Seeing Things

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…