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

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along lines running from the painter to the horizon.Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air ofrespectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath agaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do notinvolve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passeswithout hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistanceto this supremely easy movement. But this is not how theworld appears when we encounter it in perception. When ourgaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we areforced to adopt a certain point of view and these successivesnapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposedone upon the other. It is only by interrupting thenormal process of seeing that the painter succeeds in masteringthis series of visual impressions and extracting a single,unchanging, landscape from them: often he will close one eyeand measure the apparent size of a particular detail with hispencil, thereby altering it. By subjecting all such details tothis analytical vision, he fashions on the canvas a representationof the landscape which does not correspond to any ofthe free visual impressions. This controls the movement oftheir unfolding yet also kills their trembling life. If manypainters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometricalperspective, this is because they have sought torecapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the53
landscape. They have been reluctant to settle for an analyticaloverview and have striven to recapture the feel of perceptualexperience itself. Thus different areas of their paintings areseen from different points of view. The lazy viewer will see‘errors of perspective’ here, while those who look closely willget the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously,a world in which regions of space are separated bythe time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other, aworld in which being is not given but rather emergesover time.Thus space is no longer a medium of simultaneous objectscapable of being apprehended by an absolute observer who isequally close to them all, a medium without point of view,without body and without spatial position – in sum, themedium of pure intellect. As Jean Paulhan remarked recently,the space of modern painting is ‘space which the heart feels’,space in which we too are located, space which is close to usand with which we are organically connected. 3 Paulhan added:it may well be that in an age devoted to technical measurementand, as it were, consumed by quantity, the cubistpainter is quietly celebrating – in a space attuned more tothe heart than the intellect – the marriage and reconciliationof man with the world. 4space
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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
Page 13 and 14: draws and the anxieties which he ar
Page 15 and 16: shortly before the war. This second
Page 17 and 18: After his death Merleau-Ponty’s r
Page 19 and 20: empiricism is not of this kind. Thi
Page 21 and 22: The central theme of Merleau-Ponty
Page 23 and 24: acknowledgement of its special stat
Page 25 and 26: world of perception can be dismisse
Page 27 and 28: When Merleau-Ponty says that scienc
Page 29 and 30: Florentine Renaissance, or, in a Fr
Page 31 and 32: photograph in which the feet look a
Page 33 and 34: intrinsic properties which explain
Page 35 and 36: which our own life has been disturb
Page 37 and 38: only contingently connected to a ph
Page 39 and 40: imagining that our dependence upon
Page 41 and 42: Merleau-Ponty now extends this aest
Page 43 and 44: etter conception of reason (e.g. di
Page 46: The World of Perception
Page 50 and 51: The world of perception, or in othe
Page 52 and 53: explain the illusions of long- and
Page 54 and 55: provide all the answers at a time w
Page 56: exercise of a pure and unsituated i
Page 60 and 61: It has often been said that modern
Page 62 and 63: which effect certain changes in the
Page 66 and 67: In the footsteps of science and pai
Page 68: LECTURE 3Exploring the World of Per
Page 71 and 72: worlds of sight, smell, touch and s
Page 73 and 74: touch. 2 To say that honey is visco
Page 75 and 76: complexes. This is what Cézanne me
Page 77 and 78: us and above all in the found objec
Page 80 and 81: In the first three lectures, we arg
Page 82 and 83: children and the sick was held back
Page 84 and 85: person must remain open to these ab
Page 86 and 87: flow from the centre of the ‘body
Page 88: delegation to identify this monumen
Page 92 and 93: Thus far we have tried to look at s
Page 94 and 95: haunts a body and we seem to see a
Page 96 and 97: ack to the real experience of anger
Page 98 and 99: we have received from without and w
Page 100 and 101: which makes us crave their assent o
Page 102: LECTURE 6Art and the World of Perce
Page 105 and 106: world once more, as if in an exchan
Page 107 and 108: that the painter takes hold of a fr
Page 109 and 110: do explain why, hitherto, there hav
Page 111 and 112: looks at the things themselves with
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LECTURE 7Classical World, Modern Wo
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In modernity, we have a representat
Page 119 and 120:
Proust himself who raises them. As
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works of intellectuals, then to see
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with a feeling of completion or per
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NotesFOREWORD1 Merleau-Ponty’s te
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20 Although Merleau-Ponty usually t
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6 Sartre, ‘L’Homme et les Chose
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5 Paul Valéry, passim. See, for ex
Page 135 and 136:
freedom 27-8Freud 76Galileo 21geome
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

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