The World of Perception (2)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904, oil on canvas, 27.5 x 36.2 inches, collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (source)

The second half of The World of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty completes a journey from the world to the person. Descartes works from the individual thinking mind (namely, his) toward a world unknowable except by deduction. Merleau-Ponty considers space, then sensory objects, then animals, then other people, before arriving at the claim that our interiority is unthinkable except in relation to others (p. 66):

So while ultimately the notion of a pure self, the mind, devoid of instruments and history, may well be useful as a critical ideal to set in opposition to the notion of a mere influx of ideas from the surrounding environment, such a self only develops into a free agent by way of the instrument of language and by taking part in the life of the world.

Merleau-Ponty equally disdains Cartesian individualism and the collectivist blob. Later on that page:

As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.

I wish he had stuck it to Descartes once and for all and declared: Sum, ergo cogito.

Merleau-Ponty pointed out that core assumptions of the classical model of the universe are untenable. Its physics are relativistic. Its social desiderata are determined locally. It seems to be in a kind of existential dialogue with its inhabitants, with its vaunted dichotomies—form and space, form and content, sentience and insentience, self and other—are mutually informing and mutually shaping. Nevertheless we have a moral obligation to ourselves as individuals to glean the workings of the world we inhabit, and to live accordingly. Chapter 7:

…human existence can never abstract from itself in order to gain access to the naked truth; it merely has the capacity to progress towards the objective and does not possess objectivity in fully-fledged form.

Nevertheless:

We can and must analyze the ambiguities of our time and strive to plot a course through them which we can follow truthfully and in all conscience.

This is individualism properly understood. It would be easy to jump from the claim that there is no thinking apart from embodied being to yet another attempt at the philosophical or political negation of selfhood, which invariably results in demands to hand over our free will to whatever collectivist projects are in vogue these days. (For a long while I’ve thought about printing t-shirts that say “Thank you for not immanentizing the eschaton.”) It would likewise be easy to conclude from the admission that ultimate objectivity and utter moral certainty will forever elude us that we may as well indulge in solipsism and antinomianism. Merleau-Ponty is saying something far more sophisticated: that the Cartesian self isn’t real but the contingent self very much is. Moreover, the perceptions accomplished by the contingent self are to some degree reliable, substantive, and connected faithfully to existence.

On pages 46-48, Merleau-Ponty considers the example of honey. Honey has familiar qualities of sweetness, color, and viscosity. He labels our attainment of appreciation of these qualities as being honeyed. This brings him to, of all things, Cézanne.¹

…every quality is related to qualities associated with other senses. Honey is sugary. Yet sugariness in the realm of taste, “an indelible softness that lingers in the mouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing,” constitutes the same sticky presence as honey in the realm of touch. To say that honey is viscous is another way of saying that it is sugary: it is to describe a particular relationship between us and the object or to indicate that we are moved or compelled to treat it in a certain way, or that it has a particular way of seducing, attracting or fascinating the free subject who stands before us. Honey is a particular way the world has of acting on me and my body. And this is why its various attributes do not simply stand side by side but are identical insofar as they all reveal the same way of being or behaving on the part of the honey. The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees.

Compare Dōgen:

When you paint spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots—just paint spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots. It is not yet painting spring.

It is not that spring cannot be painted, but aside from my late master, old buddha, there is no one in India or China who has painted spring. He alone was the sharp-pointed brush that painted spring.

Whether these are pointing at the same thing I leave as an exercise for the reader, as I certainly haven’t solved it myself.

Lecture 6, “Art and the World of Perception,” is of enormous interest. Page 70:

If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details, which reveal it to me. Thus the work of art resembles the object of perception: its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyze it, however valuable that may be afterward as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience.

Later:

According to Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne said that the painter takes hold of a fragment of nature and ‘makes it entirely painting’. Braque put it even more clearly when, thirty years ago, he wrote that painting does not strive to “reconstitute an anecdote” but rather “to constitute a pictorial event.” So painting does not imitate the world but is a world of its own. This means that, in our encounter with a painting, at no stage are we sent back to the natural object; similarly, when we experience a portrait aesthetically, its ‘resemblance’ to the model is of no importance… even when painters are working with real objects, their aim is never to evoke the object itself, but to create on the canvas a spectacle which is sufficient unto itself… Does this mean that, in art, form alone matters and not what is said? Not in the slightest. I mean that form and content—what is said and the way in which it is said—cannot exist separately from one another.

This was broadcast eight years before Ben Shahn made the same claim at Harvard. Either Shahn knew of Merleau-Ponty’s lectures or something was in the air.

Merleau-Ponty doesn’t say it in so many words, but the implied dictum to “accept the tutelage of perception” feels analogous to the exhortation to “analyze the ambiguities of our time and strive to plot a course through them which we can follow truthfully and in all conscience.” In this light, perception takes on a moral force. Exercising our sensory powers is not only a basic function of sentience, it is a fulfillment of an obligation to ourselves. That rather does seem like it’s pointing to the same sentiment as Dōgen’s.

It would be excessive to claim that the subsequent turns in art history away from perception and toward conceptualism were a moral abdication. But the Monoculture, which is the child of conceptualism, is evidently trying to infuse ersatz moral urgency into art via a wound through which real moral urgency, that of perception, bled out. With the benefit of almost eight decades of hindsight, The World of Perception seems like a treasure map, indicating where we may yet find creative gold.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art Can Help by Robert Adams. 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.

1. It strikes me as odd that Cézanne still needed explication more than forty years after he painted his last canvases. Was Merleau-Ponty arriving late to the party, or was Cézanne so bewildering that he needed rescuing even a decade after Picasso painted the Guernica?