Kwok-Ying Lau (2014) - "The Madness of Vision The Painter As Phenomenologist in Merleau-Ponty" PDF

THE MADNESS OF VISION:
THE PAINTER AS PHENOMENOLOGIST IN MERLEAU-PONTY
Kwok-ying Lau
1. Introduction
The decision to give the present paper the title “The Madness of Vision:
The Painter as Phenomenologist in Merleau-Ponty” is motivated by the
reading of the following passage in L’oeil et l’esprit, the last work published
during the lifetime of the author of Phenomenology of Perception:
The painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost
mad, because it is complete while it is yet only partial. Painting awakens and
carries to its ultimate power a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to
possess at a distance; painting spreads this strange possession to all aspects
of Being, the latters must in some fashion become visible in order to enter
into painting.1
From this passage, there is no doubt that the final Merleau-Ponty under-
stands the painter’s vision as a vision of madness, because the latter’s
ambition is the complete possession of Being by artistic means. Further
down in the same work, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “philosophy which
is still to be done, that which animates the painter, not when she/he
expresses her/his opinions about the world, but in the instant when her/
his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, she/he ‘thinks in
painting’.”2 Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, a painter’s work is compa-
rable to that of a philosopher: if a philosopher aims at the intellectual
possession of the world, what the painter aims at is the artistic pos-
session of the same world. This understanding receives support from
Merleau-Ponty’s preparatory notes for one of the last lecture courses
delivered in the Collège de France in which he wrote: “Donc peinture une
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sorte de philosophie: saisie de la genèse, philosophie toute en acte.”3
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 26–27; Eng. Trans.
by Carleton Dallery as “Eye and Mind”, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays,
ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 166, trans.
modified.
2 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 60; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 178.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Cours 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 58.
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162 kwok-ying lau
“Thus painting [is] a kind of philosophy: capture of genesis, philosophy

entirely in the state of act.”
In fact, to conceive the painter as a kind of philosopher, in particular a
kind of phenomenological philosopher, is a line of thought already implicit
in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier encounter with Cézanne in the 1945 essay “Le
doute de Cézanne.”4 In this essay, Merleau-Ponty says, citing Cézanne’s
own words, that the painter “wrote in painting what had never yet been
painted, and turned it into painting absolutely. Forgetting the viscous,
equivocal appearances, we go through them straight to the things they
present.”5 Yet, in 1945, the year of publication of Phenomenology of
Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of pictorial vision is not as
radical as that shown in L’oeil et l’esprit, contemporary of The Visible and
the Invisible in which Merleau-Ponty tried out the systematic but unfin-
ished exposition of his new conception of ontology. In order to obtain a
comprehensive understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of art in
relation to his phenomenological and ontological thinking, we will pro-
vide, in the following pages, a sketch of the essential moments of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of pictorial vision from the Cézanne article to
L’oeil et l’esprit, drawing supplementary information from other sources,
such as the important article on art, language and literature written in
between, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence”,6 or even relevant pas-
sages in Phenomenology of Perception. We hope to throw light on the fol-
lowing points concerning the overall understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy:
i. Since Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology aims at a rehabilitation of the
sensible, he has an aesthetics constructed around his meditations on
art and painting which forms an integral part of his philosophy.
ii. The evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of pictorial vision
is parallel to the development of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological
thinking, with the effect that his meditation on painting occupies
4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doute de Cézanne”, in Sens et non-sens (1st ed. 1948, Paris:
Nagel, 2nd ed. 1958), pp. 15–44; Eng. Trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus
as “Cézanne’s Doubt”, in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), pp. 9–25.
5 Sens et non-sens, p. 30; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 17, trans. modified.
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence”, in Signes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 49–104; Eng. Trans. by Richard C. McCleary as “Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence”, in Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), pp. 39–83. This article is in fact a reworked version of the Chapter 3
(“Le langage indirect”) of the posthumously published book La prose du monde (Paris:
Gallimard, 1969, pp. 66–160); Eng. Trans. by John O’Neill as “The Indirect Language”, in
The Prose of the World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 47–113.
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Novotny, K., Rodrigo, P., Slatman, J., & Stoller, S. (Eds.). (2013). Corporeity and affectivity
the madness of vision 163
progressively a more central position within his entire philosophical

endeavour.
iii. The aesthetics embedded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
pictorial vision is an aesthetics of a new type: it is not a conceptual
framework constructed to explain or to give sense to aesthetic experi-
ences in general; rather, it is aesthetic experiences understood as expe-
riences of the sensible which provide the basis for a new conception of
ontology: ontology of the flesh which is the Sensible-in-itself, the ori-
gin of all forms of idealities.
2. Rehabilitation of the Sensible and

the Primacy of the Pre-Reflective
As mentioned above, Merleau-Ponty’s whole philosophical itinerary can

be understood as a phenomenological tentative to rehabilitate the sensi-
ble against the entire intellectualist tradition of Western classical philoso-
phy from Plato through Descartes to Hegel, and to some extent, to Kantian
transcendental idealism where, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the sensible
is often viewed as the chaotic multiple which does not bear any intrinsic
principle of unity, meaning, or life. Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, always
wants to emphasis that the order of the sensible is self-organizing and self-
sense-bestowing: the Gestalt of perceptual experience in The Structure of
Behaviour, the body-proper in the Phenomenology of Perception, and the
flesh in The Visible and the Invisible all share this common but essential
basic character. That is why for Merleau-Ponty reflection is always pre-
ceded by the pre-reflective, and the ultimate goal of all philosophical
reflection is to join the pre-reflective order, such that the intellect aims
only at the coincidence with the sensible. But this theoretical position
implies that what renders possible any reflection is not an intellectual ele-
ment which imposes its laws from the exterior and from the above upon
the pre-reflective order underneath, as the way the Absolute Spirit in
Hegel, or the ultimate God in Descartes or in Berkeley, or the mysterious
transcendent source in Plato do. The origin of reflection, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is the pre-reflective order itself: if the pre-reflective order

