Candidate No.: Y3898820 Word Count: 4,000 University of York Department of Philosophy BA Third Year Summative Assessment, Autumn 2022/23 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (PHI00007H) Essay (4,000 words) How does art illuminate Merleau-Ponty’s task of articulating his relational ontology based on fl esh? Introductio n In his posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible , particularly in the chapter “The Intertwining —The Chiasm”, Merleau-Ponty propounds a complex ontology based on his notion of fl esh . This points (loosely speaking) to a relational ontology reducible to neither monism nor dualism, by virtue of the intertwining relationship between body and world, which rejects all hitherto-known ontological polarities. Anchored in the concept of reversibility, fl esh can be seen as Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the Transcendental Problem, an improvement upon his investigation in the Phenomenology of Perception There are extensive mentions of art in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, and some key concepts in it have also been detailed in Merleau-Ponty’s essays on aesthetics, including “Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind”. What role, then, could art contribute in explicating his conclusive answer to the age-old question of being, as he presented with fl esh ? I will answer the titular question in three sections : 1. What does the artist do, according to Merleau-Ponty ? 2. How do artists partake in their art-making, in such a way that is explicative of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology ? 3. Based on my account, does art adequately illuminate Merleau-Ponty’s relational ontology ? I. What does the artist do ? As early as 1961, Merleau-Ponty talks of a “there is” that one must return to, in order to rectify the mistake scienti fi c thinking commits—of “look[ing] on from above, think[ing] of the object-in- general” (Merleau-Ponty, 1993: 12), a fl aw of Objective Thought of which he was critical: bifurcated, allowing only dialectical oppositions. Merleau-Ponty’s favourite exemplar of this “there is” was Cézanne’s paintings. In “Cézanne’s Doubt”, he remarks that the careful viewer of his paintings perceives fi rst and foremost the movement of colours and textures, not objects. We are not detached observers with a godlike perspective, but inhabit the landscape. We “live it from the inside, ... immersed in it” (Merleau- Ponty, 1971: 138). This is because art “draws upon [a] brute meaning” (Merleau-Ponty, 1971: 123), an elusive meaning that is fundamental to all of human experience— this “there is” is depth , the aether which allows for things in the world to “be there”. It is the condition of possibility for visibility, brought to the fore through the invisible harmony that arises out of the (visible) forms in art; it also announces an insoluble link between body and world, reminding us that we are not passive subjects picking up qualia from the world, but inhabitants in the ecosystem of the world. What this depth illuminates for us, then, is our situatedness in the world. Art discloses a world for us, teaching us to see. Merleau-Ponty describes it as an “openness upon the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 100), but also something that makes us aware of the invisible, because it makes us realise that the things we see eclipse one another—we know that the shadows are there at the back of a celestial object, even during a full eclipse. It is this primordial “there is” that makes both visible and invisible dimensionalities possible. One now comes to understand how the depiction of depth in Cézanne’s paintings served as a valuable example of how art “renders visible” the invisible. Wiskus (2015: 20) aptly describes how the invisible, made apparent by art, motivates our sense of being-in-the-world: “the unseen forms the theme of the painting, and what Cézanne offers to his viewers is a canvas that teems with life because the viewer is implicated in it ” (emphasis mine)—it is through the artist’s bringing out the invisible, hence accentuating the depth that brings out our situatedness, that the viewer inhabits the painting But this is not the only way in which we feel situated in the artwork. By seeing ourselves seeing, we evoke an intercorporeal perception which obfuscates the subject-object division—we are no longer solely seer or the seen, but an anonymous sensibility that is at the same time sentient and sensible. This poses a stark contrast to Cartesian ontology, putting forward instead an ontological picture governed by reciprocity. By depicting depth, art makes visible our intercorporeal situatedness in the world. This is where we turn from Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics to his more ontological theorisations. We fi nd in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” a passage that further explains the intercorporeality: “Carnal being, as a being of depths, ... a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 136 ) Here, Merleau-Ponty explicates our bodily af fi nity with the world (and hence also situatedness therein) by the fact that our “carnal being”, too, is a “being of depths”—that this depth is a “prototype of Being”. This accounts for our intercorporeal perception: it is as though this depth runs through the common “stuff” that our body and the world comprise; and as a result, we sense, and are also sensed. With this depth being a universal voluminosity that “already lies in every visible”, we now know that there is a certain continuity between body and world—not only are we situated in the world, we are of the world To recapitulate: by depicting the depth of the world, the artist accomplishes two things: (i) allowing for visibility (hence also our perceptual experience), therefore making us aware of our situatedness in the world (ii) highlighting the reversibility of dimensions, as implied by the existence of depth. In Section II, we will build on these concepts and investigate how art treats depth, such that it is testament to the ontology of fl esh II. How does the artist illuminate the ontology of fl esh ? I will give an answer in two parts: the fi rst considers the literal way in which art is embodies the ontology of fl esh, and secondly, the analogical way in which art mirrors our being, as expounded by the ontology of fl esh 1. Art as literal embodiment of fl esh Having touched on our situatedness in the world which art makes manifest, we turn to how this situatedness literally unfolds. Here I quote Vasseleu (1998: 28), who writes that art “destroys the illusion of disembodied spectatorship by basing visibility in its own carnality”, by demonstrating that “the seer’s vision is the fl esh of the seen”. Given visibility has its own carnality, this in effect concretises the fact that art itself is of fl esh. Now, though this seems to be a stretch at fi rst, we can make sense of it by rephrasing. As Beistegui (2014: 67) puts it : “By seeing the picture, it is as if I saw myself seeing, as if the picture were an image of the fact and the manner of the visibility of the world, of the “there is” that precedes all beings— of truth, then, but as clearing. ” We see ourselves seeing—the latter characterised by the carnality of which Vasseleu writes. We are, then, fl esh looking at fl esh: it is looking and being looked at simultaneously. This points, as aforementioned, towards an anonymous, intercorporeal sensibility that runs through fl esh. Here we can think of depth in more ontological terms. Artists, by depicting depth and therefore also responding to the world in which they inhabit and with whom they share the same constituent (of fl esh), are literally fl esh responding to fl esh . Since the very task of art is to “live [the world] from the inside”, art-making is the af fi nity and continuity between us and the world. This is a literal embodiment of the intertwining, reciprocal ontology of fl esh. Art-making is literally an embodiment of Being, underlain with the depth of a universal fl esh. This is also demonstrable from meaning-making in art. Meaning emerges in our taking up and responding to situations, and simultaneously letting these situations shape us. Through expression, artists release this meaning; yet we all know that circumstances, too, shape the artist. Here, then, we have a mutual exchange of signi fi cance, another instance of fl esh responding to fl esh. Art is very much the embodiment of this intercorporeality involved in the ontology of fl esh. This literal embodiment of fl esh in art has been noted by Merleau-Ponty—in "Cézanne’s Doubt”, he praises Cézanne for portraying a “lived perspective”, which was to him a fundamental aspect of our being-in-the-world. Seeing, and by extension painting, is a process through which the world makes itself visible in us. This is returning to my earlier point about art being the literal embodiment of fl esh; art guides us in the way we see, assisting us as we attempt to dwell in the visible. 2. Art as mirroring the ontology of fl es h Earlier we discussed the world-disclosiveness of art. I shall now consider its ontological double The centrality of the chiasm in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” may not be apparent at fi rst, so it necessitates explanation: the chiasm is the intersection of the images from our two eyes, where a three-dimensional image forms—this is the image “we form in our head” (admittedly in non- Merleau-Pontyan terms). What is remarkable about this, is how depth unfolds from difference (the images on the left and on the right are not the same). Already in the Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty talks of a new order that opens up from this non-coincidence : “We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze.” (Merleau-Ponty, Landes, 2011: 241 ) This is paired with dehiscence : the splitting open of fl esh observed in ripening fruits and rupturing wounds. This is signi fi cant, because it outlines a structure where we gain access to the “external” world from within an