Sunset at El Nido, Palawan, Photo by Jeane Peracullo

Introduction

In Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty sought to rediscover the body. He coined the word “lived” body to demonstrate its active involvement in the world. Perception is usually understood as an act of seeing—a physiological activity. When one perceives, however, seeing is not the first act. One does not “see” (the act is not to see only. It also involves other senses like smell, touch, hear) something as if that something stands independently of the self. Every seeing involves interpretation; in this case, the “seeing” is always mediated by paradigm one assumes. We can say that seeing-interpreting is part of perception. This means that the act of perceiving is not just cognitive alone. Merleau-Ponty claimed that perception is first and foremost embodied. Embodied knowing is not just cognitive; it involves the totality of the person including one’s psychological and emotional makeup; one’s social location (upper-middle class, middle class, etc.); and one’s gender and sexual preferences and orientation.

The depth of perception also highlights intersubjectivity. Since I perceive the world, the world perceives me as well, which gives rise to mutual recognition of our existence. For Merleau-Ponty, acquiring a depth of perception starts when one gives a direct description of one’s experience as it is, without offering causal explanations or interpretive generalizations of the experience.

Merleau-Ponty on the World of Perception & Science (1948)

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram lamented the loss of our dependence on other senses because of our over-reliance on the sense of sight. The western way of knowing is based primarily on the eye. The importance accorded to the eye is based on its immediacy with the pursuit of objectivity or pure knowledge. The supremacy of the eye over other faculties like touch, smell, and taste, rests on it is not messy, that is, it is freed from the bodily contaminants, which the other senses are subjected to. The eye is freed from bodily involvements while the other senses are more attuned with being alive, the eye, being detached gives the illusion of domination and control. This all-seeing arrogant eye establishes subject-object dualism, which results in the loss of awareness of interdependence, as well as, the refusal to acknowledge differences.

The Primacy of Touch

Touch is a source of knowledge that is at once more detailed and more stable than vision. With tactile confirmation, people are more secure in trusting their visual perspective. Touch exists in a continuum with sight and hearing. Touch attests the embodiment of the other, hearing allows the other to be listened to attentively and responsively, sight confirms the other like a relational, embodied being in its peculiarity and difference. Touch as a key sense then, emphasizes the relational aspect of who we are. It leads us to the truth that we exist in interrelationship with other subjects. It recognizes that boundaries exist between the self and the other, that interests of other persons (and the natural world) are not identical to one’s own, that knowing another takes time and attention. Touch then as the primary sense—probing, exploratory, taking in the particularity of each thing rejects the eye—which has begun to symbolize the detached, dominating and oppressing stance of “objective” knowledge.

We need to be re-acquainted with our senses and to be re-acquainted with nature! Listen to David Abram’s narration of the excerpt of his book, The Spell of the Sensuous.

According to Abram, “To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. Clearly, a wholly immaterial mind could neither see things nor touch things—indeed, could not experience anything at all. We can experience things—can touch, hear, and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, the flesh of its flesh and that the world is perceiving itself through us.”

Acquiring the Depth of Perception

“The rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove is itself a kind of a voice.”

“The rhythm and lilt of the local landscape.”

For Abram, deepening our perception means that we can begin to hear nature’s voice in the cacophony of sounds of the sheer diverse beings that make up the Earth.

Indigenous local cultures with their rich oral traditions have, across millennia, celebrated the complex relationships humans have with nonhuman animals and nonhuman beings in their midst.

“The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth .” (SS, 7).

Earth Talk: A Few Qualities Common to Traditionally Oral, Indigenous Cultures – David Abram

Towards a Corporeal Phenomenology

Just like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist, Gaston Bachelard’s deep and enduring love for the natural world is palpable. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard utilizes the poets’ extraordinary perceptual access to both the visible and invisible worlds, to construct what he calls a “concrete metaphysics.”

The term, concreteness does not only refer to the obvious physical parameters of a space or a being. It refers as well to the imagined contours of such a space or a being that extends to encompass the entire breadth and utmost depths of the universe, and all the way up to the heavens. For what is “inside” or “outside” in everyday language, but the rigidity of perception and poverty of the imagination?

The poetics of space calls for a deep appreciation of the perfection of beings that surround us, their absolute roundness, for they do not have the inside or outside (that we humans use to denote margins, and to some extent, connotations of exclusions and inclusions). He has said it best: roundness invites caresses. The roundness may refer to the shape of the earth itself, for it envelops everything in it.

The tree is the embodiment of this concrete metaphysics (1964, 240). But the tree is not just the tree that is immediately before our very eyes; the tree is also a witness or a testament to the immensity of the forest (1964, 185) that lies beyond the phenomenal field. Just because you cannot see it, it does not mean that it is not there, or that it does not exist. However, for Bachelard, “the immensity” goes even further than the geographical information that we may have. Through the eyes of a poet, the space acquires extraordinary depth and breadth.

The Poetics of Space does not call for nostalgia. It points more towards the acquisition of the depth of perception that will empower us to see that the current state of being of a thing is the thing itself-—-as it is in the present, or the here and now. Bachelard issues a dire warning: “Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are (1964, 185).”