Dissipating Illusions

Human Studies 20: 221–242, 1997. 221c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Dissipating Illusions

ELDON C. WAITDepartment of Philosophy, University of Zululand, Private Bag X1001, Kwa-Dlangezwa3886, Republic of South Africa

Abstract. Perhaps the greatest challenge to an existential phenomenological account of per-ception is that posed by the argument from illusions. Recent developments in research onthe behaviour of subjects suffering from illusions together with some seminal ideas found inMerleau-Ponty’s writings enable us to develop and corroborate an account of the phenomenonof illusions, one, which unlike the empiricist account, does not undermine our convictionthat in perception we “reach the things themselves”. The traditional argument from illusionsderives its force from an uncritical assumption that the process of experience takes place in timeconceived as an infinite series of distinct moments. Once this assumption has been bracketedwe are able to recognise the paradoxical truth that in the disillusion something can becomethat which it has always been and can cease to be that which it has never been. Furthermore,through a reflection on our experience of others overcoming their illusions, and on psycholog-ical evidence, we are able to show that there is nothing to suggest that this description of thedisillusion is a description of a private or subjective event.

Any theory which claims that consciousness is not confined to representationsof reality, but that in perception it ‘bursts forth’ into the world to makecontact with the thing itself,1 would have to rethink the traditional notionsof ‘consciousness’ and ‘reality’ and it would have to give a new account ofthe phenomenon of illusions, one which, unlike the empiricist and rationalistaccounts, would show how illusions are possible without undermining ourconviction that in perception we reach the things themselves.2 Throughout thePhenomenology of Perception and also in The Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty indicated the way in which such an account could be given. Ourobjective in this essay is to take up these indications and to use the resultsof contemporary research on the reactions of infants and adults to illusoryexperiences, to develop and corroborate such an account.

The reduction teaches us that the traditional concepts of consciousness andreality are ‘absurd’,3 that we cannot begin by assuming that consciousnessis numerically and ontologically distinct from the world and is confined torepresentations of this world, while this world, owing nothing to conscious-ness, can only be grasped in thought. If I could have no experience of the realand of its being distinct from consciousness, from where could I derive myunderstanding of the real, how could I ever verify my understanding of ‘lyingbeyond’ or ‘ontologically distinct from experience’?4

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If the champions of the ‘representative consciousness’ are to avoid thisvicious circle, the argument from illusions would have to demonstrate notmerely that perception does not reach the thing itself it would also have torender intelligible the traditional concepts of consciousness and reality. Itwould have to demonstrate that these concepts are not ‘absurd’ since they arerequired in any attempt to render intelligible the phenomenon of illusions.

A typical argument may be set out as follows; Let us say that at time T1I walk into this lecture theatre. On the far side of the table I see an ashtray,as I approach it at time T2, intending to stub out my cigarette, I see that itis not an ashtray at all but a cleverly folded serviette. Since it is not possiblefor the object to be both an ashtray and a serviette, and since it is unlikelythat it transformed itself into a serviette, I am left to conclude that I could nothave experienced an ashtray at T1, because there was no ashtray. What thendid I ‘experience’? What I ‘experienced’ must have existed only in my mind,must have been a private reconstruction of an image of an ashtray based oncertain signs. What I actually experienced could only have been signs of areal ashtray, and my perception at T1 must have involved a judgement basedon these signs, a judgement which at T2 I recognise as being false. In thesame way that Copernicus produced a much simpler model of the universeby supposing that the viewer is moving, so the philosopher is able to producea much simpler model of the world, by supposing that it is not the world thatchanges in the experience of illusions but only subjective entities, like imagesand judgements. Consequently we require the notion of a subjective entity,and the realms of experience and of reality must be conceived as numericallydistinct and parallel to each other. Consciousness never reaches the worlditself; it merely represents that world to itself and sometimes, as in illusions,those representations are inaccurate. In this way the distinction between a realworld lying beyond all experience, owing nothing to consciousness, and animmanent and subject dependent realm ceases to be ‘absurd’.

Clearly the argument cannot begin by treating the illusory experience asan event in the real world. We cannot for example begin by thinking of anillusion as an experience of an object without any corresponding object in theworld. Such a formulation of the argument takes for granted the conception ofthe ‘real’ which it was meant to render intelligible. The non existence of theashtray, and the existence of the serviette are not described from the point ofview of some perceiver, they are described from an absolute point of view. Ifthe argument is to avoid exploiting the same concepts it was meant to renderintelligible, it would have to begin with my experience of the illusion ormy experience of someone else having an illusion, without any preconceivedideas of how such experiences could relate to the world.

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From my point of view the experience at T1 is unproblematic simplybecause it is indistinguishable from the experience of a veridical perceptionof an ashtray. The argument must therefore be based on the experience atT2, the experience of the disillusion. It must claim that the experience at T2presents me with a mystery, viz. “I am confronted by a serviette where only amoment ago I saw an ashtray. Where was the serviette and what has happenedto the ashtray? If there has never been an ashtray, what did I experience atT1?” The argument claims that the mystery remains until I have created andintroduced the notion of a ‘subjective entity’, the ‘sign’ or ‘image’ on theone hand, and the notion of a ‘real’ world, which was not experienced, onthe other, but which was there all along, ‘existing in itself’, owing nothingto consciousness. The argument assumes therefore that the intelligibility ofthe experience is accorded in an act of judgement. We will attempt to showthat this is not an authentic description of the experience and that ratherthan being a mystery, the disillusion is intelligible without any judgementson my part, and hence without having to introduce concepts of a subjectiveentity like an ‘image’ or of a world ‘existing in itself’. Our argument willbe that the inauthentic description given by empiricists and rationalists is nota description of any experience but is an artificial re-construction of whatmy experience would be like if it could be divided into two numericallydistinct experiences, one at T1 and one at T2, such that the experience atT1 could be compared with that at T2 as if the two were ‘things’ in theworld, ‘external’ to each other, and which needed to be related in an act ofjudgement. We will try to show that this divisibility is not based on anythinggiven in experience, but follows from the assumption that experience is a‘real’ process in time conceived as a series of ‘now moments’. In other wordsthe naturalist conception of a time existing in itself underlies the traditionaldescription of the illusion and disillusion, rather than being grounded in theattempt to render the phenomenon intelligible. Only once these conceptionsare bracketed will we be able to give an authentic description of the experienceat T2.

