I am a graduate in Philosophy & Politics, from the University of Essex - a highly regarded institution for the study of these disciplines. I covered such areas as deconstructing the modern state, its apparatus and infrastructure and possibilities for economic growth; the history of political theory from Machiavelli’s The Prince up to Marx and Engels’ writings; as well as more specific, in-depth courses on canonised philosophical texts such as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and learned the tenets of critical theory in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. As such I have expert knowledge of a range of twentieth century Philosophy, including Marxism, Poststructuralism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Feminism, Critical Theory and Deconstructionism.

Why are intellectualism and empiricism inadequate accounts of perception for Merleau-Ponty? What is his alternative account?

"We must allow that corporeal things exist. However, they are perhaps not exactly what we perceive by the senses...but we must at least admit that all things which I conceive in them clearly and distinctly, that is to say, all things which, speaking generally, are comprehended in the object of pure mathematics, are truly to be recognised as objects" [Dillon, 1988 p.16] - Descartes, Meditations, Meditation VI.

Descartes' statement asserts that we, as rational human beings, can only be certain of the existence of things external to ourselves if they conform to the representations we have of them - that we can understand their nature only through scrupulous rational analysis that is guided (for Descartes) by a priori mathematical truths. This contention relies on Descartes' insistence that the only true certainty of human existence is that we exist primarily as thinking things. The rational ego, detached from the sensual world - Descartes' cogito - constitutes all that consciousness is, and we can be sure that we are sentient beings only by confirming the formula 'I think, I am'. This creates a divergence between the everyday phenomena of perception and the abstract ideas we associate with them, because the ideas about the object's nature appear to have priority over the experience we have of them. Empiricist theory challenged this by claiming sensory experience to be necessary for perception, but Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, exposes the flaw in the empiricist critique that it uses the cogito as a shared point of origin with intellectualist-rationalist theory. This, for Merleau-Ponty, gives the empiricist approach an overly deterministic view of objects as they appear in the world, and in doing so further reduces the phenomena of everyday perception to the alleged facticity of reflective rational-scientific calculation. This is why M.C. Dillon calls Descartes' theory "the thought that evolves into modern reductionism" [Dillon, 1988, p.16]. It is the purpose of this essay to show how Merleau-Ponty's reworking of the Cartesian cogito synthesises the characteristics common to both the intellectualist-rationalist and empiricist approaches to perception, but also manages to eliminate their differences by granting the perceiving agent a necessary and a priori interrelation with a semi-objective (or intersubjective) natural world, by developing his argument in relation to the phenomenological conception of Being.

The critique of intellectualism in Phenomenology of Perception is directed towards the idea derived from rationalist Cartesian discourse that our consciousness, as a wholly constituted being defined by the cogito, judges everything in the external world by rational reflection: "Perception becomes an 'interpretation' of the signs that our senses provide in accordance with bodily stimuli...but judgment also, brought in to explain the excesses of perception over the retinal impressions, instead of being the act of perception itself grasped from within by authentic reflection, becomes once more a mere 'factor' of perception, responsible for providing what the body does not provide - instead of being a transcendental activity, it becomes simply a logical activity of drawing a conclusion" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.39]. Merleau-Ponty characterises the follower of this approach as disregarding of the actual phenomena present to him/her in immediate perception, claiming that by preserving the ultimate truth of rational reflective judgment he/she attempts to construct a meaningful relationship to the world and its objects on the basis of egocentric rational principles: "In this way we are drawn away from reflection, and we construct perception instead of revealing its distinctive working" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.39]. Our immediate perception is not to be distrusted for Merleau-Ponty as sense experience is by Descartes. There is no need to seek certainty in our everyday experiences of the world because we are obligated to experience them anyway as a condition of our being. This reveals the intellectualist's prejudicial attitude: "Ordinary experience draws a clear distinction between sense-experience and judgment. It sees judgment as the taking of a stand, as an effort to know something which shall be valid for myself every moment of my life, and equally for other actual or potential minds; sense experience, on the contrary, is taking appearance at face value, without trying to possess it and learn its truth. This distinction disappears in intellectualism, because judgment is everywhere where pure sensation is not - that is, absolutely everywhere. The evidence of phenomena will therefore everywhere be challenged" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.437]. Intellectualist discourse claims that an object is only to be confirmed as what it is by reference to the rational idea corresponding to it in the mind of the agent, thus absolute knowledge of the object is equated to its formal characteristics. The intellectualist approach eliminates the validity of superficial, immediate appearances. This, for Merleau-Ponty, is not possible and actually leads to the contrary logical conclusion - if phenomena are to be disregarded in favour of calculation, all that can be known is calculation and not the world as it is; if all sensory information is to be doubted, then the intellectualist's point of contact with the external world is ruptured, meaning the desire for absolute determination descends into its opposite - what starts as an attempt at ascertaining valid properties of concrete objects becomes a self-referential network of abstract signifiers: "I must see the existing world appear at the end of the constituting process, and not only the world as an idea, otherwise I shall have no more than an abstract construction, and not a concrete consciousness, of the world. Thus, in whatever sense we take 'thought about seeing'. it is certain only so long as actual sight is equally so" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.437].

