Embodiment and Modernity: Ruskin, Stephen, Merleau-Ponty, and the Alps

Toward the end of his Phénoménologie de la perception [Phenomenology of Perception], Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes Jean-Paul Sartre to task for his notion of ontological freedom. By insisting that consciousness is for-itself [pour-soi], and therefore unfettered, Sartre fails to recognize how the body roots consciousness to the world. The Alps serve to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s contention that freedom is always constrained by the limits of the body’s physical capacities: “En tant que j’ai des mains, des pieds, un corps, un monde, je porte autour de moi des intentions qui ne sont pas décisoires et qui affectent mon entourage de caractères que je ne choisis pas” [“In so far as I have hands, feet, a body, a world, I have around me intentions that are not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way which I do not choose”].¹ According to Merleau-Ponty, whatever estimation the human mind may make about the passability or impassability of mountainous terrain is to some extent irrelevant. It is, rather, the body and its ability or failure to navigate mountainous terrain that determines human freedom in this context.

Nearly a century earlier, the Alps served as a similar flashpoint for two English cultural critics, John Ruskin and Leslie Stephen, who offered competing conceptions of the role that embodiment plays in individual perception and sublime experience. Departing from Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime as the experience one has when encountering phenomena that are vast and terrifying, both Ruskin and Stephen view sublimity as an elevation of mind. They differ, however, in their understanding of how such a state is achieved. For Ruskin, the Alps were cathedrals and schools; they were objects to be revered and from which one could learn much. While aligning himself with Romanticism, he thought that the preference given to subjective truth and the faculty of the imagination by a number of Romantic poets de-emphasized the materiality of the natural world. He sought to develop a new model of perception—one that simultaneously breaks with Romanticism, which he thought was responsible for distorting nature, and with Alpine climbing, which he believed threatened its sanctity. Ruskin led the charge against mountaineers whom he accused of abolishing “the romance from the mountains by climbing them” as Stephen pejoratively summarizes this line of thinking.² Sublime experience, he believed, was only possible when contemplating mountains from a distance.³

Stephen, however, rejects the notion that mountains have become for climbers mere instruments of sport and refigures mountaineering as an aesthetic and deeply meaningful enterprise. For him, imaginative powers come from, and sublime experience is generated by, physical contact with the material world. Where Ruskin faults the Romantics for eliding materiality in their model of imaginative perception, Stephen argues that the Ruskinian beholder generates its own kind of blindness by confining one’s experience of mountain sublimity to the hotel room or the distant lakeshore. Stephen’s essays respond directly to Ruskin’s charges by arguing that, in fact, climbers have cultivated a new mode of perception that he presents as modern, kinesthetic, and physically embodied.

By bringing Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodiment to bear on the debate between Ruskin and Stephen, I hope to restore the centrality of phenomenological experience to the literature on mountaineering. My article thus departs from two critical tendencies. The first traces the “influence of mountains on the development of human intelligence” by focusing on the transformation of foreboding peaks and passes into objects of sublime perception.⁴ The second tendency attempts to understand the cultural work of mountaineering literature as chiefly a celebration of English superiority, providing the nation with a conceptual model of imperialism. Elaine Freedgood has therefore contended that the literature on Alpine climbing was part of a mid-century discursive construction of a safe England, which sought to reduce “risk to knowable and predictable danger” and, therefore, to assure readers that “even the dangerous world outside Britain is subject to . . . British control.”⁵ Peter Hansen has similarly argued that “mountain climbing helped...