The Continuity and Disruption of Perception

Is there anything in our experience of normal perception to suggest that it is aprocess in the world and in time or that it is divisible into isolated moments?An authentic description of my experience of perceiving reveals that it is atleast the experience of reaching one and the same object from one moment tothe next. I am not limited to the experience of a series of ‘objects’ or imageswhich resemble each other and which replace each other, and which I wouldhave to subsume under the concept of ‘one object existing through time’. I

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experience the identity of the object as it lasts through time, which suggeststhat perception is not experienced as a process divisible into discrete momentsin time but rather as ‘holding onto the same object throughout the lapse oftime’, and hence as never entirely ‘letting go’ of the past, and ‘having’ thefuture already ‘in hand’, and in this way, as transcending the momentarypresent.

The object gives itself as ‘there’, originally there, present. But in thispresence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuityof what I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longerintuited at all, a continuity of ‘retentions’ – and, in the other direction, acontinuity of ‘protentions’ . . . (Husserl, 1970, p. 160).

If perception were experienced as divisible, it would be experienced as offer-ing me only a series of ‘objects’ which resemble each other but which couldhave come into existence and disappeared one after the other. There would benothing in my experience to assure me that the object I perceive did not comeonto existence five minutes ago or that it could outlast this moment, (and hereBertrand Russell is right.)5 It would then be necessary in an act of judgementto subsume the series of perceived objects under the concept of, ‘one objectlasting through time,’ but since we never encounter the ‘lasting through time’of any object, how could we ever know or verify what this means?

The relation between the real object which endures through time and themomentary ‘objects’ is analogous to the relation between the three dimen-sional concrete object and its two dimensional projections. Both Husserland Merleau-Ponty argued that the perception of a ‘3-D’ object cannot bedescribed, as it was by Berkeley, as the experience of two ‘2-D’ images plusthe hypothesis that there is one ‘3-D’ object in the world. Perception is expe-rienced as opening up onto the ‘3-D’ object, there where it is in the world.To assume that my perception is divisible into two discrete acts, taking placein the world and in space, one from the left and the other from the right, andthat the perceived object is reconstructed from these two perceptions, is toassume that I do not perceive the third dimension of the object, that perceptiondoes not reach the three dimensional thing as a three dimensional thing, butis limited to an intuition of its flat projections. Like Husserl, Merleau-Pontyargues that we perceive the three dimensional object itself; which means thatwe must be open to its three dimensionality, not merely to signs of its threedimensionality.6 Merleau-Ponty has shown that in an authentic description ofthe experience of depth the dispersion into space ‘partes extra partes’ of thetwo eyes is overcome, making possible one “Cyclopean” vision, indivisibleinto spatial perspectives (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 141). Similarly only a per-

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ceptual act which could overcome the dispersion into moments in time couldencounter the object as something ‘lasting through time,’7 and hence as a realobject. To experience an object as real is to experience it as having been thereall along and as outlasting this particular moment.

Consequently, we cannot assume that T1 and T2 are numerically distin-guishable, and external to each other, simply because they are two momentsin my perceptual life. The empiricist argument that my perception is divisiblein this way and that we have no experience of identity or of ‘lasting throughtime’ is not derived from a reflection on experience itself, but follows fromits ontological commitment to the naturalist concept of perception as a ‘real’process in time. Their description of the experience at T2 renders their argu-ment circular since it takes for granted the very notion of reality it was meantto justify. If it is to avoid the circularity it would have to return to an authenticdescription of the phenomenon itself.

Could it not be argued that it is precisely the experience of an illusion thatteaches us that perception is discontinuous. Since it is not an experience ofone object existing through time, but rather the experience at T1 of an ashtrayand at T2 of a serviette, is it not therefore an experience of a disruption orof a ‘cutting up’ of perception? Doesn’t the phenomenon of illusions suggestthat at some level the perceptual act must be made up of a sequence ofdiscontinuous acts? Certainly the experience of a disillusion is the experienceof a disruption, but this does not imply an actual disruption or division ofperception into discontinuous acts at T1 and at T2. We will try to show thatjust as the experience of passivity is not explained by an actual passivityof consciousness, (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, p. 216), so the experience of adisruption is not explained by, and is ultimately irreconcilable with, an actualdisruption or division of experience into distinct moments.

If T1 and T2 were numerically distinct, the disillusion would have to involvean intellectual judgement in which the two experiences are related, comparedand a decision made in favour of the latter. We wish to show that there isno evidence for such a judgement, that ‘the illusory’ and ‘the real’ are notcategories imposed in an act of judgement but are rather intrinsic to perceptualexperience,8 such that the disillusion is intelligible without acts of judgementand without the concept of ‘a representation’ or of a world existing in itself.

If the traditional description were correct, I would, at T2, have an imagewhich I judge to be the image of a serviette, and I would also have thememory of the judgement I made at T1, namely that the image before mewas that of an ashtray. The experience of the disillusion would then simplybe the experience of changing judgements or hypotheses. But how would Iexperience my conviction that my present hypothesis or judgement, that thereis a serviette on the table, is preferable to, or more reliable than, the one I

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made in the past, namely that there is an ashtray on the table? Why do Ichoose in favour of the former?

The Disillusion and Perceptual Faith

Could we argue that my faith in the serviette hypothesis is based on myknowledge that I am now in a better position than I was at T1, or based on anawareness of having looked more carefully? But, if I do not yet know whetherthe object is an ashtray or a serviette, how can I tell which position is better,which way of looking ‘more careful?’ The fact that at T2 I may be spatiallycloser is not a sufficient reason for deciding in favour of a serviette, becausethere are circumstances under which the object reveals itself only at a certainoptimal distance.

For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimumdistance from which it requires to be seen . . . (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.302).

It is not as if my present hypothesis is preferable to my past hypothesesbecause I know that I now occupy a ‘better’ point of view, or look morecarefully. On the contrary my experience reveals that it is because the objecthas proved to be a serviette, that the position from which I see a serviette, hasthe sense of a ‘better point of view’, or that my new exploration has the senseof taking a more ‘attentive’, or ‘careful’ look.

