PP,’ followed by the page number.
‘Synchronization’ is a central concept in the work of Merleau-Ponty and for those interested in understanding perception. The term itself does not appear in Phenomenology of Perception, but the idea can be found in at least twelve places in which Merleau-Ponty uses the verb ‘to synchronize’ (PP: 185; 213; 219; 222; 224; 245; 248; 251; 274; 330; 369; 516).
This is the reason parents spend so much time trying to provide their children with safe spaces to explore and synchronize with the world without hurting themselves significantly.
Kuhn (1996 [1962]: 193) has argued that this is the case of those who belong to two different paradigms: “Two groups, the members of which have systematically different sensations on receipt of the same stimuli, do in some sense live in different worlds”. Here we are extending his argument with regard to degrees of experience.
Dreyfus and Todes (1962: 560) describe three levels of phenomenological description in the work of Merleau-Ponty “starting from a fundierende analysis of the structure of appearing, progressing through an analysis of the way in which things and persons appear in the world we live in, and terminating with an analysis of the way in which objective thought posits an ideal reconciliation of the contradictions and ambiguities of appearance”. Within Dreyfus and Todes’ approach, I focus on the first two levels of phenomenological analysis here, being the lack or presence of synchronization what defines the appropriate level to adopt.
By ‘physical features’ of the perceptual scene I am not referring to the ‘qualities’ or ‘properties’ of such features, but whether they are perceptually available (i.e., present and perceptible) as well as how they are organized within the scene. These points will be discussed at greater length in the sections ‘A Situated Account of Perception’ and ‘The Physical Features of the Perceptual Scene and the Phenomenal Field’.
See Kelly (2005) for a thoroughly discussion of the normative role of indeterminate aspects of perception.
An example of this ‘tension’ is that which leads us to focus the lens of old cameras in order to get the most precise image.
As Merleau-Ponty states, “[e]ven if I know that [the picture] can be seen in two ways, the figure sometimes refuses to change structure and my knowledge must wait for its intuitive realization” (PP: 36).
The idea of a permanent gestalt shift is only relevant if ‘everything remains the same’; lack of continuous practice or aging, for instance, may lead individuals to lose their perceptual abilities.
I thank Dan Mistak for calling my attention to this point during Hubert Dreyfus’ lecture (Spring 2013, UC Berkeley).
I thank Samira Nagem Lima, an assistant researcher on the same project, for helping me with the technical details of this case.
This is also true for the kiln operator who had to learn to see the two flows of calcine. The difference is that while both slag and metal are present in the visual field of the metal operator, normal and abnormal calcine flows are apart in time for the kiln operator. This may have some impact on how easy or difficult is to develop the two skills, but both of them are embodied discrimination skills based on a figure/ground structure.
As seen, this is true only for those with the relevant experience.
We have a similar experience of not knowing where or what to look at when we walk in the streets of a new country—which sometimes gives us away as tourists. This is also noticed when we have to cross streets where traffic goes in the opposite direction, like in Japan or the UK compared to Brazil or the US. The ability to cross safely is not just a matter of “looking one way before crossing” (as written in some pathways of London); it is a matter of identifying which of the possibilities to ignore and which are significant at any given time and any given crossing. I thank Jean Lave for calling my attention to this example.
I am not going to analyze here the fact that perceptual scenes can be designed in order to elicit from or even ‘impose’ a certain figure/background on individuals; this is implicit in the idea of ‘mutual adjustment’ discussed earlier and consists of an opportunity for industrial designers to create safer and easier ways to operate.
This seems to be the kind of illusion Merleau-Ponty has in mind when explaining that “the illusion tricks us precisely by passing itself off as an authentic perception in which signification is born in the sensible and does not come from elsewhere. The illusion imitates this privileged experience in which the sense fits over the sensible perfectly, is visibly articulated or enunciated in it” (PP: 22).
Merleau-Ponty would argue in favor of the latter (in a quotation that also shows his reference to the general, pre-personal body): “Cases of ambiguous perception, where we can choose our anchorage as we please, are cases in which our perception is artificially cut off from its context and its past, in which we do not perceive with our entire being, in which we play with our body and with the generality that allows it to break at any time with all historical engagement, and to function on its own account” (PP: 292; italics added).
For instance, he proposes the idea of a ‘visual field’ and describes it as follows: “The region surrounding the visual field is not easy to describe, but it is certainly neither black nor grey. In this region there is an indeterminate vision, a vision of I do not know what, and, if taken to the extreme, that which is behind my back is not without visual presence” (PP: 6; original emphasis; bolding added). I adopt here the change in translation proposed by Kelly (2005: 81) in which the phrase “a vision of something or other” is replaced by “a vision of I do not know what”. It is true that we do not see the exact limit between the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ at the edges of our visual fields. On the other hand, it is also true that there is a space behind us that we do not perceive visually, and to claim that it is an ‘indeterminate vision’ is not a faithful description of how we perceive what is totally hidden behind our backs. If something moves at the edge of our visual fields, it may catch our attention, whereas it cannot attract our attention if it moves totally hidden behind us.
Thus, “in the visual field we see just as far as the hold of our gaze upon the things extend—well beyond the zone of clear vision, and even behind ourselves. When we reach the limits of the visual field, we do not go from vision to non-vision: the monograph playing in the neighboring room and which I do not explicitly see still counts in my visual field; reciprocally, what we do see is always, in some respect, not seen: there must be hidden sides of things and things ‘behind us’ if there is to be a ‘front’ of things, or things ‘in front of us’ and, in short, a perception… But finally, it is nonetheless true that an object travels through our visual field, that it changes place within it, and that movement has no sense outside this relation” (PP: 289).
Please see the two previous footnotes.
This is a clear example of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘motor intentionality’ (PP: 112f.), for instance, when he discuss the human ‘movement’: “The gesture of reaching one’s hands toward an object contains a reference to the object… as this highly determinate thing toward which we are thrown, next to which we are through anticipation, and which we haunt. Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world,’ and to move one’s body is to aim at the thing through it, or to allow one’s body to respond to their solicitation, which is exerted upon the body without any representation” (PP: 140).
A similar thing happens when we go to museums and spot a weird, strange object. First, we wonder whether it is a tool, a toy, or something else. Then we try to get closer and see it from as many perspectives as we can. Sometimes, we get so entertained that we almost trip over the cord that is separating us from the object!
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Acknowledgments
I am truly thankful to Hubert Dreyfus for his very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper as well as for the relevant comments from B. Scot Rousee, Stuart Dreyfus, Jean Lave, and André Abath. I am also indebted to Stuart Dreyfus and the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of California, Berkeley, for my appointment as visiting scholar in 2013 and to Cyndi Lowe for her outstanding editing work. This paper would not have been written without the support from grants coming from FAPEMIG/VALE S.A. (Process TEC-RDP-00045-10) and the CAPES Foundation (Process BEX 6237/12-6). CAPES is a research agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and FAPEMIG is a Research Funding Foundation of the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which has launched in 2010, jointly with VALE S.A, a public and national call for research projects that could impact some industry-related aspects, such as prevention of accidents and operational stoppages/breakdowns.
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Ribeiro, R. The Role of Experience in Perception. Hum Stud 37, 559–581 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9318-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9318-0