So, ‘sensation’ and ‘judgment’ have together lost their apparent clearness: we have observed that they were clear only as long as the prejudice in favour of the world was maintained. As soon as one tried by means of them, to picture consciousness in the process of perceiving, to revive the forgotten perceptual experience, and to relate them to it, they were found to be inconceivable. By dint of making these difficulties more explicit, we were drawn implicitly into a new kind of analysis, into a new dimension in which they were destined to disappear. The criticism of the constancy hypothesis and more generally the reduction of the idea of ‘the world’ opened up a *phenomenal field* which now has to be more accurately circumscribed, and suggested the rediscovery of direct experience which must be, at least provisionally, assigned its place in relation to scientific knowledge, and to psychological and philosophical reflection.”–from_ Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, p. 62 .Maurice MerleauPonty
About This Quote
The principal difficulty which has to be made explicit lies in the fact that, in our description of the world, we are describing the world as it appears to us. That is to say, we can no longer take for granted that what we mean by the word ‘world’ is represented by the word ‘world’. It has become apparent that there is another kind of thing than the world, namely, what appears to us. This other kind of thing cannot itself appear to us; but it can be understood as appearing to us. We can therefore distinguish between what appears and what appears as something which appears.
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