Back to Table of Contents
Aron Gurwitsch, a student of Stumpf and Husserl who emigrated to Paris before accepting his position at the New School in New York. Merleau-Ponty never considered himself a Gestaltist (he was a prominent figure in Phenomenological philosophy) but used Gestalt thinking to argue for a philosophy of the embodied subject in the world. “World,” following Husserl and his student Heidegger, is the world as lived, “le monde vécu” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 57), an interrelated but ambiguous structure of meaningful engagements. Gestalt phenomena provided an avenue for examining the nature of behavior, thought, and perception, where the meaning of perception is expanded from simply visual phenomena to the entire range of embodied experience. Early in Merleau-Ponty’s work, he noted how the most familiar definition of gestalt was in fact a definition of what a gestalt is not: It is different from the sum of its parts. Instead, Merleau-Ponty (1933/1971) offered a positive definition that begins to clarify how the concept of field is interwoven into gestalts: “The ‘Gestalt’ is a spontaneous organization of the sensuous field which makes the alleged ‘elements’ depend on ‘wholes’ which are themselves articulated into more extended wholes” (p. 193). Gestalts are organizations of the field that are in turn organized as elements of other gestalts in larger fields. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) offered a view that entails a layering of organizations or structures that comprise the “phenomenal field” (p. 54). Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963) suggested three types or orders of field as a way of countering the dualistic division of material or body ( res extensa ) and mind ( res cogitans ). The physical/vital/human orders, elsewhere noted as umwelt/mitwelt/eigenwelt, are interdependent fields interpenetrating and mediating between interiority/connectedness/exteriority. At base, he returns to the figure-ground concept: “A figure on a ground is the simplest sense-given that we can obtain. … [This is] the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual “something” is always in the “milieu” of something else, it always forms a part of a field” (p. 4). Forms are given in context, and without context, we do not have form. This is true of physical systems, but Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963) asserted that the systems of natural science are not the foundation from which we analogously conceptualize an understanding of a phenomenal field (p. 142). Rather, perception itself is the ground; embodied experience offers an organizing structure from which we discover and elaborate the lawfulness of nature, which in turn illuminates our structure. In addition to emphasizing the structural interdependence of form and field, this perspective brings the perceiver into the creative process of what is perceived. The perceiver is part of the field. The object of experience is never separate from the subject who experiences it. Put another way, perception or experience is always situated. We find ourselves in meaningful situations that we shape and that shape us in turn. Merleau-Ponty emphasized a phenomenological definition of structure that takes the place of the term “gestalt.” Structure was seen as the relationship of component parts that constitutes the whole, where that relationship comprises the meaning of the phenomenon in question. Psychoanalysis was a fascinating foil for Merleau-Ponty’s thinking throughout his career. Merleau-Ponty (1960/1982) noted, “The accord of phenomenology and of
572
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online