Philosophy Seminar Series: Keaton Jahn

The philosophy seminar series with speaker, Keaton Jahn. Title: Are There Proper Sensibles?: A Merleau-Pontian Exploration Abstract: Philosophers have long distinguished between “common” and “proper” sensibles: that is, properties that only seem to show up in one type of perceptual experience (e.g., colors in vision) and those accessible by two or more (e.g., shape). Much has been said about which properties fall into which camp, why, and what this may suggest about their metaphysical status. Yet throughout his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty resists this dichotomy. Perception is not an event that picks up on isolated qualities in an ontological vacuum or from an Archimedean point. On the contrary, it is quite literally a mode of being in the world. The lived body, as the subject of perception, orchestrates its rich inter-sensory and motor network in the perception of every quality, no matter which sense is most dominant in its presentation. The manner in which a sensible quality solicits a certain inter-sensory and motor response is not a contingent detail; it is an essential feature of it: / “Sensations, or ‘sensible qualities,’ are thus far from being reduced to the experience of a certain state or of a certain indescribable quale; they are presented with a motor physiognomy, they are enveloped by a living signification. … The motor signification of colors can only be understood if colors cease to be self-enclosed states or indescribable qualities offered to the observation of a thinking subject, if they effect in me a certain general arrangement by which I am adapted to the world, if they entice me toward a new manner of evaluating the world” (PoP, 217-8). / And again, “[T]he sensible does not merely have a motor and vital signification, but is rather nothing other than a certain manner of being in the world that is proposed to us from a point in space, that our body takes up and adopts if it is capable, and sensation is, literally, a communion" (PoP, 219, emphasis mine). / The conclusions are radical. Are they justified? In this talk, I’ll explore Merleau-Ponty’s position (as I understand it) that there are no proper sensibles. I’ll break down some of his best (and worst) arguments and evidence for this conclusion from The Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception, and (perhaps) The Visible and the Invisible.