Evaluation of Hearing vis-a-vis the Other Sensory Functions according to Jules Lagneau’s ‘Cours sur la perception’

Abstract

This paper focuses on the texts on hearing in “Cours sur la perception” included in Jules Lagneau’s Célèbres leçons et fragments, and discusses active judgement of the spirit related to the function of hearing, confirming the characteristics of various elements constructing music. The texts on hearing are distinctive in that they include descriptions on art, or more specifically, music, while the texts on vision and touch describes extension in general. While Merleau-Ponty criticized Lagneau in Phénoménologie de la perception, focusing on Lagneau’s texts on vision, this paper dares to focus on those on hearing. The latter texts are undoubtedly one of the clearest manifestations of active (and therefore highly evaluated) function of the spirit that Lagneau emphasized throughout the argument on perception. But they might be considered as a device of Lagneau to introduce “émotion” as the third term into the cartesian dualism. Using Lagneau’s concepts of “modification” and “attente”(expectation / waiting), this paper points out that perception in his understanding is not unmediated, but something more complicated, mediated and reconstructed, which is supported, not without endeavors, by active judgment of the spirit.