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

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