Merleau-Ponty accuses the empiricist approach of being overly deterministic, in contrast with intellectualist epistemology. His reservation originates in his interpretation that empiricism tries to assert the positivity of each and every sensation perceived by the senses all at once. He remarks that if we really did perceive objects as purely sensory stimuli, "we ought, then, to perceive a segment of the world precisely delimited, surrounded by a zone of blackness, packed full of qualities with no interval between them, held together by definite relationships of size similar to those lying on the retina" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.6]. If each object perceived by us presents all of its predicated qualities (from which our understanding ascribes their individual identities), then our senses would not only perceive their general appearance but every property inherent to the object's existence as what it is, namely its being. This is to say that, for example, we would not only see the bark and leaves of every tree when stood in a forest, but we would perceive every shade of green or brown in sight as clearly as the next - in its fully determined state. Paradoxically, what can be determined would be limited to what the eye is focusing on, since if experience of an object is necessary for it to be identified as what it is, then it would follow that what is not perceived loses its objective existence as soon as it slides from view. Furthermore, anomalies to perception like perspective are unaccounted for by empiricism - a star, to be determined as what we understand a star to be, must correspond to its dotlike appearance in the sky, when stars are infinitely larger than we perceive them to be, but would grow in actual size if seen through a telescope. Merleau-Ponty introduces the idea of apperception to account for this, as Dillon explains - "when the front of a physical object is evidentially present to me in perception, its back is co-presented, co-intended or apperceived by me...I can verify the appresented aspects by moving around the object: what was initially appresented can then become an originary presentation" [Dillon, 1988, p.116].

For these reasons Merleau-Ponty follows Gestalt theory in suggesting that our field of perception has a form-background structure: "Each part [of the perceptual field] arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning...when Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be a perception at all" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.4]. Perception cannot possibly contain all positivity, there are always qualities to objects that are not present to immediate experience. Our identification of objects as distinct from one other relies on this elementary mystique, because this is how it acquires meaningful existence - which is not something we ascribe to the object but which it contains in itself by virtue of its existing at all. The object, to be itself, must have a form of being that is not accessible to any other form of being, not even the microbiological scientist. Merleau-Ponty implies that empiricist theories of perception view the mystery of the object as simply a new frontier for scientific investigation - that everything about the object can be determined by deeper inquiry. The empiricist claims to know, or at least have the capacity to know, all that defines the object's existence because there is never a reference to being but to sensory impressions, which the rational mind must then assess and ascribe meaning to. This is to return to the detached cogito and ignore that our immediate perceptions occur to us as simple structures, which are essential to perception for us to be able to differentiate between objects. The form-background structure is key here because it highlights the necessity for Merleau-Ponty of indeterminacy, since to posit that one perceives a formal object at all implies its existence in space, and this spatial awareness is given immediately by the presence of the indeterminate background. Therefore the object's positivity can only be ascertained if one presupposes that anything not fully given to perception also has its own positivity that is hidden from consciousness: "We must recognise the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon. It is in this atmosphere that quality arises. Its meaning is an equivocal meaning: we are concerned with an expressive value rather than with logical signification. The determinate quality by which empiricism tried to define sensation is an object, not an element, of consciousness" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.7].

