Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty - Judith Wambacq Series in Continental Thought

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here, another there.

      In what follows I will examine how both authors develop this difference between two kinds of thought. It will become clear that both consider “thought thought” to be grounded upon representation. “Thought thought” is nonoriginal because it understands its activity as representing an already existing (ideal or concrete) reality. Deleuze, for example, introduces eight postulates to describe “thought thought,” the central one being the postulate of representation. He also claims that the “history of the long error is the history of representation” (DR, 374).1 Although Merleau-Ponty never explicitly mentions representation as the object of his criticism, he repeatedly stresses that the “object” of his philosophy, indeed, of (true) philosophy in general, cannot be represented: “What I want to do is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely different from the ‘represented,’ that is, as the vertical Being which none of the ‘representations’ exhaust and which all ‘reach,’ the wild Being” (VI, 253).

      The idea that thinking thought is not about representing reality goes hand in hand with the idea that the access to reality—traditionally said to happen through perception and thought—cannot happen via representations. In the following sections, we will see how both authors explain this access, and thus what their alternatives for representational thought are. Since this criticism of “thought thought,” or “representational thought,” as I will call it from now on, also implies an attack on a specific conception of philosophy, we should see this chapter as a chapter on the nature of philosophical thought according to Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. However, for an expanded discussion of this topic, I refer the reader to the third chapter, where I situate their views of philosophical thought in the broader history of philosophy.

      In order to describe Merleau-Ponty’s theory of thought, we can take his early theory of perception as our point of departure, since “knowledge and the communication with others” continue “our perceptual life even while transforming it” (PriP, 7). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty holds that perception cannot be considered simply a condition of possibility of the act of thinking, since for him perception and thinking share the same basic structure: perception is an “originating knowledge” (PP, 43).2

      A central question of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception turns on how to explain the existence of perceptual constants. We perceive the surrounding world as a collection of determinate entities, continuous over space and time. However, the functioning of the senses with which we perceive these entities is not continuous: the eyes make saccadic movements; we blink; the head and body move up and down to the rhythm of our breathing, and so on. Moreover, we always perceive from one specific point of view, determined by the position of our body. How, then, are we to determine which viewpoint reveals the true nature of an object? How are constant perceptual qualities to be explained when de facto there is only a multitude of different sensations? Are these perceptual constants constructions or are they immanent to the perceived world? In other words, is perception a mediated process, or not?

      Before delving into these questions, it should be noted that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the question of whether or not we have access to the world in itself. As this question cannot be answered—it is impossible to say something about the world beyond our experiences—he limits his examination to studying the nature and the condition of our perceptual interaction with the world as we live it, the so-called “lived world.” As an introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, it is helpful to give a sketch of the theories from which he distances himself.

      Empiricists reduce perception to the possession of sensual qualities impressed upon the body by neutral stimuli. In this view, a perceived object is naught more than the sum of sensual qualities, and perception the function of the senses. However, empiricism explains the fact that we often perceive things or aspects of things for which there is no stimulus available—the back of a vase, for example—by appealing to attention and memory to complement the senses. In the case of an absent stimulus, the actual sensation is associated with a remembered sensation on the basis of resemblance. For example, the vase I see in front of me now is perceived as being similar to the one I saw from behind yesterday, and so I supplement the lacking sensation with the sensation from my memory.

      Merleau-Ponty argues that this explanation cannot be correct because, for a sensation to be perceived as similar to a remembered one, the sensation already needs to make sense. In principle, any sensation can be compared to any other in one respect or another. But for it to be compared with the “right” property, meaning the property that will allow us to identify it, the sensation already needs to have a particular sense. Hence, empiricism does not explain how we can perceive meaningful things but presupposes meaning or sense.

      It is fair to say that the intellectualist account of perception thrives on empiricism’s failure to explain perceptual “illusions.” The fact that we sometimes perceive aspects of things for which there are no physical stimuli indicates that perception is a matter not of the senses, but of the mind, of judgment. Perceiving something as a square, for example, would require deciding which of the different perspectives on the geometric figure is the correct one, the frontal view, or the rotated view, in which it appears as a diamond. In the intellectualist account, this unconscious decision is the outcome of an algorithmic processing of the information about how the position of our body transforms the spectacle in front of us. It is important to note that intellectualism recognizes that in order for one perspective to be connected with another—the frontal and the rotated view of the geometric figure—the first already needs to possess a structure or sense, which the second can complement. Since intellectualists consider the sensual givens to be merely physical, they believe it is consciousness that constitutes the whole intelligible structure of what is perceived: we perceive with our mind.

      Like empiricism, intellectualism presupposes what it needs to explain, namely, the fact that we perceive the geometrical figure, now as a square, then as a diamond. Before examining how we settle upon the right perception, we need to explain how we have perceptions in the first place. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that perception is determinate or, more specifically, that it can be decomposed into a variety of determinate elements. It claims, for example, that our perception of the size of an object is determined by an algorithm that takes into account its apparent size, the retinal image, and the distance between the perceiving body and the object. But in practice, we do not make this distinction between the size something appears to have and its actual size: we immediately perceive it as being, not seeming, big. If we correct our perception—if we realize that the object is not so big—that is not because we returned to the apparent size of the object and recalculated its relation to the retinal image and distance, but because the object makes more sense if seen as small. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that the elements upon which perception is decided are quantifiable because they can be processed. However, experiments designed to test our ability to determine the color of an object seen in colored light have shown that we can recognize a difference in the color of objects even when the numerical equivalents of both colored objects are equal. Intellectualism, in sum, seems to adhere to an atomism that contradicts daily experience, which always “sees” indivisible and nonquantifiable entities. This atomism also implies that the atoms that compose a perception are neutral and relative. They are theoretically exchangeable because they differ from one another only numerically. But this relativism is not present in perception. It is hard to make out the content of a photograph held upside down. “Up” and “down,” in other words, do not seem to be relative, and easily exchangeable, notions. However, the algorithm that calculates what is seen by taking into account the position of the body should give the same result whether the photo is held right side up or upside down. A last problem with intellectualism is that when perception is considered to be a judgment, when a pure impression is considered to be inexistent, it becomes very difficult to determine the dividing lines between perception and thought.

      Merleau-Ponty thinks that, despite their surface differences, empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception share the same presupposition: both regard perception

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