My conviction that I see the thing itself does not result from the perceptualexploration, it is not a word to designate the proximal vision; on thecontrary it is what gives me the notion of the “proximal”, or the “best”point of observation, and of the “thing itself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.37).

Could the serviette hypothesis be preferable because it is more consistent withthe rest of my experience? An authentic reflection on the experience of thedisillusion teaches me that I am more sure that the serviette is the real objectthan I am about how consistent the serviette hypothesis is with everythingelse that I know. The existence of an object in the world is not for me anhypothesis that I make on the basis of a test of consistency. If this were thecase I would constantly be tempted to check whether the objects I experiencewere real or not, whether I was awake or dreaming.

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If the reality of my perceptions were based solely on the intrinsic coher-ence of ‘representations’, it ought to be for ever hesitant and, beingwrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselesslytaking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality stray phe-nomena which I had excluded in the first place. But this does not happen.The real is a closely knit fabric. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. x).

He who distinguishes between the real and his dreamt world does not classifyhis experiences under some concept of the veridical or the illusory in accor-dance with some or other criterion. It is not as if those experiences of minewhich are coherent and probable are classified as veridical experiences, orexperiences of the world, while those which are incoherent and improbableare classified as products of my imagination. On the contrary my experienceof the reality of the world is immediate, and it is therefore easier for me to tellwhether the world I experience is real or imaginary, than it is for me to tellwhether my experiences are coherent or incoherent, probable or improbable.

. . . the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real becauseit is coherent; the imaginary is incoherent or improbable because it isimaginary, and not imaginary because it is incoherent. (Merleau-Ponty,1968, p. 40).

As Merleau-Ponty points out, even the most likely or reasonable dreams,even those that are perfectly consistent with our waking lives, are immediatelyrecognised by us as dreams when we awake, and the most unlikely events inour lives are immediately and unmistakably recognized as real.

It [the real] does not await our judgement before incorporating the mostsurprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments ofour imagination. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. x).

It has often been pointed out that even the most credible imagination,the most conformable to the context of experience, does not bring us onestep closer to ‘reality’ and is immediately ascribed by us to the imaginary– and that conversely an even absolutely unexpected and unforeseeablenoise is from the first perceived as real, however weak be its links withthe context. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 39).

. . . the most credible phantasm glances off at the surface of the world:it is this presence of the whole world in one reflection, its irremediableabsence in the richest and most systematic deliriums, that we have to

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understand, and this difference is not a difference of the more or the less.(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 40).

If the ‘real’ were for me no more than the most probable hypothesis, thedistinction between the real and the illusory would be a purely formal onebetween the more and the less probable. No matter how rational or impartialI may be in this classification, I would never enjoy the certitude of being incontact with the world itself; and never have any appreciation of the differencebetween the real and the merely probable.

My awareness of constructing an objective truth would never provide mewith anything more than an objective truth for me and my greatest attemptat impartiality would never enable me to prevail over my subjectivity (asDescartes so well expresses it by the hypothesis of the malignant demon),if I had not, underlying my judgements, the primordial certainty of beingin contact with being itself . . . (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 355).

Certainly, there are unusual circumstances where I have no other optionbut to select an hypothesis on the basis of consistency. I may for exampleawake from a dream not knowing whether the telephone ringing was partof my dream or an actual ringing which awakened me, but which stoppedringing before I was fully awake. At moments like this I may recall that Ihad asked reception to wake me up at dawn. The hypothesis that the ringingmust have been real, then proves to be more consistent with what I knowabout the world, and for that reason the more probable. But it would be falseto suppose that all my experiences of reality are such, and that the ‘real’ isfor me the same as ‘the most consistent hypothesis’.9 It is only because I amsure of being awake and “in contact with being itself” that I trust my powersof inference, trust my ability to distinguish between the more and the lessconsistent, the more and the less probable. My primordial certainty of beingin contact with being itself underlies all my judgements rather than being theconclusion of a judgement.

Conclusion

An authentic reflection on my experience of the disillusion reveals that the‘reality’ of the serviette and the ‘illusory aspect’ of the ashtray are not attribut-es accorded by me in an act of judgement on the basis of a criterion, such as‘seen from a better point of view’ or ‘more consistent with what I know aboutthe world’. I am not confined to ‘signs’ indicating that the serviette is real andthe ashtray illusory. The real and the illusory are experienced ‘in the flesh’.

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What I perceive at T2 is from the start perceived as the real thing. The whiteI perceive is from the start the starched white of linen. There is no simpledatum of whiteness which could either be the white of an ashtray or the whiteof a serviette. To see this white is to see the serviette, because from the startit is the white of this starched linen. The thing announces itself through itscolour.10 The real does not await our judgement (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. x).At the moment of the disillusion I am more sure that there is a serviette onthe table and not an ashtray, than I am about any data or any signs that I mayexperience or any judgements I make or have made.

Similarly I am more sure that the ashtray was merely an illusion and that theserviette is the real object, than I am sure about what it means for somethingto be an illusion or to be real. There is therefore nothing to suggest thatthe disillusion involves judgements and a change of hypothesis or that theintelligibility of the disillusion must be accorded in an act of judgement andrequires the naturalist concepts of ‘representations’ and ‘reality’. There isnothing to suggest that the disruption of the disillusion presupposes an actualcutting up of the process into T1 and T2. On the contrary everything suggeststhat the distinction between truth and illusion is intrinsic to the experienceitself and hence that there must be some ‘internal’ relation between T1 andT2 (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 296). Without any need on my part to classifyor judge, the ashtray must itself, as it were ‘give way’ to the serviette, just asthe monocular images ‘give way’ to the three dimensional object as I focusmy eyes.

Monocular images float vaguely in front of things having no real place inthe world; then suddenly they fall back towards a certain location and areswallowed up in it, as ghosts, at day break, repair towards the rift in theearth which let them forth. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 233).

