Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception

Duane H. Davis, William S. Hamrick, Duane H. Davis, William S. Hamrick

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438459608
• Categoría: Filosofía
• Categoría: Fenomenología en filosofía

This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher's writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.

PART ONE

CONTEXT AND ORIENTATION

1

The Art of Perception

DUANE H. DAVIS

We pose a thesis, which is the organizing principle of this volume: in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s works, art and perception emerge as an intertwining. And we do not mean that they simply overlap or happen to be featured in some of the same works: they are ineluctably intertwined throughout his work—topically and methodologically. They can be distinguished only by an abstract analysis. His account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. His account of perception is his account of art, and vice versa. We maintain that any reading that ignores this principle examines an abstraction of his positions on art or perception.

The essays included in this volume examine aspects of this intertwining in a variety of artistic media, each author ingeniously revealing an original perspective upon this intertwining. The five sections that comprise this essay offer a short account of how art informs Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as well as how perception informs his account of art. We shall accomplish this by looking at the way the interaction appears at five different moments of his philosophical development.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is not only the title of his most famous book, but also describes his philosophical parcours. He depicts phenomenology as a problem for understanding in the broadest and most genuine and open senses of inquiry rather than as a dogmatic program to secure or provide some apodictic grounding for all knowledge and reality. Of course, to depict phenomenology as a problem is not to concede the impossibility of solutions; but these solutions will not be like ones sought after by other philosophers, nor even like those pursued by some other phenomenologists. Phenomenology is a style of inquiry for Merleau-Ponty. Its solutions are creative, disciplined responses that are stylized to open up areas of inquiry rather than attempts to pronounce the last word on any given subject. And this open-ended interrogative approach bespeaks a unique aesthetic style of rigor and discipline. As we will see, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology itself is more of an art than “the science of sciences.”1

As such, perception and art are inextricably bound together throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work. It is less the case that he associates art and perception as two disparate topics than that he calls our attention to what we have called the art of perception. As befitting Merleau-Ponty’s celebration of the fundamental ambiguities of human existence, the double genitive phrase the art of perception signifies that Merleau-Ponty uses art in association with his discussions of perception—that some art is especially germane to his discussion of perception, and it also implies that there is something essentially aesthetic about perception. Both connotations are crucial.

More specifically, art is indispensable to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception in at least two senses. First, it is essential insofar as his account of art restores art (and aesthetics) to its proper status, befitting serious philosophical inquiry, even within the philosophical examination of perception.2 Merleau-Ponty shows us over and over how much we can learn about perception and the perceptual world from art, artists, and artworks. Second, phenomenology as an art effectively re-prescribes new lines of inquiry for perception—available only because of its creative engagement within the perceived world. We call Merleau-Ponty’s unique style of phenomenology an aesthetic phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenology re-prescribes the conditions of the possibility of perception, because the conditions of the possibility for experience emerge within experience as potentials reconstructed after the fact. With all of this in mind, we can pose again our main thesis concerning the intertwining of art and perception: in both senses of the double genitive locution, Merleau-Ponty’s entire philosophical project of a phenomenology of perception calls us to consider the art of perception.

Merleau-Ponty’s foregrounding of the art of perception can be seen as a philosophy of perception’s (re)turn to art. On the one hand, a philosophy of perception ought not to be innocent of aesthetics. Moreover, it ought not to suffer the pretense of escaping aesthetics toward the aim of achieving purity. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly turns our attention to the myriad ways that art figures in the creative role we play in perception. In this first sense, the art of perception instructs us about how we embody lived space and lived time. Thus, there is disclosed an aesthetic component of what Calvin O. Schrag (echoing Aristotle) has termed a “hermeneutic of everyday life.”3 This refers to the interpretation involved in the myriad aspects of the matrix of the intentional relation of art: the relation of the artist to the artwork; the relation of the observer to the artwork; the relation of the artwork to the world; the relation of the artist to the world; the relation of the artist to the observer; and the relation of the observer to the world, (among others). We see perceptual worlds emerging in these accounts of the techniques of art.

On the one hand, the art of perception returns our attention to the aesthetic essence of aisthêsis. And inversely, it returns our attention to the aisthetic essence of aesthêsis.4 Merleau-Ponty’s account does not aim to be reductive one way or the other.5 His aisthetic/aesthetic phenomenology is an attempt to illustrate the possibility of experience and the experience of possibility without reducing one to the other. In all of these ways, Merleau-Ponty calls us to consider the art of perception. Now let us consider the art of perception at five moments in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development, though we maintain that he holds this position throughout his career.

