Ponty
Notes on "Cézanne's Doubt" & "Eye and Mind"

Ponty "Cézanne's Doubt "

The first and last pages are about what we can/not know about a life based on a person's history. Freedom or determinism?

Some elements of his life: 134
- close attention to nature and to color
- inhuman character of his paintings
- devotion to the visible world
- flight from the human world, alienation of his humanity

Impressionism vs. Cézanne 136
- seven colors of the spectrum
- local color of surrounding objects
- appearance of its complements in color
- break down of local color by juxtaposing rather than mixing colors
vs
Cézanne's attempt to recover the object from being lost in relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects. Illuminated from within.
- Cézanne's eighteen colors
- Use of warm colors, the glow of object within
- Not break up of tone but graduated colors, close to objects form.

"aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it" 237
following contour without outline to enclose color
no perspectival arrangement

Primordial sensing {without dichotomies. . . Nietzschian abyss} 237
"Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting" 238

LIVED PERSPECTIVE vs GEOMETRIC PERSPECTIVALISM 238-39
- objects close at hand are smaller and far away larger than in photo
- circle seen obliquely oscillates around an ellipse
- freeze successive distortions and perspectives by painting them
- global, perspectival distortions not in themselves but to see them as an impression of emerging order, object in act of appearing
- geometric outline is limit to which the object recedes in depth
- Depth- thing in its inexhaustible reality, full of reserves

Before Distinction between Sensations
Not five senses but one sensing 240

"Cézanne's painting suspends the habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself" 241

Word/Thing, Image/Thing 242
Not imitation but thing expressing itself through artist.
Not a separate life in each consciousness, but an expressed relation… "vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things"
"arrests the spectacle" 243

PRIMARY
"concept cannot precede execution" 244
launching the art work as if it were the first word.
"to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us"
art communicates to a community 245

Cézanne releases meaning of things as they present themselves to him. 246
"At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been." 249
"We never get away from our life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face." 251

Ponty "Eye and Mind"

Part One, problem with science

"Science manipulates things and gives up living in them" 252
Limited by model.

"To say that the world is, by nominal definition, the object x of our operations is to treat the scientist's knowledge as if it were absolute, as if everything that is and has been was meant only to enter the laboratory" 253

must return to the "there is", site and soil of the sensible. Further include associate bodies that haunt me and whom I haunt. 254

Part Two, body as folded in world

"The painter 'takes his body with him'…we cannot imagine how a mind could paint."

"my mobile body makes a diff. In the visible world being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible" 255

Two Maps: the visible world in reach of my vision and the world of my motor projects
"extraordinary overlapping"
- P. 256 "My body simultaneously sees and is seen"
- Not a self through thought which assimilates objects to itself.
- Self by confusion, narcissism, caught up in things.

Interiority: does not proceed material arrangement of body. 256-57
WHAT IF…we could not see ourselves?
"Blending" between sensing and sensible, mind and body not divided.
"Nature is on the inside" … "Quality, light, color, depth which are before [in front of] us are there only because they awaken and echo in our body and because the body welcomes them."

Where is the painting I am looking at? 258
I see according to it or with it, not that I see it.
"the inside of the outside and outside of the inside"
both nearer and farther away from the actual.

"To see is to have at a distance" 259
Distinctly Visual of Vision 260
Ex. Mountain. From out there makes itself seen [in here] by the painter.
Interrogate by what means in vision things are made to be and to be specifically this thing: Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color…not real objects but ghosts that have only visual existence.
Klee, pianter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it.
"in-spiration" and "ex-piration"

Mirror translates and reproduces reflexivity of visual.

Part Three, on Descartes
Descartes Optics- thought that no longer wants to abide in the visible so makes the visible according to a model-in-thought [see intro. On science] 263

For D. light is action by contact, like blind man's sticks. Vision is modeled after touch. "At one swoop he removes action at a distance and relieves us of that ubiquity which is the whole problem of vision"

"A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror"- meaning?
For D. the mirror image is an empty, mechanical action, a dummy. 264
For P. mirror changes "things into spectacle and spectacle into things;myself into another and another into myself" Seeing and seen, the fold. (262)

***"Vision [for D.] is not the metamorphosis of things themeselves into the sight of them; it is not a matter of things' belonging simultaneously to the hughe, real world and the small, private world. It is a thinking that deciphers strictly the signs given within the body." 265

Painting for D. is not an access to Being. It is a mode of thinking according to an intellectual possession.

Problem of Color 266

Painting shows Space- Painting is for D. only a projection system which presents things as they would inscribe in our eyes. Painting makes us see the same way we would see the thing if it were here. "Especially it makes us see space where there is none" 266

Problem of Depth- 267
Why do things overlap and why are things hidden? This display of depth shows "my incomprehensible solidarity with one of them-my body"
"Either what I call depth is nothing [from God's view, an absolute geometry] or else it is my participation in a Being without restriction" 267

"Things encroach upon one another because each is outside of the other"
Painting, which makes me see depth, is "a being that is opened up," a window.

D's concept of space as absolute 268
Right in that it sets space free.
Mistaken in creating an outside of space, beyond all points of view & embodiment 268
"something in space escapes our attempts to look at it from above" 269

Ponty's rebuttal to Descartes:
- "It is not enough to think in order to see
- Vision is a conditioned thought. It is born "as occassioned" by what happens to the body"
- It is incited th thing by the body

The soul thinks with reference to the body, not in reference to itself. 270

Part Four, Depth

Depth as "first" dimension 275
Example of tile seen through water 277
Line set free, "let a line muse" 278-79
Line as Duration 280

Through sight, the world is in me and away from me. 283