Seeing Things

Here’s even more apparatus. Often scholarly editions of the modern philosophers will have something that I call marginal headings. These are short descriptions in the margins of the text that say what topic is being discussed. They appear more often than sub-titles, and in any case are not written by the author himself. But they are a useful guide to what’s going on in the text. I think this could be especially useful for PP, since Merleau-Ponty is not very good at all about telling you what point of the argument he’s reached. In particular, he will sometimes go on for pages at a time as if he were talking in propria persona when in fact he’s presenting, say, the empiricists’ view - a view that he will ultimately reject. The marginal headings could help the reader keep track of who’s view he’s currently presenting, and in general of what topic he’s currently discussing. Are there disadvantages to this? One potential problem is that I’d like to put the French pagination in the margins also; perhaps when combined with the marginal headings this will get too busy. Other issues? Thoughts?

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The original French version of the text has an extended table of contents at the back of the book that includes what look to be sub-titles for each of the chapters. For instance, the chapter entitled La ‘Sensation’ has the following sub-titles: Comme impression. Comme qualité. Comme la conséquence immédiate d’une excitation. Qu’est-ce que le sentir? Unfortunately, these have been left out of the Smith translation. Even in the original French version, however, there is no indication as to which parts of the text these sub-titles cover. It sure would be nice to have the sub-titles in the body of the translation. One of the issues, then, will be where to put them. I understand from Bert Dreyfus that one of the translations (was it the translation into Swiss German?) has attempted this. Has anyone seen this translation? Any sense for how successful their choices were? A further note on the jump…

I used to think it was a peculiar and unique feature of French books to have an extended table of contents - just the way they tend to put the table of contents at the back of the book instead of the front. But - and probably most people have noticed this already - lots of American books used to have extended tables of contents too. I was reading James’s Varieties of Religious Experience the other day, for example, and he’s done just exactly the same thing. And just as with PP, there is no indication in the body of the text about which parts are covered by which sub-title. It leads me to believe that perhaps these were not so much sub-titles or sub-headings, therefore, as short synopses of the chapter. A sort of Cliff Notes published along with the book. If that’s right, then there’s no guarantee that the sub-titles actually correspond - and in order - to parts of the text. Any thoughts?

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Merleau-Ponty’s original paragraphing structure is awful. Sometimes paragraphs will go on for pages and pages, even switching within a paragraph from a view that he disagrees with to a view that he advocates. This makes it very difficult for the reader to follow the argument. I would like to put paragraphs into the translation to make it easier to read. What do people think - is this acceptable? It might be more acceptable if there was an easy way to tell which are the paragraphs I’ve put in and which are in the original. Is there a non-klugy way to do this?

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Welcome to Seeing Things. This is a blog devoted to the philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive neuroscience of perception. At least that’s what I expect it will become. It’s inspiration, however, comes from a much narrower need. I have been commissioned by Routledge to produce a new translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception, and I’m hoping this will be a useful aid. In particular, I plan to use the blog to make reports on my progress, to solicit feedback from knowledgeable readers, and just plain to ask for help. More details on extended…

The 100th anniversary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth will be on March 14th, 2008. Routledge thought that that would be a nice occassion to put out a new translation of his most important work, Phénoménologie de la Perception. The original French text was published in 1945, but Colin Smith’s translation is itself almost 45 years old. (It was originally published in 1962.) Unfortunately, the most recent edition of the translation has multiplied errors in a way for which Smith himself should not be held accountable. Furthermore, the Smith translation, though in many ways serviceable for beginning students, is not really a scholarly text. I’m hoping the new translation will come complete with a full range of scholarly apparatus, and also an organizational structure that will make for easier reading. I’d like to use this blog, among other things, to discuss how best to do that.

Translation is always interpretation, as they say, and so I fully expect that some of the things we’ll discuss here will extend beyond what we can learn simply from reciting Hatchette’s. To translate Merleau-Ponty’s text properly we’ll have to keep in mind the phenomena that he takes himself to be describing, and to do that will require lots of thought about the philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive neuroscience of perception. Indeed, one of my main reasons for taking on this translation project is that I hope to learn lots about these substantive issues. That’s why I describe the blog as being about perception generally, rather than just about the translation of the text. In order to keep the blog organized, therefore, I’ll try hard to produce useful categories into which to file the entries. Even so, I expect that we may do a bit of wandering from topic to topic. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, but we’ll see.

Before we get started, I should make a comment about the title of the blog. Of course object perception is one of the most basic kinds of perceiving that we do, so Seeing Things might be a reasonable name for a blog focusing on the nature of perception. But Merleau-Ponty also held an apparently quite bizarre view according to which a proper account of the phenomenology of object perception requires that we understand objects themselves as things that see, or that have a visual perspective on the world. I’ve written about this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s view - trying to defend it, in fact - in a paper called “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” (warning: PDF file) a paper that may very well make precisely the mistake its title implies. In any case, I thought a truncated version of the title would work for the blog as well.

Well, I suppose that should be enough to give you a sense for what to expect. I hope this will be a site that is interesting and useful for perception theorists of all sorts, and I’m certainly looking forward to learning a bunch. Without further ado, then, let’s get cracking…

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