Here we can see how Heidegger's interpretation of the world as a unified context of meanings not only challenges the scientific view of the world as a spatiotemporal container or the sum total of objects; it also undermines the naturalistic assumption that the value of things is merely the subjective projection of our own individual tastes. For Heidegger, things already matter to us because they are expressions of the shared meanings we are engaged in. When I sit down at the table, for example, I do not initially encounter a flat, rectangular, or box-shaped object, I encounter something that matters to me and is already embedded in a web of social meanings. It is “a writing table, a dining table… [The table where] the boys like to busy themselves … [The table where] that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time” (Heidegger 1999a, 69). Merleau-Ponty will develop Heidegger's account of engaged and situated meaning, but instead of the equipmental relations of the work-world, he begins from the perceptions of the lived body.
The perceptual world
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes his project as a “return to the world of actual experience that is prior to the objective world” (1962, 45). Like Heidegger, he is critical of the standpoint of theoretical detachment because it tends to reduce the world to a spatiotemporal container and regards things not in terms of their mutual interdependence but as “partes extra partes” (73), as objects in a purely mechanical and external relationship with other objects. The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a geometric space or the sum total of objects. It is, rather, a “phenomenal field” (57), understood as the concrete background or setting in which we exist. The use of the word ‘field’ is important because it conveys the sense of the region or space of concern that we are involved in — like the field that we play soccer on — rather than something that is spread out below us (Langer 1989, 19). For Merleau-Ponty, it is the primacy of our situated perceptual involvements that makes it possible for us to adopt a scientific view of things in the first place. This is why he refers to being-in-the-world as a return to that world “which precedes [scientific] knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language” (1962, ix).
Where Merleau-Ponty differs from Heidegger is in the way he accesses the phenomenon of being-in-the-world. Heidegger focuses largely on ‘handiness’ and the relational projects of the work-world, whereas Merleau-Ponty focuses on the world of perception as the unified background that situates and orients our projects (Wrathall 2009, 38). This is why there is a ‘primacy of perception,’ for Merleau-Ponty, because what we first experience and what underlies all theoretical reflection is the world — as it is perceived. He refers to the perceived world “as the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1964a, 13). Here the word ‘perception’ is obviously not being used in the way that it is ordinarily understood. It is not an atomistic collection of sensations that are constituted or linked together by some mental process. What we perceive, rather, is a structured and unified whole, where “the perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’ ” (1962, 4). This means that there is no such thing as an isolated or ‘pure impression.’ Sensations make sense only insofar as they relate to other sensations in this unified whole.
Here we see Merleau-Ponty's critique of perception from the perspective of the realism vs. idealism debate. The realists generally take the mind-independent world as given, which then causally stimulates the sense organs of the perceiver. The idealists generally take the mind as given and the rules and concepts therein constitute and organize the world of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, both views not only assume that perceptions are initially made up of discrete sensations, they also both adhere to the same detached scientific view of the world as a geometrical space composed of objects in causal interaction. It is because both views interpret experience through these ready-made frameworks that they are incapable of grasping what Merleau-Ponty calls “the living nucleus of perception” (1962, 38), which is always prior to any theoretical assumptions about the mechanisms of experience.
This is why Merleau-Ponty's project begins from one's own living perceptions, where I am “first of all surrounded by my body, involved in the world, [and] situated here and now” (37). Our limited perceptual orientation provides us with different aspects of a unified background or whole, which is the “horizon of horizons” (330) that underlies all of my experiences and, through my engagement with it, allows me to make sense of the things that I perceive. And this unity is not constituted or mediated by the mind or intellect. It is given in the immediacy of sense perception — in seeing, hearing, touching — itself. Thus, “I do not have one perception, then another, and between them a link brought about by the [mind].” Rather, “each perspective merges into the other” against this unified background (329–330; see Wrathall 2009, 38). On this account, things acquire meaning because they are internally related to each other and are perceived from a particular perspective within this unified context. The tree I see from my office window, for instance, immediately presents itself from a particular embodied perspective that is itself only one aspect of a structured and coherent whole. What I see is that particular oak tree I sit under for shade on warm days when I want to read outside. The meaning of the tree depends upon where it stands in a complex interrelation to other things, to the office window, the sidewalk, the seasons, the campus lawn, and my own situated identity as a middle-aged college professor.
Meaning, then, is not an idea or mental representation. The meaning or significance of things emerges spontaneously through our situated and involved perceptions, through how we are oriented in public space, and by using, manipulating, and holding things from within this fleshly orientation. Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a smoker using an ashtray to illustrate this point. The meaning or significance of the ashtray is not the idea of the ashtray in the smoker's mind, an idea that is accessible only to the intellect. The meaning, rather, is given “in person” or “in the flesh” (319–323), in the smooth bodily familiarity that the smoker exhibits as he or she skillfully uses, holds, and handles the ashtray. Against the traditional view, then, meaning is not the result of some causal ‘psycho-physiological mechanism’ that produces discrete sensations. It is, rather, already bound up in the structured and unified weave of body, consciousness, and world. The things we perceive and comport ourselves with every day are meaningful or significant to us because of their place in a referential context and the situated ways in which we use and handle things within this context.