interiority of fl esh, through its rupturing and divergence. Taken together, chiasmic vision and dehiscence tell us something valuable about the non- coincidence that echoes the non-coincidence in Being. Metaphorically speaking, the perceptual depth of our experience is borne out of the non-coincidence in chiasmic vision. This identity-in- difference, coupled with the difference-in-identity of dehiscence, is precisely what Merleau-Ponty sought to present with his ontology of fl esh. Art helps clarify this: Merleau-Ponty writes in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” that a visible is: “... a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open... a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of the world... a momentary crystallisation of visibility” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 132). An illustration of this is the musical idea. Merleau-Ponty writes : “The musical idea is one of these entities which are not positives, but differences... we do not possess the musical or sensible ideas, precisely because they are negativity or absence circumscribed; they possess us.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 151 ) The ideality of art is the Invisible that “circumscribes” the Visible. Like the chiasm and dehiscence, it is in its movement, characterised by difference and negativity, that visibility emerges; differentiation and non-coincidence open up into a world of visibility. This is precisely how depth is dealt with in art, in order to disclose to us the world in which we are situated But what is this movement ? Merleau-Ponty writes of the attentive appreciator of Cézanne’s paintings, wh o “... will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other, a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2004: 54 ) Best illustrating this difference which emerges from movement over time is music. In discussing the musical idea in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , Merleau-Ponty characterises musical movement as not just a representation of life, but a resonance with being. In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes : “As an idea that participates in time, the musical idea retains the past not as a model but as a latency—as an open dimension, a possible productivity, a passivity fl ush with an activity— which, when taken up again, makes itself felt within the present.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 169 ) Through a constant departure and return to itself, the musical idea achieves expression by utilising the open fi eld of latent meaning that it generates. This paints a dynamic picture of the fl esh: even in the context of temporality, there is no such thing as the passivity of the past—the ideality of art, then, is an invisible lining that sustains the world and renders it visible. The past is now pregnant with new possibilities which can be later reinvoked in a new light. Moreover, each repetition is an exploration of and contribution to perceptual depth, rather than a linear series going on inde fi nitely In this way, art adheres together non-coincidences, opening them up into a world of expression and productivity, mirroring the dehiscence of the fl esh; a world of depth is reborn with each new encounter, as a chiasmic formation I now take a short detour and give a very literal example of a compositional concept in music much like the ontology explicated above. The moment form , developed by Karlheinz Stockhausen, rejects linear, architectonic approaches to form. Instead “the discontinuous present is the operative mode of listening” (Hutchinson, 2019: 107). Stockhausen writes , “The aim was the instantaneous evocation of a speci fi c, almost timeless expressive character, which was felt to elude the more structured rhetoric of conventional music structures—in much the same way as a Japanese haiku strives at a pinpoint moment of clarity which is of a wholly different order from the measured logic of a sonnet.” (Stockhausen, 1991: 59 ) An example piece using this is Stockhausen’s Kontakte. The result is a series of disconnected moments which somehow still merge into homogenous mass, begetting a sort of totality borne from difference and non-coincidence. As with a lot of repertoire in musique concrète, this sort of experimentation aimed at the complete rethinking of how music may sound, entailing almost a Merleau-Pontyan revolution against ready-made options in their (sonic) ontology There is another sense in which we can see this holistic depth in art: the intertwined relationship between freedom and facticity that faces every artist. Since our freedom is only possible within constraints, the expression of an artist is at the same time an inhabiting of, as well as the body’s idiosyncratic insertion into the world; it involves an intertwining of individual style and public meaning. In rendering the world visible, the artists toils against circumstances that, sometimes, work against him; but at the same time, by being in the world, he is an arbiter in the creation