Key Arguments

• After rejecting the projection model, Merleau-Ponty reformulates the 'true problem of memory’s role in perception' as 'understanding how consciousness – by its own energy [vie] and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness – can, with time, alter the structure of its landscapes.'
• He describes how 'at each instant, its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes that horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but that it can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification.'
• The past is characterized as 'A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation – such is the presence of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible.'
• This structural account allows Merleau-Ponty to differentiate perception and memory positively: 'To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible.'
• Conversely, 'To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place.'
• He succinctly marks their difference: 'To perceive is not to remember,' thereby rejecting reduction of perception to a special case of memory or vice versa while still grounding both in the same structural presence of the past as horizon.
• By emphasizing horizons, margins, atmosphere, and 'settings' that 'assign consciousness a temporal situation,' he replaces the additive, representational model (sensations plus memory images) with a temporal, field‑like model in which the past is productively present as a style or configuration that can be thematized or left implicit.

Source Quotes

This is not a series of incomplete sensations between which memories would have to be embedded, but rather the physiognomy – the structure of the landscape or of the word – spontaneously in accordance with our present intentions and with our previous experience. Here the true problem of memory’s role in perception appears, and it is tied to the general problem of perceptual consciousness. It is a question of understanding how consciousness – by its own energy [vie] and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness – can, with time, alter the structure of its landscapes; how, at each instant, its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes that horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but that it can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification.

Here the true problem of memory’s role in perception appears, and it is tied to the general problem of perceptual consciousness. It is a question of understanding how consciousness – by its own energy [vie] and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness – can, with time, alter the structure of its landscapes; how, at each instant, its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes that horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but that it can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification. A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation – such is the presence of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible.

It is a question of understanding how consciousness – by its own energy [vie] and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness – can, with time, alter the structure of its landscapes; how, at each instant, its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes that horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but that it can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification. A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation – such is the presence of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible. To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible.

A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation – such is the presence of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible. To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place.

To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place. To perceive is not to remember. [e.

To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place. To perceive is not to remember. [e. Empiricism and reflection.] The relations “figure” and “background,” “thing” and “non-thing,” and the horizon of the past would thus be structures of consciousness irreducible to the qualities that appear in consciousness.

Key Concepts

• Here the true problem of memory’s role in perception appears, and it is tied to the general problem of perceptual consciousness.
• how consciousness – by its own energy [vie] and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness – can, with time, alter the structure of its landscapes;
• its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes that horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but that it can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification.
• A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation – such is the presence of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible.
• To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible.
• To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived anew in their own temporal place.
• To perceive is not to remember.

Context

End of section (d) 'There is no “projection of memories”' in chapter II, where Merleau-Ponty, having criticized empiricist and intellectualist models of memory’s role in perception, proposes a phenomenological account of the 'presence of the past' as horizon and clarifies the distinct structures of perceiving and remembering.