Abstract
In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world.
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Notes
We can see this in Merleau-Ponty’s study of animal learning (1963), his exploration of child development (1964a, 1973, 1988), his lectures on institution (2003), his interest in the creativity of artistic and linguistic expression (2012, 1993a, b), his accounts of the human development of sensory, perceptual and motor habits, human adaptations to disturbances in experience and bodily functioning, and intellectual insights (2012), and, towards the end of his career, his study of the emergence of new forms of living being within nature (1995).
See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “Neither empiricism nor intellectualism grasp consciousness in the act of learning” (2012, 30). Though he asserts this in the context of a particular argument and concerning conscious learning alone, this essay seeks to show how, if we think through Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts, we find that the same retrospective logic at work in conscious learning is also at work in the bodily learning involved in sensorimotor development, and the existential learning involved in emotional and linguistic development.
Plato, Meno, 80d–e.
I will refer to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (2012) with ‘PhP,’ putting the French pagination first, the English translation pagination second.
Merleau-Ponty describes this retrospective illusion in relation to our understanding of perception in multiple places, including the Structure of Behaviour, 217–20 (I will henceforth refer to this text as SB). Indeed, the acknowledgement of this retrospective illusion, which consists in taking the determinate results of a process, or what unfolds from that process, to have been there all along, as the cause of that process, is arguably at the basis of the overarching argument of the Phenomenology of Perception and of Merleau-Ponty’s texts on artistic expression and childhood development.
This is a conclusion for which Merleau-Ponty repeatedly argues. It is one of the central conclusions, for instance, of the chapter on reflex behavior in The Structure of Behavior, and of the chapters “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity,” “Sensing,” “Space,” “The Thing and the Natural World” in the Phenomenology of Perception, and of his lecture course entitled “Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression.”
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this point in The Visible and the Invisible, 133.
This is a point central to the account of perception articulated by James J. Gibson, in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Compare the effects of pink on violent and aggressive behaviour. Schauss (1979) reports a study wherein subjects show less strength in their arms when looking at pink. He also reports an experiment done by his students, Baker and Miller, involving painting a prison holding cell pink: the pink seems to have reduced or eliminated initial violent behaviour within the cell; this tactic was then used in other jails and delinquent youth centres (sp. Santa Clara County Jail and Kuiper Youth Center). In The Power of Color, Walker (1991, especially chapter 3) reports similar studies and phenomena, including the significant reduction of suicides resulting from painting green a bridge that was black.
Merleau-Ponty notes how there is a retrospective illusion (though he does not name it as such) that accompanies color sensation, with the result that several psychological accounts have assumed that the child must be seeing green, even if she is unable to distinguish it. That is, because green seems so immediately given to the psychologist, she cannot imagine “a world in which colors are indeterminate.” What psychologists must come to see, according to Merleau-Ponty, is that the emergence of the infant from an experience of indeterminacy to an experience of determinate colours, “[t]he first perception of colors, properly so called, is … a change in the structure of consciousness, the institution of a new dimension of experience…” and this new structure is what makes the identity of the color “before and after” its institution appear (PhP, 54/32, emphasis added). The new structure of experience makes it seem retrospectively as if the green had always been there.
Uexküll (1957) vividly makes the point that what we perceive is a function of our bodily resources and what the environment offers. Thompson (1995) makes this same point in relation to colour, in particular. Merleau-Ponty takes this further by emphasizing the active motor response that is required to bring colour into its determinacy for us.
Thelen and Smith (1996) show, in their book A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action, how a multitude of independent developments converge, or interact dynamically, in order to bring about various new forms of action and cognition.
Merleau-Ponty cites a (disturbing) third study that also demonstrates how the body improvisationally reorganizes itself in order to solve an unexpected problem posed by the animal’s basic project and its lack of bodily resources. In this case (SB, 40), an animal loses use of its right front limb for seizing food after the partial excision of the relevant cerebral region; it then substitutes its left limb. When, however, the left limb is amputated it regains use of its right limb. If the relevant cerebral region for the right limb is fully excised, the animal can still use its right limb when the situation makes it imperative. In other words, the animal’s bodily functioning is not pre-programmed, but reorganizes itself in light of the task that it encounters, and the systems that are most open to being drawn into the service of resolving the problem encountered.
Certain constraints are set by the organism’s genetic inheritance, so that a tick, for instance, will not develop retinal vision just because there are things that could be seen. But these constraints do not amount to fully determinate potentials; they are rather a relative openness to developing in ways that are responsive to, and that help to determine, the particular environment in which the creature finds itself. Geneticist Richard Lewontin offers a criticism of genetic determinism, or the idea that genes are the one cause at the root of biological development, in his book Biology as Ideology.
I will make reference to this text (1964a) as “CRO.”
Fogel and Thelen (1987) make a similar argument, from the dynamic systems perspective, that the development of early expressive and communicative action is not a matter of a development written in advance into the ontogeny of an isolatable infant, but rather of the infant-in-a-typically-supportive-social-situation.
This response is itself an example of a “retrospective illusion”: because Robert’s parents can see clearly that Robert does have a place in the world, and that he has not been usurped but rather occupies his own valuable position relative to his sister, they assume that Robert must be able to see this too. Their own clarity gives the illusion that this “fact” is inherently clear, and they cannot understand Robert’s behavior as a kind of blind, confused groping for an answer to the indeterminate tension he feels. I have written in more detail about the differences between Gricha’s and Robert’s environments in “Emotional Metamorphoses” (2009).
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Maclaren, K. Merleau-Ponty on human development and the retrospective realization of potential. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 609–621 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9519-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9519-x