Chapter 3 - Attention, Judgement and Other Work

Summary

In this chapter, I set out Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualism, which understands perception proper in terms of the top–down imposition of scientific and proto-scientific concepts on our sensory deliverances by way of judgements. Intellectualism begins with Descartes and is refined in parts of the B edition of Kants First Critique. The scientistic reading of Kant is propounded most notably by Léon Brunschvicg, one of Merleau-Ponty’s early teachers. I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique, to the effect that intellectualism neglects pre-conceptual perception, motivated attention and action and our early and exploratory acts of learning. It also neglects the singularity of empirical things and of the somatically and cognitively constituting subject. I go on to show how Merleau-Ponty takes up ideas from Kant that are not tied to intellectualist suppositions, including the synoptic synthesis of apprehension, the schemas for pure and empirical concepts, orientation in space, the feeling of perceiving and the productive imagination.