Merleau-Ponty and Nishida

Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual Faith

Adam Loughnane

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476124, 9781438476117
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476131
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Places the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Nishida in dialogue and uncovers a demand for a motor-perceptual form of faith in both philosophers' meditations on artistic expression.

Winner for the 2023 European Network of Japanese Philosophy Award for Excellence in Japanese Philosophy presented by the European Network of Japanese Philosophy

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a fascinating new dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists of the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Throughout the book, the reader is guided among the intricacies and innovations of Merleau-Ponty's and Nishida's ontological approaches to artistic expression with a focused look at a rarely explored connection between faith and negation in their philosophies. Exploring the intertwining of these concepts in their broader ontologies invokes a reappraisal of the ambiguous status of religion and art in the writings of both thinkers. Measuring these ambiguities, the ontologies of Flesh and Basho are read in-depth alongside great artworks and the motor-perceptual practices of seminal landscape artists such as Cézanne, Sessh?, Taiga, and Hasegawa, as well as other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history. Loughnane studies these artists' bodily practices, focusing on the intimate relations realized with the landscapes they paint, and illuminating a valence of their expressive disciplines as a motor-perceptual form of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting intercultural reading, expanding two philosophers' projects toward new horizons of research, revealing incitements in their writings that challenge unambiguous distinctions between art, philosophy, faith, and ultimately philosophy East and West.

Chapter 1

Ontology, Ambiguity, and Negation

In this chapter, I begin laying the grounds for the dialogue between Nishida and Merleau-Ponty regarding artistic expression by first establishing important features of their respective ontological positions; those being Nishida’s ontology of Basho (場所) and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh (chair). Once we proceed to consider several artists and their works in the following chapters, it should become clear that both thinkers depart from philosophy of art in the Western sense: instead of first developing an ontological position and then only secondarily applying that theory to artworks or artistic expression, Nishida and Merleau-Ponty invert the order. Artistic expression, or expression in general, actually informs key features of their ontologies. To be is to be expressive, thus the artist’s practice is exceedingly more consequential than it would be in a restricted philosophy of art approach. These philosophers complicate the standard priority of ontology over expression. That being said, I begin this chapter considering their ontologies in the abstract, followed by closer inspection of artistic practice in the following chapters. There will be some conceptual heavy-lifting at the outset to establish the grounds of the comparison, but it is essential because the concept of negation discussed in this chapter is crucial for understanding artistic expression and the motor-perceptual forms of relationality discussed throughout.

Motor-Perceptual Fabric: Faith and Transitivity

Many ideas associated with taken-for-granted understandings of faith could impede dialogue between Nishida and Merleau-Ponty. Both philosophers invoke Judeo-Christian terminology throughout their writings, but neither of their conceptions of faith is theistic, and neither considers faith as a belief in God. One might then ask, what do they propose we have faith in? What is the object of religious or perceptual faith? This seems like a sensible starting point, but the problem lies in how our common sense, our metaphysics, and even our grammar expects there to be an object to have faith in. We presume there to be a deity, a leader, nature, fate, a promise, etc., in which one believes. Although the phrase “to have faith” is neither strictly grammatically transitive nor intransitive, our expectations cast it as metaphysically transitive: We imagine faith to be faith in some thing. As such, we tacitly accept that it is an orientation of a subject toward an object. Following this logic, we might approach Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual faith” (foi perceptive) as though it were faith in perception, or Nishida’s faith as a belief in God or the “absolute.” Without questioning this starting point, we reify metaphysical oppositions that both philosophers labored to overcome. To evade that danger, I read their concepts not as faith in a particular object, not as a subjective orientation, but instead as a non-transitive form of faith. To be precise, in their philosophies, faith is not a subject’s belief in an object: faith negates both subject and object. If I were to sum up this entire study in a short sentence, I would say it is a comparison of two theories that strive to carve out a theory of artistic expression as a relation between a negated subject and object.

