Merleau Ponty

讀書時，曾經寫過一篇論文需要閱讀一些Merleau Ponty的文章，
由於時間所限，當時只選取小部份當時認為有用的段落來看，但越看越覺有趣，
立心日後有時間必認真地閱讀其著作。
畢業已一年多，終於從圖書館借來了其中一本由Galen A. Johnson編輯的The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader - Philosophy and Painting.

閱讀中，真的很精彩


"Conception" cannot precede "execution". Before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there. Because he has returned to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to take cognizance of it, the artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout, whether it can detach itself from the flow of individual life in which it was born and give the independent existence of an identifiable meaning to the future of that same individual life, or to the monads coexisting with it, or the open community of future monads. The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere -- not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the alreadly constituted reason in which "cultured men" are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which would embrance its own origins. P.69


it is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching. The reader or spectator, by following the clues of the book or painting, by establishing the concurring points of internal evidence and being brought up short when straying too far to the left or right, guided by the con-fused clarity of style, will in the end find what was intended to be communicated. The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. it will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition. P.70