itself was not endowed with the capacity of reflection, and that any reflec-
tion was only animated by an external intellectual and thinking source,
then the so-called coming into reflection of the pre-reflective order was
only a kind of mechanical manipulation at the mercy of the intellectual
master puppeteer. This is a kind of un-disenchanted world-view (please
allow such a neologism) unable to understand the most elementary life-
phenomenon which is a phenomenon of self-organization.
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The recognition of the inherent capacity to reflect within the pre-

reflective order brings about a complete reversal of the classical concep-
tion of philosophy: philosophy is activity of reflection, but neither its
source comes from the Other world, nor its destiny is directed towards
another world. On the contrary, it is this world, the life-world which we
are most familiar with, and our encounter with it which form the source of
our capacity of reflection. The life-world is at the same time the field of
deployment of our experiences and the partner of our experiential
encounter. By virtue of the experiential encounter with the world, we are
informed by the world and our reflective life begins without our knowl-
edge of it. Merleau-Ponty radicalizes the Husserlian concept of life-world
into that of the perceptual world, because perception is the primordial
mode of our contact with the world. This line of thought is persistent
throughout Merleau-Ponty’s whole philosophical development from the
Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible. In this latter
work, philosophical interrogation is never separated from the perceptual
world. It is understood as arising out of the self-reflection of our percep-
tual faith in the silent but paradoxical presence of the world: we can easily
see that there are things, there are others and there is the world, but what
are they precisely? Once when we attempt to articulate an answer, the
evidence of the world seen turns out to be an enigma.7 It gives us a head-
ache and the desire to dissipate it. The dizziness it causes and the passion
to cure it is called philosophy.
3. The Painter as Phenomenologist
But how to dissipate this dizziness and get cured from this headache?
Remaining faithful to what is given in our first but silent experience and
express it properly according to what is seen, this is what Husserl recom-
mends us in the §16 of the Cartesian Meditations when he writes:
“Der Anfang ist die reine und sozusagen noch stumme Erfahrung, die nun
erst zur reinen Aussprache ihres eigenen Sinnes zu bringen ist.”8
“The beginning is the pure, and so to speak, still mute, experience which
now has to be brought to pure expression in its proper sense.”9
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisble (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 17–19; The
Visible and the Invisible, Eng. trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press), 1968, pp. 3–4.
8 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana
I (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1950), p. 77.
9 The English translation given by Dorion Cairns deviates slightly from the text of the
Husserliana I: “Its beginning is the pure—and, so to speak, still dumb—psychological

Merleau-Ponty himself remained faithful throughout his life to the spirit

as well as to the formula of Husserl’s recommendation of faithfulness to
first experience.10
But if to describe as faithfully as possible the world as it is seen and
unfolded to us is the phenomenological philosopher’s primal task, this
very task can be accomplished by the painter as well, and probably in a
more concrete way. For either the philosopher or the painter has first of all
to be affected by the marvel or the enigma of the world; that is to say, she
or he must be a being-in-the-world. But while a philosopher of the
Cartesian type could readily think that she/he is a thinking subject with-
out a body, no painter can pretend that she/he paints only with the spirit
and not with the hands. With her/his body, the painter always adopts a
certain spatial position in the world, she/he never sees the world with a
bird’s eye-view (“la pensée survolante”). In this case, the painter is not
imposing a reflective attitude from nowhere, but is herself/himself
immersed in the world-spectacle. As a consequence, the painter lives
in connivance with the world rather than acts as a pure spectator of
the world.
In fact, if the artist is “the one who fixes the [world] spectacle and ren-
ders it accessible to the most ‘human’ among all those human beings who
themselves are part of the spectacle without seeing it”,11 it is simply
because the artist, in contrast to a pure mind, has a double carnal instru-
ment: the eyes and the hands.
“The eye is the instrument that moves itself, a means which invents its
own purposes; the eye is that which has been moved by a certain impact of
the world and restitutes the latter to the visible by the traces of the hand.”12
experience, which now must be made to utter its own sense with no adulteration.”
E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 38–39. In a translator’s
footnote (p. 38), Cairns says that “psychological” should read in German language
“psychologische” instead of “psychische” as in both the published text and typescript C. But
neither “psychologische” nor “psychische” is present in the published version of Husserliana I,
as shown in the citation above. Likewise, the French version, which is published prior to
the German, shows no trace of any word related to “psychological” in the sentence cited.
Cf. E. Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, French Trans. G. Peiffer and E. Lévinas (Paris:
A. Colin, 1931), p. 33.
10 Merleau-Ponty cited several times the French translation by Lévinas of this sentence
(Méditations cartésiennes, op.cit., p. 33) including in the Preface to the Phénoménologie de
la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p. x; Phenomenology of Perception, Eng. trans. C. Smith,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. xv) and in Le visible et l’invisible (p. 171;
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 129): “C’est l’expérience (…) muette encore qu’il s’agit
d’amener à l’expression pure de son propre sens.”
12 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 26; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 165, trans. modified.
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With this double carnal instrument, “the painter recaptures and con-
verts into visible object what would, without her/him, remains shut up in
the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances
which is the cradle of things.”13 In other words, what the phenomenologi-
cal philosopher aims at—returning to the things themselves and commu-
nicates what she/he sees to fellow humans by means of words and
concepts, the painter can fulfill this mission in a more tangible manner
without the assistance of concepts: bringing us back directly to the very
phenomena where we can witness in a concrete way the birth of things.
In fact, what a painter succeeds in doing through her/his art-work is to
render convergent all the visible and intellectual vectors of the canvas
towards an identifiable sense, and this movement of convergence essen-
tial to making visible any identifiable object is already sketched out in the
painter’s perception. This movement of convergence “begins as soon as
she/he perceives—that is, as soon as she/he arranges certain gaps or fis-
sures, figures and grounds, a top and a bottom, a norm and a deviation in
the inaccessible plenum of things. In other words, as soon as certain ele-
ments of the world take on the value of dimensions to which from then on
we relate all the others and in whose language we express them.”14 Thus in
the eyes of Merleau-Ponty, the painter amounts to a genetic phenomenol-
ogist: “by lending her/his body to the world, the painter changes the world
into painting.”15 Here what is at work is an operation of “transmutations”:16
“the genesis and metamorphosis of the Being” of the world into the vision
of the artist.17
But is Merleau-Ponty’s “in praise of painting” going too far? As a
follower of Husserl, he must have been aware of the fact that the founder
of phenomenology has sketched a theory of perspectival givenness
(Abschattung) of perceptual objects in §41 of the Ideas I first published in
1913.18 Yet there is also the hard fact that impressionist painters, foremost
of them Claude Monet, but also Renoir, Pissarro and some others, had put
13 Sens et non-sens, p. 30; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 17–18, trans. modified.