What needs to be described is this ‘giving way’ of the ashtray and thisemergence of the serviette, as my world strives towards its equilibrium.11

The Unique Intelligibility of the Disillusion

If at T2 there is the “primordial certainty of being in contact” with the serviette,we have to acknowledge that there was the same “primordial certainty” atT1, of being in contact with an ashtray. If the disillusion is not the experienceof making a new judgement, is it an experience of the object itself changingor being replaced by another? Is the experience I have of the disillusion inany way similar then to an experience that I may have for example, as I

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observe a magician transform some brightly coloured scarves into a rabbit?Is the ashtray replaced by or transformed into a serviette in the same way thatthe scarves were replaced by or transformed into a rabbit? Is the differencebetween the disillusion and the magical transformation only a difference inthe way in which the two experiences are understood or classified?

What characterises the disillusion, and what distinguishes it from the mag-ical transformation, is that it never leaves me wondering or puzzled. Thedisillusion is such that I am never left wondering for example, what hashappened to the ashtray, or how a ceramic object could be transformed intoone made of cloth, or where the serviette was hidden while I saw an ashtray.Contrary to what empiricists claim, I am never left wondering what it was thatI perceived at T1. I am never left wondering about these things not because Iunderstand what a ‘disillusion’ is, not because I have classified the event asa ‘disillusion’, and the ‘ashtray’ as a ‘subjective’ entity, but because I experi-ence the disillusion in a different way. The transformation in the disillusion isimmediately intelligible. This is not the case with the magical transformation.I am unable to understand why I no longer see the scarves, and I continue tolook for them, and I wonder where the rabbit has been hidden all this time.There is substantial evidence showing that infants continue to look for objectswhich have become occluded by others, or for objects that are no longer intheir field of vision (Kellman, 1983), but there is no evidence to suggest thatinfants continue to look for objects that have disappeared because they provedto be illusory. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that infants cease to searchfor illusory objects only once they have acquired the concept of an illusion,and so are able to classify the missing object as illusory, or their experience asa ‘disillusion’. From the start the disillusion is unique and intelligible withoutacts of judgement and without any concept of an illusion or of a subjectiveentity.

There is in the disillusion an experience of change, but it is neither anexperience of changing judgements and images nor is it in any way like themagician’s change of objects in the world. Any attempt to describe this changehowever, leads to paradoxes. For example, what distinguishes the change inthe disillusion from that of the magician, is that in the disillusion, the objectceases to be that which it has never been, namely an ashtray and becomesthat which it has been all along, a serviette, and it is in this ‘ceasing’ and this‘becoming’ that the unique intelligibility of the disillusion is articulated.

If at T2 I experience the serviette as being the real object, then in some wayI must experience its ‘having been there all along’. If I were confined to T2and restricted therefore to the momentary perspective, I would have to inferthat the serviette was there at T1, when I walked into the room, and thereforeinfer that it is a real object. Since, as we have argued above, the reality of

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the serviette is experienced “in the flesh,” I must, even at T2, experience itshaving been there all along. If at T2 I do not wonder where the serviettewas at T1, if at T2 the serviette does not ‘spring’ into existence, as does themagician’s rabbit, this is not because I know that it was there while I didn’tsee it, it is because at T2 I experience its being there at T1, experience its‘having been there all along,’ and this implies that T2 is not separable fromT1, implies that T2 opens up to T1 itself such that I am aware of the serviettebeing there at T1, just as I am aware of things that are behind my back.(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 418).12 If at T2 the object can cease to be what ishas never been, namely an ashtray, and can begin to be what it has been allalong, namely a serviette, the disillusion must involve the transformation ofthe past itself, such that at T2 I can experience this transformed T1, ratherthan merely having it in mind as an idea or image of T1.

An authentic description of my experience at T2 therefore demands thatwe give up the naturalist notion of time. Merleau-Ponty has shown that if ourexperience of the past was based purely on images or thoughts of the pastwe would never have any sense of past. Memories of the past, whether theseare seen as faded images, or psychic traces left by the past event, or evenphysiological traces such as established nerve connections, would alwayshave to be in the present, if they are to be for me. They could not therefore oftheir own teach me the meaning of ‘past’. As with the perception of reality,unless I have a direct access to the past I will be unable to interpret all thealleged signs that are held to refer to the past. Unless I am able to experiencedirectly the ‘pastness’ of the past event I will have no sense of past and nosense of time. But if I have a direct experience of the past event itself howcould it be for me past? Although my access to the past is not mediatedthrough images and memories, the past event is past, says Merleau-Ponty,because I am able to reach it only through a ‘layer of time’.

With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: Istill have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking below thelevel of presents; in order to retain it I need to reach through a thin layerof time. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 416).

I do not form a mental picture of my day, it weighs upon me with all itsweight, it is still there, and though I may not recall any detail of it, I havethe impending power to do so, I still ‘have it in hand’. In the same way,I do not think of the evening to come and its consequences, and yet it ‘isthere’, like the back of a house of which I can see only the facade, or likethe background beneath a figure. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 416).

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The past itself, as opposed to ideas or images of the past, eludes me insome sense, which is why we say that I can “reach it” but only “through alayer of time”. If we say that the object becomes that which it has alwaysbeen, namely a serviette, and ceases to be that which it has never been, wemean that this past, which eludes me, but which “weighs upon me”, which Ican reach only through a layer of time, is changed, such that I experience theserviette now, as having been on the table at T1 when I walked into the room.I can experience the serviette as the real object, because I can experience it ashaving been there all along and I am able to do this without having to form amental picture of it at T1. The situation “weighs upon me with all its weight”,it is there for me in the past even though I may not recall any detail of it. Thedisillusion is the paradoxical emergence of a new past and a new future, insuch a way that they have been there all along.

The change that I experience in the disillusion is thus one that ‘occurs’throughout time, transforming past, present and future. This is why at T2 Iam never tempted to wonder what has happened to the ashtray, or from wherethe serviette has emerged. I do not see an ashtray at T2 and this does not evenconstitute an ‘absence’ for me, because the ashtray is no longer ‘present tome’, no longer within the scope of my existence, it is ‘dissipated’ not onlyfrom my present but also from my past and future. I cease to see the scarvesand this is an enigma to me because they are still ‘present to me,’ are stillin the field of objects that ‘count’ for me, in my past and future. It is thedisillusion which presents us with the paradox of a ‘change’ of the past, suchthat something can cease to be in such a manner that it never existed andcan become something in such a manner that it has always been that which itbecomes.

