Merleau's Ponty-fication on Cézanne and Depth

Merleau's Ponty-fication on Cézanne and Depth

It is hard not to be in awe of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961).  If Woody Allen had made a Midnight in Paris movie for aspiring existential philosophers, the journey back to the past may have located the protagonist in late 1920’s Paris where Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were students together. What would it have been like to go late night drinking with this crew, ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts, arguing at length on how we understand the world? Sartre wrote many years later that Maurice convinced him of the validity of Marxist communism, but they eventually fell out because Sartre remained aligned with communism while Maurice distanced himself from the contemporary interpretations. One source of agreement between this group however is likely to have been a rejection of their lecturer Edmund Husserl’s view on phenomenological transcendence. Transcendence didn’t cut the mustard with this bunch of existentialists, they didn’t concur that perception went beyond the physical limits; for them phenomenology was concrete, the lived experience was the driver of our knowledge of the world.

It is no surprise then that Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 seminal work The Phenomenology of Perception, in which he sets out his thesis for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to either scientific correlations or Cartesian theatre philosophy, is often liberally cited in contemporary post cognitive publications like those of Hubert Dreyfus, Alva Noe and Francisco Valera.

His wonderful treatise on art,  Essays on Painting,  published not long before he died in 1961 (his pre-mature death probably not unrelated to his chain smoking habit) and more particularly the chapter titled  Eye in the Mind,  elevates art above science for the exploration of ‘brute meaning that operationalism had ignored’.  The need to re-assess the understanding of the world, after the failures -as Merleau-Ponty would see them- of both Science and Philosophy, can start again with the questions of ‘what is light’ and ‘what is depth’, not just in themselves but as they pass through us and surround us.  Merleau-Ponty’s friend the sculptor Giacometti believed that ‘Cézanne was seeking depth all his life’ and it is obvious that Merleau-Ponty gets Cézanne, big time. For both of them, depth is not science’s third dimension of space, indeed if depth is a dimension at all it should be the first one. Forms and definite planes only emerge to the viewer when she can judge how far the different parts of those forms are from her. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s very logical proposition is that a first dimension that contains the other two dimensions can no longer be described as a dimension.  Science can measure the heights, depths and widths to abstract the forms, but in painting we see a reversibility of dimension that gives us the plane from which we can abstract the measurement. Maurice poses depth as an enigma because he sees things, not separate in dimensional-space but each of them in their place, precisely because they eclipse one another. This understanding of depth allows Merleau-Ponty’s global ‘locality’ where everything is in the same place at the same time. The abstracted measurement yields the voluminosity we express when we say something is there.

In the modern art world, Cubism followed Cezanne’s exploration of depth and restated that the external form is secondary and derived. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t stop his use of art at ‘depth’ but continues to use modern art in proposing an understanding of the other great enigma ‘colour’. That, however, is the subject for another blog.

Robots: Engineered Art

Robots: Engineered Art

Theo Jansen’s  Strandbeest  sculptures attracted enormous attention in the last few weeks, with over 17 million views on  the Insider clip showing the giant pieces moving across windswept beaches. The movement is without any executive control and uses wind, funnelled by land sails, to maintain momentum. The wind-sourced energy somewhat obscures the dependence of smooth movement on the interaction between the Strandbeest and the ground. The biological robotic nature of the structures has not been lost on the popular audience where the comments range from 'they are amazing'  to 'a bit creepy aren’t they'.The immediate attribution of anthropomorphic characteristic is testament to the popular (and wrong) idea that if it moves it has a mind! If Jansen’s Strandbeest robot were shown on a sloping surface without wind the interdependence of the environment and the morphology may have been more visible. What is obvious in the Strandbeest  is the morphology and materials chosen in its construction to achieve function. The critical nature of the jointing in the ‘legs’ is very obvious in that co-ordination of movement is achieved not because of central control but because of the interaction of the jointed legs and hence the body with the environment.

Rolf Pfeiffer and his many collaborators have ably demonstrated the interdependence of the environment and morphology on his biologically inspired robots and refers to the interdependence as a global communication – a very apt way to describe interaction and engagement of the various body constituents of the world. In his farewell lecture in 2014, outlining his incredible body of work, he demonstrates the numerous robots that he has built. He has robots that run, dance, swing, swim and even fly.  All these actions are achieved without a central controller within the robot, but rather by the engineered morphology, the material chosen for construction and the specific ecological niche that the robot body is placed in. The movement that we observe emerges from the interaction of the morphology, i.e. the body and the niche it operates in.

There is a special human reaction to  Stumpy - Pfeiffer’s dancing robot, which amazingly delivers 20 gaits (dance moves) from a ‘body’ that has only 2 degrees of actuation on 4 springy  'feet' interacting with it’s ‘dance floor’ niche.

