Merleau-Ponty dialogues with the Rationalism and the painting in the “Eye and Mind”

Abstract

In the Eye and Mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty dialogues with the Great Rationalism, specially with Descartes, criticizes the ingenuous pretensions of the sciences of the early 20th century to reproduce the phenomena in laboratory and pays tribute to the painting, a form of expression that shows to the philosophy its own point of departure: the living in the world, that conjugates the verbs ‘I see’ with ‘I can’. We simultaneously see and are seen and we dislocate ourselves, even if only with the regard; moreover we touch and are touched, forming an interlacing that forms the chiasm of sensibility. In order to construct his ontology, Merleau-Ponty disagrees with every point of view that only overflies, transforming things in objects that ought to be analyzed by subjects. In contrast, he valorizes the painter’s activity, in which the painter, using his own body to paint, fuses himself with the painting. It provides elements to his philosophy, in which that who sees does not differ from that which is seen, nor the subject from the object, nor the ‘I’ from the world. In doing this, MerleauPonty wins as adept Gilles Deleuze, which, although critic of the phenomenology, endorses this amalgamation of painting with philosophy.