14 Signes, p. 68; Signs, p. 54.
18 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einfürung in die reine Phänomenologie (4th ed. 1980
conformed to 2nd ed. 1922, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag), pp. 73–76; Ideas Pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General
Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. Trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982),
pp. 86–89.

this theory into practice nearly half a century earlier in France. These
painters have not only revolutionized pictorial art but also the way we see
the world which we have presumed to be familiar with since time memo-
rial. From the impressionists on, we have acquired a new way of seeing the
world, and the world itself is seen under new lights, in the figurative as
well as the literal sense of the word.
The impressionist painters gave us a novel vision of the world. The
world is no more seen through the pictorial representational model of
the classical period according to which things and objects on a canvas are
always arranged neatly, by the technique of “trompe-l’oeil”, in relation
to the axis formed by the eyes of the painter and the central point of
the horizon which is supposed to be the fixed vanishing-point (“point de
fuite”). This classical conception of perspective, theorized during the
Italian Renaissance according to a geometric, i.e. scientific, conception of
perspective is supposed to give an illusory representation of the real
world.19 This theory, which had governed during four centuries the prac-
tice of painting in the West, was no more adopted by the impressionist
painters. Rather, under the brush of an impressionist, the pictorial object
shows itself through the complex interplay between light, shadows,
colours, reflections and lines. A pictorial object on an impressionist can-
vas never appears in conformity to the pre-established harmonious order
of the Leibnizian monads nor the characteristic clarity and distinctness of
the Cartesian ideas. On the contrary, it always shows itself somehow
bright or shadowy according to the lighting conditions under which it is
situated in a particular surrounding world. An impressionist pictorial
object never appears in outright isolation with or independent of the
worldly objects surrounding it; it is rather integrated necessarily in pro-
miscuity with a constellation of other objects which are either in front of,
partly concealed behind, or superimposed onto the object in question.
In a word: coming out of an impressionist’s hands, a pictorial object is
the restitution of a thing amid the atmosphere in which it is immersed by
the vision of the painter fascinated by it. Thus it is not an object of the
exact sciences defined as a “simple nature” in the manner of Descartes,
a notion which serves simply to illustrate the rational order of the Holy
19 M. Merleau-Ponty, Notes de Cours 1959–1961, p. 50. Cf. Isabel Matos Dias, Merleau-
Ponty: une poïétique du sensible, French trans. from Portuguese by Renaud Barbaras
(Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2001), pp. 152–153. The most authoritative
explanation of the concept and practice of perspective remains that of Erwin Panofsky.
Cf. His classic essay Perspective as Symbolic Form, Eng. Trans. Christopher S. Wood (New
York : Zone Books, 1991) ; in particular Section I, pp. 27–36.
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Creator’s perfect creation. At the same time as they succeeded in restitut-

ing the world spectacle as it is perceived, impressionist painters taught us
how to see things which are invisible to the profane eye. Claude Monet’s
series of The Cathedral of Rouen and that of water lilies in the garden of
Giverny drawn at different times of the day and in different seasons or
under different climatic conditions are among the most well-known and
successful examples of the impressionist teachings.20
4. Painting as Act of Expression and Its Carnal Basis
If the painter is comparable to the phenomenological philosopher, the

philosophy which animates her/his creative work is neither empirical
realism nor transcendental idealism; rather, it is a philosophy of expres-
sion, or more precisely, of bodily expression. That means the act of paint-
ing is neither simply an act of copying the natural reality, nor a pure act of
intellectual possession by preconceived schemas. For Merleau-Ponty, it is
clear that “art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured accord-
ing to the wishes of instinct of good taste. It is an operation of expres-
sion.”21 An act of expression is not the translation of a thought which has
already been clearly formulated beforehand by ourselves or by others.
If an act of painting comprises necessarily a moment of conception, its
conception cannot precede entirely its execution; otherwise it is simply
repetition or imitation, but not creation. Just as a poet always tries to com-
pose a new arrangement of words to convey her/his unique vision and
feelings, an artist expresses and paints as if no body has ever painted such
a world scenery before her/him. Like a child who gets to know a thing
by using a word to name it, the painter captures an object according
to its nature, rendering it into an recognizable object, i.e. something
that we can make sense of. “The creations of an artist … impose on this
givenness a figurative sense which did not pre-exist the creations them-
selves.”22 In other words, the act of painting is an event contributing to
20 For a further analysis of the phenomenological significance of Impressionist

painting, cf. the present author’s article published in Chinese: 劉國英：＜印象主義繪
畫的現代性格與現象學意涵＞(“Impressionist Painting as Modern Art and its Phe-
nomenological Significance”), 《現象學與人文科學》(Phenomenology and the Humans
Sciences), No. 1, 2004, pp. 125–153.

