Feb 12, 2025 07:03 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 12, 2025 08:34 PM by Magical Realist.)
"When I press my two hands together, it is not a question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed, but rather of an ambiguous organization where the two hands can alternate between the functions of 'touching' and 'touched.' In speaking of 'double sensations,' psychologists mean that, in the passage from one function to the other, I can recognize the touched hand as the same hand that is about to be touching; in this package of bones and muscles that is my right hand for my left hand, I glimpse momentarily the shell or the incarnation of this other right hand, agile and living, that I send out toward objects in order to explore them. The body catches itself from the outside in the process of exercising a knowledge function; it attempts to touch itself touching, it begins 'a sort of reflection,' and this would be enough to distinguish it from objects.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
We do not just passively take in information from our senses. We actively interrogate the world and its objects with our senses. The hands are moving and feeling the bark of the tree. The eyes are scanning and focusing on the image of the tree before us. The ears focus upon the sound of its leaves swishing in the breeze. Every sensory event of our bodies is an act of finding out, of searching and acquiring those particular details in the world we find ourselves already aimed at. We seem to be conscious from the ground up, in the tingling flesh and contracting muscle itself, in the very mobility/stimulation of our bodies inside a world opened up on all sides with the promise and lure of infinite informability. Consciousness in all of its depth isn't just the passive absorption of light and sound and textures by our senses, but a grasping and a wrestling with a world always challenging and yet miraculously accomodating us at all times.
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
We do not just passively take in information from our senses. We actively interrogate the world and its objects with our senses. The hands are moving and feeling the bark of the tree. The eyes are scanning and focusing on the image of the tree before us. The ears focus upon the sound of its leaves swishing in the breeze. Every sensory event of our bodies is an act of finding out, of searching and acquiring those particular details in the world we find ourselves already aimed at. We seem to be conscious from the ground up, in the tingling flesh and contracting muscle itself, in the very mobility/stimulation of our bodies inside a world opened up on all sides with the promise and lure of infinite informability. Consciousness in all of its depth isn't just the passive absorption of light and sound and textures by our senses, but a grasping and a wrestling with a world always challenging and yet miraculously accomodating us at all times.