Perception and Time-Experience in Merleau-Ponty and Bergson

Both Merleau-Ponty and Bergson underlined the significance of perception and temporal aspect of the subject. However, their account significantly differs. For Merleau-Ponty, the present has priority over past and future, as the subject perceives, acts, and exists in the “present”. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the priority of the present depends mostly on his prioritizing of perception and the acting subject. Bergson, on the other hand, considers perception in a relation to memory and present in a relation to duration, thus he emphasizes the possibility of organization and dis-organization of habit-world through varying degrees of repetition of useful memory-images. By showing duration as the condition of possibility for the experience of intuition, Bergson reveals the possibility of reversing habitual way of perceiving things.