A great deal of scholarship on Nishida or Merleau-Ponty recognizes how important negation is for overcoming subject–object dualism. Yet, the link between negation and faith has not been explored in depth. While there are several crucial discrepancies in these philosopher’s ideas of negation, the similarities are such that the differences become illuminating. For both philosophers, faith is a relation between a negated subject and a negated object, or as I will also refer to it, a relation between a non-subject and non-object. Although this nomenclature is typically associated with Nishida’s East Asian heritage, Merleau-Ponty was also striving toward negated subjectivity and objectivity. In this chapter, I consider their ontologies of flesh and Basho in tandem on this specific issue to show how they formulate notions of faith based on comparable conceptions of negation. In doing so, I aim to achieve a picture of the artist as a non-subject, the landscape as a non-object, and artistic activity as non-transitive faith binding the body and world together in reciprocal expressive negation.

To consider faith as non-transitive—faith without a subject or object—means it is not faith in some thing, but is faith as some thing; faith as a feature of embodiment itself. This grounds the study at a more fundamental level than an approach that would cast faith as a belief, a mental state, something we can will, or an ethical or religious stance, that is, the disposition of a subject.1 Faith in both Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies is ontological, not an ontic choice one cannot decide for or against. It is not so much that one has faith in the world, but that as woven into the fabric of the world one is a faithful being. One can augment or diminish faith—indeed, on these grounds artistic practice is exemplary—but faith cannot be eliminated. I thus treat it as a sensorimotor faith where both the sensory and the motor are qualities of a perceptual field, not a subject.

Another shared aspect of Merleau-Ponty and Nishida’s mature ontologies lies in their being what we might consider ontologies of expression.2 That is, the relation between body and world, self and other, is a relation of mutual expression—of “making and being made” (tsukuraretamono kara tsukurumono e 作られたものから作るものえ) to use Nishida’s term. When considering artists in this light, their expression is not individual creativity, originality, or genius (i.e., approaches that reify the subject). I explore the practices of Cézanne, Sesshū, Klee, Guo Xi, and others to show how these artists work far beyond these subjective orientations; rather, through motor-perceptual practices of faith they negate their own subjectivity to immerse in and harmonize with the demands of a world that is itself expressive. They seek to weave their bodies into the world’s fabric not as expressions of their individuality, but as an expression of that field, of flesh and Basho. In this light, the moving and perceiving body expresses itself in what I investigate as a sensorimotor form of faith. While this is the character of all expression, of all our most mundane movements and gestures, artists such as Sesshū and Cézanne are particularly adept at making motor-perceptual faith discernible. Their aesthetic practices present important challenges to assumptions that limit the scope in which we conceive of philosophic methodology. For their practices resist clean parsing within a sacred-secular binary.

Commentators have used a variety of metaphors to explain the ontologies of Nishida and Merleau-Ponty; characterizing flesh and Basho as perceptual fields, fields of forces, fields of consciousness, as topoi, place, and chōra. While each of these is helpful in portraying different aspects of their rich and complicated ontologies, I adopt a common metaphor used by both philosophers hoping to make concrete the multitude of abstractions in their systems. Both Merleau-Ponty and Nishida invoke the imagery and metaphorics associated with fabric throughout their writings. I would like to use the associated ideas of texture, weaving, wrapping, fibers, folding, lining, warp, and weft as provisional means for comparing their ontologies.3 This imagery is apt for visualizing a non-transitive faith, and for distancing ourselves from the metaphysics, grammar, and the concepts that cast faith as a belief of a subject toward an object and, moreover, to move away from the account of expression as a painter-subject representing a landscape-object.

