Abstract

In this paper, I will depict how Merleau-Ponty treats perception as the subject’s most concrete and basic relationship to the world and secondly, I will explain why Bergson points out the limitations of perception by disclosing a more fundamental aspect of human experience, which is according to him, duration: the temporal aspect of perception. Both philosophers begin by understanding perception as they aim to depict consciousness in action. The distinction between these two philosophers is that while for Merleau-Ponty the priority is corporeal perception and the subject; for Bergson the priority is duration as according to Bergson, perception is an organization of memory and duration which transcends consciousness and the subject. Referring to Bergson’s conceptualization of perception in a continuous relationship to memory, I will suggest that intuition, as an experience of the expansion and progress of memory, can reverse and transform the phenomenological experience of perception as well as habitual way of perceiving things. It will be shown that perception habitually responds to all members of a general type in the same way, but intuition aims at what is unique in the singular and particular object. As an enriching process of perception, intuition can contribute to our knowledge of the thing in itself and to the experience of novelty in perception. While Merleau-Ponty explains perception as a meaningful phenomenon in its multi-faceted aspects of being-in-the-world, Bergson emphasizes the limitations of this phenomenal and habitualized perception, and points out to the phenomenalization process in explaining the genesis of perception with duration and pure memory. Following this line of thought, it will be shown that while Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy emerges as a philosophy of indeterminacy and the ambiguity of existence, Bergson’s philosophy develops into a philosophy of creative process.