Sense vs. Respect

Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sens du réel (sense of the real) and respect du réel (respect for the real), drawn from "On Indochina" in Signs (p. 520). Chouraqui 2025 §3.1 foregrounds the contrast as the perceptual face of hermeneutic freedom: sense is the agentive perception that picks up "I can"-affordances (the surfer's sense of the sea, balance, body, physical laws); respect is the fatalistic perception that registers reality as a brute object, ready to "accept just about anything" — pure quietism dressed as realism. MP uses the contrast against Mauriac's conservatism. In Chouraqui's reconstruction, sense is the perceptual mode of the unimpaired agent who plays at the political-ethical level; respect is the perceptual mode of the agnosiac who refuses to act. The distinction prefigures (and likely informs) Gibson's later "affordance" — a debt that runs in both directions per Mace's introduction to Gibson's Ecological Approach.

Key Points

Sense (sens) is agentive perception. A surfer with a "sense" of balance is not registering the sea as a brute object; her sense emerges in interaction with the sea. Sense picks up possibilities — what the world solicits the body to do.
Respect (respect) is fatalistic perception. It "is ready to accept just about anything" (MP, "On Indochina," p. 520). Respect treats reality as imperatively given and refuses to interfere with it.
Mauriac's confused realism. The contrast is occasioned by MP's critique of Mauriac's conservatism, which presents itself as realism but is actually quietism. Respect du réel "denies the real it respects because it denies the reality of freedom."
The Gibsonian connection. Gibson's "affordance" (1979) is the secular descendant of MP's sens — what the world offers an embodied agent. Chouraqui at footnote 12: "On Gibson's engagement with Merleau-Ponty, see [Chouraqui 2021, Body and Embodiment] p. 121 ff."
The political stakes. Sens du réel is the hermeneutic skill that perceives politics as a domain of agency; respect du réel is structurally agnosiac — the perceptual mode of the agnosiac who refuses to combine recognition with action.

What the Concept Does

The contrast does three things in Chouraqui's reconstruction:

It localizes hermeneutic ethics in perception, not just in deliberation. The unimpaired agent doesn't first perceive a brute fact and then decide what to do with it; she perceives the fact as affordance, as possibility, as "I can." See motor-intentionality for the bodily-pre-reflective register; sense is the political-ethical extension.
It exposes a particular kind of bad-faith realism. Mauriac's respect du réel — and analogous conservative political stances — claims to take reality seriously while actually refusing the agent's responsibility. The skill of sense shows that genuinely taking reality seriously requires being responsive to what reality solicits. To refuse the affordance is not to be more realistic; it is to be less.
It connects MP's ethics to Gibsonian ecological perception, completing a genealogical-philosophical loop. Gibson cited MP's PhP; MP's sens anticipates affordance theory. The wiki tracks both directions of this loop.

What It Rejects

Brute-fact realism: that perception registers facts neutrally and that agency is downstream of perception. Sense is already agentive.
Fatalism dressed as realism. Respect du réel is fatalism. Sens du réel is realism. MP's contrast reverses the conservative rhetoric.
The Yogi's pure subjectivity. The Yogi has no sens because she is not engaged with a real situation; she has retreated into pure interiority. See humanism-in-extension.
The Commissar's pure objectivity. The Commissar registers facts and forces but cannot perceive what reality solicits; he too lacks sens.
The dichotomy between agent and world. Sense dissolves the dichotomy because the sense itself emerges in the agent–world interaction.

The Surfer (Chouraqui's Example)

"If a surfer has a 'sense' of balance and a 'sense' for the sea, it means precisely that they relate to the sea and to their body and the physical laws involved in surfing as they are. But it also means that this sense can only emerge in their interaction with the sea and the waves. A sense, in short, is the organ that picks up possibilities (later psychologists, under Merleau-Ponty's influence would say, that picks up 'affordances' [Gibson])." (Chouraqui 2025 §3.1)

The example is doing several things:

It rejects the inner/outer distinction. The surfer's sense is not a private feeling that responds to public facts; it is a single mode of being-in-the-world.
It is enactive. Sense emerges in the doing — exactly the structure Trotsky's horse exhibits at the political scale.
It is responsive without being passive. The waves are real; balance must be earned; but the surfer is active in the responsiveness.
It is embodied. The sense is at once cognitive (anticipating wave behavior), motor (deploying balance), perceptual (reading water), and historical (sedimented practice).

