Art as Philosophical Insight
Merleau-Ponty and Paul Cézanne’s “Mount Sainte-Victoire”
What does it mean to see this painting?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was one of the greatest figures of post-war French philosophy, identified as a phenomenologist (the study of phenomena as they appear in the field of consciousness).
Merleau-Ponty is famous for the importance he gives to the body in shaping our experience of the world. He argued that our bodily existence is fundamental to how we perceive, think, and interact with the world.
He also famously introduced the concept of “chiasm” or “intertwining” to describe the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived, arguing that they are entangled and cannot be understood in isolation.
I will first briefly present his life and work from a biobliographical perspective, and then progressively show how he referenced a famous painting, Paul Cézanne’s Mount Sainte-Victoire, to question a very important and everyday question: what does “seeing” mean?
The Life and Work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, on March 14, 1908. He showed an early aptitude for philosophy and continued his education at…
