ABSTRACT
Objective thought is unaware of the subject of perception. This is because it presents itself with the world ready made, as the setting of every possible event, and treats perception as one of these events. For example, the empiricist philosopher considers a subject x in the act of perceiving and tries to describe what happens: there are sensations which are the subject’s states or manners of being and, in virtue of this, genuine mental things. The perceiving subject is the place where these things occur, and the philosopher describes sensations and their substratum as one might describe the fauna of a distant land-without being aware that he himself perceives, that he is the perceiving subject and that perception as he lives it belies everything that he says of perception in general. For, seen from the inside, perception owes nothing to what we know in other ways about the world, about stimuli as physics describes them and about the sense organs as described by biology. It does not present itself in the first place as an event in the world to which the category of causality, for example, can be applied, but as a re-creation or re-constitution of the world at every moment. In so far as we believe in the world’s past, in the physical world, in ‘stimuli’, in the organism as our books depict it, it is first of all because
world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore. All knowledge takes its place within the horizons opened up by perception. There can be no question of describing perception itself as one of the facts thrown up in the world, since we can never fill up, in the picture of the world, that gap which we ourselves are, and by which it comes into existence for someone, since perception is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’.* Intellectualism certainly represents a step forward in coming to self-consciousness: that place outside the world at which the empiricist philosopher hints, and in which he tacitly takes up his position in order to describe the event of perception, now receives a name, and appears in the description. It is the transcendental Ego. Through it every empiricist thesis is reversed: the state of consciousness becomes the consciousness of a state, passivity the positing of passivity, the world becomes the correlative of thought about the world and henceforth exists only for a constituting agent. And yet it remains true to say that intellectualism too provides itself with a ready-made world. For the constitution of the world, as conceived by it, is a mere requirement that to each term of the empiricist description be added the indication ‘consciousness of . . .’ The whole system of experience-world, own body and empirical self-are subordinated to a universal thinker charged with sustaining the relationships between the three terms. But, since he is not actually involved, these relationships remain what they were in empiricism: causal relations spread out in the context of cosmic events. Now, if one’s own body and the empirical self are no more than elements of the system of experience, objects among other objects in the eyes of the true I, how can we ever be confused with our body? How can we ever have believed that we saw with our eyes what we in fact grasp through an inspection of the mind; how is it that the world does not present itself to us as perfectly explicit; why is it displayed only gradually and never ‘in its entirety’? In short, how does it come about that we perceive? We shall understand this only if the empirical self and the body are not immediately objects, in fact only if they never
quite become objects, if there is a certain significance in saying that I can see the piece of wax with my eyes, and if correlatively the possibility of absence, the dimension of escape and freedom which reflection opens in the depths of our being, and which is called the transcendental Ego, are not initially given and are never absolutely acquired; if I can never say ‘I’ absolutely, and if every act of reflection, every voluntary taking up of a position is based on the ground and the proposition of a life of pre-personal consciousness. The subject of perception will remain overlooked as long as we cannot avoid the alternative of natura naturata and natural naturans, of sensation as a state of consciousness and as the consciousness of a state, of existence in itself and existence for itself. Let us then return to sensation and scrutinize it closely enough to learn from it the living relation of the perceiver to his body and to his world.
