The overflow of the gaze: perception and categorial attitude in Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the appropriations made by Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty of the concept of categorical attitude, derived from the research of Kurt Goldstein. In the field of psychopathology, the categorical attitude refers to the structure of possible or virtual behaviors, demarcated in the register of the symbolic, which allow the subject to relate to the world beyond the current or present data of perception. By denoting this symbolic plane, to which the behavioral sphere of patients with brain injury seems no longer to be inscribed, the concept of categorical attitude opens to the possibility of being interpreted from the lexicon of ideation, abstraction, or generalization. This implies conceiving that the notion of category would inhabit a plane distinct from the sensitive or perceptual plane. This is the reading proposed by Gurwitsch, who brings the notion of categorical attitude closer to the elaborations carved by Husserl through the distinction between perceptual meaning and categorial meaning. In a different way, in Merleau-Ponty’s first work, The Structure of Behavior, the treatment of the categorical attitude is carried out towards rooting the idealizing capacity of human experience in the perceptual dynamics itself, defining symbolic behavior, primarily, as capable of “perspective multiplicity”