SOURCE: Crowther, Paul. “Merleau-Ponty: Perception into Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 22, no. 2 (spring 1982): 138-49.

[In the following essay, Crowther explores the significance of Merleau-Ponty's theories of phenomenology to the creation and study of art.]

Since Heidegger's Being and Time, the fundamental intent of phenomenology has been to burrow beneath the edifices of abstract knowledge (such as science or traditional philosophy) with a view to expressing a more primordial contact with the world—a contact which is presupposed but ill understood by abstract reflection. In a sense, Merleau-Ponty gives us a paradigm for the application of such phenomenological method to art, since, for him, it is art which is most successful in giving expression to man's fundamental contact with being. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty never wrote any large systematic work upon the subject, and to grasp his thoughts as a single theory of art involves reference to most of his large works, and numerous essays besides. Existing discussions of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics¹ have suffered from the shortcoming of considering the earlier and later phases of his thought, in isolation from one another. In this discussion I shall attempt to synthesise an overall view, that at the same time elucidates some of Merleau-Ponty's cryptic terminology. This task of interpretation and clarification is made easier by the fact that Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics do converge upon a specific theme: ‘It is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art.’²

Accordingly, in Part One of this paper I shall briefly outline Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception, and then, in the second section, proceed to describe how perception ‘amplifies’ into artistic creation. In Part Three, I shall elaborate Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the significance of the art work, and will, in conclusion, briefly relate his theory to other phenomenological approaches to art, with a view to highlighting some of their deficiencies.

I. PERCEPTION

The central theme of all Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is the primacy of embodiment. Our fundamental contact with things arises from a ‘practical synthesis’, i.e., from handling them, looking at them, using them, etc. Traditional philosophy, in contrast, takes consciousness as its starting point, and constructs the ‘external’ world from the sense data or ‘atoms’ of sensation that are presented to the pure perceiving subject. For Merleau-Ponty, however, the body and its operations are that which makes any consciousness possible. For example, it would be difficult to explain in terms of traditional philosophy why judgements about depth ever come about. There is no intrinsic reason, say, why one element in a landscape should appear farther away than another; there is, however, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, a ‘motive’.³ Judgements about depth can only come about in so far as it has been revealed beforehand as the ground or arena which our body inhabits and operates in.

On these terms, our fundamental knowledge of the world comes through our body's exploration of it. Consciousness is not a purely mental phenomenon, but a function of the integrated operation of all the senses. We find in perception not atoms of sensation or pure sense data, but nodes of ‘meaning’ which emerge as a foreground (through their proximity to the body and its interests), against the background depth of the whole perceptual field. A brick, for example, will define itself by its colour, texture, shape, size, position, and intended use in relation to other objects and phenomena in the field. Even if our attention, say, is focused upon the colour alone, we will still find a meaning that emerges from its harmony or opposition to other colours and light levels in the field, and indeed from the texture, shape and weight of the object whose colour it is.

For Merleau-Ponty, then, perception is an encounter with ‘meanings’. Things impress themselves upon the body not as ‘logical constructions’ or ‘substances with attributes’ but as tangible, dynamic, intersensory presences or ‘emblems’ of a certain style of being. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.’⁴

Our knowledge of the world is thus founded upon the body's relating and habituating itself to things. Such encounters will leave behind them not so much mental ‘pictures’ or memory-images, as ‘carnal formulae’, i.e., structures constituted from all the sensory and affective life of the subject. The acquisition of language, of course, facilitates this sedimentation, and enables ‘carnal formulae’ to be projected in thought or imagination even even when the things or situations that originally gave rise to them, are not present. This means that all our perceptions are ‘subtended by an “intentional arc” which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological or moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects.’⁵

It is now time to gather up two important points from this brief outline of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception. First, we remember that the body articulates the world into meanings by grasping it through the integrated operation of the senses, and relating what is thus grasped to its past and future life. In this sense, perception is creative. The body does not find meaning pre-existent in the world, but calls such meaning into existence, through its own activity. Second, such activity is, for the most part, pre-reflective; the body operates amongst, and upon, things, persons, and situations without being explicitly and directly aware that it is doing so. There are moments, however, when we do stand aside from the flux of life, and ask ‘What's really going on here?’. This attitude, of course, finds its most systematic articulation in philosophy. The problem with such reflective thought is that it has great difficulty in expressing the intersensory and historical complexity of our being in the world, and tends therefore towards over-simplification. Ryle and Heidegger, for example, have both argued in different ways, that philosophical understanding has been distorted by conceiving the world in terms of abstract models derived from the secondary realm of mechanics and technology. This is also Merleau-Ponty's position. Although our fundamental contact with the world is not a conceptless chaos, its structure and cohesion is not of the same order as that of abstract thought. An object given in perception is encountered firstly as a meaning-for-us, an intersensory style of being, rather than a ‘mental’ construction from sense-data. It is grasped in the context of complex relationships in the immediate perceptual field, and in terms of its significance in our past, and for our future life. To use Merleau-Ponty's terminology, any ‘meaning’ which becomes ‘visible’ or ‘speaks’ to us, in perception, does so only in so far as it is defined against an ‘invisible’ or ‘silent’ background of perceptual, reflective, and historical relationships.