Certainly it is not impossible in a deliberate act to ‘recall’ an ‘original’T1 in which the ashtray was seen. But we cannot assume that the events‘recalled’ in this way are genuine stages in my perceptual relationship withthe world. It is possible to see the man standing at a distance as being the samesize as my thumb, but as Merleau-Ponty has shown, this is not a sufficientreason to suppose that normal perception is constructed out of these artificialphenomena (1962, p. 261). Size constancy is more perfect in children than inadults. Similarly the ‘original’ experience at T1, ‘recalled’ in such a deliberateact is an artificial construct produced as we try to represent to ourselves theprocess from T1 to T2 as if it were an event in the world and in time.The ability to ‘recall’ false beliefs is one which is acquired only late in life(Gopnik, 1991, p. 98). It has been shown that adults who are unaware of theirpast false beliefs are obliged to “exert unusual effort to retrieve pre-updatedinformation.” (Hasher, 1981, p. 91).13

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It may be tempting to argue at this point that since the past cannot actuallychange, the transformed T1, to which I appear to have access, must be arepresentation of the past, an image or an idea. Certainly the past that changesis not a ‘real’ past, and it is true this past cannot change, and certainly in the‘real’ world something cannot become that which it has always been. Butthis does not imply that the past that is changed is an image or idea of thepast. This would be to take for granted the alternatives of the natural attitudethat the argument from illusions was meant to render intelligible. What weare claiming is that we cannot assume that this ‘real’ world is metaphysicallyand epistemologically the most fundamental world and that perception is aprocess in this world. Simply because we know that something is not part ofthe ‘real’ world does not imply that it must necessarily be part of a ‘subjective’or private world. What the reduction teaches is that whether or not somethingis ‘subjective’ must be established through the way in which it reveals itself.Subjective entities are by definition private, they are accessible to me only,and they are exactly what they are for me. If the disillusion is for me anexperience of change, is there anything in this experience to suggest that itis accessible to me only, or that it is at any moment exactly what it is forme? Is there anything in my experience of the disillusion to suggest that it isreducible to subjective entities?

It is precisely because the change in the disillusion occurs throughouttime that I am unable to reflect on it. The disappearance of the ashtray forexample, unlike the disappearance of the scarves, is something that I couldnot conceivably have witnessed. The fact that the magical disappearance ofthe scarves and emergence of the rabbit, happens too fast for me to observe, ortakes place where it cannot be witnessed, is experienced by me as somethingpurely contingent. The dissipation of the ashtray and the emergence of theserviette is also never given to me, but here there is nothing to suggest that Icould have witnessed it had I been better placed or more observant, nothingto suggest that the transformation was hidden from me. It is of its essencethat the dissipation is itself dissipated and that this latter in turn is dissipatedand so on ad infinitum, such that I never witness the transformation, nor isthere anything in my experience to suggest that a transformation is hiddenfrom me. If the change were either present to me or hidden from me as in themagical transformation, if it were conceivable that I could scrutinise the eventor reflect on its absence from me, there would be for me an ‘original’ past, an‘original T1’, which preceded the change, and then the question about whatthere was for me, in this original past would arise. The change of the past,present, and future presents us with the miracle of a change which brings aboutthe continuity of the world, a change such that there is no change, one whichdissipates itself. Like ‘perceptual faith’ any attempt to unveil or circumscribe

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the disillusion, any attempt to dispel its paradoxical nature is misconstrued,since “. . . it retreats in the measure that we approach it” (Merleau-Ponty,1968, p. 130). It is because of this dissipation of the past, and dissipationof the dissipation that the disillusion is intelligible without the notion of asubjective entity, and yet without ceasing to be paradoxical.

The Disillusion: Dispelling by the Gaze

Even though I am not able to reflect on, or scrutinise the transformation, myexperience is not like that of someone who never made my mistake, someonewho saw the serviette from the start. My experience is different without therebeing some characterizing ‘content’ of consciousness. There is for me in thedisillusion an experience of change, but it is a change neither of objects in theworld nor of images and judgements, it is a change of the very backgroundof everything, a change of that through which there are things, events andchanges. It is the paradoxical change of that which Husserl referred to as thetranscendental or last subject, and this is why it is not possible to step backfrom the disillusion and witness it from an unchanging point of view, why it isnot possible to ask what there was before the change, as if the change were anevent in time, or for consciousness. This is conceivable only if we accept thatperception is not the intuition or representation of contents to consciousnessbut is rather a ‘gaze at grips with the world’,14 and that in the disillusion it isthis gaze which ‘pierces through’ the illusory to ‘grasp’ the real, and that theillusory and the real must be defined in terms of their relationship with thispiercing gaze, and not as ‘objects’ for a contemplating consciousness.

Psychology and empiricism have involved themselves in endless difficultiestrying to base the experience of a disillusion on the experience or possessionof certain de facto, non illusory ‘contents’ of consciousness, the images, the‘real’ signs of the illusory object and of its illusory nature, all with equalpsychological reality, or equally real as contents of consciousness. If we werealways confined to contents of consciousness, how could we ever have learnthow to interpret these alleged signs of the real and of the illusory, how couldwe account for our recognition of the illusory as illusory and the real asreal? Just as Merleau-Ponty has argued that we will never understand therecognition of depth or of the past, if we start from mental contents presentedto consciousness all equidistant or all in the present,15 so we are arguing thatwe could never understand the recognition of the illusory as illusory, startingwith ‘real’ contents of consciousness, such as images or representations.Merleau-Ponty has argued that we define ‘past’ and ‘distance’ in terms of the“situation of the object in relation to our power of grasping it” (Merleau-Ponty,1962, p. 261). Events are past because I can reach them only through a layer

