Merleau-Ponty criticized empiricism and cognitivism and introduced the concepts of the body and the phenomenological field to explain the process of perception. Instead of seeing perception as mere information processing or mental operations, he understands it as a process of interaction between the body and the world, and describes it as a concrete experience with temporal and spatial dimensions.
When Chulsoo sees an apple and perceives that it is red, the apple is the object of perception, Chulsoo is the subject of perception, and “the apple is red” is the content of perception. But how do we explain this human “perception”?
Empiricism holds that there is an objective world that the human mind does not intervene in, and that the world is perceived causally. This presupposes a one-to-one correspondence between the stimulus given by the object and the perception received from the object. For example, if we take the experience of perceiving an apple as an example, the color elements stimulated by the object, the apple, are perceived by the mind, and the elements are transmitted to the brain, resulting in the perception that the apple is red. However, empiricism has difficulty explaining perceptual experiences that do not match the object, such as perceiving an apple as gray when it is a mixture of red and green.
Attentionism emphasizes the role of the mind in human perception. In other words, perception was seen as the matching of sensed elements to concepts that exist in the human mind. For example, if Chulsoo perceives that an apple is red, he is reorganizing the sensed elements around the concepts of “apple” and “red” that exist in his mind. According to the theory of attention, objects that have not been conceptualized in the mind should be impossible to perceive, but this is not the case.
Merleau-Ponty criticized both empiricist and cognitivist accounts of perception. He believes that empiricism makes the error of overemphasizing the object relative to the perceiver, and that cognitivism makes the error of overemphasizing the mind of the perceiver relative to the object, and that a common cause of these errors is the neglect of the human “body” in the perceptual process.
Merleau-Ponty focuses on the human “body,” which he distinguishes from the physiological body in that it is the subject of the mind, is not separated into body and mind, and has the orientation to be conscious of something. He introduces the concept of a “phenomenological field” with the “body” at its core to explain perception. According to him, perception is temporal and spatial in the sense that it is only possible when the body encounters an object in a specific situation. In other words, the scene in which the body, as a subject of consciousness, encounters an object in a specific time and space is the ‘phenomenological field’, and what the body experiences in this ‘phenomenological field’ is perception.
In this context, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception is original in several important ways. First, he did not see perception as the mere collection of sensory information, but rather as the process by which the body interacts with the world. In this sense, perception is not simply a process of information processing, but is intimately connected to the experience of the body. Second, by emphasizing that perception always takes place in a specific time and space, he emphasized the specificity and individuality of perceptual experience.
For example, consider an apple perceived as gray by Chulsoo, who sees it as a mixture of red and green. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this can be explained as a phenomenological experience influenced by variables such as the illusion of the ‘body’ and time and space. The perception of an object that is not conceptualized in human consciousness can also be explained as an experience of the body in an unconceptualized state, since the body is not distinct from consciousness.
In conclusion, Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception overcomes the framework of empiricism and cognitivism. He sheds new light on the nature of perceptual experience by understanding perception not simply as a subject-object relationship, but as a process in which the ‘body’ interacts with the world. This shows that perception is not simply the transmission of information or the work of the mind, but a complex process that takes place in the interaction between the body and the world. This understanding allows for a more holistic and integrative view of perception, which has important implications for contemporary philosophy and psychology.
As such, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception is an important contribution to a deeper understanding of human perceptual processes and helps to clarify the nature of perception. It provides important philosophical insights that allow us to rethink how we experience and understand the world.
