Vision and Style

Merleau-Ponty’s principal contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of art can be found in three core essays, spanning fifteen years: “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and “Eye and Mind” (1960). The art form Merleau-Ponty mostly concerns himself with is painting, often in explicit contrast with literature. He also says fascinating things about the philosophical significance of cinema in the essay “Film and the New Psychology” (1945), taking the occasion to explain the advances Gestalt psychology made beyond classical theories of perception. Likewise, in his aesthetic writings generally, MerleauPonty revisits, elaborates, and applies the arguments of Phenomenology of Perception while advancing original ideas concerning the relation between painting and perception, and between literature and painting. Vision and visual art, he insists, are both forms of stylized expression, not just passive registration of sensory input. Moreover, like perception itself, painting is not just directed toward but embedded in the world. Merleau-Ponty wants to “put the painter back in touch with his world” (S 72/57/94).