the inauguration of sense, an advent bringing about the phenomenaliza-

tion of the appearing objects. It brings to expression a first experience still
silent by instituting the ontogenesis of the visible object. If Cézanne
always doubted his capacity to capture this inaugural event, it is because
he was aware of the difficulties to paint the world in such a way that not
only he could “entirely convert the world into a spectacle, to make visible
how it touches us”,23 but also that a successful painting should be able to
awaken similar or parallel experiences rooted in the consciousness of oth-
ers. Thus Cézanne’s difficulties are those of first expression.
For the author of Phenomenology of Perception, the exploit of the painter
relies on a carnal basis: her/his own body. “It is the expressive operation of
the body, begun by the smallest perception, which is amplified into paint-
ing and art.”24 All begins by the body, because “the body is our general
medium to have a world,” and that the body is also “essentially an expres-
sive space.”25 Yet the body is not just one expressive space among all oth-
ers. As expressive movement itself, the body is the origin of all other
expressive spaces, and this precisely is because the body is a system of
kinesthetic possibilities in the world.
“Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent
that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself
brought to existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of geometri-
cal synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which
constitute the cultural world.”26
In the form of corporeal schema, the body is endowed with a system
of equivalence and reciprocal tacit comprehension between the visual,
the tactile and the auditory experiences. This system of equivalence
among visual, tactile and auditory elements of perceptual experiences
guarantees that the perceptual world at the pre-predicative level has
already a unity. The unitary perceptual world serves as the ultimate but
common reference of all kinds of expressive operations, from the most
basic bodily gesture to the most sophisticate intellectual activities of sig-
nification. In this way, the sensible world can receive as much nascent
meanings as conferred by the various expressive activities of the body,
meanings which are instituted at the very moment of contact of the body
with the world and with the things in the world.

24 Signes, p. 87; Signs, p. 70.
25 Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 171; Phenomenology of Perception, p. 146.
26 Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 445; Phenomenol ogy of Perception, p. 388.
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Hence if we can speak of the enigma of the world, we can likewise

speak of the “miracle of expression”27 precisely because it is the body
which succeeds in bringing into expression all those nascent meanings at
the threshold of being expressed. Thus for Merleau-Ponty, the body, in vir-
tue of its being itself the expressive movement and the origin of all other
expressive spaces, cannot be compared to a physical object; rather, it
should be compared to an art work.
“In a picture or a piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means
other than the display of colours and sounds… The same is true of a poem
or a novel, although they are made up of words… A novel, a poem, a pic-
ture or a piece of music are individuals, that is, beings in which the expres-
sion is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their sense is accessible
only through direct contact, they radiate their meaning without leaving
their temporal and spatial place. It is in this sense that our body is compa-
rable to a work of art. It is a nexus of vivid meanings, not the function of a
certain number of mutually variable terms.”28
Since it is, in the last analysis, the expressive operation of the body
in contact with the world which inaugurates senses in domains ranging
from music, dance and painting to poetry, novel and philosophy, the
topos of phenomenalization is the same as that of aesthetization. A phe-
nomenological philosophy of expression runs parallel to an aesthetics:
because the gesture of the phenomenological philosopher searching for
the origin of sense aims at rejoining the gesture which interrupts the
initial silence and inaugurates the nascent speech, this gesture can also
be the gesture of a painter or a poet. In the eyes of Merleau-Ponty, at the
primordial order of things, there is no privilege granted to speech in rela-
tion to painting, because both are acts of expression inaugurating senses.
And we can understand why in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy both novels
and works of art are rich sources of phenomenological description.
Philosophy is not superior to the arts, since both rely on the body as the
common sensible site of deployment of their expressive sense-endowing
activities.29

28 Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 176–177; Phenomenology of Perception,
pp. 150–151, trans. modified.
29 For a further discussion of this problem, cf. the remarkable little book by Ronald
Bonan, Premières leçons sur l’esthétique de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1997).

5. The Genius of Cézanne: Painter of the Primordial Nature
At this stage of our enquiry, two questions remained to be asked.

First: why was Cézanne once the privileged painter of Merleau-Ponty?
Second: why this privilege disappears in L’oeil et l’esprit? We will attempt
to answer these two questions respectively in the present and the next
sections.
As pointed out already at the beginning of this paper, Merleau-
Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt”, appeared in 1945, is contemporary to
Phenomenology of Perception. Evidently this essay is an appraisal of
Cézanne’s painting against the classical school, the criticism of whose
technical principle has been briefly evoked above when we presented the
artistic revolution brought about by impressionist painters. Yet in the eyes
of Merleau-Ponty, the impressionists did not keep their revolutionary
promises until the end, and it was only Cézanne who succeeded in achiev-
ing the complete artistic renewal.
We have pointed out earlier that impressionist paintings contain an
important phenomenological moment. Merleau-Ponty himself has admit-
ted this in the Cézanne essay when he wrote that “impressionism wanted
to capture, in painting, the very way in which objects strike our eyes and
attack our senses.”30 In order to obtain this effect, impressionist painters
“represented objects in the atmosphere where they are given by instanta-
neous perception.”31 Objects on impressionist paintings usually appear
luminous with vivid colour tones, because they are painted “without fixed
contours, only bound together by light and air.”32 To render visible the
effect of a luminous envelope around the objects, only the seven colours
of the prism are used; dark colours such as siennas, ochres and black are
excluded. In addition, impressionist painters employ the method of juxta-
position of complementary colours to emphasize the contrast among
local colour tones. “The result of these procedures is that the canvas,
which is no longer comparable to Nature point by point, restitutes a gen-
eral impression of truth through the action of the separate parts upon one
another.”33 But the acquisition of this instantaneous perceptual truth has
a high price to pay: “depicting the atmosphere and breaking up the tones