Given then this notion of the creativity of perception, and its invisible/silent foundations, we are in a position to proceed to Merleau-Ponty's theory of art.

II. THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART

It will be remembered that in Merleau-Ponty's terms, our perception of things or of their interrelations leaves ‘carnal formulae’ ingrained upon our body. In handling objects or palpating them with the eye, etc., our body habituates itself to the ‘style’ of being that characterizes the things or situations it encounters. Merleau-Ponty is hence led to distinguish between primary expression which brings new perceptual meanings into existence, and secondary expression, where meaning is derived from already familiar ‘carnal formulae’. For example, if we see a woman walking towards us, it may be that this is ‘just’ a woman—we pass her by without thinking anything about it. Our body is accustomed to such experience, and regulates its behaviour accordingly. However, it may be that the woman strikes us as particularly beautiful or mysterious—her way of varying the ‘accent’ of feminine being is one which does not square with our usual expectation of it. On these terms, our carnal formula of femininity is called into question and enriched; the silence of our practical engagement with the world is ruptured by a situation which demands that more should be said about it. Now it may be, of course, that this new meaning to femininity, this instance of ‘primary expression’, is one which simply flares up for a moment then is sedimented into our ‘intentional arc’, ready to inform future perceptions. However, there are some occasions when perception encounters a meaning or meanings which cannot be grasped immediately—the aura of ‘something still to be said’ lingers and becomes unbearable. We feel the need to preserve them, or articulate them further. Here, of course, is the take-off point for artistic creation. The artist is a person who sees the world in terms of such further possibilities. It is unfortunate that Merleau-Ponty uses the term ‘equivalences’ to describe the artist's response, since it is clear that what the artist's vision picks out are those deviations from perceptual norms (or the possibility thereof) which can find a fuller articulation in his work. His ‘equivalences’ are, to use a term which Merleau-Ponty borrows from Malraux, ‘coherent deformations’.

Now, why should the artist be especially prone to seeking out the deviation rather than the norm in perception? Is it just a case of his being rather more ‘inspired’ than the ordinary person? As one might expect, for Merleau-Ponty the answer to this question is to be found in embodiment rather than in realms of the spirit. The artist is a person whose approach to life has been significantly defined by a relationship to a medium such as painting or writing. He has learnt an affinity between his body and the handling of a specific medium that enables his body to take a fuller grasp on the meanings he encounters in perception. This discovery may have been a natural outcome of early ability in relation to the medium, or it may come about through a crisis in life or a series of extraordinary situations that awaken him to a lack of fullness in his existence. Whatever the origin, once the artist has lent himself to a medium, his perception thereafter will be influenced by its demands. As Gombrich says in relations to one branch of the arts: ‘… painting is an activity, and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints than to paint what he sees’.⁶

Why should this relationship to a medium be so important when there is, after all, a strong creative element in perception itself? Well, Merleau-Ponty notes that perception ‘stylizes’. Each person is a unique individual, and though we can expect different subjects to share a common phenomenal field and similar carnal formulae (through the fact that we are all embodied), each person will have his own style of relating his body to the field. He will place his own valuations on phenomena—some will be the object of interested attention, others will be passed over. These gestures of emphasis or understatement are the basis of style in perception. Now, in the artist, such style is even more pronounced. In re-creating or exploring these original responses through the handling of a medium, the artist not only responds to, but, in a sense, re-learns the situation(s) which gave rise to his equivalences. Consider again the example of a woman passing by:

If I am … a painter, what will be transmitted to the canvas will no longer be only a vital or sensual value. There will be in the painting not just ‘a woman’ or ‘an unhappy woman’ or ‘a hatmaker’. There will also be the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it by a face as by clothing, by ability of gesture as by inertia of body—in short, the emblem of a certain relationship to being.⁷

In other words, working in a medium enables the body to continue the creative stylizing process begun in the artist's perception itself, in order to concentrate the ‘scattered’ meanings found there, and make them exist in a unified concrete form. It brings his own perceptual style to a point of consummation.