Since we interact with the world in this way, it is essential for Merleau-Ponty that we are able to understand our own consciousness through our relation to externality. He follows the Husserlian axiom that consciousness must always be conscious of some phenomena, which leads him to posit that "we must regard [the reflective act of consciousness] as a creative operation which itself participates in the facticity of that experience" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.71]. An introverted cogitation of consciousness cannot be an effect following immediately from experience, neither an act of a constituted, wholly rational ego communicating with itself. Reflection does not detach consciousness from the world, it simply switches the focus of consciousness from experience to itself. This means that the agent still remains aware of his/her objective existence - externality is still an object of conscious being - but the intentions of consciousness are directed inward rather than outward. He continues: "That is why phenomenology, alone of all philosophies, talks about a transcendental field. This word indicates that reflection never holds, arrayed and objectified before its gaze, the whole world and the plurality of monads, and that its view is never other than partial and of limited power. It is also why phenomenology is phenomenology, that is, a study of the advent of being to consciousness, instead of presuming its possibility as given in advance" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.71]. The transcendental field is the objective world as perceived by the agent according to whatever he/she is conscious of at any given time. This includes all sensory phenomena as well as the orientation of the subject in the objective world - we understand that we inhabit the world because our consciousness of the indeterminate makes us spatially aware. What Merleau-Ponty's approach offers that empiricist theories do not is an illumination of the actual qualia of existence as a conscious being in the world. The focus of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is to give illustration to the immediate, everyday perceptions that constantly and unavoidably occur within our conscious state. These perceptions, because we do not perceive their objects in full positivity, make absolute knowledge of anything impossible and thereby limit our intentional existence - we are involved in a constant interrelation of natural phenomena, meaning the objects affect our consciousness of them as we can affect their appearance by manipulating them.

Sense experience, then, to have a different intentionality to reflection, must occur to consciousness before any rational commentary can be made on it. But since it is clear that the phenomena of sense experience are at least partly intelligible to consciousness prior to analytic reflection, there must be some pre-thetic level of the conscious subject on which these judgments are made. This is what he calls the 'tacit cogito': "In the propostition "I think, I am", the two assertions are to be equated with each other, otherwise there is no cogito. Nevertheless we must be clear about the meaning of this equivalence: it is not the 'I am' which is pre-eminently contained in the 'I think', not my existence which is brought down to the consciousness which I have of it, but conversely the 'I think', which is reintegrated into the transcending process of the 'I am', and consciousness into existence" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.446]. Our existence must be presupposed if we are to think, because thinking is a predicate of human existence. The Cartesian cogito attempts to validate the opposite, but existence cannot be a predicate of anything, it is contained in the being of the thing as it is present in the world. Thus, the phenomena of consciousness are granted priority to their properties for a reflective judgment, because they are perceived by the tacit cogito as pre-eminent conditions of subjective existence: "it is not because I think I am that I am certain of my existence: on the contrary the certainty I enjoy concerning my thoughts stem from their genuine existence. My love, hatred and will are not certain as mere thoughts about loving, hating and willing: on the contrary the whole certainty of these thoughts is owed to that of the acts of love, hatred or will of which I am quite sure because I perform them" [Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p.445]. The aspects of conscious life which Merleau-Ponty recognises are accepted as universally present in all people, which he accounts for by granting them a form of being within the being of the conscious subject; we are aware of these acts of will because we understand them as existing within us prior to any rational verification.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dillon, M.C. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge 2004)