This course will consider the way Merleau-Ponty answers the questions of how we engage with both other subjects and aesthetic artefacts. Though focussing on either one of these issues would be worthwhile, they are mutually illuminating in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, not least because of his tendency to invoke examples from one of these domains when discussing the other. We will begin by getting our footing in Merleau-Ponty’s early works and thought, establishing how he thinks embodied subjects express themselves and engage with one another. From here, we will consider his suggestion that artistic gesture is a particularly revelatory mode of expression, a thought we find throughout both his early and later writings. We will then consider how this theory of expressive activity and our receptivity to it can help us think about various phenomena in the interpersonal and aesthetic domains, beyond those that Merleau-Ponty explicitly discusses.
Please note: this course will dedicate a decent portion of each lecture to discussion, and so will encourage participation from attendees.
Lecture 1: The Structure of Embodiment
The first lecture will briefly introduce Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual context, as well as the authors and intellectual movements that he (and phenomenology more generally) was both influenced by and situating itself against. Having sketched the general shape of phenomenology’s territory, we will then consider key aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s major contribution to phenomenology, namely, the theory of the embodied subject. To this end, we will focus on his early works The Structure of Behaviour and the Phenomenology of Perception.
Required reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 100–148. Routledge, 2012.
Recommended reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behaviour. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. 129-137
Lecture 2: Intersubjectivity and Expression
This lecture will begin by sketching out different approaches to intersubjectivity that exist within the phenomenological and existential traditions. From here, we will begin unpacking Merleau-Ponty’s own theory of intersubjective engagements and their possibility. Again, this will largely draw on the Phenomenology. To begin thinking about the plausibility of this story, we will also discuss his essay The Child’s Relation with Others and ask what kind of pre-linguistic space this story might be at risk of assuming. To temper this proposal, we will turn to how other authors have responded to this concern on his behalf more recently.
Required reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Body as Expression, and Speech.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 179–205. Routledge, 2012.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Others and the Human World.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 361–84. Routledge, 2012.
Recommended reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Child’s Relation with Others.” In The Primacy of Perception, 96–155. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
- Gallagher, Shaun, and Andrew N. Meltzoff. “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies.” Philosophical Psychology 9, no. 2 (March 1, 1996): 211–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089608573181.
Lecture 3: Taking on the Artist (and Other’s) World
Having established the structure of embodied activity and intersubjective encounters, we will turn to the question of aesthetic engagement. This lecture will draw mostly on Cezanne’s Doubt, which will expose us to the (potentially) radical claims that Merleau-Ponty is making about the disclosive power of aesthetic conduct. Some questions that arise are: what is the relationship between the expressive gesture and the whole life from which it emerges? What are the enabling and constraining factors that allow us to access the other’s world? Our response we will consider recent contributions from critical phenomenology.
Required reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In Sense and Non-Sense, 9–25. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “On the Phenomenology of Language.” In Signs, 84–97. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Recommended reading:
- ‘Freedom and Others’, Phenomenology of Perception, 466-484
Lecture 4: Expressive Invitations and Style
This lecture will focus on the essays Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence and Eye and Mind, which present Merleau-Ponty’s most thoroughgoing exploration of the expressive force of artistic (specifically, painterly) activity. We will here consider some questions from more classic aesthetic theory and think about how we might answer them, based on what is presented in both these texts and the materials that we have so far read. For instance: how is it that we grasp movement in the still work? In what does an artist’s style consist?
Required reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs, 39–83. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception, 159–90. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Lecture 5: Where to?
This final lecture will be divided into two parts, with the first being more critical in focus and the second aiming to extend Merleau-Ponty’s thought. First, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s position with other approaches in response to which he was writing Indirect Language (at least in part: e.g., Sartre’s views on prose as being able to communicate meaning directly; Malraux’s views on artistic style). Here we will think about whether Merleau-Ponty’s position is a compelling alternative to these other views. The second portion of the lecture will be spent thinking about how concepts that we have gleaned from this course (e.g., ‘style’) can allow us to describe more complex interpersonal and aesthetic phenomena that Merleau-Ponty himself left undescribed, though was clearly interested in.
Required reading:
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Writing?” In What Is Literature?, translated by David Caute, 1–26. Routledge, 2001.
Recommended reading:
- Murphy, Ann. “The Spirited Interworld: Caregiving and the Liminal Phenomenology of Dementia.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 7, no.1 (2024): 57-68.
- Ratcliffe, Matthew. “Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty.” European Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2020): 657–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12513.