In response to Eye and Mind, I want to try to digest and restate Merleau-Ponty’s
account of painting as a means of entry into the text. Following this,
I want to explore and question his privileging of painting as the prime
exemplar of phenomenological understanding. Merleau-Ponty begins his essay by
addressing the scientific pursuit of absolute objectivity. He argues that the
division of science as autonomous from other methods of knowing is contrived
and the pursuit of purely objective knowledge is in vain. “Scientific thinking
, a thinking which looks from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must
return to the ‘there is’ which precedes it; to the site, the soil of the
sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our
bodies—not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an
information machine but this actual body I call mine…” (454) It seems he is
positing that the vanity of pure objectivity is twofold. First, we cannot ever
know the thing itself and, second, scientific knowledge must return to or
include perception in order for it to ever be known and understood.
Merleau-Ponty asserts painting as a kind of antidote to this futile and
ultimately meaningless objectivity. He sees painting as the action most capable
of analyzing and demonstrating sight as we, bodily beings, experience it. He
articulates this generally but lucidly early in the essay. “The painter ‘takes
his body with him’ says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could
paint.” (455) Merleau-Ponty continues by investigating the specifics of our
perception that ground our knowledge as an understanding through the body and
explaining how these particulars of perception are expressed in painting. He
describes the duplicity of feeling. “My body simultaneously sees and is seen.
That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what
it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it
touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.” He then uses
this duplicity to argue against the Platonic understanding of the image as
secondary. The mind is unable to imagine a pure form distinct from perception
because it is conditioned by perception thus the image is not secondary or
false or true. The image is a primary record of sight or as Merleau-Ponty states
with more complexity “a central operation contributing to the definition of our
access to Being.” (461)
I find Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and
the few claims I’ve summarized to be accurate. I do, however, think that they
are not exclusive to painting and that painting is no more capable of
contributing to our access to Being than any of the other arts. Painting
expresses and documents the experience of sight and its synethesia with other senses.
Other sensorial arts such as sculpture, music, and performance offer their own
unique access to Being that other realms of art cannot replicate. For example,
the space and dimensionality of sculpture allow us to experience time and
narrative as it relates to our bodies. In order to view an entire sculpture we
must move around and/or through it and thus begin to comprehend it as it
relates to the movement of our body. A painting is unable to provide this
understanding. James Turrell’s work is a good example of sculptural access to
perception and, perhaps, the linkage between objectivity and perception for
which Merleau-Ponty sought. Turrell uses an acute awareness of optics and
astronomy to create light installations and experiences that address human perception
and illusion. The creation of the work is heavily design and science based yet
Turrell’s compulsion towards light derives from a fascination with the way in
which we perceive the world and a Quaker faith that deifies light.
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