The Sense of Things

The Sense of ThingsAuthor(s): Marjorie GreneSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer, 1980), pp. 377-389Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430319 .Accessed: 12/09/2013 08:07

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MARJORIE GRENE

The Sense of Things

IT WAS AN UNEXPECTED and probably in- appropriate honor to be invited to give the first Mandel Lecture to the American Society for Aesthetics. The mandate of this lecture, I take it, is to relate biology and art. Now admittedly, even though I am not a working biologist, I do occasionally practice something called philosophy of biology; but what I know about aesthetics you could easily fit into one of Darwin's smallest barnacles. So you will have to forgive my ignorance and possibly what may shortly appear to be my perversity. From the point of view of your branch of our profession, I know not what I do.

What I do know, though, is that there is one major philosopher in the twentieth century who relied for his reflection about human existence on two chief sources: biology, or at least the bodily nature of man, and art. That philosopher, of course, is Merleau- Ponty. On the one hand, he makes the lived body central to his account of human existence, and on the other he insists that the best model for a philosophy of existence is art, and in particular painting. So it seems appropriate on this occasion to think about Merleau-Ponty, and to ask of him, in particular: how, if at all, do his stress on body and on painting belong together? One would expect to find the answer in the last work published in his lifetime, The Eye and the

MARJORIE GRENE is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of California, Davis. The Sense of Things is the Inaugural David and Marianne Mandel Lecture in Aesthetics delivered before the American Society for Aesthetics in Tuc- son, Arizona, October 1979.

Mind. And, indeed, the answer is there, but hard to decipher. I shall take as my text in this lecture a part of the two paragraphs in which it is first stated, and then look at some other Merleau-Pontyian sources to illumine, so far as possible, this rather delphic pro- nouncement, returning on the way to fill in part of the passage that I am omitting at first reading.

First, then, my text. Early in The Eye and the Mind, Merleau-Ponty writes-in very lit- eral translation; I dare not give you the original, since my accent is too bad for pub- lic display:

It is necessary that the thought of science- thought of aerial reconnaissance [what Merleau- Ponty calls "survol," the kind of external, map- like view one gets from the air], thought of the object in general-place itself once more in a preliminary "there is", in the site, on the ground, of the sensible world and of the worked up world [the world, I'm afraid, transformed by human labor] as they are in our life, for our body, not that possible body of which it is permissible [op- tional?] to maintain that it is an information machine, but that actual body that I call mine, the sentinel that stands silently beneath my words and my acts.

And the next paragraph:

But art, and especially painting, draw upon that expanse of raw meaning of which activism will know nothing.1

That is enough to start from.

Before I begin beating about the neigh- boring fields in search of enlightenment on these strange words, however, there is one methodological remark I must preface to


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whatever else I say. Everything I report from Merleau-Ponty's work, and anything I may say myself, though I am not really speaking for myself on this occasion, but simply trying to report Merleau-Ponty more plainly than he reports himself-everything I say, in short, is grounded, once and for all, in the fundamental concept of being-in-the-world. My leading question: how the concepts of the lived body and of painting belong together, can be answered only if being-in-the- world is first taken as the fundamental theme of any reflection about human being. Only on that basis, I believe, can we begin to understand how (in terms of my title) things make sense within the world we are in. O. K., we refer through senses-that is a relatively superficial insight. What matters is, however, in the world we find ourselves in-as we have already heard, at one and the same time, the sensible world and the world we have wrought-there is "sense": direction (as in "sens unique"), sense (meaning), and sense in the sense of sense-perception, what it is borne in upon us that there is-the "il y a prealable" of our text-that there is sense in all these three senses at once. To understand any of this we need to start, somewhat as Heidegger did in Being and Time, with Being-In. It is the illusion of being outside that misleads.

Now that our starting point is settled, then, perhaps we can move a little closer to our question if we narrow our sights a bit. We must take being-in-the-world as the frame of our inquiry. Within that context let us think for a moment about Merleau- Ponty's explicitly central theme, the primacy of perception. Perception is precisely not the mythological given plus inference. It is the bodily presence-in-absence of things in the world confronting us, the immanence X transcendence of our being with things in the world, so that, as he puts it, we ignore ourselves being drawn into the thing. Both facticity, our thrownness into the world on the one hand, and on the other, understanding, what Merleau-Ponty calls the consciousness of rationality, "a logos in the state of birth"-both contingency and nascent intel- ligibility, in other words, are carried by this fleshly presence of things to me, of myself in

the organized, limited yet horizonal world. Husserl in Ideas One had described perception in terms of the grasp of an indefinite organized system of profiles; I see the lamp; although I don't strictly "see" its farther side, I do see it as an object I could see the other side of, and in this case lift and move. The apple tree in the garden I could not lift but could walk round; solidity belongs to my perception of it. It is not "inferred" from some two-dimensional images cast (in- visibly to me) upon my retinas. In short, no one ever had a childhood like Berkeley's. We are with what Erwin Straus called the allon from the start. What Merleau-Ponty is doing, in other words, in his account of perception, is to insert Husserl's description of that transaction with the real into Hei- deggerian Being-in-the-world-though with a difference. Heidegger, while insisting on a realistic view of perception, dismisses Leib- lichkeit, bodiliness, in Being and Time as uninteresting to his high (or deep) ontologi- cal purpose, and introduces the Being of things in the world and our Being with- things (Sein bei-innerweltlichem-Seienden) as on the one hand primarily "readiness to hand" and on the other primarily the kind of concern entailed in getting jobs done with hammers, traffic signals, data banks, or what you will. That is a kind of rationality, more Deweyan than Heidegger would have liked to admit. But it's not fundamental, or not all of what is fundamental. For we are in, not only, and not first and foremost, the worked up world, le monde ouvre, but the sensible world. Our rationality, Merleau- Ponty tells us, emerges on the ground of nonhuman nature: if we try to make it self- supporting we miss it. And indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, exclusive attention to Hei- degger's Daseinsanalysis does produce a one- sided emphasis on human order to the ex- clusion of recognizing any order in nature,2 and hence issues at best in an analogue of Winchian relativism and at worst in Sar- trian arbitrariness. Only attention to the animality of man, to our real fleshly being- in-the-world as lived bodies, can stabilize the over-perilous view of historicity that results from the Heideggerian account. That is Merleau-Ponty's corrective to Heidegger's

