Galen A. Johnson

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to aesthetics is L’oeil et l’esprit (1961). Like his two earlier essays on art, “Le doute de Cezanne” (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 Cezanne,” he was interested in Cezanne 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 Phenomenologie de la perception (1945), but he was nevertheless struck by Cezanne’s insistence on a peculiar kind of “germinating” (germinait) with nature in which the artist comes to be present “at the world” (l’etre au monde). The landscape “thinks itself in me” (se pense en moi), Cezanne would say.

HISTORICITY, NARRATIVES, AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN LIFE

In this essay I wish to develop a conception of Verstehen that takes its clue from the historicity of human life. It was Dilthey who wrote that because we are historical beings we both seek and are able to understand human actions, life and civilization.1 Yet many philosophical accounts of Verstehen, including those of Max Weber, R. G. Collingwood, Peter Winch, and even Alfred Schutz, have ignored or minimized the correlative roles of historicity in the formation of meaning and narrative in the understanding of meaning. The view I will develop is two-sided: because human action is historicity-laden, Verstehen is best construed as narrative description. The thesis is a version of Paul Ricoeurs hermeneutical notion that human action is a text-analogue and understanding meaningful human action is therefore like reading a text.2 Ricoeur has more recently singled out narrative texts in particular as models of human action,3 as did Hannah Arendt in her master work, The Human Condition: The chief characteristic of this specifically human life whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography ... For action and speech ... are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be.4

The Flesh of Images, Images of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty forwarded

The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema, by Mauro Carbone, is his third book in a body of work interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of Flesh: The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (2004), An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas (2010), and The Flesh of Images: MerleauPonty Between Painting and Cinema (2015), translated by Marta Nijhuis. Taken together the works create an original cumulative interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of Flesh, culminating in The Flesh of Imageswhich develops a new cinematic phenomenology of perception together with a contemporary account of Being as Visibility historically situated within the reflections and refractions of screens today. The opening chapters of The Flesh of Images characterize Merleau-Ponty’s ontological notion of Flesh as “Visibility.” There are the visible things, the invisibles of inattention, forgetting, self, language, and more, but above all there is Visibility that renders both the visibles and the invisibles possible. Carbone writes in the very first sentences: “It is well known that the notion of ‘flesh’ is at the core of Merleau-Ponty’s later reflection. However, what is often forgotten is that ‘flesh’ is another name for the ‘element’ of Visibility” (FI, 1). He cites The Visible and the Invisible: “It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it.” It is far more customary in Merleau-Ponty scholarship for the notion of “flesh” to be understood as carnality, reversibility, and element of Being. Rendering Flesh synonymous with Visibility is an innovation with only scattered precedents in the literature, to my knowledge. Element, carnality, and reversibility do not disappear, rather they organize themselves as dimensions or together as a constellation of Visibility.

On the Origin(s) of Truth in Art: Merleau-Ponty, Klee, and Cézanne

AbstractBeginning from Klee’s statement on truth in self-portraiture that his faces are truer than real ones and Cezanne’s promise to tell us the truth in painting, we consider the origins of truth in art for the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. We discover that truth in perception, in life, and incarnate existence, as in art, originates from bodily movement. Similar to Heidegger’s argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a truth happens between the work and painter, between the work and viewer, and is not limited to the domain of language, but words and symbols mix together with colors and forms, as in the paintings of Klee. Similar to Husserl’s argument in “The Origin of Geometry,” the originary sense of art, like geometry, is an interweaving (Verflechtung) of world, intersubjectivity, speech, and writing that achieves a more “militant” (powerful) truth than mere logical propositions. Truth is marked by its endurance, mobility, agility, subtlety, and depth. These interweavings mean there is no single origin of truth in art and life but a plurality of origins in movement, pleasures, and desires for the becoming of creation.

THE VOICE OF MERLEAU-PONTY : THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET

“There remain of a man those things one is set dreaming by his name and by his works which make of his name a mark of admiration”. Thus wrote Paul Valéry of Leonardo da Vinci. For us, this extraordinary statement could serve admirably as an éloge to Merleau-Ponty on the centennial of his birth. “Everything interests him. It is of the universe that he thinks always. And he thinks of rigor. He is so made that he misses nothing of all that enters into the tangle of what exists – not a single shrub. He goes down into the depth of that which is for all to see.” To speak personally, if I may be allowed, for more than twenty-five years now, Merleau-Ponty’s writings and thought have guided my work, and he has become to me more than a teacher and supreme philosophical guide, more a voice I carry with me, even though we never met. In the recent words of Derrida just prior to his own death, in Merleau-Ponty’s late writings so much “remains open and at work” in his “pages so strong, so alive, which have contributed so much to open a pathway for the thinking of its time, and our time.” The first time I heard Merleau-Ponty’s voice was in the Introduction to Signs, heard not out loud but on the inside of my body in that peculiar inner phenomenon of silent reading and discussing with oneself in which the I is both self and already Other. It was that text in which Merleau-Ponty explored in writing something about his own childhood and his friendship with JeanPaul Sartre. “There are two ways of being young,” he wrote in the famous lines, “which are not easily comprehensible to one another. Some are fascinated by their childhood; it possesses them, holding them enchanted in a realm of privileged possibilities. Others it casts out toward adult life; they believe that they have no past and are equally near to all possibilities. Sartre was of the second type. Thus it was not easy to be his friend”. And if Sartre was of the second type, are we to assume that Merleau-Ponty was of the first? One hears the voice of Merleau-Ponty in the rhythm, tone, and melody of the lines of his very unique and admirable prose. That first time I heard Merleau-Ponty’s written voice was a long time ago, reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I heard his voice again just this year and this time it was his spoken voice. This experience was what set me thinking about the question of voice. This time Merleau-Ponty’s voice was “on the outside,” we might say, in a way he did not hear it himself on the inside of his

The Invisible and the Unpresentable: Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionism and the Aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty

Cezanne’s or Balzac’s artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but takes up culture from its inception and founds it anew: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. … The artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt”)

A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE MORAL SENSE OF NATURE AND ARTIFACTS

ConclusionThese inquiries do not diminish or overshadow the power and importance of the gift that isThe Embers and the Stars. It must be counted among the richest, most eloquent, original, and challenging new works of philosophy to appear in recent years, standing alongisde the best of the authors Kohák admires most, like Marcel and Ricoeur. It must be read. Moreover, we must press Kohák for both the philosophical theology and philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of artifacts toward which this work points. Once there was a man, once there was a raccoon, once there was a work. That is the miracle, that is the point.