Perception and Painting in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought

Maintaining that “the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1964/1964: 13), Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought to develop a descriptive philosophy of perception, our kinaesthetic, prescientific, lived-bodily experience and cognition of the world—the unification of our affective, motor and sensory capacities. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘perception’ is an expressive and creative instance intimately linked with artistic practice, and although he wrote about all kinds of art, painting was the art form he considered in most depth. This paper seeks to elaborate upon the links between perception and painting in his thought, examining his three main essays on the topic of painting. We begin with the descriptive phenomenology of “Cézanne’s Doubt” under the influence of Edmund Husserl (1945), to structuralism in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and finally to his formulation of an original ontology in “Eye and Mind” (1961).