Given, then, the importance of continuity of style from perception to handling of medium, we must not forget the ground which makes this possible. At every moment the artist's responses will be informed by that ‘intentional arc’ already alluded to. He has learned techniques, discussed art, looked at other people's works, and perhaps finds that the system of ‘equivalences’ which gave rise to other works by him, have become immanent in his present creation or point towards certain modifications. From all this we see that each brushstroke or stanza or whatever, is underpinned by an enormous complexity. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne: ‘The rules of anatomy and design are present in each stroke of his brush just as the rules of the game underlie each stroke in a game of tennis.’⁸

Now, the very possibility of the artist's style evolving in the light of influence from other works, or ‘rules of design’, depends on works of art being publicly accessible, i.e., not merely ‘equivalences’ in the artist's mind. In working out his ‘equivalences’ in a medium, the artist is not translating a ready made thought but rather adding to it. In the process of creation we find hoverings, reworkings, estimations of the effect of individual signs upon the developing whole. The work-in-progress takes its stylistic clue from perception and extends it until the qualitative configuration of marks or words or whatever announce that the perception is complete. Simply to reduce art works to the artist's mental states, or intentions etc., is to reduce them to insignificance. It is the process of physical re-creation in a medium that takes the creativity of perception to completion. We could not, in fact, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, understand how a ‘mind’ could paint. Hence, the conclusion that: ‘A novel, a poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed …’⁹.

To those who have done their aesthetics in the analytic tradition, the rejection of the art-as-mental-states thesis may seem a battle long won. Why tread this ground again? There are a number of reasons. First, Eugene Kaelin¹⁰ has argued that if we forget the art-as-mental-states thesis, it is to Croce's aesthetics that Merleau-Ponty's theory can best be compared. However, the enormous polarisation manifest in their respective attitudes towards the ontological status of the art work is so irrevocably fundamental as to make further comparisons of less than academic interest. There is a second, related, point here. Some of the most influential phenomenological philosophies tend to reduce the human subject to a mere network of intentional acts, and interpret the art work itself in terms of mental states. Sartre has been seen as occupying this position,¹¹ and more significantly, Ingarden—who argues that the art work is primarily the artist's intention with its physical embodiment a mere ‘existential substrate’.¹² In his stress on the physicality of artistic creation Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from this tradition in a way that at the same time goes beyond the piecemeal analysis of Gallie's ‘journeyman aesthetician’ in the analytic tradition. We find a deep account of the origin of the work of art that places it in the broader context of human existence. This analysis has, as I shall argue in the following section, an important contribution to make to our understanding of the significance of the art work; and to our understanding of art as a trans-cultural phenomenon. It is with a consideration of the latter point that I shall round off this section.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of ‘… a unity of human style which transcends spatial and temporal differences to bring the gestures of all painters together in a single effort, a single accumulative history—a single art or culture.’¹³ The reasons for this are twofold. First, all human gestures or perceptions are comparable in that they have meaning, i.e., refer beyond themselves, and are statements within the same syntax—embodiment. Given the importance of bodily gesture in the creation of art, it is not surprising that we find, for example, so much similarity between paintings from different cultures since they all have a common ground—the body's physical articulation of meanings discovered in perception. It is sometimes pointed out, of course, that ‘art’ is a concept peculiar to western culture. However, if we follow Merleau-Ponty's clues we are led to search beneath the diverse social functions of art works to find a distinct ontological category—namely artefacts which consummate the stylizing process begun in perception itself. Though the term ‘art’ arose (and rather late at that), in the context of a specific culture, there was a unique kind of existent already waiting beneath the web of social and cultural usages, for the dignity of being picked out by a distinct name.

Now in its character as a public embodiment of individual experience, the art work has social consequences. It is a source of possible influences on other works; it creates new possibilities of meanings, and is integrated into the perceptual style of those who encounter it. Even a work which is first found unintelligible, will, if it has any worth, eventually create its own public.

