Jonathan Gilmore
Between Philosophy and Art
“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)
a concepção de como o self, corpo, mente e mundo inter-relacionam
a arte ocupa um lugar central para elaboração de sua fenomenologia
Does the essay offer an analysis of C´ezanne, of C´ezanne’s painting,
of painters and paintings, or of artists and art in general of which
C´ezanne and his work are – in relevant ways – representative? If
philosophy requires general applicability, does this mean that as
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion is more particularly focused, it is less
philosophical?
um foco estreito para um amplo
I argue, more specifically, that this tension
in Merleau-Ponty’s essays between the attempt, on one hand,
to offer a general philosophical theory and, on the other, to furnish
particular explanations and interpretations of art, is ultimately left
unresolved. That is, his deep commentaries on the arts illustrate and
extend his general philosophical views but generate no philosophy
of art in them selves.
em A dúvida de Cézanne
começa com um catálogo de algumas dúvidas epistemológicas do pintor (só mais tarde será a sua existencial e metafísicadúvidas a ser explorada): ele trabalha sozinho, sem a confirmaçãode estudantes ou o incentivo de críticos; ele se pergunta seele tem talento suficiente; ele suspeita que seu estilo incomum pode serdevido a um defeito em sua visão. Merleau-Ponty descarta a últimaexplicação fisiológica, mas flerta atribuindo alguns explicações para os diversos valores temperamental, físico e males psicológicosa partir do qual o pintor sofreu - a sua "constituição mórbida", possível"Esquizofrenia", "alienação da humanidade", "fraqueza nos nervos",e assim por diante - só para descartar a ideia de que o significado do
trabalho do artista pode ser determinada a partir de tais características de sua vida.
mas é válido para todos
a arte, o artista e a vida do artista são interdependentes
a arte reflete a vida do criador
mas não de modo transparente
Cézanne instantiates the kind of perception
that phenomenology ascribes to all ordinary perception. Yet Cézanne
makes thematic the content of that phenomenological description of
what he sees, raising it to a level of perspicuity such that his painting
is both the product of vision and about vision, both exemplifies
the way in which we perceive our environment and pictorially describes
or reflects on the way in which we perceive. At the same
time, Cézanne faces the problem of such phenomenological description:
the phenomenologist describes the prereflective and prejudgmental
bases for our experience in the world, but in describing that
experience freezes it, or corrupts it, turning it into what the partial
(and thus falsely totalizing) account of perceptual experience offered
by science would say it is. In this way, C´ezanne’s painting is both
an object for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis and, like
self-psychoanalysis, the source of a phenomenological analysis in
itself.
critica o impressionismo, afetação, materialismo, ali há pensamento
Cézanne tardio, estilo próprio, que Merleau-POnty chamou de desumano
aparência domundo, mas a aparência do mundo, uma vez que vem a ser configurado comoespaço de formas individualizadas para um observador.
em vez de mostrar as sensações
Cézanne tried to render the
process by which such sensations feed into the generation of the landscape
or other objects of experience.
volta à presença do objeto
Merleau-Ponty também contesta teorias positivistas de percepçãosegundo a qual o mundo aparece-nos como dados dos sentidos
que são interpretados e dados por configurações mentais.
ele argumenta que a perspectiva particular de consciência de alguémnão deve ser entendido apenas como uma tela de subjetividade que, seretirá-la, iria permitir o acesso ao próprio objeto.
“Perspective does not appear to
me to be a subjective deformation of things but, on the contrary, to
be one of their properties, perhaps their essential property. It is precisely
because of it that the perceived possesses in itself a hidden and
inexhaustible richness, that is a ‘thing’” (SC 201/186)
just as phenomenology rejected the dichotomy
between realism and idealism, so Cézanne is described by Merleau-
Ponty as refusing to be fixed between the poles of impressionism
and symbolism, between a notion of art as rendering only appearances
and a notion of art as grounded in an artist’s personal, perhaps
idiosyncratic response to the world.