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submerge at the same time the object and cause the disappearance of its
proper gravity.”34 Putting this in philosophical language: impressionist
paintings are still too empiricist and not phenomenological enough.
In comparison with impressionism, Cézanne’s painting is more phe-
nomenological because “he wanted to return to the object without aban-
doning the impressionist aesthetics, which takes nature as its model.”35
According to Merleau-Ponty, the merit of Cézanne consists in “rediscover-
ing the object behind the atmosphere.”36 More precisely speaking, under
the brush of Cézanne, the pictorial object “is no longer covered by reflec-
tions and lost in its relationships to air and to other objects; it seems dully
illuminated from within, light emanates from it, and the result is an
impression of solidity and materiality.”37
Why did Cézanne succeed in this phenomenological exploit? Because
he is a genius: such is Merleau-Ponty’s answer. For the author of Phe-
nomenology of Perception, “Cézanne’s genius is to proceed by the arrange-
ment of the overall composition of the picture in such a way that when we
look at the picture globally, the perspectival deformations are no longer
visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision,
to give the impression of an nascent order, of an object at the moment of
appearing and building up itself before our eyes.”38
“Cézanne’s genius”: this should not be understood merely in the techni-
cal sense, but also in the philosophical sense of the term. Putting it in
a strait forward manner, we can say that Cézanne is animated by a phe-
nomenological vision which consists of two moments: reduction and
constitution. First of all, in refusing to follow any traditional artistic school
or any unquestioned alternative artistic position proposed by the tradi-
tion,39 Cézanne enacts the phenomenological reduction. Then comes the
moment of constitution: “he wants to depict matter as it is taking form
and at the nascent order by a spontaneous organization.”40 But even this
constitutive moment is preceded by a very crucial phenomenological
distinction. In the words of Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne “does not make the
break between ‘sense’ and ‘intelligence’, but between the spontaneous


order of the things perceived and the human order of ideas and sciences.”41
Translating this into phenomenological terms: the distinction is not a lat-
eral distinction between two regions of beings as in the tradition of empir-
icism and intellectualism, but a vertical distinction between the primordial
natural order and the human order of things. The task of constitution is
complete only when we succeed in witnessing the birth of the primordial
natural order of things. Always according to Merleau-Ponty, this is pre-
cisely what Cézanne in fact wanted to do: “It is this primordial world that
Cézanne wanted to paint, and that is why his pictures give the impression
of nature at its origin.”42
To go back from the naturalism of the objective sciences to the origin of
the primordial nature: such a project of research is on the phenomeno-
logical agenda since Husserl. But when Merleau-Ponty added that
“Cézanne wanted … to put intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and
tradition back in contact with the natural world which they are intended
to understand, and to confront the sciences with nature ‘from which
they came’”,43 the author of Phenomenology of Perception was simply
promoting Cézanne to be the painter-phenomenologist par excellence.
No serious reader of Phenomenology of Perception would be surprised
by this explanation of Merleau-Ponty, for the entire project of this great
work is precisely the tentative to return from the world of objective
sciences and culture back to the primordial perceptual world, which has
at its base the inhuman nature, to search for the origin of the system of
transcendences—the World—Things—Others. Among other formula-
tions, below is how Merleau-Ponty summarizes the sense of his research
project at the end of the Second Part of his magisterial work of 1945:
These descriptions must become an opportunity for defining a variety of
comprehension and reflection altogether more radical than objective
thought. To phenomenology understood as direct description needs to be
added a phenomenology of phenomenology. We must return to the cogito,
in search of a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one
which endows the latter with its relative validity, and at the same time
assigns to it its place. At the level of being it will never be intelligible that the
subject should be both naturans and naturatus, infinite and finite. But if
we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and
the Other, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to
understand.44

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6. Invitation to see the Invisible: Towards a

General Theory of Pictorial Vision
To what extent we can claim, with Merleau-Ponty, that Cézanne’s artistic

research is parallel to the philosophical research of Phenomenology of
Perception? Is Cézanne’s pictorial vision really a happy mapping of
Merleau-Ponty’s ontological vision?45 It is not our aim to answer these
questions in the present paper. Now the problem we want to tackle is: why
the privilege accorded to Cézanne by Merleau-Ponty in the 1945 essay dis-
appears in L’oeil et l’esprit? The answer we would risk to give is: if in 1945
Merleau-Ponty found in Cézanne’s artistic research a happy coincidence
with his own philosophical project in the Phenomenology of Perception,
towards 1960 when Merleau-Ponty was writing his ultimately unfinished
book on the radicalized new ontology he was conceiving, his meditation
on arts was at the same time broadened into a general theory of pictorial
vision. There is a parallel development between his reflections on pictorial
art and his own phenomenological ontology.
In fact, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s favour shown towards Cézanne,
we can easily raise the following interrogation from the artistic register:
how about other great painters before and after Cézanne? How to make
sense of the paintings of Da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer, David,
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Paul Klee and Kandinsky,
or the sculptures of Michelangelo, Rodin, Giacometti and Germaine
Richier, to give only a few of the most important names before and after
the advent of Western Modern art? What Merleau-Ponty needed in 1960
was no more a restricted philosophy of art centred on Cézanne, but a gen-
eral theory of pictorial vision which can account for all kinds of art works
which represent the most divergent or even opposing tendencies in the
history of Western painting. We think we can formulate this new philoso-
phy of pictorial vision as follows: an invitation to see the invisible through
the visible. In Merleau-Ponty, this is a development parallel to the deep-
ening of the phenomenology of the primordial world into the ontology of
the visible and invisible occurred between 1945 and his premature death
in 1961. The outline of this general theory of pictorial vision announces