Hence we see that painting, indeed art in general, is conceived by Merleau-Ponty as an institution inaugurated from the simple ground of perception. It occurs when tendencies given in an individual's perception interact with a certain social context—specifically, the tradition that has arisen in relation to a medium. As Hegel observes: ‘… even if the talent and genius of the artist has in it a natural element, yet this element essentially requires development by thought, reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing.’¹⁴ These productive skills are, of course, acquired by acquaintance with a tradition, and it is this, I think, which places Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in a proper context—namely as a prefiguring of that confluence of Hegel and Heidegger brought about in Hans-George Gadamer's ‘philosophical hermeneutics’.

III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK OF ART

Any serious theory of art must answer at least two related and fundamental questions. First, how do we differentiate works of art from other human artefacts; and second, why do we find the art work so especially rich in meaning? Merleau-Ponty offers answers to both these questions; indeed such answers constitute the very heart of his aesthetic theory. It is to this I now turn.

A first point to note in that on Merleau-Ponty's terms the work of art is separated from the bulk of human artefacts by having semantic qualities, i.e., formal configurations which refer, in some sense, beyond themselves. This is true even of abstract art or music, in that the former refers to the ‘allusive logic’ of visual reality itself—or, as it were, the perceptual ‘flesh’ beneath the visual skin; and the latter sets out ‘… certain outlines of Being—its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheavals, its turbulence.’¹⁵ This semantic quality, of course, is not in itself enough to define the work of art, since it is a feature common to any sign-system or language. It will be remembered, however, from part one of this study, that our fundamental and pre-reflective contact with the world is ‘silent’. Language, as formulated in the traditional intellectual disciplines, gives it only an incomplete or distorted expression through being unable to grasp the depth of ‘invisible’ relationships that underlie and define ‘visibilia’ (i.e., those meanings encountered in perception). The art work, however, is better equipped to give voice to this silent domain.

To bring this out let us contrast the way we apprehend meaning in the traditional disciplines with the way we apprehend them in the novel or poem. To begin with, the fundamental business of, say, the philosophical, scientific, or historical text, is analytic. It seeks to reduce some specific phenomena or range of phenomena, to a statement of objective laws or relations which are immanent in them. In other words, it draws us into an essentially cognitive engagement, an abstract mode of understanding which seeks to grasp the ‘invisible’ foundations of the phenomena or phenomenon investigated. Now of course, any poet or novelist may be moved by such abstract ideas, but his specific presentation of them in a medium seeks to engage our whole being rather than cognition alone. To use a sign-system analytically—as in the traditional intellectual disciplines, or indicatively—as in the propositions of ordinary language, involves a bare and essentially cognitive operation with signs. There are occasions, though, when we use signs in a much richer way; in a way that seeks to construct or re-construct some aspect of the world, in all its sensuous immediacy, i.e., as it might be encountered in perception itself. This is the realm of the imagination, and for Merleau-Ponty the work of art is essentially an imaginary or imaginatively re-constructed situation presented in a publicly accessible form.

There is a clear, but for the most part unacknowledged, debt here to Ingarden, and even more importantly, Sartre. However, Merleau-Ponty's account makes significant advances on both, and, in so doing, gives us an explanation of why we find the art object so especially meaningful. To illustrate this, let us briefly consider Sartre's theory of the art work, and specifically his example of the painter. On Sartre's terms the artist begins with a mental image of his subject, and, in painting it, ‘simply’ constructs ‘… a material analogue of such a kind that everyone can grasp the image, provided he looks at the analogue.’¹⁶

This is, quite simply, a more sophisticated presentation of the argument that has bedevilled the philosophy of art since Book X of Plato's Republic; namely that the physical work of art is ontologically ‘inferior’ to the state of mind from which it emanates. For Sartre, the work of art exists in order to refer us back directly to some image in the mind of the artist. This account, however, cannot explain the peculiar richness of meaning that we find in works of art. Specifically, it fails to grasp the important changes that take place in the transition from ‘inspiration’, to execution and end product, in the process of artistic creation. In section two of this paper I presented Merleau-Ponty's plausible account of how the act of making an art work significantly extends and articulates the ideas or ‘equivalences’ which are its starting point. This process has a further crucial consequence which I shall now outline in some detail.

Merleau-Ponty tells us that the novelist ‘… takes up his dwelling in a character's behaviour and gives the reader only a suggestion of it, its nervous and peremptory trace in the surroundings.’¹⁷ In other words the basis of the artist's expression is ‘tacit’ or ‘indirect’. He uses his medium to present some aspect of the world in its sensuous immediacy, but because he has his own particular style of handling the medium, what appears in the work will be indelibly stamped by that style. Hence, some aspects of the subject-matter will be emphasized and made figural, whilst other aspects will be omitted or underplayed. In other words, the work of art gives us an interpretation or evaluation of its subject-matter, and will depend as much on what the artist omits in the process of creation, as by what we find in the end product.