Cézanne demonstra a relação com o mundo como seres encarnados
com uma perspectiva
e com incompleta compreensão do mundo em que o significado que
experimentamos surge em nosso corpo em nosso confronto com o mundo
e não em categorias dadas na mente
objetos tem significado primeiro por causa de nossa relação sensoriomotora com eles
Phenomenological description expresses
the meaning objects have as a consequence of belonging to the orbit
of such embodied beings: “the experience of a real thing cannot be
explained by the action of that thing on my mind: the only way for a
thing to act on a mind is to offer it a meaning, to manifest itself to it,
to constitute itself vis-à-vis the mind in its intelligible articulations”(SC 215/199).
Cézanne para MP recusa-se a forma habitual de ver o mundo
mas o que a pintura dele nos mostra que nós não vemos no mundo?
não é aquele mundo dos homens...mas o mundo mesmo...interpretação minha...
One response, suggested but not explicitly
argued for by Merleau-Ponty, is that C´ezanne’s techniques constitute
discoveries by which he is able to make salient or perspicuous
something that is part of visual experience, but not recreate that visual
experience. Thus, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between a landscape
painting by C´ezanne in which he shows “nature pure” and a
photograph of the same scene that would invariably suggest “man’s
works, conveniences, and imminent presence” (SNS 18/14; AR 64).
If the mechanical reproduction displays such an already categorized
and inhabited world, this would not be because the photographer intends
it to be so but because the photographer in Merleau-Ponty’s
comparison lacks the technical means to show the world in any way
except as we habitually see it. If C´ezanne’s painting prevents that
experience of seeing an image just as one sees the world, it is not
because his depiction of the landscape leaves features out that the
photograph leaves in. It is because the painter, unlike the photographer,
employs a technique that calls attention to – and does not just
participate in – the ways in which objects are given individuation,
meaning and form. So, in Merleau-Ponty’s reference to what ´Emile
Bernard described as “C´ezanne’s suicide – aiming for reality while
denying himself the means to attain it,” it is not just any painterly
techniques that are denied, but those, such as mathematical perspective,
by which a preformed, familiar, and naturalizing order is
imposed on the flux of experience (SNS 17/12; AR 63).
Cézanne tematiza o uso de sua perspectiva
revela estas de uma forma que permitem ser refletidas como uma convenção
o pintor
“abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations” (SNS 17/13; AR 63).
Here, Merleau-Ponty refers to more than just exclusively visual sensations.
For he argues that sensations are not experienced as arriving
individually, one after the other, but holistically, each conditioning
the others as they are all revealed. Sartre writes in this connection
of how a
lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended
throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which
is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour . . . if I poke my finger
into a jar of jam, the sticky coldness of that jam is a revelation to my fingers
of its sugary taste.
cita aquela parte de pintar odores, na verdade uma citação de Cézanne
tais sensações holísticas colocam o corpo num papel primordial
na constituição dos objetos
de uma perspectiva vivida
Cézanne não escolhe entre representar as coisas como elas são ou da forma como elas aparecem. Em vez disso, ele deseja:
“depict matter as it takes
on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization” (SNS
18/13; AR 63–4)
ao desenhar o objeto sem contorno é como que sugerisse a forma
algo que está na fenomenologia do Hurssel sobre a ausência e presença dos objetos
e Merleau-Ponty também trabalha essa questão, para o qual nossa intencionalidade motora
projeta
depois no fim do cap. do qual se refere Gilmore, falando de filósofos e pintores
afirmando que os dois estão envolvidos no mesmo tipo de projeto
apesar na diferença de métodos e materiais
The important difference, then, between Cézanne’s and
Merleau-Ponty’s investigations is not the result, but that the painter
may not be aware, or at least not be able to articulate his awareness,
of the truth of experience he has revealed, whereas the philosopher
might be able to articulate the truth of experience he has uncovered.
devem lidar com o risco de distorcer tbm
. In his
late, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
appears to seek to dissolve this contrast between experience and its
linguistic articulation, suggesting that the structures of the two are
interdependent. Here, at least, his treatment serves as a counterinstance
to the charge that a philosophy of art invariably subordinates
art to philosophy or deforms the art in making it amenable to philosophical
analysis. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges in a way that
the artist can engage in a kind of philosophical analysis of experience
that is not entirely open to the philosopher.
