Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / This dissertation addresses the first and most fundamental question in environmental philosophy: how should we conceive of the human place within nature? The title derives from the moment in Descartes’ second meditation when he considers what he believed himself formerly to be: a rational animal. Inquiring into what animality and rationality are would send him down a slippery slope, and he decides that he does not have the time to waste on such questions. Prioritizing the rational over the empirical, the metaphysical distinctions that follow precipitate a pivotal episode in the rise of modern science and technology: a disembodied intellect is freed to discover and manipulate the laws and forces at work in nature, conceived mechanistically. While generating many positive advances, for instance in anatomy and medicine, that break with Aristotelian ontological suppositions also marks the beginning of centuries of violence toward the animal within, not to mention the animals, or animal-machines, without. In response, many contemporary environmental thinkers swing the metaphysical pendulum in the opposite direction. Troubled by the consequences of an implicit mind-body dualism, they assume some rendition of its early modern antithesis, Spinozist ontological monism. God, or Nature is understood as comprising a single substance, with all other beings conceived as modifications of that substance. Such ontological humbling is supposed to produce an ethical humility, putting the human back in its place as one humbled part of the larger whole. Our concern is that without important qualifications, such ontological humbling merely provides another justification for man’s modern conquest of nature, in accordance with instrumentalizing, human-centered ends. If the human is conceived as merely one more species among others, we boast an equal right to act in accordance with the powers of our own natures. In response, we develop a thesis that builds from insights in the works of Maurice Merleau- Ponty. We argue that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is characterized by an “archeological,” or origin-directed orientation, according to which he eventually theorizes a phenomenological analogue to Spinoza’s ontological monism: his instigating insight is that both the perceiver, or the subject, and the perceived, or the object, derive from a common ontological fabric. Beginning from insights indicative of a contrary, but complimentary orientation present in Merleau-Ponty’s early works, we begin to construct a “developmental” account to balance out his increasingly “archeological” path, introducing qualifications that orient his thought in an ethical direction. The integrative ethical ideal that we propose entails a developmental, rather than regressive “descent” of the animal slope (le versant animal), without undermining or denying ethical capacities and responsibilities that are specifically human. Drawing from the works of Schelling’s middle period to which Merleau-Ponty turns in his late lectures on Nature, we argue that we must acknowledge tendencies toward violence and domination present within nature itself—and, consequently, present within us, as part of nature—such that becoming fully human would demand the overcoming of those tendencies in the service of a higher ethical ideal. Taking a cue from Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, we propose an integrative ideal of self-giving love. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / All our movements presuppose our being oriented. But what does it mean for the embodied subject to be oriented in space? How is the egocentric space of the lived body connected to the larger domain of objective space? While Husserl explored how the egocentric subject comes to situate itself within intersubjectively constituted objective space, Merleau-Ponty’s further inquiry into pre-objective spatiality suggests that the embodied subject is always already oriented beyond itself, via its connections to the three dimensions of the physical world. His work on the subjective experience of depth and verticality laid the groundwork for a phenomenology of the three dimensions, which I undertake here. For each of the three dimensions—verticality, horizontality and depth—I explore the interconnections among a) the sensed dimensions of bodily space b) the dimensions of intersubjective space and c) the geometric, abstract axes of objective space. Each of the dimensions in lived space is qualitatively distinct, both as sensed in the body and perceived externally, and they differ accordingly as bearers of meaning. My primary aim is to elucidate the specific character of the dimensions in all their expressive, existential, and cultural significance; this is done first at the level of