itself in the Second Section of L’oeil et l’esprit by the following terms:
45 This correspondence is contested by Michel Haar. See his article “Peinture,

perception, affectivité”, in Merleau-Ponty, phénoménologie et expériences, ed. Marc Richir
and Etienne Tassin (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1992), pp. 101–122. Cf. also the very interesting
dossier edited by Galen A. John, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and
Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

From Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting cele-
brates no other enigma but that of visibility.46
Merleau-Ponty’s ambition to construct a general theory of pictorial vision
in order to understand the whole history of Western painting continues to
explain itself in a passage that we have cited at the very beginning of this
paper:
The painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost
mad, because it is complete while it is yet only partial. Painting awakens and
carries to its ultimate power a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to
possess at a distance; painting spreads this strange possession to all aspects
of Being, which must in some fashion become visible in order to enter into
the work of art.47
The painter’s vision is a vision of madness, because it aims at the total pos-
session of Being, including that which is visible and that which is invisible.
The desire to see the invisible is madness, but the power to render visible
the invisible is a magic power: “the painter, whatever she/he is, while she/
he is painting practices a magical theory of vision.”48 The painter’s magical
power of vision addresses in particular to a profane eye, which is an eye
which waits for others to teach her to see. Yet among those who teach oth-
ers to see, there is on the one hand the intellectualist whose seeing is actu-
ally a reflection on seeing. On the other hand, there is the painter’s seeing
which is a vision in act. Thus vision splits itself into two.49
Only the vision in act can teach the profane eye to see the invisible. As
a vision in act, “the painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely
‘physical-optical’ relation with the world” in the manner of a modern sci-
entist.50 On the contrary, in the vision of the painter “the world no longer
stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter to
whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or
coming-to-itself of the visible. Ultimately the painting relates nothing at
all among experienced things unless it is first of all ‘autofigurative’. It is a
spectacle of something only by being a ‘spectacle of nothing’, by breaking
the ‘skin of things’ to show how the things become things, how the world
become world.”51 What the painter does is not to project a preconceived
46 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 26; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 165–166.

47 L’oeil et l’esprit, pp. 26–27; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 166, trans. modified.
48 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 27–28; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 166.
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representation of the world through some intellectual images, but to bring

on the canvas what she/he sees in the world at the very moment of the
auto-sense-formation of the things. In this way she/he assists at the auto-
phenomenalization of the things and the auto-ontogenesis of the world.
What Merleau-Ponty emphasizes here, which differs from the Cézanne
essay, is that the sense formation process is not lead by the body as the
subject of expression. The sense-endowing vision itself is provoked as
much by the visible, as some painters such as Paul Klee has reported, tell-
ing that he felt seen by the trees in the forest,52 in such a way that the
vision itself is in a situation of intertwining: “Essence and existence, imagi-
nary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories
in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses,
of mute meanings.”53 Here, the theory of pictorial vision is embedded with
an ontological dimension—intertwining and promiscuity—parallel
to the radically a-subjective ontology of the flesh in The Visible and the
Invisible.
But what needs further explication is: what does the invisible mean in
this new theory of pictorial vision? What is to be seen in the dimension of
the invisible? Those who themselves are not visible but render possible
visibility such that other objects can be seen. Below are some examples.
i. Space and light. They are conditions of visibility, but themselves invis-
ible, at least to the profane eye. So to Merleau-Ponty, the task of pictorial
vision is “not to speak of space and light, but to make space and light,
which are there, speak to us.”54 Monet’s “Magpie” and especially Cézanne’s
“Mont Saint-Victoire” series are good examples of those admirable paint-
ings capable of making space and light speak to us. But two centuries ear-
lier than the impressionists and post-impressionists, the Dutch painter
Vermeer’s “View of Delft” (1660–1661) is already one of the most acclaimed
master pieces of the kind.
ii. Pictorial depth. According to Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s work again
provides one of the best examples to understand what is pictorial depth
since he has searched in this direction during his whole artistic life.
To Merleau-Ponty the question of pictorial depth “cannot be merely a
question of an unmysterious interval, as seen from an airplane, between

these trees nearby and those farther away. Nor is it a matter of the magical
vanishing of things, one by another, as we see happen so vividly in a


