Simply put, immediacy perception gives us the bare facts of experience, the discrete bits and pieces that enter our awareness. Meaning perception is a kind of glue that holds these pieces together and makes them a whole.
“An intention,” we are told in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (section 337), “is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions.”
For Merleau-Ponty the ‘object’ of perception cannot be viewed in isolation, because is in reality embedded in a context, the nexus of relations among existing things which gives it meaning within the world. Thus no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there.
There is nothing in the case of feeling to correspond with what, in the case of thinking, may be called mis-thinking or thinking wrong. The most general name for this thing is failure. Failure and its opposite, success, imply that the activity which fails or succeeds is not only a ‘doing something’ but a ‘trying to do something’, where the word ‘trying’ refers not to what is called ‘conation’, but to an activity which sets itself definite tasks, and judges itself as having succeeded or failed by reference to the standards or criteria which it thereby imposes on itself.
Strauss said that “a tribal community may possess a culture, i.e., produce and enjoy hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, and enjoy fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.” For that, you needed the “conscious culture of humanity,” to be found in the works of writers like Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche.
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” according to a universal legal maxim. It is asking a great deal, both of legal insiders and of those without. It demands that ordinary persons have a general understanding of legal principles, at least as far as their own affairs are concerned. The Digest [Roman legal precepts] and the Talmud are huge storehouses of concepts, and to be required to have even a sketchy idea of them is a powerful stimulus to learning abstractions. What is less obvious, but equally important, is that the maxim imposes a heavy burden on the law itself. Legal concepts must be, in some sense, comprehensible at large. No formulas, no flow charts, no diagrams. Despite a common impression to the contrary, the law cannot possibly be a tangle of esoteric rules that invariably need resort to a lawyer to understand or to have understood on one’s behalf. Since the point of the law is to order ordinary affairs, the language in which the rules are expressed must be substantially that of ordinary life.
