"Debris of the Clear World": three essays on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of painting
Embargo Date
2024-06-20
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Maurice Merleau-Ponty devoted only three essays to art in his lifetime; however, comments on painting are also present throughout his philosophical body of work, and the idea that art and phenomenology share a parallel and mutually enlightening task is a theme that he never abandoned. For Merleau-Ponty, painting does phenomenological work by showing that the indeterminate features of perception are not mere “debris” of an otherwise “clear world.” This dissertation critically examines the trenchancy of his account of the bilateral import of phenomenology and painting.
Chapter One traces the problem of “catching experience in the act” to its origin in the Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie. I argue that Merleau-Ponty recognizes that a version of this problem poses a genuine problem for phenomenology in the form of what he calls “objective thought.” Seen in light of his concern for objective thought’s capacity to distort, his attention to indeterminacy and distortion in Cézanne’s portraits and still lifes takes on philosophical significance. I analyze how Merleau-Ponty sees phenomenological concepts such as style, horizons, and coherent deformation at work in a number of paintings and suggest how such features remedy objective thought by resisting the tendency to mistake objective properties of objects for properties of the experience in which they are given.
Chapter Two argues for an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of style in terms of an “aesthetic interpretation” of Kant’s doctrine of the schematism. Viewing style in the context of a need for a schematism in perception provides a natural way to understand Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception “already stylizes,” and it reveals that the manifestation of style is what makes painting philosophically illuminating on his view. I argue that the privileged status Merleau-Ponty gives to representational over abstract painting is unwarranted in view of his understanding of the schematizing role of artistic style.
Chapter Three studies the influence of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Erwin Panofsky’s influential essay Perspective as Symbolic Form. I show that Merleau-Ponty and Panofsky, through Cassirer’s influence, are led to starkly opposing conclusions about the value of geometrical abstraction in perspective painting.