The Perceptual Experience of Past and Present Consciousness

    • Cover Photo
    • Presentation speakers
      • Gale Richardson, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine, USA


    This paper explores the relationship between the perceptual experience of past and present consciousness. How do time and consciousness produce an isolationistic nationalism instead of an interconnected, cosmopolitan event of the present ‘zone’ of consciousness and being? Is it possible to have another being behind my existence? Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues the following concerning time and consciousness: “None of the dimensions of time can be deduced from the others. But the present (taken broadly, with its originary horizons of past and future) has, nevertheless, a privileged status because it is the zone in which being and consciousness coincide” (Phenomenology of Perception 447). Through the perceptual lens of Merleau-Ponty, I examine the ‘zone’ of ‘being and consciousness’ in three parts in order to conclude how time and consciousness have the potential to collide instead of coincide with the present. First, I demonstrate that the ‘act of representation’ presences a person, while the ‘experience’ is simply a representation unless the experience is carried into being. Next, I determine that if I ‘arrive at a consciousness’ that has someone other than I behind my consciousness, then my ‘being and being conscious’ cannot unite as one. I am, therefore, not conscious of my being and am not conscious of my thoughts or actions but only of the one behind my consciousness. By the end of this paper, I substantiate Merleau-Ponty’s argument that when ‘my being and consciousness’ unite together, then I am not ‘reduced to knowledge;’ rather, I am one with consciousness; and my ‘consciousness of existing’ participates with the genuine ‘gesture’ of existence itself. I call humankind to action in unlocking the primary perception of both the past and the future interconnected to the present event of subjectivity so as to avoid the duality of being behind a nationalism of isolation.