The Upsidedown World

of Merleau-Ponty

Jonah Bossewitch

PHI 333

Professor Beatrice Longuenese

Novemver, 1996

Space is often described as the final frontier, but stargazers and science-fiction buffs rarely intend the various senses which this assertion can be understood. Since the formulation of the concept of space, philosophers have puzzled over the nature of this slipery, deceptive notion, and its relation to perception. As Kant formulates, "What, then, are space (and time)? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited?"1 While this issue may seem excessivly esoteric, it actually has a direct bearing on many central concerns in the philosophy of mind, including the interaction between the objective and the subjective worlds. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that Merleau-Ponty finds this subject extremly enlightening, and treats it in depth.

Although many of his ideas oppose the traditional Empircist stance, Merleau-Ponty shares with them the fundamental belief that certain types of knowledge can not be derived from a priori principles. He argues that "analysis has no justification for positing any stuff of knowledge as an ideally separable 'moment' and that this stuff, when brought into being by an act of reflection, already relates to the world"2 Merleau-Ponty reasons that the only way to discover new arguments is by breaking free from the closed loop of reflection, and turning to the wisest instructor of all—experience. Merleau-Ponty also reognizes, as any good scientist knows, that the key to uraveling a phenomena is through the study of boundary cases. Boundary cases allow the theorist to extract relevant informationextract more readily, since they eliminate extraneous variables, and render the crucial ones more salient. "We cannot catch it in the ordinary run of living, because it is then hidden under its own aqusitions. We must examine some exceptional case in which it disintigrates and reforms before our eyes."3

It is ironic that Merleau-Ponty often denigrates the scientific establishment, condsidering that, at heart, he reads like a humanist empirical psychologist. His choice to confront the problem of perception in the "ultimate court of appeal," namely experience, is consistent with the scientific method and "all its technical instruments." Merleau-Ponty does not limit his conception of experince to personal experince of a phenomena, but also admits the experience of observation as evidence with which and confirm or refute a theory. Furthermore, the cases that Merleau-Ponty cites certainly do involve some unusual, if not technical, apparatus. It seems as if we ought to understand Merleau-Ponty's exposition of his methodology as an argument that the subject of space belongs as much to psychology as it does to physics, with philosophy as the bridge that links the two approaches together.

Since Merrleau-Ponty wanted to isolate the phenomenology of space, he analyzed two sets of experiments which directly address this issue. Both sets of experiments involve an apparatus which alter the subject's ordinary visual input. Stratton designed a lens that inverted and reversed the image (a mirror image, 180° rotation), while Wertheimer's experiments invlovle a device which reflected the image at a 45°. Both of these experements were inspired by the physiological fact our retina's invert the input imgae, making the signal the brain receives upsidedown with respect to the scene in the external world. This strange fact, which cannot be determined through introspection4, naturally triggered many to speculate what might happen if the image was distorted artificially. The interpretations of these experiments also provide theorists, such as Merleau-Ponty, with ammunition for psycho-philosophical disputes.

Although it has generated tremendous interest in recent years, the probem of knowledge representation is far from solved. Many are surprised to learn that the eye sends an inverted mesage to the brain, however, their surprise probably stems from the naive assumtption that there is something like a tiny homonuculus located in the back of the skull, watching the projection of the eye on a movie screen. Once we understand that the visual cortex processes a representation of an image rather than the image itself, the orientation of the image becomes less crucial to the computation. However, the questions remain, how does a person learn to percieve the world correctly? Are images that appear upright relative the the veiwer always peceived as upright, or could a person learn to correct an artificially altered image? What cues does the mind use to determine its own reference frame? How much interaction is there between the various sense in the formation of an experience? These are the primiary questions that Merleau-Ponty attempted to use as a foothold to grapple with the ontology of space. "What we want to know is how an object can appear to us as 'the reight way up' or inverted', and what these words mean."5

Merleau-Ponty describes two sets of Stratton experiments, published under the titles Some preliminary experiments on vision without inversion of the retinal image, and Vision without inversion of the retinal image. The earlier experiments lasted two days, and Stratton reported that "the whole landscape at first appears unreal and upside down; on the second day normal vision begins to reassert itself, except that the subject has the feeling that his body is upside down."6 Stratton followed up these experiments with trials that lasted a week, and he found that "from the third to seventh dat, the body progressively rights itself, and finnally seems to occupy a normal position, particularly when the subject is active."7 When the glasses are removed visual perception imeadiately rights itself, however motor coordination takes some time to adjust back to normal.

We must be cautious with Merleau-Ponty's account of Stratton, since not everyone agrees that his results are conclusive. In his book Perception, Irvin Rock also describes the experiments of Stratton, in the context of experimental psychology. He notes that Stratton's "findings have been in dispute and are often misstated in textbooks. Rock cites inconsistent discriptions that varied from day to day, Stratton's ambiguity in differentiating between egocentric and environmental orientation, and Stratton's failure to distinguish between becoming comfortable with an experience as opposed to the experience becoming similar to its prior state. He also laments Stratton's neglect of 'more telling" experiments, such as spontaneous identification of familiar, symetrical objects (such as 'M' and 'W'). Rock points out that later investigtions, such as Erismann's and Kohler, are also inconclusive, and at present, we can not rule out the possibility that we can never learn to fully adapt to an altered image, and perceive it as if it were normal. Rock argues that "the most plausible answer to these related questions is that some linkage exists between the inverted image and upright vision, either inately, or through a lifetime of experience."8

Lucky for Merleau-Ponty, Rock's critisisms	do not significantly effect structure the of his argument. Although a more conservative interpretation of Stratton would have been less dramatic, and perhaps less convincing, it would still have provided sufficient evidence for Merleau-Ponty to preserve his conclusions. The central purpose of this example is to show that the standard dichotomy between form and conent needs to be challenged. Merleau-Ponty introduces Stratton's work by posing the questions "Is it true that we are faced with the alternative either of percieving things in space, or (if we reflect and try to discover the significance of our own experineces) of conceiving space as the inconceivable system governing the acts of unification preformed by a constituting mind? Does not the experience of space provide a basis for its unity by means of an entirely different type of synthesis?"9

In weighing the merits of the Idealist's and the Realist's positions, Melrleua-Ponty is forced to invent a third option which synthesizes the two. He cannot side with the Idealist, who believes that space is absolute and understood exclusively through the mind, since this position would predict that a subject should experience no trouble perceiving an inverted image as upright. Nor can he side with the strict Rationalist, who belives that space is purely subjective, and formed by the association of sence data with one another (primarily vision and touch), since this position would predict that the subject would learn to perceive naturally with the glasses, but would take as long to unlearn this newly aquired perception as it takes to learn it. "We can therefore see what the question involves; empiricism would wilingliy take the actual orientation of my bodily experience as the fixed point we need if we are to understand that ther are directions for us,—but both experience and reflection demonstrate that no content is in itself oriented. Intelectualism starts from this relativity of up and down, but cannot stand outside it in order to account for an actual perception of space. We cannot understand, therefore, the experience of space either in terms of the considerations of contents or of that of some pure unifying activity."10

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant attempts to answer the questions Kant then argues that both space and time must be (a) a priori and (b) nothing but the form of appearances.