Art and the existential-phenomenological tradition
One of the characteristic traits of the existential-phenomenological tradition in philosophy is a serious engagement with the fine arts – literature, poetry, theater, music, and the plastic arts. By the existential-phenomenological tradition, I mean the tradition of philosophers influenced by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, with its deep roots in the work of Nietzsche. This engagement with the arts doesn’t typically take the form of a philosophy of art or an aesthetics. These philosophers are not primarily interested in offering a philosophical account of what art is. Nor are they interested merely in using art work as an occasion or excuse for philosophical reflection, nor as a mere illustration of philosophical doctrines. Rather, these philosophers believe that works of art at their best are capable of showing us the phenomena under consideration more directly, powerfully, and perspicuously than any philosophical prose could.
This reliance on works of art stems from the phenomenologists’ understanding of the method and task of phenomenological inquiry. Heidegger sums it up this way:
For those working in this tradition, the highest aspiration of phenomenology is to resolve philosophical questions in and through an apprehension of the phenomenon in question. To the extent that a verbally articulated description of the phenomenon helps us to achieve such an apprehension, phenomenology will offer such an account. But there is no commitment to correct verbal description as such – indeed, there is a constant worry among these authors that certain otherwise correct descriptions of phenomena might actually make it more difficult to achieve an understanding of things. This worry is behind Heidegger’s observation that “equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example)” (Heidegger 1962: 68). Some ways of talking about hammers – discussing them as substances with properties, for instance – obscure the way the hammer appears to us when we’re hammering with it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that phenomenology consists simply of hammering with hammers and cutting with knives, and so on. The trick is rather to figure out how to direct our attention to the constitutive structures of such activities, whether through an assertoric description or another mode of indication – for instance, the poetic or the pictorial. And just as it might take some verbal description to help point out what is decisive about the hammer that we are hammering with, it also might require considerable discussion to understand what it is that a pictorial depiction shows us.
It is in this sense that the existential phenomenologists rely on art as a kind of phenomenological demonstration. Their confidence in the phenomenological power of art is amply evident in their work. Nietzsche’s first book was an analysis of tragedy, and in his later work he turned often to music, drama, and the pictorial arts for insight into our historical condition. In the Gay Science, for instance, he argued that:
The power of art in this regard, and its superiority over philosophy, is a product of the way it works on us affectively, thus not just altering our beliefs about the world, but, more importantly, our dispositions through which we encounter and evaluate the world. “All art,” Nietzsche writes, “exercises the power of suggestion over the muscles and senses. … All art works tonically, increases strength, inflames desire (i.e., the feeling of strength)” (1968: §809).
Like Nietzsche, Heidegger came to recognize that, by reorienting us and redisposing us for the world, art could show us things which we couldn’t otherwise see. Indeed, Heidegger’s 1935–36 essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” marked a decisive change in Heidegger’s approach to philosophy as a whole. Heidegger claimed that art, according to “the highest possibility of its essence” (höchste Möglichkeit ihres Wesens) is a “revealing that establishes and brings forth” (ein her- und vor-bringendes Entbergen) possibilities of existence that could not be understood and established in any other way (2002: 38–39). And yet Heidegger also was concerned that, in our historical age, we are losing our ability to experience art as world disclosive. “The question remains,” Heidegger worried, “is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?” (2002: 38). Much of his later work was concerned with reviving an experience of the work of art as a world-disclosive experience, a project he pursued through repeated reflections on Greek architecture, the paintings of Raphael, Van Gogh, Klee, and others, and the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, and George.
These parallels between Heidegger and Nietzsche are instructive. But the philosopher I want to focus on here is Merleau-Ponty. His engagement with art is a little bit different than other existential phenomenologists, in just the same way that his focus on perception distinguishes him from the others. The “big questions” about history, the nature of human existence, the critique of our historical age – big questions directly implicated in the way the other phenomenologists engaged with art – hover only at the periphery of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment in essays such as “Eye and Mind,” “Cézanne’s Doubt,” and “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” There, Merleau-Ponty’s central preoccupation is the lessons that art can teach us about the nature of our embodied perceptual engagement with the world. “Art and only art,” Merleau-Ponty claimed, is able to show us “in full innocence” the “sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body” (1964a: 57). In this context, the art that Merleau-Ponty refers to is primarily pictorial art. The reason that “art and only art” can exhibit for us the world as we perceive it, Merleau-Ponty proceeds to explain, has something to do with the kind of seeing that the artist practices, and the way that when the artist records what he sees on the canvas, it allows us to also take part in his way of seeing the world. Merleau-Ponty, in all likelihood thinking of Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte Victoire (see Plate 9), writes:
There are two sides of this story that I want to focus on – on the one hand, the artist’s side of the equation: the way that the artist “interrogates” the world “with his gaze.” On the other hand there is us viewers of the work of art, who need to practice a receptivity to the work so that it can “make us see the visible” (this is, by the way, a paraphrase of Paul Klee. We’ll discuss this later). Merleau-Ponty’s most clearly worked out example of how these two sides work together comes in his discussions of Paul Cézanne. Rather than looking at Cézanne, however, I want to draw on the work of Paul Klee, an artist that Merleau-Ponty mentions from time to time, but whose work is not accorded the same kind of detailed treatment as is Cézanne’s. I think that, precisely because of its abstractness, Klee’s work in some respects illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s view better than Cézanne’s. But before getting to Klee, I want to say something more about how Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the primacy of art in phenomenological investigation is, and is not, to be understood.
Pictorial technique and theories of perception
We can restate Merleau-Ponty’s view in this way: art, and the pictorial arts in particular, is uniquely well qualified to help us understand our perceptual engagement with the world. This is because the artist somehow is able to become attuned to the means by which the world is composed for our visual perception, and then is able to orient us through the pictorial work to the process of composition. That means the work of art performs a kind of phenomenology insofar as it shows us something in such a way that we can understand it more perspicuously than we did before. But we have not yet said exactly what it is that art shows us, according to Merleau-Ponty.
In its insistence on the priority of the art of painting in understanding perceptual experience, Merleau-Ponty’s view bears a certain superficial resemblance to a view espoused by, among others, Leonardo da Vinci. Understanding why da Vinci’s position is not Merleau-Ponty’s will help set us on the path to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s account. But for that, I want to delve very briefly into art history and some of the developments in Renaissance painting that formed the background to da Vinci’s view.
As is well known, one of the innovations in painting in the early Renaissance was a change in pictorial space brought about through the use of optical perspective. This innovation was achieved by a variety of techniques. For one, artists began to impose a consistent perspectival distortion on objects depicted throughout the painting – that is, the distortion that would prevail if all the objects in the painting were seen from a single, static point of view. Another development was the use of occlusion to create a sense of depth, closer objects occluding the view of more distant objects, as if the objects in the paintings were arrayed along a third dimension.
This was an important development, as one can see in the well-known differences between the Enthroned Madonna figures Cimabue painted and those done by his student Giotto. Both artists give their paintings a consistent viewpoint – the perspectival distortions of the thrones specify a viewer standing squarely in front of Madonna’s throne, at about her shoulder or eye level. But in Cimabue’s painting, even though the angels are occluding one another, they still somehow all stand in the same narrow plane, stacked up, as it were, along the sides of the throne. I...