subjective, bodily spatiality and then again at the broader cultural and historical level. To this end, I look to philosophy as well as to visual art, architecture, the history of religion and myth, psychology, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. Investigating the axes of the body in relation to the dimensions of the world means asking about orientation itself, for it lies at their nexus. I examine the role of spatial orientation in self-understanding, self-identity and memory as well as in shaping relations with the Other. Ultimately, the prevailing cultural (western) ideas of modern space and subjectivity, rooted in the cogito, prove to be in tension with a phenomenology of space and the three dimensions. The primacy of egocentricity deserves to be questioned in light of various alternate modes of spatial experience (attuned, shared) and alternate modes of orientation (allocentric, absolute). I conclude that orientation is better described as symbiotic and reciprocal, with the lived body always in relation to the world beyond itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Contemporary aesthetics includes a project directed at understanding the nature of pictorial representation. Three types of theories enjoy recent favor. One explains pictorial representation by way of resemblance or experienced resemblance between the picture and what it represents. A second employs interpretation: the spectator looks at a picture and interprets conventionally determined symbols found therein to mean what it represents. The third describes pictorial representation as a matter of experience. On this approach, when the spectator looks at a picture she has a visual experience of the thing represented. Key components of representation include the representation bearing artifact and the human activity that produces it. An adequate account of pictorial representation must neglect neither. Theories focusing on resemblance fail to account for the human role in representation so that a picture may represent only what it can resemble. Theories making interpretation of conventional symbols the key fail to account for the role visible properties play in grounding representation. Wollheim's experience based theory, however, unifies the visible properties of the artifact and the intentions of the artist in a single experience, called seeing-in, whereby a spectator sees in a picture what an artist intends to represent. Wollheim fails to specify just how visible properties of the artifact ground seeing-in. His account of seeing-in raises other curiosities as well. These issues can be dealt with if we apply phenomenological concepts developed by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception to our experience of pictures as a method of enriching Wollheim's account of seeing-in. / Master of Arts

In this dissertation, I examine art’s profound connections with temporality, understood as a defining feature of human existence. More specifically, I argue that art can be understood as a technology that experiments with and modifies human temporality through a process that oscillates and mediates between the self immersed in the artwork and the self that reflects upon that immersion. The first step in this argument consists in establishing art’s technological character via a phenomenology of art-experiences, suggested by the “postphenomenology” of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek, and by Alva Noë’s notion of artworks as “strange tools.” Artists and audiences play with possibilities of human action and perception, embodiment and cognition, precisely insofar as they are predicated on temporality. I clarify the operative sense of ‘temporality’ in this regard by critically appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s account of time and temporal style. In that account, time is a kind of rupture at the base of experience and temporal “style” expresses the fact that we are our time and that our existence consists, with a certain continuity, in both sedimented experiences and a transition between temporal perspectives that is itself perspectival. While acknowledging this account’s merits and its fruitfulness for understanding the experience of art, I argue that it needs emending since it entails an aim for completion that does not do justice to the full experience of time. My next step is to expand and offer some corroboration for my account by examining three works of art: Terrance Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011), Katsushika Hokusai’s woodprint The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), and Delmore Schwartz’s poem “Calmly we walk through this April’s day” (1937). In this connection I develop several novel concepts, useful to evaluating art-oriented temporality, including the concept of “temporal layering,” a more sophisticated understanding of the protentional/retentional structure of time, and the concept of “temporal framing,” which articulates how art experiences shape “regional” temporalities. Finally, I investigate how creating art reconfigures temporality. Borrow from Alfred Schütz, László Tengelyi’s, and Toni Morrison, I argue that we can understand creative moments as epiphanic events at the edges of regions of time. / 2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