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of time, and objects can be far from me, because they can slip from the grip ofmy gaze.16 Similarly we cannot reflect on the ‘real’ and the ‘illusory’ as if theywere ‘things for consciousness, they must be defined in terms of their relationto a consciousness which pierces, dispels and grasps. We can define the realas that which resists or ‘stops up’ my gaze, offering it something to grasp, andthe illusory as that which ‘shatters under its piercing and dispelling force’.My experience of the disillusion is not reducible to subjective entities becauseit is not so much a consciousness of piercing as a piercing by consciousness.It is not something ‘for me’, it is rather something that I do. The eye and bodymovements that I carry out as I ‘look again’ or ‘look more carefully’ are notmovements in space, or time, they are my ‘progress towards reality."17 It isnot the mind that classifies the ashtray as illusory and the serviette as real, it ismy way of ‘looking’, or my gaze as a power of piercing and grasping which‘dispels’ the ashtray and ‘relegates’ it to the illusory, in order to ‘unveil’ and‘grasp’ the serviette as the real object.18

The Impossibility of a Complete Reduction and Disillusions of Others

The traditional argument against Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an embodiedconsciousness, of which the notion of the ‘gaze’ is an example, is that the‘ultimate’ consciousness cannot be the embodied consciousness itself, butrather must be the consciousness of the embodiment.19 Could it not be arguedagainst the thesis of the dispelling gaze, that if my experience differs fromthat of someone who never made my mistake, that I must in some way beaware of the piercing by the gaze, be a consciousness of the piercing anddispelling by consciousness and that even if it is true that the disillusion iselusive and “retreats in the measure that we approach it,” there must be anexperience of this elusiveness, and of this retreating, and that this awarenessand this experience presupposes an internal or private life, accessible to meonly, an internal life made up of representations and judgements? And finallyif the unique intelligibility of the disillusion is intrinsic in perception and canbe read off only from experience itself (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 296), if it is‘pregnant’ in the transformation, in the ‘giving way’ of the ashtray etc., thensurely this ‘being already intelligible’, must be intelligible for me, and therewould have to be a judgement in which this ‘already intelligible’ is given ameaning. Could it not therefore be argued that ultimately we are unable tomake sense of the experience of the disillusion without the notion of a privateworld of representations and judgements?

What evidence is there to suggest that my certainty is rooted in an experienceof the disillusion, or in an experience of piercing and dispelling, and not inthe piercing and dispelling itself ? What evidence is there to suggest that the

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intelligibility of the disillusion is accorded in a judgement? If any descriptionfrom ‘within’ the first person point of view could lead us only to ‘contentsfor consciousness’, then these questions can only be decided from ‘without’.Let us suppose that I witness Paul making a mistake. As he enters the roomhe takes the serviette to be an ashtray, but then walks over to the end of thetable and just as he is about to stub out his cigarette, he exclaims, “Ah, thisis a serviette, I thought it was an ashtray.” Is there anything in my experienceof his behaviour to suggest that there are two events running parallel to eachother; the disillusion or the waking up to what is actually on the table, asthis is experienced by Paul, and Paul’s disillusion and waking up, as this isexperienced by me. What evidence is there from my point of view to suggestthat the disillusion for Paul is something to which only he has access?

As far as I am concerned, the object is for Paul a serviette, not becausefor him, it is the most likely hypothesis, but because he has at this moment‘opened up’ to what is actually in front of him. If Paul persisted in taking theobject to be an ashtray, it would be clear from my most spontaneous reactionsto Paul that for me it was not a question of providing Paul with argumentswhich support the serviette hypotheses, it would be a question of getting Paulto ‘see’ what is actually there. I would point to certain features of the serviette,not because they constitute reliable evidence for a serviette, but as a way ofawakening him to what is really there, as a way of directing or leading hisgaze. Furthermore, when he does come to see the object for what it actuallyis, I do not need any explanation as to why he also takes the object to be aserviette, other than the fact that he is open to what is there. I know that oncehe has seen the serviette, he will not require any arguments, or evidence. Ido not need to imagine inside Paul processes in which evidence is weighedup and decisions in favour of a serviette are made. Nor on the other handdo I need to imagine a series of causal processes, starting from the serviette,resulting in Paul’s consciousness of a serviette, as the effect of these causes.For me Paul takes the object to be a serviette simply because it actually is aserviette, (or is a serviette as far as I am concerned), and he is open or awaketo what is there, his gaze has pierced through to grasp the thing itself.

Second, in spite of the fact that he has just made a perceptual error, heis certain that he perceives a real serviette and not some subjective privatereconstruction. He will be certain that it is a serviette, not because he isconfident in his deductive powers, in his ability to take into account all thedata presented to him and weigh up evidence in an objective manner, butsimply because he ‘knows’ that he is open or awake to what is actually there.What is significant is that for me, his certainty is legitimate, in the sensethat I am not surprised, or amazed that he could be confident, even though Iam unaware of him having made any judgements, or assessments, and even

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though I have no proof that he could justify his taking the object to be aserviette.20 For me his confidence must be based on his openness, or on hisawakening to the serviette. It cannot be based on his experience of beingopen, for only a short while ago he must have had a similar experience ofbeing open to an ashtray. If his confidence were based on an experience, hewould have to have some evidence that this time, the experience was reliable,and his conviction that there is a serviette in front of him would have to be theconclusion of a judgement, in which his experience of being open is taken intoaccount. For me he has no such evidence and has made no such judgement, yetI experience his confidence as legitimate. I could experience his confidence aslegitimate only if for me there were no intermediaries, such as experiences orrepresentations, between his openness for me and his openness for himself.21

Paul must be in contact with numerically the same openness which for me‘explains’ why he sees a serviette. He must know that he is open to the thingitself; not because he has an experience of awakening to it but simply becauseof the awakening of his experience. There must be a consciousness of doingand being that is inseparable from the doing and being itself, there must bea ‘for Paul’ that is inseparable from a ‘for me’. His certainty must be basedon this awakening to what is there, and this act is something for me, since it‘explains’ why he sees a serviette. There is therefore nothing in my experienceto suggest that the openness on which Paul’s certainty is based could be amere representation, or a subjective entity. If Paul was unable to focus hisattention onto what his awakening to the serviette is for him, if it recedesin the measure that he approaches it, this could be because his awakeningis not whatever it is for him, since it is also for me. Nevertheless, because Iexperience his confidence as legitimate, he must, for me, be in direct contactwith this openness, with the openness that is always more than what it is forhim.

