Abstract of a paper ‘ Painting, Merleau-Ponty and the fullness of Being’ originally prepared for a conference at the University of Liverpool
Merleau-Ponty quotes Cezanne – ‘The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness ‘ 1…’Nature is on the inside ‘2 ; – and Paul Klee ‘Some days I felt the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want penetrate it’.3
Much loved by painters and often detected behind the words of contemporary critics, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty gives an insight into how meaning develops as we look at a painting and the relationship of this to our experience of being-in-the-world in our life as a whole. The paper invites viewers to look at a selection of paintings from different periods and genres, and introduces key tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore the paintings further in relation to the meaning of life and mortality.
Rejecting materialist and idealist determinism, his ontology distinguishes between subject and object but also unites them in a reciprocal dependency, in our perceptual experience as ‘embodied subjects’. In his framework we relate to the world through our bodies as well as our minds and meaning in life is a question of how we take up our concrete present, our natural and social situation in the world that we live through. Life is full of ambiguities, not least on account of its contingency. The world is there in our consciousness, yet we are also in it and it appears to have an existence of its own. Coherence is only possible, he suggests, through a coherence of our body with the world and is a sensual process of seeing and being seen, touching and feeling touched in an integrated development of our thoughts and feelings, but our knowledge of things is never complete.
The tacit language of painting, says Merleau-Ponty, is better able than analytic thought to express this. Looking at work by great painters can illuminate the existential paradoxes of feeling ourselves as both subject and object, as viewing the work from a distance yet also inhabiting it, as eternally grasping a presence which eludes us and is always being remade. It can take us to what Merleau-Ponty means by the thickness of the perceptual ‘chiasm’, the point at which self and other intersect reversibly and we are united yet separated from that which is other than ourselves, and where we are always becoming in a perpetual present.
Acknowledging our response to the paradoxes of time and place in a painting and the latent, presence of the invisible behind the tactile may help us to understand ourselves and how we approach death. For Merleau-Ponty there is a dialectical relationship between being and ‘non- being’, which encompasses knowledge of death as well as the invisibility of thought and the unseen, unknown aspects of things yet to cohere. Given the contingency of consciousness and the fragility of the concepts through which we express our lives , says Merleau-Ponty, we have a moral responsibility to develop our knowledge of who we are through the elucidation of our concrete present.
The tragedy of his own, early death makes the questions his work raises even more acute. Does looking at or making art bring us closer to the phenomenogical quest to discover the advent of being of consciousness and the meaning of being-in-the-world ? Does it help us to understand the experience when we say something is ‘there’ in ambiguity ? Do we, like Orpheus in search of Eurydice – or Schrodinger contemplating the sacrifice of his cat – seek to explore the boundary between life and death ? Do we still long for the clarity of absolute knowledge, and eternal life ?
Bibliography:
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C.Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1964). The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press. In O’Neill, J.(ed) Phenomenology, Language and Sociology : Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Carleton Dallery, London : Heinemann, 1974, pp. 196-226
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1964a). Cezanne’s Doubt. In Merleau-Ponty, M. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricial Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press,1964, pp. 9-25
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1964b) Eye and Mind. In Phenomenology, Language and Sociology : Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Op. cit. pp. 280-311
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1964c) Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, In Phenomenology,Language and Sociology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ibid, pp.36-80
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1967) The Structure of Behaviour. Trans. A. Fisher, foreward J. Wild. Boston: Beacon Press
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Lefort, C. (ed). Trans. A.Lingis, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press
copyright: Gillian Robertson 2021