Dermot Moran has a nice piece on Merleau-Ponty and seeing here, followed up as nicely by the ever perceptive Fido the Yak. Moran’s piece offers a nice summary of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of ocularcentrism in philosophy. As Moran states, “Seeing can touch: it touches the texture of things. We literally see roughness and smoothness, for example, the coarse texture of the carpet.” We can think here of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to aesthetics as demonstration of this claim, as he puts it in his article on Cezanne: “These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses….We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor.”
Mikel Dufrenne, whose The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is first on my “summer reading list,” is also important here. I have jumped to his discussion of presence and perception. Dufrenne’s line of thought is more or less consistent with Merleau-Ponty: the body’s intentionality is prior to cognition, records the phenomenon of the world, and is capable of perceptive knowledge, thanks to the interplay between the corporeal cogito and the reflective cogito. But Dufrenne is especially good on describing the primacy of the body during aesthetic experience, as he writes: “The aesthetic object is above all the apotheosis of the sensuous….Thus the aesthetic object first manifests itself to the body, immediately inviting the body to join forces with it. Instead of the body’s having to adapt itself to the object in order to know it, it is the object which anticipates, in order to satisfy, the demands of the body” (339). This is truly the act of the body stretching out into the world, asserting itself as the basis of all experience.
To prove this claim, Dufrenne speaks of the embodiment of the artist, offering a brilliant analysis of the phrase “thinking with one’s hands” (see also Elizabeth A. Behnke’s equally excellent article “At the Service of the Sonata”). Dufrenne has us think of the artist’s relation to creativity, the free flowing spontaneity which is possible thanks to the invisible border between creation and the physiology of the hand, writing that: “Each inflection of the melody awakens an echo in his body, as do the subtleties of harmony which means as much for the hand as for the ear. He hears with his fingers” (341, my bold). “He hears with his fingers” – what a truly marvellous image!
The contribution from Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne is especially striking, given the Kantian (and Schopenhauerean) backdrop which privileges cognition over the sensuous realm. Consider Schopenhauer on sight in “certain larvae, worms, and zoophytes” (W2, 84). He writes: “Animals without eyes know only by touch what is immediately present to them in space.” The idea here is one of substitution: the deficiency of blindness limits spatial depth to the scope of touch, thus instigating touch as the primary sense - a manifestly dubious claim.
How is the tension between sight and touch played out during “aesthetic experience?” Is aesthetic experience the mode of affective experience, whereby cognition is divested of its materiality? Is the materiality of the body an encumbrance to the “pure subject of knowing,” to cite Schopenhauer? What then of “losing” oneself in the artwork? Do the eyes perceive independently of the body?
Yet as the Moran article shows, sight is not synonymous with vision. And here Merleau-Ponty shines through directing thought “downward” – a direction at odds with traditional accounts of aesthetic experience. But this is no simple replacement of cognition with the body: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics attests to the “bodily teleology” latent in all appearances. Latency is an important idea. Turning back to Schopenhauer: if we take the aesthetic subject in Schopenhauer as devoid of individuality and thus “elevated” to the “eternal world-eye,” then where does the body dwell if not in a site of disappearance, thus affecting an aesthetics of disembodiment? Yet the body does persist and is returning to, though no doubt in a different mode of being. Soon after, Schopenhauer makes an odd admission: the peacefulness of the nervous system – secured by, among other things, “a peaceful night’s sleep” – alters the susceptibility toward aesthetic pleasure. Does the latency of those embodied conditions manifest themselves as aesthetic experience? That would be a question which focuses on how the passages, anxieties, and reveries of the body become constitutive of the very experience of having transcended the body.
Mikel Dufrenne, whose The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is first on my “summer reading list,” is also important here. I have jumped to his discussion of presence and perception. Dufrenne’s line of thought is more or less consistent with Merleau-Ponty: the body’s intentionality is prior to cognition, records the phenomenon of the world, and is capable of perceptive knowledge, thanks to the interplay between the corporeal cogito and the reflective cogito. But Dufrenne is especially good on describing the primacy of the body during aesthetic experience, as he writes: “The aesthetic object is above all the apotheosis of the sensuous….Thus the aesthetic object first manifests itself to the body, immediately inviting the body to join forces with it. Instead of the body’s having to adapt itself to the object in order to know it, it is the object which anticipates, in order to satisfy, the demands of the body” (339). This is truly the act of the body stretching out into the world, asserting itself as the basis of all experience.
To prove this claim, Dufrenne speaks of the embodiment of the artist, offering a brilliant analysis of the phrase “thinking with one’s hands” (see also Elizabeth A. Behnke’s equally excellent article “At the Service of the Sonata”). Dufrenne has us think of the artist’s relation to creativity, the free flowing spontaneity which is possible thanks to the invisible border between creation and the physiology of the hand, writing that: “Each inflection of the melody awakens an echo in his body, as do the subtleties of harmony which means as much for the hand as for the ear. He hears with his fingers” (341, my bold). “He hears with his fingers” – what a truly marvellous image!
The contribution from Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne is especially striking, given the Kantian (and Schopenhauerean) backdrop which privileges cognition over the sensuous realm. Consider Schopenhauer on sight in “certain larvae, worms, and zoophytes” (W2, 84). He writes: “Animals without eyes know only by touch what is immediately present to them in space.” The idea here is one of substitution: the deficiency of blindness limits spatial depth to the scope of touch, thus instigating touch as the primary sense - a manifestly dubious claim.
How is the tension between sight and touch played out during “aesthetic experience?” Is aesthetic experience the mode of affective experience, whereby cognition is divested of its materiality? Is the materiality of the body an encumbrance to the “pure subject of knowing,” to cite Schopenhauer? What then of “losing” oneself in the artwork? Do the eyes perceive independently of the body?
Yet as the Moran article shows, sight is not synonymous with vision. And here Merleau-Ponty shines through directing thought “downward” – a direction at odds with traditional accounts of aesthetic experience. But this is no simple replacement of cognition with the body: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics attests to the “bodily teleology” latent in all appearances. Latency is an important idea. Turning back to Schopenhauer: if we take the aesthetic subject in Schopenhauer as devoid of individuality and thus “elevated” to the “eternal world-eye,” then where does the body dwell if not in a site of disappearance, thus affecting an aesthetics of disembodiment? Yet the body does persist and is returning to, though no doubt in a different mode of being. Soon after, Schopenhauer makes an odd admission: the peacefulness of the nervous system – secured by, among other things, “a peaceful night’s sleep” – alters the susceptibility toward aesthetic pleasure. Does the latency of those embodied conditions manifest themselves as aesthetic experience? That would be a question which focuses on how the passages, anxieties, and reveries of the body become constitutive of the very experience of having transcended the body.
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