Theo Jansen's Strandbeests also evoke a very human engagement not least because of their scale, however it is a pity that the artist has commented that he wants to incorporate 'artificial intelligence' into his next creations rather than seeing the inherent intelligence he has already embodied through the interaction of morphology, material and environment.

Is this stool taken?

Is this stool taken?

Ai Weiwei, Bang, 2010-2013, 886 antique stools, installation view

I walked through and around Ai Weiwei’s 2013 Bang organic sculpture when it was exhibited in Vancouver last year. The unified sculpture emerges from the connection of 886 three-legged wooden stools, all of which were made by traditional Chinese craftsmen. 

Walking through the internal spaces created by the piece, the individual stools quickly lose their object distinction while the primacy of their relationship to the overall structure is established. There is also an awareness that appreciation can only be achieved by exploring it from its created internal spaces i.e. becoming part of it.  It was evident that the gallery had to adjust the exhibition space, rooms, and other works of art, to display Bang.  In that necessary adjustment to accommodate the sculpture, western and eastern cultural differences become apparent. The traditional western display of the Objet d’art for passive appreciation by a clearly distinct viewer can be contrasted with the eastern integration of both art and viewer to create an identifiable relationship.

Richard Nisbett, Incheol Choi, Kaiping Peng and Ara Norenzayan propose that exposure to eastern and western cultural and social systems yields not only different ways of knowing the world, but also yields different cognitive thought systems. They see eastern systems driving a relationship-based perception which they contrast with an object-centricity of western societies. This view has the uncomfortable conclusion that neither our metaphysical understanding nor its consequent tacit epistemology are universal, but instead malleable.  To support their view, they carried out several studies including the testing of categorisation with eastern and western social groups. The eastern participants often rejected logically motivated outcomes in favour of typicality and plausibility, consistent with their experience of the world. The experimental studies highlighted significant differences in ‘to what’ and ‘how’ visual attention was directed. By measuring eye movements, quantifying eye saccades and combining the data with self-reported descriptions of visual scenes, they concluded that the attention of western participants was drawn to the individual objects in a scene rather than the entire scene and the relationships of its constituent elements seen by their eastern counterparts.

This can all be seen as highly interesting as an ethnography study. The researchers’ strong arguments for connecting object attention with personal agency are indeed worthwhile, while the categorisation data highlights the serious deficiencies in disciplines that use categorisation as a tool to understanding cognition. Even propositions that social systems like those of ancient China, which by sheer size, agrarian dependency and feudal organisation would be inclined to lean on harmony and agreement, are highly plausible. However, there is a wider implication being made in the paper i.e. that western logic is not a core universal cognitive process, but rather is cognitive content, originating in the the social and cultural systems of ancient Greece. In anticipation of a logic-criticality argument for technical progress, the authors list the numerous advances made by ancient China,  ‘the original or independent invention of irrigation systems, ink, porcelain, the magnetic compass, stirrups, the wheelbarrow, deep drilling, the Pascal triangle, pound-locks on canals, fore-and-aft sailing, watertight compartments, the sternpost rudder, the paddlewheel boat, quantitative cartography, immunization techniques, astronomical observations of novae, seismographs, and acoustics’,  as examples of the many technological achievements that were in place in China before Ancient Greece. The literature supports Nisbett’s contention that these advances were not a result of scientific theory but instead were indicative of a heuristic system that was advanced by practicality and empiricism. For many Greek philosophers, Plato included, concrete perception and direct experiential knowledge was viewed as unreliable and always rejected when it conflicted with their reasoned logical position. This sometimes impeded their progress.  Logan, as quoted by Nisbett, highlights that the Greek rejection of the concept of zero was due to the reasoned impossibility of nonbeing – to them it was logically self-contradictory! Understanding of zero, infinity and infinitesimals eventually came to the west via an eastern trail.

It is counterintuitive that a thought process like logic with its heavy cognitive load is the thought system of choice when heuristics are available. There is little value in eliminating possibilities on the basis of noncontradiction and abstracted reasoning if direct experience and dialectical reasoning provides a quick, practical answer. However, the efficacy of non-abstracted reasoning is clearly diminished when direct perception is unavailable. The learned techniques and application of abstract reasoning tools like logic have historically delivered for science in these instances.  Given the demonstrated different manifestations of thought systems for eastern and western participants in Nisbett’s experiments, his thesis that ‘metaphysics, epistemology and cognitive process exist in mutually dependent and reinforcing systems of thought’ is reasonable, as is his conclusion that a division of cognitive process and cognitive content may be arbitrary. The case can be made that both noncontradictory logic and contradictory dialectical constancy are learned cognitive content that provide tools for discovery rather than being discovered tools of innate cognitive process. 

The increasing appreciation of works by Ai Weiwei in what Nisbett defines as the west can be attributed to many reasons, not least the political and historical commentary that is associated with them. But in their ability to force western eyes on relationship saliency rather than object saliency, they may add weight to the argument that although there are cross-cultural differences in cognitive systems, they are not fixed.