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analysis of being-in-the-world. One cannot overemphasize its importance. We are, through perception, always already bodily with things, not only things shaped by man, but things in our real natural environment, which, however transformed, however pol- luted, is still "natural." We are as human beings in culture, but culture in turn is contained in nature. To borrow a Merleau- Pontyian metaphor, whatever melody our society may prescribe, it is always as lived bodies that we sing the world, maybe out of key, maybe forgetfully, maybe with inge- nious novelty, but really, in the flesh.

Oh, those Merleau-Pontyian metaphors! What has singing to do with painting, I would like to know? MIaybe if I try to say, I can find out. Although he occasionally mentions auditory sources (as in the singing metaphor or the discussion of Swann's "little phrase") Merleau-Ponty relies most heavily for his perceptual theme on vision. One could say that he wants to restore the full perceptibility of things, to overcome the dis- tinction between primary and secondary qualities. Listen to what he says about color, for example, in The Primacy of Perception, his lecture to the French Society of Philos- ophy on November 23, 1946, presumably in the late afternoon. He has been rejecting the inferential view of perception. "In the same way," he writes,

it is not true that I deduce the true color of an object starting from the color of the background or the lighting, which most of the time is not given to me. At the present hour, because day- light is still coming in through the windows, we perceive the yellow of the artificial light and it alters the color of the objects. But when the day- light has gone that yellow color will no longer be perceived, and we will see the objects approxi- mately in their true colors. Thus the true color is not deduced, with allowance made for the lighting, since the color appears precisely when the lighting disappears.3

But to deny the inferential component in color perception is the first step in denying its derived and conventional character. Gali- lean nature may be sought out inferentially and when we discover it it may well be written in the mathematical language. Not so the nature we find ourselves in when as perceivers we discover where and who we

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are. In that nature color and taste and smell are not mere names, they are real aspects of what there is, welcoming, threatening, sometimes deceptive, but not "merely" nom- inal. Vision in particular, in its colorfulness yet haziness, its nearness yet remoteness, exemplifies archetypally our way of being. Things afar strike us and are near; yet, however near, they are separate, remote, different from ourselves. They both lure and re- pel, absorb and separate, like the gaze of a stranger passing in the street.

Now clearly painting is par excellence the art that expresses the character of visual perception. It shows in its very enterprise the way that sights start up around us, present themselves in their nonpresence. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the painter as giving us a second visible, the icon of the first, he is not talking mimetic theory. He is speaking of the painter as bringing into being solidity in and through surfaces, distance through the canvas under his hand. Vision for Merleau-Ponty epitomizes perception, and painting epitomizes vision. It represents it, not in the sense of a "representative theory of perception," but in the sense in which, in a representative democracy, one person is said to represent-stand in for-others. As sights loom up around us, so does Mont Ste. Victoire on canvas or paper through the medium of Cezanne's brush and Cezanne's hand. This superfluity of ourselves over merely natural being, the way Mont Ste. Victoire is through the mediation of Ce- zanne more than it is, so to speak, on its own, this is the richness inherent in human perception, being more than it is: sensible of the sensible, in and through the sensible.

The body, Merleau-Ponty tells us in the Phenomenology of Perception, is "a focal point of living meanings" and like a work of art.4 Why? Because perceiving, living the body as being-in-a-world, is like making a work of art: giving meaning to what already is by making something that expresses it. And the body lived is like what the artist has made: a moment filled with meaning. Consider my glimpse of the San Francisco skyline. Every time I drive in from the valley and catch sight of it, there it is, zebra killers, Bank of America and all, still "thine



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alabaster cities gleam." This is not just reti- nal images, nor yet inferences from them. It is a moment of meaning, concrete yet for- ever, an Augenblick. So much the more reso- nant, momentary in something akin to that Kierkegaardian-Heideggerian sense, is Ce- zanne's mountain. So, indeed, does the or- ange color at the base of the Portrait of Gustave Jeffroy give, once and for all, the lie to Galileo. The world is colored and col- orful-open your eyes and look! And if you look as the painter looks, making sense of the sights around you as the painter makes sense of line and color, so much the more intensely are you the being in the world that it is given you to be.

It is essential to recognize that Merleau- Ponty is speaking here, and always unless he says otherwise, about human perception only. True, we are to understand human existence on the background of the living, extra-human. But the point about empha- sizing the vital order (as he calls it in the Structure of Behavior) is precisely to provide the medium for the human. We want to know, as Socrates said he did at the opening of the Phaedrus, what sort of strange animals we are. Admittedly, we can no longer fruit- fully ask what extra something God has in- serted into a mere lump of clay. We have to try to understand ourselves as a kind of animal, descended, along with chimps, orangs, gorillas, from some ancestral pri- mate, and in turn, by a set of very curious chances, from some long-vanished first ter- restrial experiments at life. Given all that long story-which is indeed fascinating in itself-as philosophers we want to know what kind of being it is that has consequently come about. Though human existence is evanescent, it is what we are and we want to understand it. But human existence is a kind of animal existence, a funny twist in living, sufficient to transform Umwelt, animal environment, into Welt, a human world. Thus it is man-animality,5 as Mer- leau-Ponty puts it, our kind of being-an- animal, that we are reflecting on. That is what scientism, whether intellectualistic or empiricist, he believes, has proved incapable of understanding; that is what, in his "radical reflection," he wants to glimpse. The

difference from "mere animality" is hinted at in our text, in a puzzling sentence that I omitted from my earlier quotation. Let me fill it in now, and see what I can do, drawing on other texts, to comment on it.

Following the sentence I quoted earlier (it was one sentence), which referred us to the sensible and worked up world, which in turn are "for our body, this actual body that I call mine, the sentinel that stands silently beneath my words and my acts" . . . following that statement, Merleau-Ponty continues:

"It is necessary that with my body" [which is coming into view, remember, only after science has placed itself once more in a preliminary there is], it is necessary that with my body asso- ciated bodies awaken, the "others" who are not my congeners, as zoology says, but who haunt me, as I haunt them, with whom I haunt a single actual Being, present [I suppose it's the Being that's present], as never animal has haunted those of its species, its territory, or its environment.8

It is this sentence I want now to proceed to comment on, but let me fill in the paragraph, since the other sentence I omitted sets the theme, I believe, for all Merleau- Ponty's thought. Here it is parenthetical: "In this primordial historicity," he writes,

the lively and improvising thought of science will learn to dwell on things themselves and on itself, will once more become philosophy.7

Then we have the sentence about art and especially painting that I quoted earlier.

So let us take off a bit from our haunting sentence. It is clear that "perception" in Merleau-Ponty's usage refers to a uniquely human process and that it is that uniquely human perception that is to be compared to art, and in particular to painting. Let us see if we can probe a bit further the significance, for Merleau-Ponty, of this motif.

What is the special uniqueness of human perception that is illuminated by thinking about painting? I want to suggest four an- swers, or possibly aspects of an answer, although I must confess I am not at all sure how they relate to one another, especially the first and all the others. But let us try. The characteristics of human perception I

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shall touch on (characteristics of human perception as Merleau-Ponty describes it) are: 1) the interreverberation of seer and seen, 2) expression, 3) originality, and 4) truth, or better, the origin of truth. The second and third have often appeared in discussions of art, although I doubt if Merleau-Ponty's "expression" has much to do with the same term as used by aesthetic theorists. The fourth, it seems to me, is the pay-off in his account. The first, which Merleau-Ponty em- phasized more and more in his later writings, is the one I find most puzzling. So I will start there.

The seer and the seen. Most sighted crea- tures, one would have thought, are in some circumstances also seen, and even seen by themselves: like a dog licking its sore paw. In the same way, I can see parts of my body, but not all of it; in particular, my face, I'm behind it. Of course if you said to some other kind of female animal, as my obstetri- cian once said to me, "Your ovaries are per- fect; I have seen them," no communication would result. I thought it an amusing, but perfectly intelligible, remark: intelligible, I suppose, because I know that my body "is" an object visible to others and ultimately dissectable by others as any piece of three- dimensional material is. But that is not my everyday way of living myself as seen, and that is why the remark was worth a small laugh in the Bergsonian spirit. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty wants to tell us something about ongoing being-in-the-world as carried by the lived body. He is not speaking of the demotion of the lived to machine parts, a demotion which, when not threatening, is funny. Rather, he is speaking of the way I take my place in the natural and cultural world as just this history, with just this style. He is speaking of what he calls existence, which is neither sensation (the chronic low backache that sent me to the doctor) nor thought (the physician's anatomical and physiological knowledge, which located the ovaries in the patient and under proper surgical circumstances enabled her to tell good ones when she observed them): he is speaking of existence, which is neither sensation nor thought, but bodily being-in, in the setting of a society, a language, a past

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and a present that endow it, intrinsically, with sense. Merleau-Ponty's account, in the Phenomenology of Perception, of the way things make sense through and in our bodily being, seems to me by far the most perspicu- ous philosophical account available to us of what it is to be human. But our question is: why does he narrow his sights from the ambiguities of action and passion (as in sexuality), psychological and semantic (as in originating speech), necessary and contin- gent (as in choice), sense and the sensed (as in the meaning of things in the world) to that particular pair: the seer and the seen?

Was he thinking of the unseen eyes watch- ing Sartre's reconnoitering soldier? That is precisely not Merleau-Pontyian being-in-the- world, but its collapse. Possible spying eyes make me an object. Were I stationed up there on the hill I would reduce to objec- tivity the searching eyes and limbs and thoughts of those in the valley below. It is just not that kind of flip-flop Merleau-Ponty is after. I am always as much seen as seer, as much seer as seen. So, for that matter, it sometimes appears from Merleau-Pontyian texts, is every being. Even the cube (which seems to come down in French philosophy from Malebranche) has a kind of point of view. But if that is so, have we not lost the specifically human, or even the living, in perception? Cubes do not see. Perhaps we could say that all beings express Being, also their own being; the "expanse of raw meaning" erupts in and of itself, here, there, and everywhere. And somehow our vision uniquely captures those scattered breakings- into-being. That is the theme of Merleau- Pontyian ontology, which it would take us too far from perception (and painting) to pursue. But let us see if we can somehow recover some footing on this slippery ter- rain. The seer and the seen. How, looking at the skyline of San Francisco, am I looked at, too? I seem to be pure spectator, almost as if I were looking at a panorama from the air. What has my visibility to do with it? I am part of the flow of traffic; if I am so carried away by the view that I forget the driver behind me, I may be seen, indeed, and never see again. But that is a kind of pragmatic context, which I am sure Mer-



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leau-Ponty did not intend. Anyway there might be no one there to see. If I climb to the top of our farm in County Wicklow, as I used to do daily, I look down the fields and across the valley toward Castle Howard, but I am sheltered in Thom's Walls by ruins, bracken, brambles, behind that, the forestry. There is no one to see me. How am I visible? As bodily presence, sensing myself as seeing body, partly visible to myself standing (breathless) at the top of the hill? Perhaps like Margaret in "The Ruined Cottage" I slip into the landscape and so grow to be part of it. But again, surely, the same would hold of any seeing animal, not only of a human one. The sheep in the Walk Meadow see their neighbors and the grass they are grazing, but they belong to the landscape too. What is the difference in my case? Obviously, that I am haunted by the famine, which is not my history, but that of the place and also of my children. Yet such recollection surely has nothing to do with visibility; it is rather the invisible integument of human sensing, it belongs to how we see, not to how we are seen.

Try looking in the mirror. At first glance that does not work either because it is too Sartrean. That image is not myself, but myself as object: what others see of me. But am I not in a way that image? "We are literally," Merleau-Ponty remarks, "what others think of us and what the world is."8 Goffman was mistaken if he intended his account of the "presentation of self" to be exhaustive: how I present myself is how I present myself. Yet that "I" is neither the addictive "they" of Heideggerian everydayness, nor the reified Ego of the Sartrean circuit of selfness, much less the tired old "secret inner something" that we would all (well, almost all) hope to hear the last of. It is the center of a presentation that is at the same time "out there." I act as others find me acting on them, much as I suffer what others suffer me to suffer. Simi- larly, perhaps, the perception through which I both apprehend and prehend things or events out there, is itself perceptible. Our glances can meet only because we can look at one another in the flesh and because we can look together at the same scene, as Sar-

trean beings could not. Perhaps, then, my view of the relation of myself to my mirror image should be qualified. It is that me that moves about the world, both sees and is seen among the others who see me and with whom I see our common locale, whether landscape or local.

Here some of Merleau-Ponty's remarks about painting may help us to understand his view of human perception. Painters, he points out, have often been interested in mirrored views, or-a related theme-in painting themselves painting. In either of these projects, it is the interrelation of beholder-beheld, the doubling of perceiver- perceived, Merleau-Ponty finds, that fasci- nates the artist. What the painter gives us is not just things-there but things-to-be- seen, and the seer-seeing, engaged in the effort to see, to evoke on canvas a kind of quintessence, for the viewer, of visibility. He exhibits a restless to-and-fro that is nevertheless, uneasily, one. Thus being-in-the- world makes possible a kind of detached attachment: not the (impossible) "pure" reflection of the intellectualist tradition, but a "fold in being" as Merleau-Ponty calls it, a sort of uncanny twist to the familiar, an Unheimlichkeit, as Heidegger put it, at the heart of Dasein. What the mirrored subject or the painter painting himself painting shows us, however, is not the way to Hei- deggerian dread or Sartrean angoisse, not a total undercutting of the ground of our existence. Quite the contrary: on the ground of bodily being, carried by it and contained by it, it is the ambiguous containment-detachment, identity-with-difference, of human being that comes into view. Although there may be a "certain dread,"9 an incipient diz- ziness, inherent in this destiny of ours, it is by no means a total undercutting of the everyday that is in question, but just the slight unease of seeing oneself at one's bodily task, so that, in the flesh, we interrogate the fleshly being we nevertheless are. Heidegger made one of his beloved language-bound distinctions between "das Gefragte, das Bef- ragte, das Erfragte." What Merleau-Ponty wants to show us, I believe, is how all three, what we are asking, whom we are asking it of, and what we are seeking to find, are,

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in the tension that constitutes our very life, one and the same. Interrogation is our way of being, not anguish, but a kind of limited if never ending puzzlement, not inward and secret, but a puzzlement puzzled at our puzzling way of being with puzzling things, puzzling because both present and unfathomable, as, reciprocally, we are both present and unfathomable to them. It is that kind of being rooted through the body in the world, transcending yet not transcending bodily being, that the real and mirrored scene, or the painter painting himself as painter, serves to express.

I don't know if that helps. Perhaps it may help to contrast what I have been trying to suggest with the thesis stated by Michael Fried in a recent article on "The Beholder in Courbet." 10 Fried's theme, he tells us, is "the deep accord that may be shown to exist between crucial and hitherto unremarked aspects of Courbet's self-portraits, including their seeming impassivity, and the conception of the 'lived body' developed in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, among others." 11 "This is not to say," he continues, "that Courbet actually held such a conception in the abstract. On the contrary, it will become evident that from his beginnings as a painter, as in the Small Portrait of Courbet, he found himself compelled to seek to express in and through the medium of the self-portrait a consciousness of being one with his body which it is extremely unlikely he could have expounded in words,"12 But Courbet was, in these paintings, Fried argues, "an in- stinctive phenomenologist."13 Setting aside the vexed question whether and how Mer- leau-Ponty was a phenomenologist at all, let's consider briefly Fried's presentation of Cour- bet's self-portraits in connection with Mer- leau-Ponty's account of the painter's task. Courbet, in Fried's view (which of course I would not venture to question as a view of Courbet)-Courbet was doing his utmost to overcome spectatordom, to convey the bodiliness of the artist who lives himself as subject and spectator at once. ". . . the painter," he writes, appears to have taken steps to minimize any sense of confrontation between sitter and beholder." 14 Consider, e.g., the features he stresses in the Sieste cham-