The distinction between philosopher and painter is posed once
again in “Eye and Mind” where Merleau-Ponty describes the scientific
point of view that treats objects and beings in the world as
essentially susceptible to manipulation and control.
ah que bom este artigo...
explica por que Merleau-POnty sugere a diferença da arte e filosofia
by contrast, that the domain of inquiry that belongs to the arts is
precisely this human world that “operationalism” – a way of casting
the world in instrumental terms – ignores. However, whereas literature
(as well as philosophy) must appraise what it treats, must have
a judgmental relation to its subject, the painter is “entitled to look at
everything without being obliged to appraise what he sees.” Merleau-
Ponty says that the painter alone can stand outside the sphere of
action and judgment, “as if in the painter’s calling there were some
urgency above all other claims on him.” Merleau-Ponty asks what
this calling is, “What, then, is the secret science which he has or
which he seeks?” (OE14–15/161/123). Although here he appears to
invoke a modernist notion of artistic autonomy, in which art is in
its essence held to be immune to the demands of the practical,moral,
and political spheres, Merleau-Ponty understands artistic autonomy
not as a rejection of the world’s claims on the artist, but the pursuit
of a claimthat is greater. This claim, which Merleau-Ponty develops
in “Eye and Mind” (in a way that represents a change from his predominant
concern with vision in the earlier essays), addresses the
artist’s role in expressing a way of existing in the world that is not
just his own but is that of the collective group, society, or milieu to
which he belongs. Yet it is precisely in absenting himself, in a form
of autonomous existence, from the demands of action and judgment
that define membership in such a society that the artist is able to
achieve such general, nonindividualistic expression.
o pintor leva o seu corpo com ele, cita Valéry, MP cita
sugerindo a visão encarnada que está em MP
aquele que se encontra com o mundo com seu corpo
e não um ponto de vista
aliás...tem uma citação que fala que o pintor pinta com o corpo, será que a mesma que
o Gilmore tá citando?
acho que é... “takes his body
with him.”
contra onoção de um sujeito unificado que serve como garantia transcendentalsobre a unidade do mundo,
Merleau-Ponty introduces ways of
speaking of a decentered self: one that is not immediately present to
itself. There is, he writes, “another subject beneath me, for whom
a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.
This captive or natural spirit is my body” (PP 294/254/296).
“The body’s animation
is not the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts.” Rather, it emerges
fromwhat Merleau-Ponty describes as “a kind of crossover” between
the body as subject and the body as object: “between the seer and
the visible, between touching and touched” (OE21/163/125).
nos seus escritos tardios MP vai falar desta relação
da atitude em direção ao mundo
préreflexiva
da aderência préjulgamento do mundo
So, Merleau-Ponty writes,
“painting is an analogue or likeness only according to the body,”
meaning that it is not a visual identity that determines likeness between
image and world but a fit between the understanding of the
world the painter’s image offers and our prereflective, prejudgmental
sense-making experience of what we perceive (OE 24/165/126).
a pintura não é uma cópia do visível
pq é a partir de perspectiva
mas é o mundo que vemos
em relação à nossa percepção
expressa o que exige uma interminável tarefa
como a fenomenologia, sem fim...a experiência não termina
não é realismo, ou naturalismo como MP se refere às pinturas de Cézanne
não é mostrar as simples aparências das coisas
a arte é fundamentalmente um processo de expressão
“a process of expressing” (SNS 23/17;
AR 67–8).
“‘Conception’
cannot precede ‘execution’” (SNS 24/19; AR 69)
Thus, Merleau-
Ponty refers to Andr´e Marchand’s comment, after Paul Klee, “In a
forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at
the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me. . . . I
think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not
want to penetrate it” (OE 31/167/129).