Merleau-Ponty makes use of fabric-related analogy throughout his writings. In his Phenomenology of Perception, he writes, “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven,”4 while later in Eye and Mind he refers to the body as being “caught in the fabric of the world.”5 In “What is Phenomenology?” he calls the real “a closely woven fabric,”6 and we find references to tissue, strands, weaving, fibers and other fabric-related terminology throughout his writings. We must be careful, though. Fabric-related analogies and terms lend themselves to positivist assumptions because of their association with materiality and thus reify mind–matter opposition. It is important to keep in mind that for neither Nishida nor Merleau-Ponty is the fabric of phenomenal reality describable in positivist terms: the fabric metaphor is expedient where it helps us visualize the structure of negation. To this effect, Merleau-Ponty writes that the “closely woven fabric,” of perception is the “locus of the simple or immediate nihilation.”7

As we get deeper into the analysis, we find a thoroughgoing negation of subject and object in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy invoking features suggested by the various fabric analogies. In The Visible and the Invisible, he refers to the visibility of flesh as having a “lining” of invisibility.8 One of the French words Merleau-Ponty uses that is translated as “lining” is “doublure,” which has the sense of a fabric where one material lines another, such as the way silk lines the inside of a suit.9 When speaking of how flesh “envelops” visible and tangible things, he also uses the word “tapiss,” which has fabric-related connotations too.10 Meanwhile, we find him referring to flesh as an “ontological tissue,” as the “the fabric of the visible,” the “connective tissue of exterior and interior horizons”; he calls “wild being” (l’être sauvage) the “common tissue of which we are made,” the “fabric of brute meaning”; The world for him is a “closely woven fabric,” and our connection to it is by way of “intentional threads.” There is a “tissue that lines” the visible and the seer, both of whom are “abstract[ed] from one sole tissue.” Another important fabric-related term is “fold” (pli), but he cautions that “the field must not be conceived as a cloth in which object and consciousness would be cut out.”11 His appealing to the “fold” rather than the “cut out” is an important point to return to as we argue against the possibility of a position external to or “cut out of” the perceptual fabric of flesh. Galen Johnson proposes translating Merleau-Ponty’s use of “étoffe” (“l’étoffe ontologique,” “une seule étoffe”) usually rendered as “stuff” instead as “fabric” or “cloth” to avoid the language of substance ontology, because, as he claims, “fabric has some life and movement as it folds, rustles, and moves together with the actions of the body.”12

Turning to Nishida, we find provocative intimations of similar analogies when describing his idea of “nothingness” (mu 無). He quite remarkably uses a Japanese term that, among its various meanings, denotes the “cloth on the inside of clothes” or a material “lining” (裏付ける).13 In an admittedly liberal translation—yet one which Nishida himself oversaw—his collaborator-translator has rendered 裏付ける as the material “lining” of a kimono.14 This resonates nicely with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the invisible lining the visible since the traditional Japanese belief was that the kimono’s interior lining of silk is invisible yet imparts visible form and shape to the fabric’s exterior. We find many other instances of the fabric metaphor running throughout Nishida’s ontology. When unfolding the “peri-logical” (hōronriteki)15 aspect of his Basho theory, he describes the “emplacement” of the various levels of Basho within each other, using the metaphor of “wrapping” (tsutsumu 包む) and “enveloping” (fukumu 含む). According to his ontology, beings visible on the level of the “place of being” (yū no basho 有の場所) are “enveloped” or “wrapped” within the “place of nothingness” (mu no basho 無の場所). Yet, we must be clear that among the layers of Basho, which overlap and envelop, the underlying layer is the “place of nothingness” (mu no basho 無の場所). This layer is reducible neither to pure materiality nor ideality but is the place embracing both and making their mediation possible.

Both thinkers have a propensity toward fabric metaphor while thwarting a “positivist” account that would link that terminology with materiality; in particular, materiality that would be unambiguously visible. Although the imagery associated with fabric lends itself to thinking of matter as straightforwardly visible, what is essential for deploying these analogies to help picture aspects of their complicated ontologies, is that both philosophers conceive of the fabric of reality as ambiguous regarding visibility and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Faith, Flesh, and Basho
• Chapter 1 Ontology, Ambiguity, and Negation
• Chapter 2 Perceptual Fabric: Space, Time, and Light
• Chapter 3 Motor-Perceptual Fabric: Time and Motion
• Chapter 4 Expression as “Motor-Perceptual Faith”
• Works Cited and Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover