The World of Perception (1)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty begins with a foreword by Stéphanie Ménasé, whose site indicates (I can’t read French) that she’s a scholar, bodyworker in the Feldenkrais tradition, and an abstract painter—quite a good abstract painter at that. She’s not credited as editor, but she was instrumental to the publication. She handled typewritten drafts from the Institut national de l'audiovisuel that Merleau-Ponty read over French national radio for several consecutive Saturdays in the fall of 1948. They were first published in French as Causeries, “Chats.” That the author of a mammoth volume published three years earlier on the same topic could deliver such engaging and informal talks to a nonspecialist audience speaks well of him.
Much of this week’s reading entailed a lengthy, helpful, and opinionated introduction by Thomas Baldwin, a Merleau-Ponty scholar who edited a book of his basic writings. Baldwin notes that “After his death Merleau-Ponty’s reputation in France declined quickly as French philosophers turned away from French existential phenomenology to the study of German philosophy, especially to the works of Heidegger and the ‘masters of suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.” It’s an apt appellation. The pessimistic or paranoid character of much postmodern art is temperamentally connected to doubters like Heidegger and Nietzsche. Merleau-Ponty bears a different message: perceptions reveal true things about the world and we are at home in our bodies.
Merleau-Ponty was an empiricist, but not like Hume or Berkeley. Baldwin, page 7:
Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl in taking it that the relationship between perception and all other modes of thought, including science, is one of ‘Fundierung’ (foundation), which involves a kind of rootedness that does not restrict the capacity for more sophisticated articulations of experience in the light of deeper understandings of the world. So he consistently rejects those forms of empiricism which aim to restrict or reduce the contents of thought to possible contents of experience.
He also rejected the possibility that science would provide an ultimate basis for understanding the perceived world. In the first lecture, he has critical words for Descartes in particular and the French in general (on page 32): “It is characteristic not just of French philosophy but also of what is rather loosely termed the French cast of mind to hold science and knowledge in such high esteem that all our lived experience of the world seems by contrast to be of little value.” Baldwin (p. 13):
Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that he does not contest the value of scientific inquiry. What he does reject is the thought that science penetrates ‘to the heart of things, to the object as introduction it is in itself ’. Instead, he holds, science provides only abstract representations of aspects of the world that are of technological value, but which do not constitute ‘absolute and complete knowledge’.
Merleau-Ponty recommends a kind of faith, though he might have objected to calling it that. Baldwin puts it this way (pp. 17-18): “Merleau-Ponty holds that our experiences are interconnected and reveal to us real properties of the thing itself, which is much as it appears and not some hidden substance that lies beneath our experience of its appearance.”
One key to this attitude is Einstein. Merleau-Ponty (p. 36):
The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation; it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer.
This leads to a claim on page 39 that is consonant with the Heart Sutra.1
Instead of a world in which the distinction between identity and change is clearly defined, with each being attributed to a different principle, we have a world in which objects cannot be considered to be entirely self-identical, one in which it seems as though form and content are mixed, the boundary between them blurred.
The other key is Cézanne. The painter was an important touchstone for the philosopher. Cézanne demonstrates, according to Merleau-Ponty, that classical space, scientific as it was, did not capture how it feels to occupy the world. Page 40:
Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passes without hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistance to this supremely easy movement. But this is not how the world appears when we encounter it in perception. When our gaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we are forced to adopt a certain point of view and these successive snapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposed one upon the other.
Cézanne and his scions, in contrast, captured the phenomenon of the landscape. The views shift, and the mind stitches the views together into a cohesive and relatively stable whole. It was on that basis that the Cubists purported to have discovered a kind of realism. Merleau-Ponty cites the beautifully stated claim of Jean Paulhan (p. 41) that “the cubist painter is quietly celebrating—in a space attuned more to the heart than the intellect—the marriage and reconciliation of man with the world.” Merleau-Ponty makes as lovely and forceful a claim about the modern painter on the same page:
If many painters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometrical perspective, this is because they have sought to recapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the landscape. They have been reluctant to settle for an analytical overview and have striven to recapture the feel of perceptual experience itself.
Our perceptions are contingent, and our presence in the world affects what the world presents to us. Nevertheless, our perceptions are facts. We only ever have our distinct view, but that view is a genuine slice of the Pie of Truth.
It strikes me that Merleau-Ponty is available for philosophical reclamation by people who make art seriously. The World of Perception is a gentle way into his work. If you’re not already following along, pick up a copy and jump in.
You will notice an ambitious renovation of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club homepage. This is the product of a rewrite of the whole shebang, from JSON to XML and from Javascript to Rust. Date math in vanilla Javascript is notoriously bad and my script decided that we were meeting on Thursdays after some number of Fridays. Rust has a library that lets you code date = date + Duration::weeks(1) and it does what you think it will. The move to XML also let me describe break weeks, and Rust was able to schedule around them.2
New books on the calendar include Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism edited by Jed Perl. This is a Library of America title with more than 800 pages, but it’s an anthology, so we’re going to tackle it two weeks at a time, forty pages per week, and intersperse other titles between the two-week blocks. They are, so far, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë and What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. The latter is in the public domain and the link goes to Project Gutenberg. I’m recommending the Aylmer Maude translation because I own it, but I’m sure the Penguin edition translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky is comparable if you want to buy it new.
To be added: Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia, Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World by Jed Perl, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun, Clement Greenberg, Late Writings edited by Robert Morgan, The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence edited by Jill Lloyd, Against Nature (A Rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, The Veil of Depiction: Painting in Sufism and Phenomenology by Evrim Emir-Sayers, Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, Observation: Notation: Selected Writings of Andrew Forge, Reactionary Modernism by Jonathan Bowden, Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger, Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han, and The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana.
That should keep us busy for a while, but feel free to suggest others.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
Also Clement Greenberg, who noted in another context that form and content were not sufficiently distinguishable to enable claims that the effect of art derived from one or the other.
Probably Javascript could too but this is just so sweet:
struct Book {
title: String,
author: String,
url: String,
sections: Vec<Section>,
}
struct Section {
description: String,
url: String,
}
struct SectionForWeek {
title: String,
author: String,
url: String,
description: String,
}
struct Week {
number: i32,
date: NaiveDate,
pretty_date: String,
content: Option<SectionForWeek>,
}