But Merleau-Ponty does not advocate a theory of art as idiosyncratically
expressive. He says that an artist such as C´ezanne “speaks
as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before,”
so that the risk is whether what is expressed can succeed in
being extracted from the flow of experience and take on a meaning
for the artist and for others (SNS 24/19; AR 69). Expression thus implies
a kind of social context in which meaning can be shared, and
consequently expression admits the possibility of failure ofmeaning
as well. This, then, is the deeper, existential andmetaphysicalmeaning
of C´ezanne’s doubt, a doubt about whether his work can achieve
meaningfulness at all. It is a doubt that springs fromthe contingency
of meaning when the creation of art enjoins no preestablished language
of forms but offers, in both content and form, a new order of
expression. As in the quote referring to Klee, Merleau-Ponty conceives
of such meaning as generated not exclusively by the artist,
but by the world in which the artist is situated. In The Visible and
the Invisible, he describes how in performance the musician “feels
himself, and others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the
sonata sings through him” (VI 199/151). It is as if the artist – like the
rhapsode in Plato’s Ion – serves only as a vehicle for the expression
of the artwork, rather than the reverse.
a arte como divulgação do mundo...teve muita coisa interessante antes...pootz
do caralho, inclusive um comentário sobre a posição de Sartre
“The painter’s vision is
not a view upon the outside, amerely ‘physical–optical’ relation with
the world. 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”
(OE 69/181/141)
“The painter can do nomore
than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life
for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these
separate lives; it will no longer exist in only of them like a stubborn
dream. . . . It will dwell undivided in several minds” (SNS 26/20; AR
70).
começa a falar de estilo, em Linguagem indireta e as vozes do silêncio, quando MP
afirma que a percepção já é estilizada
Merleau-Ponty contends that style
should be understood as the expression of an individual’s bodily perception
of the world: style encodes what our embodied existence in
the world makes salient about it, that is, how we, prior to any intellectual
judgment, give meaning and configuration to the world. Yet
just as our experience is perspectival, so, too, a style instantiates a
particular point of view, one that serves to assemble and integrate
features of the world into coherent objects, even as it shows the
impossibility of perceptual closure. So all persons have a stylistic
relation to the world; the artist, however, is the one who reveals that
relation in material forms such as sculpture and painting.
“a way of inhabiting the world, of treating it, and of interpreting it
by her face, by clothing, the agility of the gesture and the inertia
of the body,”
“the perceived
world . . . is not a pure object of thought . . . it is, rather, like a universal
style shared in by all perceptual beings.”
cita o caso de REnoir que pinta um riacho em frente ao mar de Cassis,
uma vida, um estilo de ser no mundo
“if we experience no external constraints, it is
because we are our whole exterior.”
“if there is true freedom, it can only come about in the course of our
life by our going beyond our original situation and yet not ceasing to
be the same” (SNS 27–8/21; AR 71–2).
It might be objected that to go beyond one’s original situation or
to change one’s fundamental project is, within the confines of the
theory Merleau-Ponty sketches, precisely to change one’s self, to be
a different person and thus realize freedom not within one’s own life,
but within the life of “another.”
MP diz que nós, nunca inteiramente mudamos
“looking back on what we were, we
can always find hints of what we have become” (SNS 28/21; AR 72)
não há garantia de que os recursos que sobrevivem a uma mudança naauto são características essenciais, em vez de recursos apenas acidentais quepode-se encontrar em ambas as encarnações anteriores e posteriores da pessoa
Assim, o que importa para o bem da unidade é se o indivíduoa partir de sua própria perspectiva pode ver a capacidade ou o desejo de iralém da situação original, tal como previsto nesta situação inicial.
sua vida não é apenas determinada pelos acontecimentos do passado
não só o futuro é determinado pelo passado
but the past,
through imaginative projection, is determined by the future
determinação como interpretação
This is why Merleau-Ponty
can assert that psychoanalysis – as a hermeneutic method – allows
us to see our being free as amounting to the “creative repetition of
ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves” (SNS 32/25;
AR 75).
