Key Arguments

• He claims 'We can only understand perception by accounting for a color-function, which can remain even when the qualitative appearance is altered,' explicitly shifting from static qualities to a functional notion.
• Using the example 'I say that my pen is black and I see it as black in the sunshine,' he notes that 'this black is much less the sensible quality of blackness than it is a dark power that shines from the object, even when it is covered over by reflections,' emphasizing color as a power or tendency rather than as a simple presented quale.
• He adds that 'this black as a dark power is only visible in the sense in which a moral blackness is visible,' explicitly drawing an analogy to moral qualities that are not given as simple sensory properties but as expressive significations.
• He compares real color to background in figure/ground structure: 'The real color remains beneath the appearances just as the background continues beneath the figure, that is, not as a quality that is seen or conceived, but rather as a non-sensorial presence,' characterizing it as an operative, unthematized presence.

Source Quotes

The Maoris have 3,000 color names, not because they perceive many, but rather because they do not identify them when they belong to structurally different objects.9 As Scheler said, perception goes directly to the things without passing through colors, just as it can grasp the expression of a gaze without thematizing the color of the eyes. We can only understand perception by accounting for a color-function, which can remain even when the qualitative appearance is altered. I say that my pen is black and I see it as black in the sunshine.

We can only understand perception by accounting for a color-function, which can remain even when the qualitative appearance is altered. I say that my pen is black and I see it as black in the sunshine. But this black is much less the sensible quality of blackness than it is a dark power that shines from the object, even when it is covered over by reflections, and this black as a dark power is only visible in the sense in which a moral blackness is visible. The real color remains beneath the appearances just as the background continues beneath the figure, that is, not as a quality that is seen or conceived, but rather as a non-sensorial presence.

But this black is much less the sensible quality of blackness than it is a dark power that shines from the object, even when it is covered over by reflections, and this black as a dark power is only visible in the sense in which a moral blackness is visible. The real color remains beneath the appearances just as the background continues beneath the figure, that is, not as a quality that is seen or conceived, but rather as a non-sensorial presence. Physics and also psychology give an arbitrary definition of color that in fact only works for one of its modes of appearance, and which has long concealed from us all of the others.

Key Concepts

• We can only understand perception by accounting for a color-function, which can remain even when the qualitative appearance is altered.
• I say that my pen is black and I see it as black in the sunshine. But this black is much less the sensible quality of blackness than it is a dark power that shines from the object, even when it is covered over by reflections, and this black as a dark power is only visible in the sense in which a moral blackness is visible.
• The real color remains beneath the appearances just as the background continues beneath the figure, that is, not as a quality that is seen or conceived, but rather as a non-sensorial presence.

Context

Middle of the same subsection on color constancy, where Merleau-Ponty moves from criticizing accounts of constant qualitative color to proposing a functional, background‑like conception of real color.