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The Cartesian conception of space as an empty grid is unable to account for embodied perspective from which all space is experienced. Merleau-Ponty turns to painting in order to learn something of a different conception of space and depth. The understanding of space Merleau-Ponty seeks to articulate is that of lived space (309): "I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me." 
Painting gestures to such a thick conception of depth that shatters the abstract shell of space (see, 311). Cézanne uses color to convey this richer understanding of depth. This, Merleau-Ponty suggests is at work in Cézanne's Portrait of Vallier, which "sets between the colors white spaces which take on the function of giving shape to, and setting off, a being more general than the yellow-being of green-being or blue-being" (312).
Merleau-Ponty points also to Cézanne's watercolors in which space "radiates around planes that cannot be assigned to any place at all" (312).
Return, then, to Cézanne's work on Mont Saint-Victoire to witness the overlapping movement of planes of color (see, 312).
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Movement and Line Merleau-Ponty also points to the painting of Paul Klee (1879-1940) who used line and color to convey this thick sense of depth and movement endemic to living space. He sites Klee as saying that the "line renders visible" rather than imitating the visible (314). This is evident in the following two paintings, Ad Parnassum (1932) and Highways and Byways (1929).
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This conception of science is beautifully articulated in a recent blog post by John Tierney of the New York Times entitled "Turning Homosexuality On and Off" in which he introduces the work of the University of Illinois at Chicago neurobiologist, David Featherstone, whose research has been able to genetically turn on and off the sexual orientation of fruit flies. When Tierney asks if it might one day be possible to quickly alter human sexual orientation, Featherstone said:
Although I am not sure my research is a big step in this direction, I think that ultimately the answer will be: Yes. After all, the goal of neuroscience is a complete understanding of brain function. Understanding in science is typically demonstrated by the ability to control a process.This is a concise articulation of the scientific attitude that Merleau-Ponty criticizes for having lost a sense for the "opaqueness of the world" (291).
To be sure, Merleau-Ponty has a great deal of respect for and understanding of the sciences, however, he insists that scientific thinking,
a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the "there is" which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body - not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts" (293).The impetus behind Merleau-Ponty's turn to art in general and to painting in particular is his recognition that painting is attuned to the "there is" and can instructively turn philosophy and science once again to a sense of the "opaqueness of the world."
To control is not to understand; rather, understanding is born from and lives in our embodied engagement with the opaque world. It involves not manipulation, but a certain capacity to see such that what remains unseen, invisible, absent is not felt as a lack to be overcome by a total comprehension, but as that which remains itself a condition for the possibility of all meaningful engagement with the world.
Here are two pictures that show this struggle and the distortions that arise from it:
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He also points to the portrait of Gustave Geoffroy, suggesting: "The work table in his portrait of Gustave Geoffroy stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture. In giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions ..." (276).
Merleau-Ponty insists, however, that the distortion in the table actually captures more effectively the way we ourselves perceive things; that is, to our natural vision of the "object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes" (278).
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To emphasize this phenomenological point about different perspectives, it is helpful to look at the portrait of Mme Cézanne in a Yellow Chair in which the segment of the line behind her on the wall is dislocated, as it would be to natural vision.
Merleau-Ponty summarizes why he thinks Cézanne is an important painter of the phenomenology of perception this way:
it is Cézanne's genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes" (278).
The thesis proposal is composed of two parts: a thesis statement and a preliminary description of the project.
First, develop a clear and concise thesis statement. A thesis is not a topic. The word “thesis” comes from a Greek word that means stand or position. Thus, a thesis statement takes a stand or establishes a definite position on a given subject. A “topic” merely indicates the general area of concern.
A topic is vague: “Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic theory” is a topic. This indicates a general area of concern, but does not present a specific argument. A thesis sets forth a definite position for which the rest of the paper argues. Thus, it serves to give the entire paper a purpose and direction. For example, “Cézanne’s painting embodies Dewey’s conception of art as a ‘solvent union’ and highlights the similarity between Dewey’s aesthetic theory and that of Merleau-Ponty” is a good thesis statement. Ideally, a good thesis statement will be the organizing principle of the entire structure of the paper.
