Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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crave the eternal when we are beginning to know ever moreabout the reality of our time, to want the clearest conceptwhen the thing itself is ambiguous – this is to prefer the word‘reason’ to the exercise of reason. To restore is never to reestablish;it is to mask.There is more. We have to wonder whether the image ofthe classical world with which we are often presented is anymore than a legend. Was that world also acquainted with thelack of completion and the ambiguity in which we live? Wasit merely content to refuse official recognition to their existence?If so, then far from being evidence of decline, wouldnot the uncertainty of our culture rather be the most acuteand honest awareness of something that has always been trueand accordingly something we have gained? When we are toldthat the classical work is a finished one, we should remindourselves that Leonardo da Vinci and many others left unfinishedworks, that Balzac thought there was, in fact, no way ofsaying when a work of art has reached the fabled point ofmaturity: he even went as far as to admit that the artist’slabours, which could always continue, are only ever interruptedin order to leave the work with a little clarity. Weshould also remind ourselves that Cézanne, who thought ofhis entire oeuvre as an approximation of what he had beenlooking for, nevertheless leaves us, on more than one occasion,111
with a feeling of completion or perfection. Perhaps our feelingthat some paintings possess an unsurpassable plenitude isa retrospective illusion: the work is at too great a distancefrom us, is too different from us to enable us to take hold ofit once more and pursue it. Perhaps the painter responsiblesaw it as merely a first attempt or indeed as a failure. I spokea moment ago of the ambiguities inherent in our political situationas if no past political situation, when in the present,ever bore the traces of contradiction, or enigma, which mightmake it comparable with our own. Consider, for example,the French Revolution and even the Russian Revolution in its‘classical’ phase, until the death of Lenin. If this is true, then‘modern’ consciousness has not discovered a modern truthbut rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible –supremely acute – in today’s world. This greater clarity ofvision and this more complete experience of contestation arenot the products of a humanity that is debasing itself butrather of a human race which no longer lives, as it did for along time, on a few archipelagos and promontories. Humanlife confronts itself from one side of the globe to the otherand speaks to itself in its entirety through books and culture.In the short term, the loss in quality is evident, yet this cannotbe remedied by restoring the narrow humanism of the classicalperiod. The truth of the matter is that the problem weclassical world, modern world
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First published in French as Causer
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ForewordThe seven lectures collecte
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are preceded by a number. We have e
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draws and the anxieties which he ar
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shortly before the war. This second
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After his death Merleau-Ponty’s r
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empiricism is not of this kind. Thi
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The central theme of Merleau-Ponty
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acknowledgement of its special stat
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world of perception can be dismisse
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When Merleau-Ponty says that scienc
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Florentine Renaissance, or, in a Fr
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photograph in which the feet look a
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intrinsic properties which explain
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which our own life has been disturb
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only contingently connected to a ph
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imagining that our dependence upon
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Merleau-Ponty now extends this aest
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etter conception of reason (e.g. di
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The World of Perception
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The world of perception, or in othe
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explain the illusions of long- and
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provide all the answers at a time w
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exercise of a pure and unsituated i
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It has often been said that modern
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which effect certain changes in the
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along lines running from the painte
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In the footsteps of science and pai
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LECTURE 3Exploring the World of Per
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Page 126 and 127: NotesFOREWORD1 Merleau-Ponty’s te
Page 128 and 129: 20 Although Merleau-Ponty usually t
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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