Notre mémoire vise à mettre en lumière le rôle crucial que joue le thème de la nature dans l'œuvre de Merleau-Ponty. Nous y défendons une lecture continuiste de son corpus, situant, à la jointure de ses différentes phases, la persistance de l'interrogation sur la nature et sur le monde naturel. De ses premiers écrits sur la psychologie du comportement à son projet ontologique tardif - culminant dans son ouvrage inachevé Le visible et l'invisible - Merleau-Ponty cherche avec insistance à se frayer un chemin vers le versant inarticulé du monde vécu, à poser le regard sur ce qui précède et sous-tend la solidité et la cohérence du réel. Une telle entreprise, visant le « naturel » comme ce qui se trouve en dehors de nos réseaux humains de signification, doit se déployer à rebours des positivismes traditionnels qui tendent à introniser un seul pôle de l'expérience - le sujet ou l'objet - au statut de fondement du réel. Ce qui singularise le concept merleau-pontien de nature, c'est qu'il est avant tout le lieu où tente de s'exprimer un paradoxe irrésolu : la nature est ce qui résiste pleinement à notre humanité sans pouvoir être envisagé en dehors de celle-ci. Notre mémoire cherche à comprendre la genèse proprement phénoménologique de ce paradoxe de la nature, en mettant en lumière l'apport crucial des textes de Husserl à la critique merleau-pontienne des différents positivismes, critique qui reprend l'idée de « monde vécu » pour rompre définitivement avec l'idée d'une nature comprise comme théâtre objectif sur lequel se déploieraient une productivité humaine, une histoire, des vies subjectives et une culture intersubjective. Nous suggérons que la reprise que fait Merleau-Ponty des écrits de Husserl le pousse à envisager le questionnement sur la nature non-humaine comme une interrogation du versant « sauvage » de l'expérience qui, plutôt que de se trouver figé en dessous de l'histoire humaine, est à comprendre comme une productivité dynamique toujours à l'œuvre dans l'expérience vécue, une pré-objectivité aux avatars multiples qui participe à la détermination ouverte du réel. / This thesis is an attempt to shed light on the crucial role that the notion of nature plays in Merleau-Ponty's work. By approaching the philosopher's corpus as a unified movement built of several phases, we argue that his persistent interrogating of nature and the natural world can be understood as the hinge that articulates together all of its different moments. From his early writings on behavioral psychology to his late ontology - which culminates in his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible - Merleau-Ponty consistently seeks a way to grasp the dimensions of lived experience which have not already been articulated, to thematize what precedes and subtends the solidity and coherence of the reality that we experience. Such an endeavor, seeking nature as what lies outside and beyond our human networks of signification, unfolds in contradistinction with the classical positivist ontologies that tend to elevate a single pole of lived experience - either the subject or the object - as the founding term of reality. What characterizes Merleau-Ponty's concept of nature is that it resists such hypostases by remaining the locus of an unresolved paradox: nature is what fully resists our humanity without being conceivable outside of the boundaries of our humanity. This master's thesis seeks to unfold the phenomenological genesis of this paradoxical view of nature by highlighting the crucial contribution of Husserl's writings to the Merleau-Pontian critique of positivism, a critique that takes the idea of "perceived world" to definitely divorce the traditional conceptions of nature as an objective theatre stage upon which unfolds a human productivity, a history, a multiplicity of subjective lives, and an intersubjective culture. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty's taking up of Husserl's writings brings him to comprehend the interrogation of non-human nature as an investigation of the "wild" aspect of experience. The latter, instead of being conceived as a fixated entity that lies underneath human history, is to be envisaged as a dynamic productivity that is always at work across lived experience, a pre-objectivity which takes various shapes, and which participates in the open-ended determination of reality.