“in every life, one’s birth and one’s past define categories or
basic dimensions that do not impose any particular act but which
can be found in all” (SNS 31–2/24–5; AR 75)
Merleau-Ponty appears
to operate with two positions here. One is that a person’s life can be
understood as more and more conditioned by actions and events as
it is lived, such that at any one time the cumulative history of one’s
life shapes its subsequent history, even if it does not exhaustively determine
it. The other position is that one’s life is best conceived not
as a chain of causes and effects but as exhibiting a kind of organic development,
such that the nature of the person is not the result of the
actions and events attending one’s life, but rather emerges through
them. This emergence gives a unity to the life not just from the outside,
as the entity that happens to serve as the locus of those events,
but from the self-interpreting inside as well. The nature of this self
may not be visible in any greater degree to the individual herself
than to external observers. Thus, Merleau-Ponty speaks of Cézanne
as “never at the center of himself,” needing to look to others for selfrecognition
(SNS 32/25; AR 75). Again, the analogy with an artist’s
style presents itself: an artist’s style, once formed, may emerge into
perspicuity only in the course of the artist’s work, becoming visible
to the artist and to others only late in his oeuvre. In “Indirect Language
and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of an artist’s
style as “just as recognizable for others and just as little visible to
him as his silhouette” (S 67/53; AR 90).
não consegue passar sua fenomenologia para outros pintores, como cita
Leonardo
afirma que o pintor deve penetrar no
“envelope of things” (OE 71–2/182/142)
But such a phenomenologically
inflected principle of art could hardly be extended over the
whole of art history. Indeed, it might be said that such a model of
art – art as a competitor and an antidote to the scientific view of
the world – applies mainly to those artists (Leonardo, Monet in his
series paintings, C´ezanne, Seurat) who looked to science, in part,
for their own self-definition and who sought to arrive, through their
own means and methods of art, at truths about a world otherwise
understood in scientific terms.(Recall that while Merleau-Ponty attributes
to C´ezanne the endeavor to depict form as it comes into
being, he acknowledges C´ezanne’s own understanding of his project
as committed to the representation of things as they are.) Gilmore
cita a influência da fenomenologia de Merleau-POnty em obras
minimalistas, como Richard Serra, coisas deste tipo
mas a obra que Gilmore cita é Shift
A bit later, Richard Serra would draw on such a minimalist
interpretation of phenomenology to create pieces such as Shift
of 1970–2, a site-specific work composed of six sections of concrete
(815 feet in total) laid down on a hilly field in King City, Ontario.
There the art’s meaning is generated not through its appearance, nor
through its “concept,” but through the way it structures the experience
of individuals – asmoving, seeing bodies – who start at opposite
ends of the work and try to keep each other in view as they traverse
the terrain in which “abstract geometries were constantly submitted
to the redefinition of a sited vision.”
o artista divulgando um ponto de vista sobre o mundo
Merleau-Ponty appears to believe, however, that such a general
style is grounded in, and expresses, an even more fundamental phenomenon:
a common human style of perceptual comportment. In
this way, he offers a model of art history that is analogous to, but
more radical than, theories of the internal evolution of art developed
by such philosophicallyminded historians of art as Alois Riegl,
Erwin Panofsky, and Henri Focillon. Riegl sought to uncover the
unity within the variousmanifestations of art by appeal to universal
“laws” of artistic development and a Hegelian concept of the Kunstwollen,
a kind of aesthetic will or intention that operates through
the artist. Panofsky tried to register the unity of historical periods in
the idea of a symbolic form, a neo-Kantian notion of period-specific,
a priori categories that structure thought and experience. And Focillon
theorized that the unity of art through its changes was explained
by the way those transformations were internally generated: “form
liberates other forms according to its own laws.”16
Merleau-Ponty, however, proposes a kind of unity much more fundamental
than that offered by these theorists, one derived from the
basic orientation of the human body in the world. If those art historians
sought a general explanatorymodel of why art changes, Merleau-
Ponty sought a way of understanding how, through its changes, art is
in its essential features the same. Such a view of art history as inhering
in and generated out of a universal style may offer an answer to
the charge that Merleau-Ponty offers less a general theory of art than
a thesis about a particular historicalmoment or formof art. For if all
art is, in its fundamental motivation, the same, then to speak of one
art is to speak of them all. In any case, if Merleau-Ponty’s writings
on art illuminate the experience of art, and the relations between
artist, spectator, and world, without propounding a theory of art that
would admit of universal application, thatmay be one of the sources
of its depth. The artworks and artists he treats serve less as examples
than as exemplary instances, chosen precisely because of the ways in
which they serve as models of what art strives to be. Merleau-Ponty
does not theorize about artistic practice in a way that detaches it
from ordinary human experience but shows instead ways in which
the two are continuous in their interrogation of the world.