perspective drawing… What becomes an enigma arises out of their rela-

tion, out of that which is between them, out of the fact that I see things
each one in its place precisely because they eclipse one another, and that
they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own
place. [What becomes an enigma] is their exteriority known in their
envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy.”55
Understood in this way, pictorial depth is not the third dimension
added to the dimension of height and width painted on the canvas; rather,
it is “the experience of the reversibility of dimensions, of a global ‘local-
ity’—every thing in the same place at the same time, a locality from which
height, width, and depth are abstracted, of a voluminosity we express in a
word when we say that a thing is there.”56 Pictorial depth, itself being not
directly visible on a canvas, can render visible the deflagration of Being.
Other than Cézanne, some of Pissarro’s paintings (e.g. “The Red Roofs,
Corner of a Village, Winter”, 1877) can also serve as one of the best illustra-
tions of this line of thought.
iii. Lines. Likewise, since a long time painters know that lines are not
visible in themselves in a picture. For example, the contour of an apple or
the border between the field and the meadow are not object of direct
representation.
“They are always on the near or the far side of the point we look at. They
are always between or behind whatever we fix our eyes upon; they are
indicated, implicated, and even very imperiously demanded by the things,
but they themselves are not things. They were supposed to circumscribe
the apple or the meadow, but the apple and the meadow ‘form them-
selves’ from themselves, and come into the visible as if they had come
from a pre-spatial world behind the scenes.”57
Other than the Bauhaus masters such as Paul Klee and Kandinsky,
Matisse’s drawings and pictures on female bodies are eminent examples
of pictorial research on lines. What they show is again the intertwining
and promiscuity of Being.
iv. Movement. This is another paradoxical problem the representation
of which preoccupies Western philosophers since Zenon of Elea. As the
latter has tried to explain in his famous argument of the flying arrow, there
is precisely no movement if the moving object remains in a fixed spatial
position at every moment of the time frame. Thus if we want to represent
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movement successfully, we must be able to render visible that at a certain

time point, a moving object must be at a certain spatial position and at the
same time moving away from that position. And it is modern painting
(e.g. since Delacroix’s “Liberty guiding the people”, 1830, or even since
Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” which is again painted two hundred years
earlier in 1642) which renders possible the visibility of movement on the
canvas.
“The picture makes movement visible by the internal discordance of
the body. The position of each member [of the body], precisely by virtue
of its incompatibility with the position of the other members according to
the logic of the body, is otherwise dated [i.e. not ‘in time’ with the others];
and since all of them remain visibly within the unity of a body, it is the
body which comes to bestride time [enjamber la durée]. Its movement is
something premeditated between the legs, the trunk, the arms, and the
head in some virtual ‘control center’, and it breaks forth only with a subse-
quent change of place.”58
In other words, what a painter succeeds in restituting is a constant state
of unbalance of the body in movement which, while passing over to a
momentary balance position, will lead us to anticipate, by virtue of the
implicit knowledge of our body (by our corporeal schema which guaran-
tees the unity of our body’s pre-reflective knowing and doing), the subse-
quent moment of unbalance. Géricault, painter of French Romanticism
who inscribed his name in the history of Western Art by his magnificently
pathetic work “The Raft of the Medusa”, was also a specialist of horse
paintings. His large number of paintings depicting all kind of movements
of horses are famous examples illustrating how movement succeeds in
finding its secrete way of pictorial representation. More precisely speak-
ing, explains Merleau-Ponty, Géricault’s paintings of “the horses in Epsom
Derby bring me to see the body’s grip upon the soil and that, according to
a logic of the body and of the world that I know well, these ‘grips’ upon
space are also ways of taking hold of time [durée].”59
What is common in the above brief explication of the invisible is that
together with the visible, they render possible pictorial vision. And picto-
rial vision is precisely that kind of vision which “assists at the fission
of Being from the inside”.60 Since for Merleau-Ponty, “vision is the encoun-
ter, as at a crossroads, of all the aspects of Being”,61 by pictorial vision,

“it is mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning”,62 pic-
torial vision also participates in the movement of phenomenalization and
ontologization.
Here we can understand why the late Merleau-Ponty could no more
grant his unique favour to Cézanne. For in his whole conception of phi-
losophy coming to full maturity, what corresponds to his conception of
radical ontology on the way to find its own expression is precisely a phe-
nomenology of pictorial vision in general. Now what Merleau-Ponty
aspired to is not the thematization of any privileged region of things or
beings (be it the primordial nature), but the key to the opening of univer-
sal being (l’éclosion de l’être universel). Thus to the late Merleau-Ponty,
the problem of painting should no more be a problem of the dispute
between figurative or non-figurative painting. For as we have shown above,
Merleau-Ponty in 1960 came to the awareness that “painting celebrates no
other enigma but that of visibility.”63 Whether figurative or non-figurative,
as far as a painting can let “all branches of Being manifest themselves
through depth, colour, line, movement, contour, physiognomy”,64 it fulfills
the phenomenological motivation of letting “mute Being itself comes to
show forth its own meaning.”65
7. Phenomenalization, Aesthetization and Ontologization:

Concentric Movements
In the last Merleau-Ponty, there is a radicalization and generalization of

perception into vision, parallel to the radicalization and generalization of
the body-propre into flesh—flesh as the sensible par excellence, as well as
the radicalization of the institution of the event of phenomenalization
(the advent of meaning) into the movement of ontogenesis (dehiscence of
Being). The world as inchoative Nature institutes itself as the movement
of ontogenesis. Solicited by the vision of the world and intrigued by its
enigma and its marvel, both the philosopher and the painter cannot with-
hold themselves from the desire to express themselves in response to
what they see. Whereas the philosopher expresses herself/himself in
speech and in concepts, the painter chooses to express herself/himself in

