Recovering Presence: On Alva Noë's Varieties of Presence, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2012

References

• Cf.J. Kevin O'Reagan and Alva Noë, “A Sensimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness“, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, 2001, p, 948.
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• As J. Kevin O'Reagan and Alva Noë make clear in their important study: ‘Seeing is not directly related to having a retinal image, but being able to manipulate the retinal image’. ‘A Sensimotor Account of Vision and and Visual Consciousness’, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, 2001, p, 948.
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• Alva NoË, Action in Perception. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 85.
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• Ibid, p. 78–79.
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• In his later work, Merleau-Ponty accentuates this dimension even more profoundly, and is centring his phenomenology around the notions of depth and flesh (chair): “It is because of depth that things have a flesh”. The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1968, p. 219. I shall not pay specific attention to the developments of this dimension in Merleau-Ponty's later thought here. The notions of depth and flesh are already contained in his early phenomenology, and, I take it, is first and foremost won by an analysis which encompasses passivity.
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• This chapter is partly written as a response to a criticism which is informed by Merleau-Ponty's thinking, in particular that if Sean D. Kelly, “Content and Constancy: phenomenology, psychology, and the content of perception”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXVI No. 3, 2008, pp. 682–690. I share some of Kelly's worries, however, without thinking that the enactive approach advocates an entirely different phenomenology of experience from that of Merleau-Ponty. Kelly seems to assume that presence on the enactive approach just is actuality, which it surely is not, since what yields presence is availability. I take it that Merleau-Ponty and the enactive approach share a similar aim, accounting for presence as depth, real presence; the question is whether enactivism is sufficiently aware of how background and passivity is intertwined.
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• Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 68.
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• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Massachussetts and Illinois: Nortwestern University Press, 1964, p. 14.
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• As Sean D. Kelly has remarked in his insightful piece on depth in Merleau-Ponty: “The real thing is present in every perspectival presentation of it, although, of course, it is never presented determinately in any one”. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty”, in Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 95.
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• Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 6. The translation is altered in line with the important discussion of this passage in Sean D. Kelly, op cit, pp. 74–111. I take it that Merleau-Ponty's invocation here of a je ne sais quoi is not arbitrary, but indeed hints at the proto-aesthetic nature of the perceptual encounter in so far as the very form and structure of thingly presence relies upon an indeterminate presence in absence.
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• Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen, Berlin University Press, Berlin, 2007, p. 38. My translation.
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• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973, p. 60.
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• As according to Husserl: “It is a passivity which belongs to the act, not as a base but as act, a kind of passivity in activity”, Experience and Judgement, translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973, p. 108.
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• Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’. In Galen A. Johnson (ed.): The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Nortwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, p. 127.
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• Ibid, p. 126.
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