11 - Between Philosophy and Art

Summary

“Every theory of painting is ametaphysics,” declares Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” his last major philosophical essay on the visual arts (OE42/171/132). The immediate target of his remark is Descartes, in whose brief comments on engravings Merleau-Ponty finds a denigration of art as but a handmaiden to perception, capable of disclosing only those features of the mind-independent world already available to ordinary vision. However, his claim is meant to apply much more broadly. By addressing the nature of representation, its content, means, and ends, and the relation of the artist to the world, a theory of painting entails a metaphysics: a conception of how the self, body, mind, and world interrelate. In his major essays on visual art - “Cézanne's Doubt” (1945), “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and “Eye and Mind” (1961) - Merleau-Ponty draws on this internal relation between theories of painting and metaphysics to challenge prevailing philosophical and scientific accounts of perception, meaning, imagination, and human subjectivity.

Yet if every theory of painting implies a metaphysical theory, not every metaphysical theory offers a theory of painting. Art plays a central role in Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to elaborate his phenomenology; however, even in the intense, searching reflection of “Cézanne’s Doubt” on the painter’s life and work, it is not clear that from such phenomenological inquiry there emerges a philosophy of art.