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petre. To begin with, Courbet's hand: at first evincing unconsciousness, "it soon makes us almost uncomfortably aware of the land as a potential locus of sensation and hence as a sign of the sitter's possession from within of his own lived body." 15 Second, sleep: here "free rein" is given to "the body's liveness in its simplest and most ele- mental form."16 Third, the orientation of the body, head back, legs toward the fore- ground; this suggests, Fried says, "the resistance to all variation of perspective of the sitter's body seen from his point of view"- again, a resistance that "belongs to the body as actually lived." 17

Now all this corresponds closely enough to Part One of the Phenomenology of Per- ception (on the body) but contrasts sharply with Merleau-Ponty's remarks about painting, whether in that work or elsewhere. In- deed, both the structure of his major work and his emphasis on the painter's task seem to me to be clarified by putting them in opposition to Fried's argument. If bodily liveness, the abolition of spectatordom, was the theme of Courbet's early self-portraits, it was also to be the initial theme of the Phenomenology of Perception, where the phenomenal body is introduced against the empiricist or intellectualist rendering of behavior or consciousness. The body is the vehicle through which I am in the world, a focal point of living meanings. Its pri- mordiality needs to be restored, or, better, established for the first time in philosophy, if being-in-the-world is to be apprehended as truly being-in, with things, among people, in the perceived world, the world in which I become, in qualified freedom, the history that I am. In the three major steps of Merleau-Ponty's argument, to the phenomenal body, from the body to perception, from perception to temporality and freedom, bodily liveness is the first stepping stone, a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for the whole. Once we recognize the lived, as distinct from the objective, body, we can move further toward the recognition of the being-in-the-world it mediates: a style of being through the body out there with things and other people, while at the same time here at the bodily center. "The body,"



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Merleau-Ponty writes at the conclusion of Part One, "is not an assemblage of particles of which each would remain in itself, nor yet a network of processes defined once for all-it is not where it is, it is not what it is, because we see it secreting in itself a "sense" which comes from nowhere, pro- jecting it on its material surroundings and communicating it to other incarnate sub- jects." Intellectualistic accounts of language, he continues, overlooked the fact that, in order to be able to express (thought), "the body must in the last analysis become the thought or intention that it signifies." The goal of Part Two will be to show how: "this revelation of an immanent or nascent sense in the living body extends . . . to the whole sensible world, and our look, alerted by the experience of our own body, will find again in all the other 'objects' the miracle of expression." And here he gives a painterly example:

Balzac describes in the Peau-de Chagrin a "cloth white as a layer of newly fallen snow from which there arose symmetrically the place settings crowned with light-colored rolls. All my youth, said Cezanne, I wanted to paint that, that cloth of fresh snow . . . I know now that one must want to paint only: the place settings arose symmetrically, and light colored rolls. If I paint 'crowned,' I'm done for, you see? And if I really balance and shade my place settings and rolls as in nature [sur nature] rest assured that the crowns, the snow and all the trembling will be there."

Merleau-Ponty concludes, "The problem of the world, and to begin with that of our own body, consists in this: that it all stays there, resides there: que tout y demeure.'8

Now, granted, the recognition of the lived body affords access to the theme of indwelling, the contrary both of intellectualist pure thought and of empiricist atomic sensations. But human dwelling through the body out there with things is also precarious. It is never total spectatorhood but neither is it quite total being-in. It has the doubleness experienced precisely in the painter's task: to achieve perception, achieve communion with the world by making something that expresses, but is not quite, the world itself. True, such communion is always already achieved in bodily sensing, but imperson-

ally, wholly unaware of itself. To bring the foundation of that achievement to expression is the task of Merleau-Ponty's radical reflection, and the task of the painter is akin to it. Of course the ground of being-in in the lived body may well be a painterly theme, too, as in the self-portraits Fried analyzes. But the theme that specially interested Merleau-Ponty was the more developed one: of the ambiguous seeing-body-seen, lived-body-mirrored, a theme that assimi- lates that of the body to full, ambiguous being-in-the-world. Again, in the metaphor I have been reverting to, the body as a focal point of living meanings is like a work of art. But the perceiver, who through the sense-giving and sense-reading of his senses, is out there with things and other people in the sensible and worked up world: the perceiver is like the painter, seeking to bring to expression some aspect of the world and therewith worldhood itself. Not his bodily liveness but the way everything dwells there is what matters most. And there, in the world, where everything remains, the lived body becomes ambiguously perceiver-perceived, center-periphery.

So much for my first point: the seer and the seen. The Balzac-Cezanne passage I quoted during that ramble comes from the penultimate paragraph of the chapter on "The Body as Expression and Speech." In that chapter, Merleau-Ponty had stressed the importance of gesture, which he took as an analogue and even as the foundation of speech. It is the expressiveness of the body that, in speech, spreads onto things. Dualism has no way to understand this and hence no way to understand speech. Language, which even at its most routine must be embodied, by voice or hand, language is an extrapola- tion of bodily expression. And expression, as Merleau-Ponty puts it in Signs, far from being "one of the curiosities that mind can propose to examine," is, on the contrary, "its existence in act." 19 "Despite the diver- sity of its parts," he had remarked earlier, "which makes it fragile and vulnerable, the body is capable of drawing itself together in a gesture which dominates its dispersion for a time and sets its monogram on all it does [or makes?-'a tout ce qu'il fait']."20

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The Sense of Things

And plainly, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, "it is the expressive operation of the body, be- gun in the least perception, which is ampli- fied in painting and in art." 21 The painter brings his body with him, he is not betrayed by the illusion of disembodiment that may afflict the writer, and especially the philosopher.