1. The Phenomenology of Perception and Its Aesthetic Primacy

In this section, we will try to show how the art of perception is central to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In this work, Merleau-Ponty announces a new direction for phenomenology, an explicitly aesthetic orientation to his analysis of perception. In order to establish this, we will discuss the following topics: (1) how the art of perception provides Merleau-Ponty a different sort of rigorous analysis from modern science; (2) how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the art of perception differs from Husserl’s scientific model of phenomenology; (3) how there is an important reflexivity at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenology; (4) how Merleau-Ponty’s project of a phenomenology of perception is centered on expression in two senses—as an account of works of art as expression, as well as portraying perception in the context of the expression of phenomena; (5) how Merleau-Ponty attends specifically to the artist Paul Cézanne in his Phenomenology of Perception to provide a rigorous analysis of the art of perception.

In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty described phenomenology as “a problem and a promise,”6 making room to redefine phenomenology in his own style (PhP, lxxi/ii).7 Merleau-Ponty noted here how it might seem peculiar that one still needs to ask “What is phenomenology?” some fifty years on in the movement.8 But he points out that the indeterminacy of what phenomenology is or where it is going are not signs of phenomenology’s failure to establish its own identity, but its very hope for a viable future. At the very end of the Preface, he likens this hope to that of art.

Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same kind of astonishment and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state. (PhP, lxxxv/xvi)9

This conspicuous allusion to artists is featured as the grand conclusion of the anthemic Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenology is essentially an intertwining of art and perception. Here, at the very onset of his phenomenology of perception project, he calls our attention to the rigor and discipline of art—thus laying claim to that sort of “painstaking” labor to announce his vision of a new style of phenomenology. It is an acknowledgment of another sort of rigor and discipline more befitting the understanding of perceptual phenomena quite apart from that of the rigor of science.

This appeal to art is not to dismiss science tout court; nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear by his invocation of these artists as paragons of another form of discipline that art provides more than just examples for his phenomenology. Also in the Preface, Merleau-Ponty appropriates from Husserlian phenomenology a critical standpoint in relation to modern science. “Phenomenology involves describing, and not explaining or analyzing” (PhP, lxxi/ii). The “promise” (voeu) of phenomenology is at once “a disavowal [désaveu] of science” (ibid.). As we pledge ourselves to the revealing of phenomena as phenomena, we detach from our scientific orientation, with its theoretical presuppositions about phenomena. But while we notice Merleau-Ponty’s disparaging remarks about objective modern science in the Preface—and they are presented in stark contrast to his vision for phenomenology, we also see him in dialogue with psychologists and other scientists throughout the text, and indeed throughout his career. When we describe Merleau-Ponty’s position as an aesthetic phenomenology, in sharp contrast not only to objective modern science but also in contrast to Husserl’s vision of phenomenology as “the science of sciences,” this is not to foreswear science altogether or to offer some forced choice between art and science. It may be helpful here to remember that there is an ancient common root of art and science: technē. And while Merleau-Ponty draws the aforementioned contrasts between his vision for an existential phenomenology from modern objective science or Husserl’s scientific phenomenology, he also calls our attention to the commonality of all three standpoints: expression. Phenomena are expressions. Phenomenology is a reflexive awareness of perception, which is the first-order expression of phenomena; science is a second-order expression (PhP, lxxii/iii).10 But what if phenomenology were to assume a different style of reflexivity than science such that it makes no claim to purity or certainty? What if this aesthetic phenomenology showed us that there is no awareness of the self except as ambiguity (ibid., 360/397)?

Science proceeds by making theoretical assumptions about the world that have the effect of qualifying its claims about the world. It is tantamount to a conditional statement, where if the condition of the antecedent clause is not met, the statement has nothing to say about the consequent. And that is precisely the way Merleau-Ponty puts it. “Everything I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless.” (More literally translated: without which scientific symbols would mean to say nothing—“sans laquelle les symboles de la science ne voudraient rien dire” [PhP, lxxii/ii].) They would have nothing to say.

Our modern epoch is defined by its inability or unwillingness to recognize this conditionality of scientific knowledge. It is repressed—we live in denial of it. We might well say that science’s uniqueness lies in its status as the art that wants to forget that it is an art. Instead, science is treated as if it unconditionally presented the truth of the real world. But this duplicity is achieved by the pretense of positing an objective and universal standpoint for science: the disinterested observer. This same pretense is to act as if it severs rather than serves the connection between the scientific observer and the world—in effect discounting the value of our own lived perspectives. This makes it impossible to affirm the aforementioned antecedent condition for scientific knowledge. Thus, modern objective science has nothing to say about the world, unless we acknowledge the usually unacknowledged conditions and contingency of its manner of understanding. Science has a human face that tries to remain expressionless—as if science itself were not an expression.

And, as we noted above, Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenology differs from Husserl’s scientific phenomenology. Just as art differs from science insofar as it recognizes, acknowledges, and trades upon its conditionality, an aesthetic phenomenology makes no claims to apodictic knowledge. While phenomenology always seeks the essence...