Merleau Ponty At The Limits Of Art Religion And Perception

This book poses the question of what lies at the limit of philosophy. Through close studies of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's life and work, the authors examine one of the twentieth century's most interdisciplinary philosophers whose thought intersected with and contributed to the practices of art, psychology, literature, faith and philosophy. As these essays show, Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre disrupts traditional disciplinary boundaries and prompts his readers to ask what, exactly, constitutes philosophy and its others. Featuring essays by an international team of leading phenomenologists, art theorists, theologians, historians of philosophy, and philosophers of mind, this volume breaks new ground in Merleau-Ponty scholarship-including the first sustained reflections on the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and religion-and magnifies a voice that is talked-over in too many conversations across the academic disciplines. Anyone interested in phenomenology, art theory and history, cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion will find themselves challenged and engaged by the articles included in this important effort at inter-disciplinary philosophy.

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a fascinating new dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists of the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Throughout the book, the reader is guided among the intricacies and innovations of Merleau-Ponty's and Nishida's ontological approaches to artistic expression with a focused look at a rarely explored connection between faith and negation in their philosophies. Exploring the intertwining of these concepts in their broader ontologies invokes a reappraisal of the ambiguous status of religion and art in the writings of both thinkers. Measuring these ambiguities, the ontologies of Flesh and Basho are read in-depth alongside great artworks and the motor-perceptual practices of seminal landscape artists such as Cézanne, Sesshū, Taiga, and Hasegawa, as well as other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history. Loughnane studies these artists' bodily practices, focusing on the intimate relations realized with the landscapes they paint, and illuminating a valence of their expressive disciplines as a motor-perceptual form of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting intercultural reading, expanding two philosophers' projects toward new horizons of research, revealing incitements in their writings that challenge unambiguous distinctions between art, philosophy, faith, and ultimately philosophy East and West.

Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today? The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontology as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God. What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty's final abandonment of Christianity was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy suggests a new kind of natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenological account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.

Braiding together strands of literary, phenomenological and art historical reflection, Modernism and Phenomenology explores the ways in which modernist writers and artists return us to wonder before the world. Taking such wonder as the motive for phenomenology itself, and challenging extant views of modernism that uphold a mind-world opposition rooted in Cartesian thought, the book considers the work of modernists who, far from presenting perfect, finished models for life and the self, embrace raw and semi-chaotic experience. Close readings of works by Paul Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Paul Klee, and Virginia Woolf explore how modernist texts and artworks display a deep-rooted openness to the world that turns us into "perpetual beginners." Pushing back against ideas of modernism as fragmentation or groundlessness, Mildenberg argues that this openness is less a sign of powerlessness and deferred meaning than of the very provisionality of experience.

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher's phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty's key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty's central terms and concepts.

Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, now indispensable to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to architectural theory and practice is well established. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vibrant collection of original essays by twelve eminent philosophers who mine Merleau-Ponty’s work to consider how we live and create as profoundly spatial beings. The resulting collection is essential to philosophers and creative artists as well as those concerned with the pressing ethical issues of our time. Each contributor presents a different facet of space, place, or architecture. These essays carve paths from Merleau-Ponty to other thinkers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, Ettinger, and Piaget. As the first collection devoted specifically to developing Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of place and architecture, this book will speak to philosophers interested in the problem of space, architectural theorists, and a wide range of others in the arts and design community. Contributors: Nancy Barta-Smith, Edward S. Casey, Helen Fielding, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Randall Johnson, D. R. Koukal, Suzanne Cataldi Laba, Patricia M. Locke, Glen Mazis, Rachel McCann, David Morris, and Dorothea Olkowski.