Phenomenology of Perception

"Yes. Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher from the 40s and 50s, a contemporary of Sartre and De Beauvoir . I read him for the first time in my early 20s before his works were translated. He represents so-called ‘existential phenomenology’. Of fundamental importance to him was that we are ‘embodied’ creatures, not disembodied perceptual systems and free-floating intelligences. He understood painting to be involved in a network of relations in which embodiment is crucial to the creation and experience of the work. He takes it to be a fundamental truth about our being in the world. This truth is something that philosophy has tended to ignore, or minimise, in the interest of a more abstract view. He insists we are in the world, not as minds conjoined to mechanical bodies, but as fully incarnated creatures. In his view, perception itself is a bodily activity. We are not separate from the world; we are woven into it. He sees certain painters – Cézanne, obviously – as registering the fact of embodiment in their art. His early essay, Cézanne’s Doubt , is one of the great texts on 20th century painting. Merleau-Ponty has meant a great deal to me. My own feelings about art as a young man were intensely ‘bodily’. It was marvellous to discover that’s how he thought it should be. The consideration of embodiment has been basic to almost everything I’ve done in art criticism and art history until now. Specifically, the issue of embodiment plays a key role in my Caravaggio book. Because of the brilliance of the realism in his paintings, they have tended to be seen in ‘optical’ terms – as if depiction in his art is equivalent to what one might see in a mirror. I’m not claiming this is wholly wrong, but that manifestly at work there’s a relation to his own embodiment and activity in making the paintings – and that we, as viewers, relate to them in a similar way."