Far from being a philosophical error, therefore, as Collingwood called it, art, and especially painting, conveys, on the contrary, a profound philosophical truth: it shows how the least human movement may initiate meaning, may bring into being the transformation of a pre-existent world. "When one passes from the order of events to that of expression," Merleau-Ponty writes in Signs, "one does not change worlds: the same givens that were suffered become a signifying system." 22

Notice, Merleau-Ponty is not putting forward some new version of any of the views that "art is expression." On the contrary, he is claiming, first, that the uniqueness of human existence lies in the way in which the body becomes (and has become) expressive, and second, that the expressiveness of the body is most evident in the way in which the artist and especially the painter works. If there is any traditional view he is echo- ing, it may be part of what, in Herder, Berlin calls "expressionism" (a term that Taylor, at a suggestion from Berlin, has re- vised to "expressivism").23 Herder, these authorities report, opposed a dualistic reading of human nature, and insisted that art exemplifies most clearly that single nature. Since Herder is as obscure to me as Merleau- Ponty is to most readers, I have not tried to verify this claim. But it would be odd if so fundamental a thesis had not been an- ticipated somewhere.

Think about it a little. Poodles dancing mime the expressiveness of dance; they have to be drilled to do it. So do ballerinas, but their training also transforms their being, provides a new vehicle of expression, as any important human training does. Chimpan- zees can be taught to draw, but it seems unlikely that their world is transformed by that amusement as the painter's is by his task. Chimps of course can also be taught

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to speak, up to a point, and to understand language. But again these achievements take place in a very odd situation carefully con- trived by human experimenters. Such con- trivances have not characterized the chimpan- zee Umwelt as they recurrently characterize the human world. Chimps do make tools, they do communicate in some rudimentarily intentional fashion: but so far as we can tell they have no professional poets, painters, or dramatists. Well, they have no science or religion either; are not these as important aspects of our way of life? Why just art? Religious ritual, too, is surely expressive in the sense that bodily movements in it mean. It exemplifies less well than art, however, the originating character of human expression. Ritual in general rather restates the old than creates the new-whereas a painter even in copying makes something that was never made before. I will return to that point shortly. What about science? The be- lief that theoretical knowledge, and especially science, is what singles out humanity is precisely the claim that Merleau-Ponty, like Herder, was trying to overcome. Not that he is taking some countercultural stand against science. He is opposing scientism: the view that the manifest image, even if we have to rely on it in daily life, is somehow inferior to the scientific, which tells us what we really are. On the contrary, if science is to be understood, it must be as a family of human practices, in which, in sub- mission to standards of accuracy and sys- tematic scope, a community of workers pas- sionately pursue their common goal of trying to grasp how, in the real world around them and in which they too live their lives, some real phenomenon really works. To put scientific detachment first as if it were self- subsistent, instead of an expression of an arduous and esoteric self-discipline, is to misunderstand both science and the human way of being that makes such enterprises as the scientific possible. That methodological self-knowledge may not matter to physics, but for the so-called human sciences it is fundamental. And when Merleau-Ponty speaks in our text of science once more be- coming philosophy, that is probably the kind of insight he has in mind. That is cer-



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tainly the kind of insight that both the intellectualist and empiricist traditions had lost and that Merleau-Ponty wants to restore by looking through its origin in the lived body at the primordial structure of the human world.

A final glance at two of his remarks about gesture in the speech chapter may help to gloss a little further the concept of expression he is seeking to place at the foundation of his view of man. Even bodily gesture, he

points out, may differ from culture to culture-as, he reports, a Japanese smiles when he is angry, while a European's face turns red. At the same time he cites in support of his own view a case of Darwin's inter-

pretation of gesture, where there is not only no cross-cultural difference but a uniformity explained in terms of natural selection.

Merleau-Ponty does not deny that explana- tion (of frowning, in this case) but sees the

phenomenon as transformed by its human use. He writes:

... it is the definition of the human body to

appropriate in indefinite series of discontinuous acts kernels of significance which outstrip and

transfigure its natural powers. This act of transcendence is met first in the acquisition of a behavior, then in the silent communication of the gesture: it is by the same power that the

body opens itself to a new conduct and makes it

intelligible to outside observers. Here and there a system of definite powers is suddenly decen- tered, broken up and reorganized under a law unknown to subject and observer and that is re- vealed to them in the same moment.

He applies this interpretation, then, to language:

Language in its turn poses no different problem: a contraction of the throat, a whistling emission of air between tongue and teeth, a certain man- ner of playing on the part of our body can [se

laisse] suddenly be invested with a figured sense and signify it beyond us.24

I hope it is beginning to be clear to some

degree to some of you what sort of expressive power he is talking about and why the

painter, making in his painting a focal point of living meanings, should so well exemplify that power.

There is another feature of human ex-

pression, and hence of human perception,

difficult to separate from expression itself, as I have been trying to present it, and that is its originality. The fundamental gestures like frowning and laughing seem to be standard everywhere; a recent collection of photographs, conceived in the Darwinian spirit, was intended to support this view. But Merleau-Ponty wants to claim, on the contrary, that every human gesture, and every human perception-which elaborates the gesture of gathering up some aspect of the world-every human expressive moment is a new birth. Nor is this the instantaneous meaning-giving of a Sartrean account, but a renewed giving of meaning to what was already there, to the il y a prealable in and from which meaning takes place. This originating power of existence is described in the Structure of Behavior, in the first passage in which, so far as I know, Merleau-Ponty alludes to the unique significance of art. My

present point, and indeed the last one also, can best be put forward as commentary on this passage, itself in turn a commentary on our original text.

