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"This wonderful book provides us with a potentially transforming look at self-love."
-Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Graduate School, "Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2005
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
-Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Graduate School, "Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2005
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception.
From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Seven little lectures (first given 1948 on French Radio) on modern philosophy and art and how they reevaluate the classic conceptions of what it is to perceive the world. More than just a run down of interesting research results on human perception, rather a modernist manifesto, which energetically rejects the stale world of the classics with it's hollow ideals of rationality and metaphysical grace and eternal completeness in favour of a full acknowledgement of the temporal finite, embodied, and sometimes irrational world of our senses. After all, we are not disembodied spirits but bodies and thus an integral part of the world we perceive.
Btw. modern in this context means modern in a proper modernist way, i.e. the one last genuinely used in the fifties and maybe early sixties of the last century, this makes it not only an inspiring read, and an interesting entry point into the world of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, but also a fascinating document of its time.
Btw. modern in this context means modern in a proper modernist way, i.e. the one last genuinely used in the fifties and maybe early sixties of the last century, this makes it not only an inspiring read, and an interesting entry point into the world of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, but also a fascinating document of its time.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
70 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Finally, an effective way to introduce Merleau-Ponty
28 Jan 2005
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
As a scholar whose intellectual life has been continually guided and inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty for three and a half decades, I am overjoyed by the translation and publication of these seven radio lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in France in 1948. For the serious scholar, these are beautifully written and elegant statements about the heart of Merleau-Ponty's project to shift the ground of philosophy and phenomenology by diving into the depth of the perceptual world and turning to art as a touchstone for a reawakened perceptual experience. However, for the beginning philosophy student, they are wonderfully clear, engaging, and immediately comprehensible. For many of us, it has been frustrating that for the introductory student, much of Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre is intimidating or calls for a greater investment of concentration than many students are willing to make. This book is the perfect solution: it is brief, clear, and inviting. The perfect introduction... I can't recommend it highly enough! ... A sheer delight, as well as subtle, nuanced and evocative!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Merleau-Ponty made plain
28 Jun 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Theory can be difficult to understand and apply. This book gives the author's philosophy clarity without compromising his theoretical application. Glad I've added this book to my collection. An added positive: it's easy reading!
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
there is something about anger in this book
12 Nov 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Letting the person escape.
The World of Perception (1948, 2002, 2004) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty has an introduction by Thomas Baldwin which mentions "important matters that escape science" (p. 14) and the idea of freedom that we only imagine:
. . . we can neither escape personal responsibility
by imagining that our dependence upon others
determines how we are to act,
nor escape this dependence upon others
by imagining that our freedom enables us
to shape our future inalienably. (pp. 23-24).
the significance of everything
we try to do is dependent upon
the meaning others give to it. (p. 24).
the poet has to rely on the fact
that the reader brings certain
expectations and understandings
to their reading of the poem (p. 26).
there is no escape from the
requirement to justify our actions,
but, equally, no escape from the fact
that as we locate our justifications
in a space of reasons whose dimensions
are set by others, we have to accept
that they are bound to be found wanting
in some ways. (p. 27).
We glimpse an enigmatic world when we allow entertainment values to provide the frame of reference of society as in these radio talks by Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
In fact, this world is not just open
to other human beings but also to
animals, children, primitive peoples
and madmen who dwell in it after
their own fashion. (p.54).
The standards of institutions which can fire people for not being needed at the moment, or for failing to adopt a new priority which has been selected in order to surround those with power and wipe out everything that they stand for, grants greater meaning to "these extreme or aberrant forms of life and consciousness." (p. 54). Having discovered the techniques for bombing people back into the stone age, the extremes of financial manipulation have also created a world reserve currency which can leave the entire world destitute by shutting off the electricity. We assume that civilization formerly belonged in an intellectual context:
For classical thinkers,
this is a question of divine law:
for they either see human reason
as a reflection of the creator's
reason, or, even if they have entirely
turned their back on theology,
they are not alone in continuing
to assume that there is an underlying
harmony between human reason and the
essence of things. (pp. 55-56).
And if, for one moment, I step out
of my own viewpoint as an external
observer of this anger and try to
remember what it is like for me
when I am angry, I am forced to
admit that it is no different. (p. 63).
The location of my anger,
however, is in the space
we both share (p. 64).
For anxiety is vigilance,
it is the will to judge,
to know what one is doing
and what there is on offer. (p. 67).
Cinema has yet to provide us
with many films that are
works of art from start to finish:
its infatuation with stars,
the sensationalism of the zoom,
the twists and turns of plot
and the intrusion of pretty pictures
and witty dialogue, are all tempting
pitfalls for films which chase success
and, in so doing, eschew properly cinematic
means of expression. (p. 73).
The World of Perception (1948, 2002, 2004) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty has an introduction by Thomas Baldwin which mentions "important matters that escape science" (p. 14) and the idea of freedom that we only imagine:
. . . we can neither escape personal responsibility
by imagining that our dependence upon others
determines how we are to act,
nor escape this dependence upon others
by imagining that our freedom enables us
to shape our future inalienably. (pp. 23-24).
the significance of everything
we try to do is dependent upon
the meaning others give to it. (p. 24).
the poet has to rely on the fact
that the reader brings certain
expectations and understandings
to their reading of the poem (p. 26).
there is no escape from the
requirement to justify our actions,
but, equally, no escape from the fact
that as we locate our justifications
in a space of reasons whose dimensions
are set by others, we have to accept
that they are bound to be found wanting
in some ways. (p. 27).
We glimpse an enigmatic world when we allow entertainment values to provide the frame of reference of society as in these radio talks by Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
In fact, this world is not just open
to other human beings but also to
animals, children, primitive peoples
and madmen who dwell in it after
their own fashion. (p.54).
The standards of institutions which can fire people for not being needed at the moment, or for failing to adopt a new priority which has been selected in order to surround those with power and wipe out everything that they stand for, grants greater meaning to "these extreme or aberrant forms of life and consciousness." (p. 54). Having discovered the techniques for bombing people back into the stone age, the extremes of financial manipulation have also created a world reserve currency which can leave the entire world destitute by shutting off the electricity. We assume that civilization formerly belonged in an intellectual context:
For classical thinkers,
this is a question of divine law:
for they either see human reason
as a reflection of the creator's
reason, or, even if they have entirely
turned their back on theology,
they are not alone in continuing
to assume that there is an underlying
harmony between human reason and the
essence of things. (pp. 55-56).
And if, for one moment, I step out
of my own viewpoint as an external
observer of this anger and try to
remember what it is like for me
when I am angry, I am forced to
admit that it is no different. (p. 63).
The location of my anger,
however, is in the space
we both share (p. 64).
For anxiety is vigilance,
it is the will to judge,
to know what one is doing
and what there is on offer. (p. 67).
Cinema has yet to provide us
with many films that are
works of art from start to finish:
its infatuation with stars,
the sensationalism of the zoom,
the twists and turns of plot
and the intrusion of pretty pictures
and witty dialogue, are all tempting
pitfalls for films which chase success
and, in so doing, eschew properly cinematic
means of expression. (p. 73).
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