of these circumstances that he fi nds himself in—not only does he paint the invisible, but he also moulds the very visibles that he sets out to paint Rothko was acutely aware of this paradox. For him, paintings were “a mirror of life’s impulses and vulnerability... individuality [but also] integration into a totality that both preserves and destroys them” (Waibel, 2010: 87). He is quoted saying , “Shapes are unique elements in unique situations... organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion... they have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms.” (Breslin, 1993: 240 ) It is in the context of the intertwining of freedom and facticity that visibles thrive in depth, that one recognises in the organisms within the fl esh “principles” and “passions”. Our being is synecdochic of the way these shapes “live”, conditioned by facticity but thriving in our unique agency I now summarise the ways in which art illuminates Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of fl esh : 1. By giving us a “lived perspective”, art depicts the visible in such a way that the re fl exive nature of perception becomes apparent. Coupled with the carnality of vision, fl esh is perpetually responding to fl esh—pointing to the intercorporeality in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology 2. We looked at movement in art, as well as how the Visible opens up into the world; both art and Being mirror the general schemata of the chiasm and dehiscence. Taken together, they are at once an identity-in-difference and a difference-in-identity, underscoring the non-dialecticality of the ontology of fl esh 3. Art and Being are governed by both freedom and facticity. Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology is characterised by the interweaving of traditionally bifurcated polarities—difference and identity, too, are enmeshed together III. Evaluation: Has this been a convincing account ? Here I consider some rebuttals regarding whether our previous fi ndings do satisfactorily support the idea that art illuminates Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of fl esh. The fi rst is derived from an objection from Levinas, who argues that the idea of fl esh disregards alterity, making all differences within human experience merely a matter of perspective “within a general matrix of commonality”. Surely, with art being in the cultural realm of human experience, he would disagree that art mirrors an ontology of fl esh. I then look at another argument, originally set against Wittgenstein, but would be a valid objection here: the accusation that the ontology of ambiguity (and by extending it to aesthetics) is “lazy” philosophy (Hurka, 2004) On Levinas’s account, Merleau-Ponty is mistaken in his ontology because his model inevitably transforms differences into identity, but the point of departure for any account of intersubjectivity must be to “recognise the Other” (Sanders, 2008). To condense his views brie fl y, he argues that such relations cannot be governed by reciprocity, as subjectivity, on his understanding, must be understood through the separation between the self and the Other Now, Levinas’s objection raises for us a further question: we understand that the ontology of fl esh is neither monism nor dualism, but it is not obvious whether difference or commonality takes ontological priority. Depending on how we understand this, would it not nullify Levinas’s argument ? We must turn now to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of (apparent) difference. In Section II, we discussed the identity-in-difference as well as difference-in-identity in fl esh, presented in the chiasm and dehiscence. What this suggests is that we cannot merely opt for either difference or commonality to be basic—because if we have truly understood Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining ontology, we would know that the two, like any other bifurcated opposites, are two sides of the same coin. This can be illustrated with a passage from “Cézanne’s Doubt” : “The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives ; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a coloured piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition .” (Merleau-Ponty, 1971: 20; emphasis mine. ) Just as the instances in a moment-form composition coagulate miraculously into a single mass, the ideality of art “dwells undivided... like a perennial acquisition”. Only here, we see clearer the picture of difference and commonality in terms of human subjectivity: commonality does not browbeat individuals into forming a lifeless amalgamation, but rather embraces each mind and preserves their essence as an eternalised ideality. As seen in any false dichotomy, difference and commonality do not have to fi ght for ontological precedence. In this way Levinas is mistaken— otherness has not been reduced into oneness with the idea of fl esh; they are equally primary and equally reversible. Indeed one of the most important takeaways from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is