Nature of Perception in Relation to Mystery of Modern Art Based on Merleau-Ponty's Thought

 
 
 
Perception and embodiment have an ontological status in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. The distance between subject and object is eliminated in perception, because in which especially in sensory perception there is no theorizing. Being-in-the-world is one of the fundamental characteristics of the subject's existence, so he has a relationship with the things before any reflection. Artworks have always been mysterious, while modern art is more mysterious than pre-modern art. The concern of modern art is truth and truth is always mysterious. Moreover, the modern subject has no control over his life-world because the modern world is incomplete and ambiguous. In addition, modern art does not contemplate the world in a single perspective; in painting, ambiguity replaces clarity, and multiple points of view replace one-point perspective. This can be another reason for the mystery of modern artworks.
Accordingly, when facing a modern artwork, a person sometimes feels close to the world and sometimes feels estranged; and this is the secret. In this article, it is considered what perception is according to Merleau-Ponty and how it is related to the mystery of modern art. This relationship indicates that modern art is a perceptual phenomenon and perceptual matter is mysterious. This mystery originates from the modern life-world, the existence of the modern subject and the nature of modern art. The data for this study have been collected through library and documentary sources and then they were described and analyzed qualitatively. The objective of this study is to reveal another significant aspect of modern art from Merleau-Ponty's perspective.
Most artworks have mysteriously emerged throughout history; even naturalis and realist artworks that are closer to the nature have been mysterious and ambiguous. According to ancient thinkers, mystery was associated with the beyond world and the muses or goddesses of art were the source of inspiration. Due to the mystery and ambiguity that are found in artworks and poems, they have always needed to be interpreted by experts; and this is one of the remarkable aspects of art. Merleau-Ponty's quotation about modern artworks confirms this point. Ragarding paintings he claims: "Today, painters exhibit the paintings that sometimes look preliminary designs. These are the works that are the subject of endless analyses because they do not have a single meaning." These words of Merleau-Ponty can be generalized to the early modern art, including the works of post-impressionists and cubists, whose contribution to the art of modernism is notable.
Due to the complex nature of modernism in modern art, the interpretation of modern art is more problematic than the art of the past. Most of these artworks are full of metaphors; this has led the artworks to be interpreted from different perspectives. Modern thinking has two characteristics of incompleteness and vagueness. These two characteristics are enough to consider modern artwork as mystery, despite the fact that some anti-modernist thinkers consider it to be nonsense. Along with Merleau-Ponty, mystery and ambiguity have been the concerns of other thinkers, for instance, existentialist philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Martin Heidegger had specific theories on mystery. Mystery has always been an integral part of art. Heidegger considered the issue of mystery of artworks to be related to being-in-the-world, which was a characteristic of the artist. Heidegger's attitude to being-in-the-world was favored by Merleau-Ponty, through which he explained the philosophy of perception. Attributing being-in-the-world to perception was one of the differences between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, but the common aspect of their philosophy was thinking about the existence. Existence is other than existent. Therefore, even in the unconcealment of existence, its secret is not revealed. What is disclosed is the secret of existence itself, covertly. Therefore, the history of the mystique of artworks in Merleau-Ponty's thought should be traced in Heidegger's notion of existence, which considered mystery in the relationship between human and existence.
Merleau-Ponty showed special attention to art and presented his thoughts in various fields of human sciences through the explanation and interpretation of artists' works, especially the analysis of Paul Cézanne's works. For him, the mystery of artworks was directly related to perception. The importance of perception for him is so much that his most significant work, according to many thinkers, is called Phenomenology of Perception, in which he explained the perception in detail and also discussed art, especially Cézanne's paintings. Merleau-Ponty rediscovered the perceived world utilizing the modern art and philosophy.
In the present study, an attempt has been made to answer this question: "What is the association between perception and mystery of modern artworks in Merleau-Ponty's thought?" To answer this question, it seems that according to Merleau-Ponty, human, including the artist and his audience is an embodied and being-in-the-world subject. The world is not the object of his cognition, so man perceives the world in its entirety in a pre-reflective manner. Human perception of being-in-the-world is an existential perception and the artwork takes place in this world. The world is mysterious and this mystery is found more in modern art for the reason that firstly, human does not dominate the world because he is a part of body of the world, and secondly, rediscovery of the perceived world in modern art is highly prone to negligence. In other words, the complexities of modern art and our negligence of being in-the-world are the reasons for its mystery.
Philosophical concepts can rarely be formulated to follow rules. The thoughts of some philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc. are of this type. Their thoughts are not like Michel Foucault's discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu's field theory to be easily formulated and used to interpret and analyze the artworks. In this article, Merleau-Ponty's thought and key concepts are used not as a rule and formula in analysis and framing, but as a way to interpret modern art and his thoughts on mystery. Thus, Merleau-Ponty's notions and keywords that form the theoretical framework of this article have been used not as rules and formulas but as keys in interpretation of his concepts. We are not faced with a smooth and rule-based path, but with a philosophical path in the analysis of our work.
In this article, Merleau-Ponty's perceptual thought has been expanded in several related realms. Notions such as being-in-the-world, existence, bodily experience, embodiment, and unity of subject and object have been discussed. The concept of mystery should be studied and understood along with these notions. Merleau-Ponty clearly found the abovementioned notions in Cézanne's works and elaborated them in an article entitled "Cézanne's Doubt". Present study considers Merleau-Ponty's perceptual theory as a theoretical framework for analysis and development of this issue.