Perceptual ambiguity is a necessary, unwilled structure of embodied existence.

Evidence

In traditional philosophy, the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived is established as the diff erence between a subject and an object. With Merleau-Ponty, this diff erence is ruined. One cannot be a perceiver without being perceived. One cannot be a perceiving subject without also, and necessarily, being an object of perception. Th is simultaneity of our subject and object status constitutes the ambiguity of the lived body. We are not one (the subject) or the other (the object) but one (the subject) and the other (the object). Th ere is nothing willed about this ambiguity. It is a necessary and anonymous structure of our existence. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 67

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise definition of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ambiguity of the lived body’ — the simultaneous subject-and-object status that is anonymous and necessary.
• XREF: connects to: So-called sensory relativity is really objective contradiction resolved by free choice.; Perception arrives pre-shaped by expectations and context, never raw — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 729; Being embodied is essential to existence, but no particular body structure is. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 80 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodern perception holds incompatible coordinates without unifying them #complicates (0.78)