In the last part of the Structure of Be- havior, when he is comparing the physical, vital and human orders, Merleau-Ponty dis-

tinguishes human order at two levels, both of which are essential to selecting the human out of the general biological order. It is the second he stresses as the culminating carrier of our uniqueness and that I want to stress here. First, then, as many have pointed out, culture, the artificial structures within which we are fated to have our being, cuts out the human from the merely living. Merleau- Ponty chooses "the Hegelian term 'work'" to designate "the totality of activities by which man transforms physical and living nature."25 But that reference fails, for him, to capture the most essential human trait. What essentially characterizes a human be-

ing, he holds, "is not the capacity to create a second nature-economic, social, cultural -beyond biological nature, it is rather that of outstripping the structures he has created in order to create others." 26 "Thus," he continues-and here I am quoting the passage that holds the key to his conception both of originality and of truth, and to the relation, as he sees it, of both of these to art:

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The Sense of Things

Thus the human dialectic is ambiguous: it is manifested first by the social or cultural structures that it makes appear and in which it im- prisons itself. But his [i.e., man's] objects of use and his cultural objects would not be what they are if the activity that makes them appear did not also have the sense of denying and outstripping them. Correlatively, the perception that has appeared till now as the insertion of consciousness in a cradle of institutions and in the narrow circle of human 'environments' ('milieux'), can become, in particular through art, perception of a 'universe.' For the test of an immediate reality is substituted the knowledge of a truth.27

And then he quotes from Scheler: "man is a being who has the power to raise to the condition of objects the centers of resistance and of reaction of his environment (. . .) in which the animal lives in a state of ec- stasy."28 Let us consider for a moment the notion of transcendence introduced in this passage: not just making, but remaking, denying the made to make what never was before: this is the culmination of human dialectic. There is always a "generation gap," because each group coming to itself at once lives and denies the world of its forebears, lives that world its way. Even a person giving his life to uphold tradition does it his way: Planty Pal was as unlike his uncle the Duke of Omnium as his children were to be unlike him. Tradition always consists in self-denying ordinances, yet not unequivo- cally so, like Sartrean nihilation. Every human moment, every human life is a renewal of the past, a transcendence, not only of, but in facticity. Even (human) perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests in this same paragraph, exhibits that ambiguity of custom and novelty, dependence on the already made and freedom to make anew. Every sight of San Francisco Bay, every sight of a mountain landscape, is a renewal not only of myself as viewer but of the world as viewed, and therewith of myself, in that world along with others, perhaps as both seer and seen? Maybe, indeed, it is at this point that our initial ambiguity becomes intelligible. In Illinois I once went to fetch the blacksmith and found nothing where his house had been. What was strange was not only the absence of an expected spec- tacle, inherent in one's everyday concerns, but the transformation of myself into pure

387

spectator, from the routine appearance of a farmer's wife in a decrepit '37 Ford, come to fetch the smith, into a shocked gazer at nothing-in an eerie way too with the others who were not there. I was not dreaming; the house had burnt down in the night, as wooden houses will. But the point is that such odd experiences show up by contrast the everyday seeing-as-part-of-the-scene that constitutes the way we are with others in the human world: again, in a precarious detachable attachment that is continuously being made, made, not like the Creation, out of nothing, but as the remaking and reseeing of what already was, and yet always renewed and new, an Augenblick.

Now that something like the painter's task should come into view in this context seems not too farfetched. Let us return for a moment to our earlier theme of the lived body and Merleau-Ponty's suggestion in the Phe- nomenology of Perception that the body is like a work of art. It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that as the painter makes his painting, so I make my body. But I do make my body lived: I make what, in the lived moment, is more than the moment. I give to my senses the sense that is at the heart of human temporality. I shape the visible, the first icon of the icon that the painter makes.

But two qualifications should be added here. If I shape the visible, that is because it too shapes me. That "everything dwells there" gives vision its passivity and therewith a certain anonymity.29 There is no pure I. It sees in me. So, Klee said, the woods spoke to him. Moreover, if every such moment of meaning is new, there is always yet another fulfillment to seek. The painter's work, like the perceiver's, is novel, not only because that painting never was before, but because the painter's task, like the task of the human existent, is open, never com- plete. The profiles of Husserlian perception are but the first beginning of that ongoing openness, with which I am bodily out there with things. Human indwelling, while human life lasts, is never "totalized"; the less than completeness of its self-making, the contingency of its freedom, is the very stuff of which that self-making, that freedom, is



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made. So, Merleau-Ponty says, the task of the painter was there when the first human being opened his eyes upon the world.

