Perceptual and intuitional experience in Merleau-Ponty and Bergson

Abstract

In this thesis, I will make distinctions between Merleau-Ponty‟s and Bergson‟s account of perception, and disclose how intuitive experience and memory transform and improve perceptual experience. I will, first of all, depict how Merleau-Ponty treats perception as the subject‟s most concrete and basic relationship to the world. Secondly, I will explain why Bergson points out the limitations of perception by disclosing a more fundamental aspect of human experience, which is according to him, duration: the temporal aspect of perception. Both philosophers begin by understanding perception as they aim to depict consciousness in action. The distinction between these two philosophers is that while for Merleau-Ponty the priority is corporeal perception and the subject; for Bergson the priority is duration as according to Bergson, perception is an organization of memory and duration (time) which transcends consciousness and the subject. Merleau-Ponty explains perception in its multi-faceted aspects of being-inthe- world, and as a meaningful phenomenon in the habit-world. He treats time and space as a unity in the experience of the body and perception. However, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Bergson emphasizes the limitations of this phenomenal and habitualized perception, and elaborates the genesis of perception in terms of duration and pure memory. Considering perception in a continuous relationship to memory, Bergson shows the possibilities for organization and dis-organization of the habitworld through varying degrees of repetition of useful memory-images as well as through compositions and re-compositions of habitualized acts. Following this line of thought, I will suggest that intuition, as an experience of the expansion and progress of memory, can reverse and transform the phenomenological experience of perception as well as habitual way of perceiving things through the intuition of the singular object. It will be shown that perception habitually responds to all members of a general type in the same way, but intuition aims at what is unique in the singular and particular object. This intuition of singularity can contribute to our knowledge of the “thing in itself” as well as to the experience of genuine novelty in perception. In sum, it will be shown that Merleau-Ponty‟s phenomenology emphasizes the indeterminacy of perception, and his philosophy emerges as a philosophy of ambiguity of existence, while Bergson‟s philosophy develops into a philosophy of duration and creative process.