The work of art, then, does not aspire to reproduce perception but rather to give a sensuous interpretation of it; one which, through the artist's style ‘carves out relief in things’ or ‘distends’ the world into ‘fuller meaning’.¹⁸ This seems rather a strong claim. Are we to take Merleau-Ponty as saying that the art work is ‘visible’ or ‘meaningful’ in a stronger sense than perception itself? Our answer here must be in the affirmative, for the following reasons. Everyday perception gives us constant encounters with ‘visibilia’, but the demands of life are such that we do not have time to take note of the various ‘invisible’ relations which define these situations. This, however, is precisely where the artist's indirect expression comes into its own. Merleau-Ponty tells us for example, that ‘No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, but is in fact its lining and depth.’¹⁹ The thinking behind this remark is as follows. Proust does not simply indicate or describe a series of characters and events, rather he weaves his narrative from a sensuous presentation of only those events which essentially link and bind the characters in their common situation. We find their crucial decisions and mistakes, the moments of insight, the chance occurrences which prove pivotal in the course of their relationships. In other words, the author builds the ‘visible’ meaning—i.e., the ostensible story or plot, from a scaffolding of what he takes to be the most important ‘invisible’ relationships in the situation. The choices he makes here will be a function of his own moral, political, or aesthetic values, and these more abstract ideas of course will appear in ‘transparency’ behind the sensuous surface of the narrative, as its ‘lining and depth’.

Merleau-Ponty offers us a similar analysis of the visual arts. We are told, of painting for example, that ‘… it gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible.’²⁰ In this cryptic observation Merleau-Ponty is pointing out that as embodied subjects we are surrounded by a rich variegated texture of visual being, of which discrete objects are merely the punctuations or caesuras. We see or imagine something as say, a mountain, without taking note of the fact that what makes it visible as a mountain is a differentiated play of greens and browns, in juxtaposition to various other textures and shapes. Everyday vision ‘forgets its premises’ but this is precisely what the painter captures. He makes the mountain ‘visible’ in such a way that we cannot help but notice the invisible perceptual relationships that define it. Indeed, in so far as the artist has constituted his sensuous image from just ‘these’ ‘invisibilia’, and just ‘these’ combinations of brushstrokes and colours, we are placed in a new relationship to him as well as to his subject-matter. Hence the work of art expresses the artist's personal relation to a shared world, and is, therefore, of interest both in its own right, and its implications for other lives. The meaning and richness of the work will be inexhaustible simply by virtue of our historicity. As the pattern and meaning of personal and collective existence takes on new meaning, so will our understanding of particular works of art and their creators.

In Merleau-Ponty's theory, then, we find that the art work is defined and given its rich meaning by virtue of occupying a unique halfway position between perception and reflection. Unlike ordinary language and abstract thought, it has a sensuous immediacy that comes close to that of our fundamental perceptual contact with the world. Unlike perception itself, however, it preserves and articulates the most crucial ‘invisible’ scaffolding of the specific situation it is expressing.

One could perhaps summarize Merleau-Ponty's conception of art in terms of a distinction between showing and saying: art shows what traditional philosophy tries to say. It is not insignificant in this respect that Merleau-Ponty (like Heidegger before him) was led in his later philosophy to a quasi-poetic vocabulary in order to express man's fundamental relation to Being.

CONCLUSION

I have sketched out what I take to be the fundamental features of Merleau-Ponty's theory of art. It is a theory not without shortcomings and I shall have occasion to indicate and rectify these at length elsewhere.

However, even in its broadest outlines, Merleau-Ponty offers a theory which already marks a significant advance on some phenomenological approaches to art. Its improvement upon Sartre's has already been noted. I shall now relate it briefly to the thought of two key figures in the German tradition of phenomenology.