The second part of the proposal will involve specifically laying out and describing the basic structure of the paper. This description is not rigid and it is meant to be further developed as you do your research. It is a starting point and rough outline of the project.
Finally, I will be reviewing these proposals to ensure that they are neither too broad nor too specific. Please don’t hesitate to see me if you are having trouble developing a thesis.
In Part I of The Phenomenology of Perception entitled "The Body," Merleau-Ponty wrote: "to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it" (81). Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire near his home in Aix-en-Provence over sixty times. It is instructive to look at a series of these paintings to see how Cézanne inhabited the mountain. First, look at two earlier paintings from the years 1885-87. (All images are from the Cézanne entry at the WebMuseum, Paris.)
Now look at two later paintings, the one on the left is thought to be one of the last paintings Cézanne made of the mountain (1904-06), although the one on the right seems to me to anticipate more directly the movements of cubism and expressionism that were to follow. These movements are respectively embodied in paintings like Picasso's Brick Factory at Tortosa (1909) and "The Fate of the Animals" by Franz Marc (1913):
Merleau-Ponty sites Cézanne as saying: "The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness." The above paintings beautifully articulate the consciousness of the landscape surrounding Mont Sainte-Victoire and suggest an important connection between Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Dewey's naturalism.
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that Cézanne himself understood his paintings as "attempting a piece of nature" (276). In a statement that should remind us of Dewey's understanding of the nature of art and the art of nature as a solvent union of the ordered and the novel, Merleau-Ponty writes of Cézanne:
He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization (277).
The chapter entitled Experience, Nature and Art in John Dewey's Experience and Nature develops a conception of art as a
solvent union of the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with its phase that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contingent, novel, particular ... (359)He goes on to speak of routine and a capricious impulse as the limiting terms that define art at the extremes. Each extreme in isolation is unnatural and, thus for Dewey, inartistic (360). He goes on to insist: "for nature is an intersection of spontaneity and necessity, the regular and the novel, the finished and the beginning" (360).
Obviously this conception of the relation between art and nature goes far beyond an aesthetic theory concerned exclusively with the meaning of art in isolation from the world of politics and culture. However, the terms in which Dewey articulates the meaning and nature of art do lend insight into what was at stake during that fateful historical moment in the 1930's in Europe when the forces of fascism took control of artistic expression.
Genuine German versus "Degenerate" Art
When the Nazi's came to power in 1933, they took control of the Culture Chamber and set about funding only the artists who produced what they called genuine German art. In Dewey's terms, this art was highly inartistic because it only emphasized the phase of regularity and order, excluding altogether the natural phase of novelty, irregularity, whimsy and surprise. In the process, they also gathered many works of modern art, particularly the art associated with the movement of Expressionism. Before their scheduled destruction, they were sent on a tour entitled the "Degenerate Art Exhibition" in the mid- and late-1930's. A look at some examples of both "Genuine German" and "Degenerate" art will draw Dewey's point about art being a solvent of two poles into sharp relief.
Perhaps it struck some of you as strange that Merleau-Ponty concludes his treatment of history in the first chapter of Adventures of the Dialectic with a discussion of politics. What is the relationship between a philosophy of history and politics? What sort of politics does Merleau-Ponty suggest that Weber develops?
To begin to think about these questions, let's look at a few passages. With Merleau-Ponty, it is perhaps best to begin with the dichotomy he seeks to situate himself between:
...history considered as a succession of isolated facts and the arrogance of a philosophy which lays claim to have grasped the past in its categories and which reduces it to our thoughts about it. (Basic Writings, 336)How does Merleau-Ponty articulate a position between these two extremes? What sort of conception of truth is at work in his account of historical truth?
