Aesthetics—Then and Now

Then (and here I speak of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy [SPEP] in the early 1960s when it was founded), Continental aesthetics on the American scene was dominated by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had died in 1961—the year before SPEP began! My first SPEP (as a first-year graduate student at the ripe age of twenty-one) was in 1966 at Penn State. Themes such as visibility, expressivity, and indirect language were offered as new and exciting ways to think about aesthetics. After all, Merleau-Ponty’s last essay (“Eye and Mind”/“L’oeil et l’esprit”)—published during his lifetime in 1960—was both a radical reformulation of his 1947 “Cezanne’s Doubt” and a whole new departure in aesthetic thinking. For those who read the French (and many of the members of the new American society were Francophones), this new essay spawned a reconsideration of Merleau-Ponty’s work in aesthetics (as he linked it up to his ongoing phenomenology of perception, expression, and meaning/sense). When Al Lingis published his translation of the great work that Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died (and The Visible and the Invisible appeared only a couple of years after SPEP was founded in 1962), visibility (as formulated in “Eye and Mind”) achieved further articulation.

I. 1960s: Visibility | Expressivity | Indirect Language

Visibility arises out of the chiasmatic conjuncture of the painter’s seeing (invisible to the artist’s own seeing) and what is seen (the visible that the artist sees and paints). Aesthetic experience was placed in that between-zone that Merleau-Ponty would have named “perceptual intentionality.” Visibility, however, is cast in a new language, still understood perceptually but now as an intertwining (as Al Lingis translated l’entrelacs). The seeing of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, for Cézanne, as it appears (and how it appears) before him still incorporates his embodied doubts. Perhaps one could understand the visibility of Cézanne’s seeing the mountain as something like Heidegger’s 1930s poetizing of the artist in relation to the artwork in relation to art as an event of the Open. One could even think these two essays together, as framing aesthetic theory—particularly in the augmented Reclam edition of Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” which Gadamer published in 1960—the same year Merleau-Ponty published “Eye and Mind.” But Heidegger was already thinking Van Gogh’s relation to his painting of shoes as allowing for the disclosure (truth) of a world. What Heidegger missed was that special relation of visibility that Van Gogh might have experienced in viewing his own shoes on the floor of his room. Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne may still have been looking at the mountain, or at a bowl of fruit, or even at his own image in a mirror. For Merleau-Ponty visibility is not a disclosure of a world—even when Cézanne views his own painting. Rather, visibility is an expressive conjuncture of seeing seen as sense (sens)—but visibility cannot be seen. It can only be sensed—or expressed (in an embodied sense).

Expression in the later Merleau-Ponty (and we are all familiar with the important chapter on the body as expression and meaning/sense in the 1945 Phenomenology of Perception) is no longer simply gestural or facial expression. Rather, expression has become a matter of style, being-in-the-world, even wild being (l’être brut). Expression in the later Merleau-Ponty has become a question of ontology and not simply phenomenology. And yet, much of Merleau-Ponty’s concern focuses on expressivity and not just expression. Or, at least, expressivity is the name that Mikel Dufrenne gave to this important aspect of aesthetic experience in the wake of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. Dufrenne himself, editor of the Revue d’esthetique and author of the 1950s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (which Ed Casey translated into English), was sometimes referred to as “the Dean of French Aesthetics.” Expressivity, as Dufrenne used to say, is like squeezing meaning or sense out of a orange. Ex-pressivity comes...