Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne: On Doubt of the Thought and the Infinity of Perception - Paperback

by Augustinus Miri (Author)

EXTRACT: "It is not by anxiety or by the gaze of the other, as Sartre insists, but by the doubt that man is set free. By letting the body experience, the body exist and come into being, the thought escapes the doubt of a me and my relation to the world that can never be explained by science".

The book presents Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in a critique of the doubt of thought and highlights how it enables the infinity of perception. By unfolding Cézanne's unique color modulations, which negate both the necessity of the line and Cézanne's self-doubt, the book explains how it is the infinity of perception that forms our world of external surfaces, but science claims is an illusion.

QUOTE: "The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. [...] But why do we say this, since in all these cases the landscape is not independent of the supposed perceptions of the characters and, through them, of the author's perceptions and memories? How could the town exist without or before man, or the mirror without the old woman it reflects, even if she does not look at herself in it? [...] This is Cézanne's enigma, which has often been commented upon: Man is absent from but entirely within the landscape." (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, p. 169)