The role of human choice in history is a critical dimension of Merleau-Ponty's account of history and its continuing and continual importance for the present. He emphasizes also the importance of ambiguity in opening the possibility for meaning. To understand the way history is determined by and wins meaning in choice, it is necessary to see choice in its relation to ambiguity. Regarding ambiguity, or Vielseitigkeit, Merleau-Ponty writes:
The ambiguity of historical facts, their Vielseitigkeit, the plurality of their aspects, far from condemning historical knowledge to the realm of the provisional ... is the very thing that agglomerates the dust of facts, which allows us to read in a religious fact the first draft of an economic system... (BW, 335).Interestingly, ambiguity is the condition for the possibility of historical meaning. It allows us to read one set of facts in terms of another, and so to make meaning out of the facts.
This is the case, however, also because the facts are "all embedded in the unitary web of human choices" (BW, 335). The notion of choice also links the past to the present, to recover the fundamental choices of the past is to extend methodologically the experience of the present (BW, 341).
What happens to the meaning of truth in this context? Truth is not the accurate account of historical facts, but it must be recognized to work "together with decision" (BW, 343).
This, then, suggests why politics is important to historical understanding. It is a question of responsibility. Weber distinguishes between the ethic of ultimate ends in which politician seek to manipulate the masses for the sake of some definite end, and the ethic of responsibility in which the mature politician takes a stand for something and takes responsibility for the consequences of this stance (BW, 344).
Finally, then, to link history to politics, Merleau-Ponty suggests: "In politics, truth is perhaps only this art of inventing what will later appear to have been required by the time" (BW, 345).
In the previous post, we focused on the question of how natural things present themselves to perception as a kind of communication. Merleau-Ponty gives privilege to language and dialogue as the mode whereby we are made aware of our co-existence with others in a common world.
Between Realism and Idealism
Merleau-Ponty situates his position again between two poles, here it is between a certain idealism that presumes the external world is immanent (163) and a certain realism that insists that I am subject to a purely causal action (163). The former is associated with the for-itself (consciousness constitutes the world), the later, with the in-itself (objects arrayed in space).
Prior to this distinction, Merleau-Ponty argues there is the perspective that emerges from our being-in-the-world; the recognition that consciousness has a body (149). From this perspective, the problem of other consciousnesses dissolves. And dialogue is the mode by which the consciousness of others is experienced.
Dialogue with the Other
Although our perception of artifacts suggests already that there exists a "thinking older than myself" (150), it is through dialogue with another that "there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground" (153).
In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being (153).
Given the way communication places one outside oneself, how it is that Merleau-Ponty can hold onto "the permanent truth of solipsism" (154)? What does solipsism mean here? He claims: "There is here a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable" (157). Why, on Merleau-Ponty's terms, does this not throw us back into a certain kind of idealism?
In order to draw Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the natural world and our co-existence with others into relation to the next section of the course on language, it will be helpful to focus on the role communication plays in Merleau-Ponty's account of our experience with the natural world and our co-existence with others. I will address the first issue here and the second in another post.
The Thing and the Natural World
Merleau-Ponty thematizes the relationship we have with things in dialogical terms. He describes perception as a kind of "question to which these things provide a fully appropriate reply" (136). He suggests further:
The passing of sensory givens before our eyes or under out hands is as it were, a language which teaches itself, and in which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of the signs, and this is why it can literally be said that our senses question things and that things reply to them. (138)
In emphasizing the manner in which human-beings have access to things, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the thing as "correlative to my body ... to my existence" (138). "The whole of nature," he continues, "is the setting of our own life, or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue" (138).
In the same breath, however, Merleau-Ponty speaks a slightly different language, one that is more biological. The relation of perception to things is a "symbiosis, certain ways the outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meeting this invasion..." (136).
Is there a tension here? What is the power of the metaphor of communication for understanding our relation to things? What are the limits of it? Is it a metaphor at all?