In the writings of Gadamer on art,²¹ we find (as with Sartre) an inclination to favour what the art work is perceived ‘as’, i.e., the salient meaning, at the expense of the relationship between meaning and the ‘invisible’ scaffolding which makes it possible. Whilst, like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer holds that the work of art is in some sense enriched being, the reason for this is that the artist gives us the ‘essence’ of the subject-matter. In such work, the ‘original’ which is represented ‘emerges into truth’ and enjoys an ‘increase of being’. Unfortunately this account presents some difficulties. For example, in what sense does the artist give us the essence of his subject-matter? What would differentiate this ‘emergence’ into truth, from truth in the context, say, of philosophy or science? Indeed why should it constitute an ‘increase of being’ for the ‘original’? Matters become especially problematic when we remember that many art works are realizations of imaginary conceptions which take actual situations or originals in life only as their clue, or starting point. In Merleau-Ponty's account, we find that the ‘originals’ which prompt artistic creation are not simply objects or situations, but carnal responses to them. These are articulated in terms of a medium, unlike reflective thought, that gives a sensuous and more complete expression to meanings encountered in perception. It is in this sense that the art work is ‘enriched being’. What Gadamer's approach fails to grasp is the nature of what is emerging in the art work and where it is emerging from. The unique richness of the work cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the presentation of a subject-matter's essence—the abstract methods of philosophy are quite adequate to such a task.

Heidegger's philosophy of art can be criticized from roughly the same direction. We are told for example, that ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry. The essence of art, on which both the art work and artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth.’²² Here we find again the notion of the artist expressing the ‘truth’ or essence of his subject-matter. However, ‘essence’ in Heidegger's sense is much more a relation to that pre-reflective contact between man and Being which looms so important in Merleau-Ponty's thought. For Heidegger it is Being which figures more significantly in this relationship by summoning man into language. Thereafter man expresses Being in two specific modes of language; first the inauthentic—which forces Being into abstract, technologically originated concepts, and second, the authentic, which is language close to the primal source of things and which allows them to appear before consciousness as they are ‘in truth’. Art (and poetry especially), is an instance of the latter.

Unfortunately, whilst Heidegger is prepared to admit that in the art work ‘createdness is expressly created into the created being, so that it stands out from it,’²³ he does not think through the implications of this in relation to his main thesis that art allows things to appear as they ‘truly’ are. Merleau-Ponty's theory of art in contrast, affords a very reasonable primacy to style—that ‘distention’ which draws the world out of focus into ‘fuller meaning’. Though the art work has certain objective semantic qualities, it is the artist's articulation of these through his own personal style, which gives us a sensuous and unique image of the perceptual world, with its scaffolding made tangible. In other words what the artist is expressing is not simply the essence of objects or situations as they are ‘in themselves’, but the way a certain style of Being impresses itself upon his flesh and finds a new mode of visibility. Hence Merleau-Ponty makes us aware of the art work's significance as an expression of the artist's individual embodiment. Heidegger's account, in contrast, unfairly subordinates the artist's own expression to the demands of the ‘truth’ of his subject-matter.

This is really symptomatic of a wider malaise. In much modern phenomenology (and indeed modern philosophy as a whole) there is a universal stress on language, and, at one remove, ideology, as being the fundamental link between man and the world. This, however, leaves open the question of how language and ideologies are themselves possible. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy gives us the opportunity to think this problem through. We find that language, ideology, and art are founded upon a more fundamental link between man and world—namely embodiment. With all its sensuous means, it is art which gives this mystery its fullest expression.

Notes

1. Namely Marjorie Grene, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Sartre's Aesthetic Dialogue’, British Journal of Phenomenology, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1970), pp. 59-72; Stephen Levine, ‘Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Art’, Man and World, No. 2 (1969), pp. 438-52; Eugene Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), Chapters VII to XI.

2. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (London: Heinemann; 1974), p. 83.

3. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1974), p. 48.

4. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, included in Sense and Non-Sense (Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 50.

5. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 136.

6. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon; 1971), p. 73.

7. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, included in Phenomenology, Language, and Sociology, ed., John O'Neill (London: Heinemann; 1974), p. 51.

8. ‘Cézanne's Doubt’, included in Sense and Non-Sense, p. 17.

9. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 151.

10. Eugene Kaelin, ibid.

11. E.g., Margaret Macdonald, ‘Arguments used in Criticism of the Arts’, included in Aesthetics and Language, ed., William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; 1970).

12. See, for example, Roman Ingarden, ‘Artistic and Aesthetic Value’, included in Aesthetics, ed., Harold Osborne (Oxford University Press, 1972).

13. The Prose of the World, p. 81.

14. G. F. W. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 27.

15. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, included in Osborne, op. cit., p. 57.

16. J. P. Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen; 1972), p. 220.

17. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, op. cit., p. 73.

18. Ibid., p. 75.

19. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 149.

20. Eye and Mind, op. cit., p. 62.

21. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 99-119.

22. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, included in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1978), p. 184.

23. Op. cit., p. 181.