It is in that first opening, moreover, that we can best glimpse the origin of truth. In our present context, that is perhaps Mer- leau-Ponty's most radical claim. Does not truth belong primarily to science, to theoretical knowledge rather than to art? Look again at the statement of the Structure of Behavior:

The perception that has appeared to us till now as the insertion of consciousness in a cradle of institutions, and in the narrow circle of human environments, can become, in particular through art, perception of a 'universe.' For the test of an immediate reality is substituted the knowledge of a truth.N

As Husserl pointed out in Crisis, we inhabit in our time, or partly inhabit, a universe constituted by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century-and by now, we may add, by the scientific revolutions of the twentieth. The world we inhabit is that of Newton, Einstein, Planck. What has art to do with it? If truth is the correspondence of statements with reality, art, we know by now, has nothing to do with that. If truth is in some way a claim to universality, art makes that claim, as Kant showed us, only in a playful, "subjective" way. It is not serious, like science. And if what defines humanity is the transformation of an environment into a universe, the substitution of "the knowledge of a truth" for "the test of an immediate reality," then surely it is science, not art, that shows us what we are. Not so for Merleau-Ponty, and for one very good reason. "Objective thought" in science forgets its roots in bodily existence and so fails to understand itself. "Human life," he says in the Phenomenology of Perception, "is defined by this power it has of denying itself in objective thought" 31-that is true of both science and art, of the special theory of relativity and of Cezanne's Mont Ste. Victoire, but where does it get that power? It gets it, Merleau-Ponty continues in the same passage, "from its attachment to the world itself." Human life, he goes on, "'comprehends' not only such and such a

definite environment but an infinity of possible environments, and it comprehends itself because it is thrown into a natural world." 32 But, it must be admitted, the philosophy of science, in its first half century, has specialized precisely in forgetting that truth: in making the activities of science float disembodied on a sea of mere phe- nomena. Nor does any mode of scientific realism so far in vogue correct fundamen- tally, as far as I can tell, this positivist error. For the natural world Merleau-Ponty is al- luding to is not the "world" as read by fundamental physics, a skeleton without even a closet to be a skeleton in, but the rich, real world of things, persons, places in which we, and all things, find ourselves. The nature Merleau-Ponty is recalling us to is the natural world, and it is that world that the

painter can best exhibit to us, just because his task is so clearly bodily and what he makes so concretely, in its expressive origi-

nality, a "focal point of living meanings." Such focal points, moreover, are discoverable by the philosopher, too, if he can sufficiently overcome his objectivist prejudices to recover, if obscurely and fleetingly, a sense of the source of sense, there where things loom

up sensibly, present though inexhaustible, absent yet before us, in the ambiguous mental-physical, past-future, actual-possible, finite yet infinitely open, human world.

1 Maurice Me:leau-Ponty, L'Oeil et l'esprit (Paris,

1964), pp. 12-13. First published in Art de France I, 1, January, 1961.

2 M. Grene, "The Paradoxes of Historicity," Re- view of Metaphysics, 32 (1978), 15-36.

8M. Merleau-Ponty, "Le Primat de la percep-

tion," Bulletin de la sociStd francaise de philoso- phie, 49 (1947), 119-53, 122.

4 M. Merleau-Ponty, La Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris, 1945), p. 176.

6 M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris, 1964), p. 328.

'L'Oeil et l'esprit, p. 13. 7oc. cit. 8 Phenomenologie de la perception, p. 124. 9 Phenomenologie de la perception, p. 99 (men-

tioned only in connection with repression). 10 M. Fried, "The Beholder in Courbet," Glyph 4

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 82-129. 11 Fried, "Beholder," p. 97. 1 Ibid., pp. 97-98. 1Ibid., p. 111.

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The Sense of Things

14 Ibid., p. 101. 15"Ibid., p. 100. 16 loc. cit. 17Ibid., p. 101. 18Phdnome'nologie de la perception, p. 230. 19 M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris, 1960), p. 98. 20 Signes, pp. 85-61. "21Ibid., p. 87.

Ibid., p. 80. 23 See Sir Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (New

York, 1976), p. 153 and Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cam- bridge University Press, 1976), p. 13, n. 1.

24Phenomenologie de la perception, p. 226. 2a M. Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comporte-

389

ment (Paris, 1942), p. 176. 26Ibid., p. 189. 27 Ibid., pp. 190-91. 28 Ibid., p. 191; quoted from Max Scheler, Die

Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Munich, 1947), pp. 47-50.

29I am grateful to John Compton for pointing out that I had neglected the anonymity of Merleau- Pontyian perception; this passing glance is intended to correct that error. And I think it is fair to link the impersonality of perception with its passivity.

30 See note 27 above. 31 Phenomtnologie de la perception, p. 377. 32 loc. cit.



Article Contentsp. [377]p. 378p. 379p. 380p. 381p. 382p. 383p. 384p. 385p. 386p. 387p. 388p. 389

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer, 1980), pp. 373-496Volume Information [pp. 491-496]Front MatterEditorial [pp. 373-375]The Sense of Things [pp. 377-389]Talking to Myself: A Dialogue [pp. 391-395]Art as a Human Behavior: Toward an Ethological View of Art [pp. 397-406]"Musical Time" and Music as an "Art of Time" [pp. 407-417]Time and Tense in Cinema [pp. 419-426]The Work of Art and Its General Relations [pp. 427-434]Aesthetic Uniqueness [pp. 435-449]Afterwords: Criticism and CounterthesesA Defense of Intrinsic Criticism [p. 451]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 453-457]Review: untitled [p. 458]Review: untitled [pp. 458-460]Review: untitled [pp. 460-461]Review: untitled [pp. 461-463]Review: untitled [pp. 463-465]Review: untitled [pp. 465-466]Review: untitled [pp. 466-468]Review: untitled [pp. 468-470]Review: untitled [pp. 470-471]Review: untitled [pp. 471-473]Review: untitled [pp. 473-474]Review: untitled [pp. 475-477]Review: untitled [pp. 477-479]Review: untitled [pp. 479-480]Review: untitled [pp. 480-482]

Books Received [pp. 483-486]American Society for Aesthetics News [pp. 487-490]Back Matter

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The Sense of Things