Similarly, if I experience his confidence as legitimate, it means that for mePaul doesn’t merely regard himself ‘open’ in accordance with what beingopen means to him, he must regard himself as open in accordance with whatthis means ‘for me’. The intelligibility of the disillusion for Paul cannotbe constituted in an act of judgement, because it must be numerically thesame intelligibility that I encounter in his behaviour, the intelligibility thatenables me to understand why it is that Paul takes the object to be a servietterather than an ashtray. This means that Paul must be open to an intelligibilitythat is more than what it is for him, since it is for me. If Paul is unableto find ‘in himself’ the act of consciousness through which the disillusionor the awakening becomes intelligible to himself, this could be because theintelligibility is delineated in the awakening, and is not constituted in anact of judgement. It is therefore not possible for Paul to withdraw from the

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disillusion in order to confine himself to what it means to him, and thereforenot possible to dissolve its paradoxical nature.

Consequently, whether we begin our description of the disillusion from theinside or from the outside there is nothing to suggest that it is a descriptionof a private world, since the transformation is accessible to others in that it‘explains’ to them why I see a serviette and not an ashtray. Similarly the‘unique’ intelligibility of the disillusion could not have been constituted byme in an act of judgement. Since it renders my behaviour intelligible to othersthe intelligibility must be pregnant in the piercing and dissipating of the gazeitself.

It is ultimate consciousness itself that pierces, which is why we will neverbe able to withdraw from the piercing in order to describe it exhaustively.Nor will we be able to reduce notions like that of ‘dispelling’ and of ‘chang-ing the past’ to ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, which is why our formulationsremain paradoxical. Nevertheless by holding in suspension the assumptionsof the natural attitude we have been able to reveal a primitive and concreteintelligibility captured in these expressions and delineated in the disillusion,an intelligibility which does not presuppose acts of judgement, but which isintrinsic to perception itself, and it is in accordance with this primitive andconcrete intelligibility that I may have illusions and disillusions without thisundermining my primordial certainty that in perception I reach the thingsthemselves.22

Notes

1. “Evidence, according to Husserl, is the presence of the thing itself in the original (in contrastto the presentation, memory, portrait, image, symbol, sign, concept, word); one would betempted to say presence in flesh and blood. This is the self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit)which Husserl calls ‘originary’.” (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 101)

“The fact is that if we want to describe it, we must say that my experience breaks forthinto things and transcends itself in them.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 303)

“Consciousness defined by its intentionality bursts outwards, moves to where things are.”(Ricoeur, 1967, p. 6)

2. Dillon (1988) goes as far as to argue that perhaps the greatest challenge to an existentialphenomenological account of perception is that posed by the argument from illusions. (p.93)

3. “We subtract just as little from the plenitude of the world’s Being, from the totality of allrealities, as we do from the plenary geometric Being of a square when we deny (what inthis case indeed can plainly be taken for granted) that it is round. It is not that the realsensory world is ‘recast’ or denied, but that an absurd interpretation of the same, whichindeed contradicts its own mentally clarified meaning, is set aside. It springs from makingthe world absolute in a philosophical sense, which is wholly foreign to the way in whichwe naturally look out upon the world.” (Husserl, 1970, p. 169)

4. “For if I am able to talk about ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’, to bother my head about the distinctionbetween imaginary and real, and cast doubt upon the ‘real’, it is because the distinction

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is already made by me before any analysis: it is because I have an experience of the realas of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one not of asking how critical thoughtcan provide for itself secondary equivalents of this distinction, but of making explicit ourprimordial knowledge of the ‘real’, of describing our perception of the world as that uponwhich our idea of truth is forever based. We must not therefore wonder whether we reallyperceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.” (Merleau-Ponty,1962, p. xvi)

5. “There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang up into being fiveminutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unrealpast.” (Russell, 1978, p. 159). Russell’s mistake is to remain committed to an empiricistconception of experience in spite of its destruction of our idea of reality. The hypothesis isunacceptable because it assumes that our only contact with the past is through memoriesand hence that there is no experience of the world maintaining its identity throughout thelapse of time. Nevertheless the argument claims that it makes sense to us to distinguishbetween a world which has been there all along and a world which sprang into existenceonly five minutes ago. If we have no direct experience of the world’s ‘lasting throughtime’, or of the world’s ‘being already there’, how would we ever know what was meantby these expressions, and what difference would there be for us between the hypothesisthat the world ‘sprang into existence five minutes ago’ and the hypothesis that the worldhas been there all along?

6. “The sides of the cube are not projections of it, but precisely sides. When I perceive themsuccessively, with the appearance they present in different perspectives, I do not constructthe idea of the net projection which accounts for these perspectives; the cube is alreadythere in front of me and reveals itself through them.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 204)

7. “We can no more construct perception of the thing and of the world from discrete aspects,than we can make up the binocular vision of an object from two monocular images. Myexperiences of the world are integrated into one single world as the double image mergesinto the one thing, when my finger stops pressing upon my eyeball. I do not have oneperspective, then another, and between then a link brought about by the understanding, buteach perspective merges into the other, . . .” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 329)

“We exclude the term perception to the whole extent that it already implies a cutting up ofwhat is lived into discontinuous acts. . . .”(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 158)

8. “The difference between illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perceptioncan be read off only from perception itself.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 296)

9. See Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) discussion of an analogous distinction between operative andthetic intentionality in the experience of time. (p. 418)

10. “A colour is never merely a colour, but the colour of a certain object, and the blue of acarpet would never be the same blue were it not a woolly blue.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.313)

“In reality, each colour, in its inmost depths, is nothing but the inner structure of the thingovertly revealed. . . . One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass. . . . One sees thespringiness of steel the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softnessof shavings.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 229)

11. Speaking about the perception of a drawing done in perspective, i.e., where distant objectsare drawn smaller than those close by, Merleau-Ponty (1962) says that:

The perspective drawing is not first of all perceived as a drawing on a plane surface,and then organized in depth. The lines which sweep towards the horizon are not firstgiven as oblique, and then thought of as horizontal. The whole of the drawing strivestowards its equilibrium by delving in depth. The poplar on the road which is drawnsmaller than a man, succeeds in becoming really and truly a tree only by retreating

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towards the horizon. It is the drawing itself which tends towards depth as a stone fallsdownwards. (p. 262)

12. “If the past were available to us only in the form of express recollections, we should becontinually tempted to recall it in order to verify its existence, and thus resemble the patientmentioned by Scheler, who was constantly turning around in order to reassure himselfthat things were really there – whereas in fact we feel it behind us as an incontestableacquisition. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 418)

13. Considerable research in psychology has been done on the “I knew it all along” effect. It hasbeen shown that children and even adults under certain conditions, appear to be unable torecall their original opinions, when in an experiment, they are given new information whichcontradicts those opinions. By and large psychologists have interpreted this phenomenonin terms of the ‘updating’ and ‘eliminating of memories.’ It is argued for example that“. . . outcome knowledge is immediately assimilated with prior knowledge . . . leavingno residual information in memory about the original knowledge state.” (Hasher, 1981,p. 86). Although we do not share the author’s explanation of the phenomenon, it is clear,first, that as far as the subject is concerned, his conviction is not based on any judgementin which his new opinion is found to be superior or more reliable than his old opinion, andsecond, that if his memory is “updated” and false information eliminated, that the subjectmust be unaware of this elimination and updating, and that somehow the new memorymust not strike him as new.

14. Merleau-Ponty has argued that it is possible for the entire visual field to be experienced asinverted even though there is no upright background or framework, as in the experimentsconducted by Stratton, or for everything in the visual field to appear smaller without anyreference point, precisely because perception is not the representation of contents but agaze at grips with the world.

When we say that an object is huge or tiny, nearby or far away, it is often without anycomparison, even implicit, with any other object, or even with the size and objectiveposition of our own body, but merely in relation to a certain “scope” of our gestures, acertain “hold” of the phenomenal body on its surroundings. (1962, p. 266)

15. We can say of the illusory what Merleau-Ponty said of the past and of depth. “Psychologyhas involved itself in endless difficulties by trying to base memory on the possession ofcertain contents or recollections, the present traces (in the body or unconscious) of theabolished past, for from these traces we can never come to understand the recognition ofthe past as past. In the same way we shall never understand the perception of distance ifwe start from contents presented, so to speak all equidistant, a flat projection of the worldas recollections are a projection of the past in the present. And just as memory can only beunderstood as a direct possession of the past with no interposed contents, so the perceptionof distance can be understood only as a being in the distance which links up with beingwhere it appears.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 265)

16. “We ‘have’ the retreating object, we never cease to ‘hold’ onto it and to have a grip on it,and the increasing distance is not, as breadth appears to be, an augmenting externality: itexpresses merely that the thing is beginning to slip away from the grip of our gaze and isless closely allied to it.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 261)

17. It is as a gaze that consciousness ‘progresses towards reality’ in focusing, and as a gazethat it pierces and dispels the ashtray, in order to reach through to grasp the serviette itself.

The movement of my eye towards the thing on which it is about to focus is not thedisplacement of an object in relation to another object, but progress towards reality.(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 279)

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18. What Merleau-Ponty has said of the role of the gaze in the perception of depth we can sayof the piercing gaze in the experience of the disillusion.

The act which corrects the appearances, giving to the acute or obtuse angles the value ofright angles, to the distorted side the value of a square, is not the idea of the geometricalrelations of equality, and the geometrical mode of being to which they belong – it isthe investing of the object by my gaze which penetrates and animates it, and showsup immediately the lateral faces as “squares seen askew”, to the extent that we do noteven see them in their diamond-shaped, perspective aspect. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.264)

19. See, for example, Richard Zaner in The Problem of Embodiment (1964): “. . . it becomesevident that he [Merleau-Ponty] gives up the theory of reductions . . . for him the world isalways-already-there, before all analysis, analysis can only therefore render this explicit.However he at no time recognizes in this regard that if the world is indeed ‘tout fait’, theworld is meant as ‘tout fait’. . . . (p. 203).

20. “The methods of proof and of cognition invented by a thought already established in theworld, the concepts of object and subject it introduces, do not enable us to understand whatthe perceptual faith is, precisely because it is a faith, that is, an adherence that knows itselfto be beyond proofs, not necessary, interwoven with incredulity, at each instant menacedby non-faith).” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 28).

21. “He must and I must have an outer appearance, and there must be, besides the perspectiveof the For Oneself – my view of myself and the other’s view of himself – a perspectiveof For Others – my view of others and theirs of me. Of course, these two perspectives, ineach of us cannot be simply juxtaposed, for in that case it is not I that the other would see,nor he that I would see. I must be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of theother must be the other himself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xii)

22. “We are not faced with a choice between a philosophy of immanence or a rationalism whichaccounts only for perception and truth, and a philosophy of transcendence or absurditywhich accounts only for illusion and error. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 295)

References

Dillon, M.C. (1988) Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Uni-versity Press.

Gopnik, A. and Slaughter, V. (1991). Young Children’s Understanding of Changes in theirMental States. Child Development 62: 98–110.

Hasher, L. Attig, M.S. and Alba, J.W. (1981). I Knew It All Along: Or, Did I?. Journal ofVerbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 20: 86–96.

Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. AnIntroduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: NorthwesternUniversity Press.

Kellman, P.J. and Spelke, E.S. (1983). Perception of Partly Occluded Objects in Infancy.Cognitive Psychology 15: 483–524.

Kellman, P.J., Gleitman, H. and Spelke, E.S. (1987). Object and Observer Motion in thePerception of Objects by Infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perceptionand Performance.13(4): 586–593.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1967). The Structure of Behaviour. Trans. A.L. Fisher. Boston: BeaconPress.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge& Kegan Paul.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston, IL:North-Western University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1967). Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Trans. E.G. Ballard and L.E.Embrie. Evanston IL: North-Western University Press.

Russell, B. (1978). The Analysis of Mind. New York: Humanities Press.Zaner, R. (1967). The Problem of Embodiment. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Dissipating Illusions

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