Phenomenology Fundamentals

After reading David Cerbone's chapter on Merleau-Ponty and his rather interesting introduction to the study of Phenomenology, I thought it would make sense to jot down a few fundamentals that will be helpful for me to keep in mind.  Also, while reading the introduction I noticed some interesting intersections with McLuhan's little publication, "The Medium is the Massage."

A Few Important Phenomenological Points (as I understand it):

1) Holistic structure of experience: Also a tenet of Gestalt Psychology which Merleau-Ponty admired.  As Cerbone suggests, "In experience, the whole is prior to the parts and so is more than their sum," and "bodily self-experience is a dimension of my "being-in-the-world", which resists decomposition into physiological and psychological components." Merleau-Ponty calls this unity of consciousness the Intentional Arc.  He says it is a "...unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility."

2) Return to the Phenomena: As the quote in the last point suggests, we need to get back to something that is prior to objective (and scientific) understandings of experience. Phenomenology is highly descriptive, and that has to do with understanding pre-objective experience. As Merleau-Ponty says, we need to "reveal a 'primary layer' of sense experience." 

3) Embodiment: Borrowing from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty championed the idea that the body is central to all experience. Husserl said in Ideas II that "the Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception." The body is also not just an object in the world, it is "categorically distinct" and one way of describing this is with the phenomenon of "double-touch" (where a hand can both touch and be touched).  The lived body has both of these aspects. 

4) Seeing as Prejudicitave: We see and then we judge.  Merleau-Ponty suggests that "nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see." This concept is very new to me, but as I understand it, there is a passive reception of objects through the senses, and this reception can be fooled, such as with an illusion, but we still have a sense of judgement that understands the greater meaning (an objective sense of truth?). What I have to be careful not to do here, is to turn the senses in to mere channels of perception (b/c that's what the empiricist does), and not to suggest that judgement comes before sense perception (as an intellectualist would). 

Intersections with McLuhan:

After looking at Walter Ong a little bit and thinking about the switch to literacy and the effect this had on sight gaining primacy over the other senses, I began wondering what this would mean for the unity of consciousness that is a part of phenomenology.  In what I have been reading, discussions of ranking the senses have mostly been left out.  Phenomenologists sort of combine sense perception, and talk about them as equal. To zero in on sight seems against the project of phenomenology, and looking at it as a causal result is pretty well out of the question. Husserl says that a "subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing Body" (a body that is not just a corporeal thing, but involved in the experience).  I don't think Ong is suggesting that with literacy, society became uni-sensual with nothing but a sense of sight, but I am curious about what this switch in the hierarchy means for Phenomologists.  Does anything really change if some senses are more important than others, or would the phenomologist feel that the balance was disrupted?

What I found really interesting about Cerbone's introduction to Phenomenology is that it felt a lot like what McLuhan was trying to do in his 1967 publication "The Medium is the Message." This little book is filled with pictures that draw attention to the process of reading and how we take part in literate activities without realizing the perceptual faculties involved.  When Cerbone was describing the visual sensations of the words and the tactile experience of the book, it brought me right back to a section in The Medium is the Message that is simply an image with two thumbs holding the pages of the book open.  There seem to be some fundamental differences between the aims of these two works, but I'm noticing some overlap too.  I'm going to keep the aims of these two camps in mind, and hopefully either reconcile them or identify their major differences.  

*And lets not forget multi-media art works... I'm still looking for some perfect examples that fit into what I'm thinking about, but like a phenomenologist, I'd like to look at the experience of these works of art, rather than at their particular content or message.