the silent act of painting which is expression without concept of the

63 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 26; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 165–166.
64 L’oeil et l’esprit, pp. 88; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 188.
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Universe of Being. Hence both the philosopher and the painter participate
in the event of auto-phenomenalization of the world which institutes the
ontogenetic movement of Being. The history of Western philosophy since
Plato has not only denied the artist in general and the painter in particular
the right and the competence to participate in this primordial event of
auto-phenomenalization, the sensible is simply refused entrance to the
home of Being. It was not until the phenomenology of Hegel that the sen-
sible was granted a partial right to participate in this inaugural event of
ontogenesis. Yet the sensible in Hegelian phenomenology is relegated to
the most elementary stage of the process of the formation of the Spirit,
and is always only a second class member of the club of conceptual game.
It is only with Merleau-Ponty that the sensible is fully rehabilitated and
regains its equal right as competent participant of the event of auto-phe-
nomenalization of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the very event of the
birth of art in the caves of Lascaux is seen as the primordial event of auto-
phenomenalization and ontogenesis of the world and its subsequent his-
torical deployment:
The first sketches on the walls of caves set forth the world as ‘to be painted’
or ‘to be sketched’ and called for an indefinite future of painting, so that they
speak to us and we answer them by metamorphoses in which they collabo-
rate with us.66
And the birth of art in the real and tangible caves of Lascaux, much earlier
than the birth of philosophy in the imaginary and mysterious cave of
Plato, is understood by Merleau-Ponty simply as the birth of humanity:
The field of pictorial meanings is opened since a human being has appeared
in the world. And the first sketch on the walls of caves founded one tradition
only because it gathered another–the tradition of perception.67
Birth of art, birth of humanity, birth of the world: they are the synonyms of
one and the same primordial event, just as aesthetization, phenomenal-
ization and ontologization are terms to name the same concentric
movements.
Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the phenomenological and ontolo-
gical significance of the birth of art in Lascaux receives an echo from

Georges Bataille, another important contemporary French thinker, in his
66 Signes, 75; Signs, 60.

67 Signes, 87; Signs, 70. The Eng. trans. omits the crucial phrase here: “The field of picto-
rial meanings is opened since a human being has appeared in the world.” “Le champ des
significations picturales est ouvert depuis qu’un homme a paru dans le monde.”

admirable book Lascaux ou la naissance d’art (“Lascaux or the Birth of

Art”). May I borrow Bataille’s words to take part, with Merleau-Ponty,
in their praise of the very event of the birth of art:
“Inévitablement, l’art en naissant sollicitait ce mouvement de spontanéité
insoumise qu’il est convenu de nommer le génie. Ce libre mouvement est le
plus sensible à Lascaux, … elles [les peintures de Lascaux] créaient le monde
qu’elles figuraient… Un sentiment de danse de l’esprit nous soulève devant
ces oeuvres où, sans routine, la beauté émane de mouvements fiévreux: ce
qui s’impose à nous devant elles est la libre communication de l’être et du
monde qui l’entoure, l’homme s’y délivre en s’accordant avec ce monde dont
il découvre la richesse… Réciproquement, l’accord de l’être avec le monde
qui l’entoure appelle les transfigurations de l’art, qui sont les transfigura-
tions du génie.”68
“Inevitably, art at birth solicited this unreprimable movement of spontane-
ity that the name of genius should be suitable. This free movement is most
sensible in Lascaux… they [the paintings of Lascaux] created the world that
they represented by figuration… A sentiment of the dance of the spirit
arouses us before these works where, without routine, beauty emanates
from feverish movements: what imposes on us in front of them is the free
communication of being and the world which surrounds it, from there
human being releases herself/himself in harmony with this world which
she/he discovers the opulence… Reciprocally, the agreement of being with
the world which surrounds it call for the transfigurations of art, which are
the transfigurations of genius.”(The present author’s own translation)
68 G. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, Tome IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 80–81.
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THE MADNESS OF VISION:

THE PAINTER AS PHENOMENOLOGIST IN MERLEAU-PONTY

sorte de philosophie: saisie de la genèse, philosophie toute en acte.”3

“Thus painting [is] a kind of philosophy: capture of genesis, philosophy

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

progressively a more central position within his entire philosophical

2. Rehabilitation of the Sensible and

As mentioned above, Merleau-Ponty’s whole philosophical itinerary can

Merleau-Ponty, is the pre-reflective order itself: if the pre-reflective order

The recognition of the inherent capacity to reflect within the pre-

3. The Painter as Phenomenologist

now has to be brought to pure expression in its proper sense.”9

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

Merleau-Ponty himself remained faithful throughout his life to the spirit

13 Sens et non-sens, p. 30; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 17–18, trans. modified.

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

Creator’s perfect creation. At the same time as they succeeded in restitut-

4. Painting as Act of Expression and Its Carnal Basis

If the painter is comparable to the phenomenological philosopher, the

20 For a further analysis of the phenomenological significance of Impressionist

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

the inauguration of sense, an advent bringing about the phenomenaliza-

23 Sens et non-sens, p. 33; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 19, trans. modified.

Hence if we can speak of the enigma of the world, we can likewise

27 Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 230; Phenomenology of Perception, p. 197.

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

5. The Genius of Cézanne: Painter of the Primordial Nature

At this stage of our enquiry, two questions remained to be asked.

30 Sens et non-sens, p. 19; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 11, trans. modified.

34 Sens et non-sens, p. 20; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 12, trans. modified.

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

41 Sens et non-sens, p. 23; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 13, trans. modified.

6. Invitation to see the Invisible: Towards a

To what extent we can claim, with Merleau-Ponty, that Cézanne’s artistic

in 1961. The outline of this general theory of pictorial vision announces

45 This correspondence is contested by Michel Haar. See his article “Peinture,

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

46 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 26; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 165–166.

representation of the world through some intellectual images, but to bring

question of an unmysterious interval, as seen from an airplane, between

52 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 31; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 167.

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

perspective drawing… What becomes an enigma arises out of their rela-

movement successfully, we must be able to render visible that at a certain

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

7. Phenomenalization, Aesthetization and Ontologization:

In the last Merleau-Ponty, there is a radicalization and generalization of

speech and in concepts, the painter chooses to express herself/himself in

62 L’oeil et l’esprit, p. 87; “Eye and Mind”, op. cit., p. 188.

gical significance of the birth of art in Lascaux receives an echo from

66 Signes, 75; Signs, 60.

<UN> : Dedicated to maurice merleau-ponty. BRILL.

admirable book Lascaux ou la naissance d’art (“Lascaux or the Birth of

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