Even in experiments, perception is world-directed, not inner-sensation centered.

Evidence

In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 738 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

QUALITY is nothing other than the being of the this when it is considered apart from all external relation with the world or with other thises. Too often quality has been conceived as a simple subjective determination, and its quality-of-being has then been confused with the subjectivity of the psychic. The problem has then appeared to be especially to explain the constitution of an object-pole conceived as the transcendent unity of qualities. We have shown that this problem is insoluble. A quality does not objectivate itself if it is subjective. Supposing that we had projected the unity of an object-pole beyond qualities, at most each one of them would be given directly as the subjective effect of the action of things upon us. But the yellow of the lemon is not a subjective mode of apprehending the lemon; it is the lemon. And it is not true either that the object X appears as the empty form which holds together disparate qualities. In fact the lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its shape and its color to what we may call the alimentary intuition. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 594 (#expands, via linked claim)

Let us note first that no matter how absorbed I am in my reading, I do not for all that cease making the world come into being. Better yet, my reading is an act which implies in its very nature the existence of the world as a necessary ground. This certainly does not mean that I have a weaker consciousness of the world but that I am conscious of it as a ground. … To be conscious is always to be conscious of the world, and the world and body are always present to my consciousness although in different ways. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 881 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Even visual anomalies are objective relations between world-objects, not subjective modifications.; Senses are not subjective channels but objective rules of worldly revelation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 856; Directed attention does not weaken world-consciousness but relegates the world to ground — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 881 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Experience begins embedded in the world, not isolated from it #corroborates (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 738
• Perceived qualities exist objectively as the thing itself, not as subjective effects #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 594
• Directed attention does not weaken world-consciousness but relegates the world to ground #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 881
• Sensation requires an object other than the sense acting on it #expands (0.75)
• In African thought the world is experienced, not theorised about #exemplifies (0.75)
• Perception is indistinguishable from the practical organization of the world into instruments #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 860