ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s principal contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of art can be found in three essays, spanning fifteen years: “Cezanne’s Doubt”, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, and “Eye and Mind”. Visual art and vision itself, he argues, are both forms of stylized expression, not just passive observations of sensory givens. Vision is itself already essentially expressive, for it always has its own bodily character, its own style. Not surprisingly, Andre Malraux’s flawed notion of the putative subjectivity of modern art is parasitic on a correspondingly flawed notion of the putative objectivity of classical styles. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the generality of perceptual and artistic style forges a middle way between relativism and universalism, more specifically between psychologism and Platonism. Such a style is intelligible only in the context of a world, in the concrete situations in which it is implicated: “the very decisions that transform us are always made in reference to a factual situation”.
