The Shock of Sensation: Merleau-Ponty's Non-Immediacy of Perception

by Corry Shores
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The Shock of Sensation
Merleau-Ponty's Non-Immediacy of Perception

What does the immediacy or mediacy of sensations got to do with us?

Perhaps life is never boring: we are always shocked in the immediacy of our experiences, only in certain moods we do not notice.

Brief Summary

For Merleau-Ponty, our sensations are like the nexus or crossroads of many other qualities of the object. So what we see is mediated by all these other relations that modify a perception. Sensations then are not the immediate result of an external stimulus.

Points relative to Deleuze

For Deleuze, sensations are the differential relations between microperceptions [see this entry for more]. We feel them directly and immediately.


[Quotation:]

When red and green, presented together, give the result grey, it is conceded that the central combination of stimuli can immediately give rise to a different sensation from what the objective stimuli would lead us to expect. When the apparent size of an object varies with its apparent distance, or its apparent colour with our recollections of the object, it is recognized that 'the sensory processes are not immune to central influences.' [ft.11, citing Stumpf] In this case, therefore, the 'sensible' cannot be defined as the immediate effect of an external stimulus. [9b/ fr. 30, boldface mine]

Paul Klee's 'Gray Point' Diagrams



(From Paul Klee's sketchbooks)

Merleau-Ponty makes this point also in regard to optical illusions. For Deleuze, sensations are always direct. They impact our bodies and directly touch and influence our inner workings, often in a disruptive way.

For example, the perception of green results from the direct shocking impact of the differentials sparking between yellow and blue.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

It is not that we are first affected by the blues and yellows, and then secondarily affected by the difference between them; no, rather, we are directly and immediately affected by the differences between the blue and the yellow, and only secondarily can we analyze-out the blue and yellow from the green. And this analysis is only possible when the yellow and the blue stand-out differentially from the green somehow, when placed under closer analysis.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.


Klee, Paul. Das bildnerische Denken, (Basel : Schwabe, 1981);
Unendliche Naturgeschickte, (Basel : Schwabe, 1970)