The surfer is the model of hermeneutic freedom in the perceptual register and of play-as-higher-seriousness in the existential register. The surfer is not riding a brute object; the surfer is playing a wave whose reality is unimpaired by the play.

The Gibsonian Connection

Chouraqui at footnote 12 of his 2025 paper points the reader to *The Body and Embodiment* (2021) p. 121 ff. for the Gibson–MP relation, and to Mace's introduction to Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 2015 reissue). The relevant claims:

Gibson read PhP carefully.
The "affordance" concept (Gibson 1979) is structurally MP's sens secularized — what the world offers an embodied perceiver.
The reverse loop also holds: MP's late writings on flesh and visible-invisible anticipate ecological perception's blurring of the agent/environment distinction.

This makes sense vs. respect doubly load-bearing for cross-tradition history of philosophy: it locates the ecological-psychological tradition's "affordance" inside the phenomenological tradition's reservoir of distinctions, and it locates MP's own perceptual-ethical claim outside the standard transcendental-phenomenological register where it usually sits.

Mauriac and Conservative Quietism

The original textual context: MP is critiquing François Mauriac's conservatism in "On Indochina" (in Signs, 1960). Mauriac claims to be realistic; MP charges him with confusing sens du réel with respect du réel. Conservative quietism dresses fatalism in realist clothing.

The argument structure:

Realism seems to require taking reality as it is.
Mauriac concludes: therefore, do not interfere with reality.
But "do not interfere" is itself an action, with consequences for the further reality.
Refusing the affordance is not taking reality seriously; it is denying that reality has affordances at all.
Therefore, respect du réel "is ready to accept just about anything" — including outcomes the agent could have prevented.

This makes sense vs. respect a critical-political tool, not just a perceptual concept. It is what allows MP to charge Mauriac (and structurally, the Yogi, fatalism, and many conservative-realist stances) with bad faith dressed as humility.

Connections

is the perceptual register of recognition-and-institution — sense is recognition+institution at the level of perception.
opposes the perceptual face of agnosia-mp — agnosia is where sens fails, where the world becomes a series of mere objects.
is the perceptual register of play-as-political-virtue — the surfer is in the attitude of play.
is the precursor of the Gibsonian affordance — see james-j-gibson.
is structurally analogous to motor-intentionality — what motor intentionality does at the body-schema level, sens does at the political-ethical level.
contrasts with Mauriac's respect du réel — fatalism dressed as realism.
applies the primacy-of-perception thesis — perception is already agentive; ethics and politics inherit perceptual structure.
is exercised in trotskys-horse — riding the horse is having the sens of the horse.
connects to gestalt-principles-of-unification — the figure-ground structure of sens is gestaltic.

Open Questions

What is the relation between MP's sens and Husserl's Sinn (sense)? The two are clearly related but the wiki does not yet articulate the relation; "On Indochina"'s usage is colloquial-French sens (as in bon sens, avoir le sens de), not the technical Husserlian Sinn. A Phase-8 or future-ingest task could clarify.
How does sens relate to "Le sens du divin" (Bachelard) or the broader French phenomenological tradition of sens as orientational? Bachelard's usage may overlap.
Does Mauriac (the entity) deserve a wiki entity page? He is currently mentioned only in passing; the respect du réel charge is structurally important for MP's politics but Mauriac is not a recurring figure in the wiki corpus. Defer until cross-source recurrence emerges.
Korsten and Chouraqui's 2024 paper on Spielraum — see play-as-political-virtue § "Open Questions" — uses the sens / respect contrast to read political aesthetics; once that source is ingested, the wiki should connect sense vs. respect to Spielraum explicitly.
Does Gibson's affordance retain MP's agentive character or attenuate it? Some readers (e.g., Heft) think Gibson naturalized MP at the cost of the deeper agency-claim. The wiki could test this once Gibson sources are ingested.

Sources

chouraqui-2025-healing-schneider — §3.1 (the central elaboration); the surfer example; footnote 12 on Gibson; references to "On Indochina" (Signs p. 520).
merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "On Indochina" (1947 essay collected in Signes 1960), p. 520. The sentence: Mauriac confuses "sense for reality" [sens du réel] with "respect for reality" [respect du réel]; the latter "accepts just about anything."