Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to aesthetics is L’oeil et l’esprit (1961). Like his two earlier essays on art, “Le doute de Cézanne” (1945) and “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence” (1952), L’oeil et l’esprit exhibits two remarkable aesthetic features: the arts are the gateway for philosophical thought above the sciences; and modern art, more than classical or Renaissance art, uniquely merges with the effort of phenomenology “by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: xvi). In “Le doute de Cézanne,” he was interested in Cézanne for the latter’s attempts to paint the “lived,” prescientific experience of the world as a painterly analogue to phenomenological “seeing.” He had qualified his endorsement of edmund husserl’s epochē in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), but he was nevertheless struck by Cézanne’s insistence on a peculiar kind of “germinating” (germinait) with nature in which the artist comes to be present “at the world” (l’être au monde). The landscape “thinks itself in me” (se pense en moi), Cézanne would say.