Objects and Fields

Abstract

“A psychology,” Merleau-Ponty tells us, “is always brought face to face with the problem of the constitution of the world” (1945, p. 60). Perception was classically viewed as “a window on to things”—as revealing the “truth in itself”—and, correspondingly, the subject became transformed into a “psycho-physiological mechanism” (1945, p. 54). The function of the mechanism is gathering information. Merleau-Ponty explains:

Sense experience, thus detached from the effective and motor functions, became the mere reception of a quality, and physiologists thought they could follow, from the point of reception to the nervous centres, the projection of the external world in the living body. The latter, thus transformed, ceased to be my body, the visible expression of a concrete Ego, and became the object among all others. Conversely, the body of another person could not appear to me as encasing another Ego. It was merely a machine… (1945, p. 55).

“…man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” (M. Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. xi.)