ABSTRACT
The Primacy of Perception, the title of one of Merleau-Ponty’s most famous talks, gives us a hint as to how most phenomenologists view perception. It is considered fundamental. The phenomenological dictum ‘to the things themselves’ can be seen as a call for a return to the perceptual world that is prior to and a precondition for any scientific conceptualization and articulation. It can consequently be interpreted as a criticism of scientism, as a rejection of the view that ‘science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’ (Sellars 1963, p. 173). This criticism is by no means to be interpreted as a rejection of scientific rationality. The idea is not that a scientific exploration of reality is false, invalid, or superfluous. The target of the criticism is not science itself, but a certain inflated self-interpretation of science. As both Merleau-Ponty and Husserl point out, there is a more original relation to the world than the one manifested in scientific rationality. In our pre-scientific perceptual encounter with the world, the world is given concretely, sensuously, and intuitively. In daily life, we do not interact with ideal theoretical objects, but with tools and values, with pictures, statues, books, tables, houses, friends, and family (Husserl 1952/1989, p. 27), and our life is guided by practical concerns. We should never forget that our knowledge of the world, including our scientific knowledge, arises from a first-person perspective, and that science would be meaningless without this experiential dimension. Scientific discourse is embedded in the world of experience, in the experiential world, and if we wish to comprehend the performance and limits of science, we have to investigate the original experience of the world of which science is a higher-order articulation (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. viii-ix). Even the most exact and abstract scientific results presuppose the intuitively given subject-relative evidence of the lifeworld – a form of evidence which does not merely function as an unavoidable, but otherwise irrelevant, way-point towards scientific knowledge, but as a permanent and quite indispensable source of meaning and justification (Husserl 1970, p. 139). The standardizations of procedures and the development of instruments that provide precise measurements have facilitated the generation and
accumulation of third-person data and the establishment of intersubjective consensus. But without conscious subjects to interpret and discuss them, meter settings, computer printouts, x-ray pictures, and the like, remain meaningless. Scientific knowledge depends (although, of course, not exclusively) on the observations and experiences of individuals: it is knowledge that is shared by a community of experiencing subjects.