the ambiguity of being: non-coincidence and sameness go together, since there is always this difference between us and the world, viewed as depth, yet we also owe our bodily af fi nity to the world because body and world are of one fl esh Hurka (2004) terms this ontology of ambiguity an “anti-theoretical position”, which he believes to be “properly open only to those who have made a serious effort to theorise... and found that it cannot succeed”. And because they “do not make this effort”, they “are simply being lazy” (Hurka, 2004: 254). He then goes on to attack Wittgenstein’s “inability” to give a unifying analysis of games, merely settling for an ambiguous family resemblance theory This is a problematic view. Already in the Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty writes that ambiguity is a positive indeterminacy: we see indeterminately , through “the kind of visual experience we have of the hidden side of an object... a vision of something or the other” (Kelly, 2006: 81). And we have established that this knowledge of a “there is” is precisely what matters in our account of art. Not only is it unfair to deem the complex ontology of intertwining “lazy”, it also accomplishes nothing, considering that this very fact of positive indeterminacy characterises art and our perception. Even if we disregard this point, what good reason do we have to suppose that ambiguity is a negative indeterminacy that we must eliminate? It seems that Hurka’s view is a continuation of Objective Thought, striving for an unattainable absolute knowledge through thematisation. This evades the whole point of phenomenology, whose aim is to return to pre- re fl ective experience, to inhabit the world rather than explain and theorise. I have also demonstrated in the earlier sections that art and Being do exhibit this indeterminacy—a severe blow to Hurka’s attempt at attacking the “anti-theorist position”. Might it not be that indeterminacy is not a consequence of our ignorance, rather a fact of existence? Moreover, one must not con fl ate ambiguity with relativism, which Merleau-Ponty rejects; embracing ambiguity does not imply an anarchistic “anything goes” position. For, again, this ambiguity is positive, and it is a fact of existence that we can dwell in. There is a truth, for Merleau- Ponty, and it is ambiguous. This is the ontology that art illuminates—there is always ambiguity, but there is the fact of matter in the way that we interweave with the world There is no better comment that concludes the ambiguity of seemingly opposing dichotomies, than Merleau-Ponty’s mentions of “secret blackness of milk... accessible only through its whiteness” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 150). This was taken from Bachelard, who writes : “We shall feel that [in milk] the material imagination needs there to be something dark between whiteness. Without it, milk would not have this matte whiteness, this thick, deep whiteness that is sure of its depth... It is this desire to see the other side of whiteness beneath whiteness that leads the imagination to darken certain blue re fl ections passing over the surface of the liquids and fi nd its way toward ‘the secret blackness of milk’.” (Bachelard, 2011: 17 ) This is a commentary on general ontology, but also one on art and the endeavours of the artist. We come back to the idea that the art idea is essentially an invisible lining that brings out the Visible. This seeming opposition, after all, has to coexist in harmony—in intertwining, in fl esh Having hopefully answered the objections, I conclude with a pertinent quotation : “Many have tried, but in vain, with joy to express the most joyful Here at last, in grave sadness, wholly I fi nd it expressed.” (Hölderlin, 1994: 53 ) Conclusio n I set out to investigate how art explicates Merleau-Ponty’s relational ontology, and established that what was essential to art-making were the depiction of depth and the rendering visible of invisibles. I explored how artists undertake these tasks in such a way that art mirrors the ontology of fl esh, and in particular, I highlighted the ambiguous intertwining of traditional opposites, manifested both in art and our general being. I considered also two objections: to Levinas, I responded by further explicating the reciprocal ontology of fl esh, using examples from art to explain the ontology of (non-)difference that is implicit in fl esh, serving to further strengthen my point that art has a crucial role in illuminating Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. Against Hurka, I argued that describing art and Being with the ontology of fl esh is not only not “lazy”, but also apt, because they are best characterised by ambiguity I also do the reverse, showing that phenomenology illuminates aesthetics. This in turn demonstrates that, art and Being, too, are fl esh responding to fl esh , dictated by a reciprocity which gently interweaves them into the mingling that is human experience. 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