Merleau-Ponty (on hold)

        

       Gestalt

Reason  ^  Cause

-Ponty is describing non atomistacly. Motive based as in a tendency for equilibrium. Gestalt - the whole determines what counts as a part. A middle way between the empiricist and intellectuals(rationalist/cognitivist). Middle C sounds different relative to the whole song. The duck rabbit. One grasp the word quicker than grasping the letters.

-The empiricist are explaining and analyzing atomistacly through associations of meaningless impressions, a causal account. Behaviorism account.

-Intellectuals atomist account is rule based,reason or rational based, kantian cognitive, symbolic representation.

The house and door knob. Our bodies get set for a perception. The hand shapes itself into the doorknob, we get set bodily to enter or walk around a house. At a fake house movie set, the body set to walk around, not into. The body not only gets set for the scene but copes with its surroundings i.e. whats in back of me.

Attention 

The intellectualist has a searchlight notion in that our attention toward an object reveals something truer after it has been decontextualized and it remains unchanged. By braking down the gestalt we see the latent truth. Ponty is against this for its destruction of the gestalt. A good use of attention is to recognize its creative element in that attention to an object can bring out its role in a gestalt.

The emperisis and inttelectuals assume that the kind of attention that gives us objects with properties reveals something that was there all along. Afordances are what we deal with in everyday coping, not objects with properties as the notion of a given (unordered building blocks) assumes.

Ponty there is no percepts or stuff to be interpreted or organized. What a object is depended on how its coped with.

Explicit suggest something implicit. Perception is not a making explicit of something implicit, but a making articulate the background (Heidegger's notion of the background).

Motive takes the place of intellectualist unconscience thinking.

Ponty an idealist similar to Kant in that perception depends on the phenomenal world and that that world will never be compleat, but that does not mean that the physical world depends on us.

What makes an object real is that it is both given (being-for-me) and transcending (being-in-itsself)

The body is the condition of objects as real. our perspective or our being-in-the-world.

Being-in-the-world is this tendency for optimal grip toward equilibrium