Merleau-Ponty représente une figure originale de la réception de l'inconscient psychanalytique en France et c'est d'abord autour de la question du complexe, mais surtout de celle du refoulement, qu'il entend engager un dialogue avec Freud. Si la discussion avec ce dernier est d'abord compromise par des prismes de lectures philosophiques et psychologiques qui en déforment le sens original, le philosophe a pu se donner de 1942 à 1945 une connaissance plus directe de l'oeuvre du psychanalyste, chez lequel il trouve l'intuition précieuse du refoulement, qu'il entend reprendre à son compte au sein de la théorie de la perception. La question est alors de savoir en quoi le réaménagement de l'inconscient au travers de l'enjeu central du refoulement permet encore de reconnaître le refoulement freudien dans la figure merleau-pontyenne du refus. En prenant Merleau-Ponty à la lettre, on se demande ainsi dans quelle mesure et dans quelles limites le philosophe peut continuer à parler du refoulement « dont parle la psychanalyse » à partir du moment où il procède au réaménagement existentiel du problème freudien en dehors de tout naturalisme. S'il est possible en effet de procéder à une critique des cadres théoriques inadéquats dans lesquels Freud a d'abord pensé le refoulement, et s'il est possible dans une certaine mesure de « parler un autre langage » que celui, matérialiste et énergétiste de la psychanalyse, peut-être l'ontologie merleau-pontyenne générale, dans ses conceptions relatives au sujet, à son corps, à son temps, à sa perception et à son monde déforme-t-elle alors nécessairement le refoulement freudien et tout ce qu'il permet de penser, théoriquement et pratiquement. / Merleau-Ponty stands an original position in the french reception of the Freudian problem of the unconscious, and this is around the concept of complex, or rather upon the problem of repression that he intends to open a dialogue with Freud. If the meeting with the latter ia at first compromised by the fact that external and previous psychological and philosophical readings of Freud have disformed the very genuine meaning of Freud to Merleau-Ponty's eyes and views, the philosopher was able, from 1942 to 1945, to change those views by getting a direct reading and personal understanding of the psychoanalyst's works, in which he finds the precious intuition of repression that he wants and needs to himself for his own theory of perception. Question is therefore to see how the refoundation of the unconscious by the means of the new understanding of the repression allows to maintain the Freudian repression and to be able to still recognize it, when it actually becomes the merleau-pontyan idea of refusal. Followinf Merleau-Ponty, we'll see if he can still claims he talks about the very repression psychoanalysis founded, as soon as he redefines the repression from an existentialist method and view and intends to extract the repression from its naturalists schemes and grounds. If it is quite possible to criticize the old scientific grounds amongst which Freud gave birth to the repression in the first place, and if it is possible to speak another conceptual language than Freud, a materialistic and energetical one, maybe the merleau-pontyan ontology regarding the subject, his embodiement, his timely structure, his perception and his world tend to deform the freudian repression.

Nous proposons dans notre thèse de donner de la cohérence à la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, en soulignant l'importance de la problématique du « sens », de l'« expression », et surtout du « langage ». Dans notre point de vue, si sa phénoménologie du corps, qui s'appuie sur le champ phénoménal, et son ontologie de la chair, qui est maintenue à travers la notion de la chair en tant que négativité et en même temps texture commune des êtres peuvent se placer comme une même philosophie, c'est à travers une continuité qui est impliquée dans son passage à partir de la simultanéité du sens et de l'expression qui est montrée par le comportement dans la structure du comportement et la Phénoménologie de la perception à l'être de chair fonctionnant en tant qu'entre-deux des termes opposés dans le visible et l'invisible. Le langage est ici un concept central explicitant la continuité et la cohérence entre les deux : dans sa thèse originale sur le langage, le comportement en tant que langage corporel (ce qu'il appelle la « parole parlante », le « cogito tacite » ou le « langage silencieux ») qui est considéré comme méta-langage et la modalité du mouvement charnel du phénomène langagier, qui est retrouvée dans la réversibilité verticale entre la sédimentation et la sublimation du sens et de l'expression et dans la réversibilité horizontale entre l'ipséité et l'altérité qui est demandée pour la fixation ou l'incarnation du sens fonctionne comme principe ou comme exemple par lesquels sa phénoménologie du corps et son ontologie de la chair sont définies comme une phénoménologie ontologique ou une ontologie phénoménale. [...] / We propose in our thesis to give consistency to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, highlighting the importance of the problem of "meaning", "expression", and especially "language". In our view, if its phenomenology of the body, which relies on the phenomenal field, and its ontology of the flesh, which is maintained through the notion of the flesh as a negativity and at the same time, a common texture of the beings can be placed as a single philosophy, it is through a continuity that is involved in its passage from the simultaneity of meaning and expression that is shown by behavior in The structure of behavior and Phenomenology of perception to the being of flesh functioning in as two opposing terms in The Visible and the Invisible. Here, language is a central concept explaining continuity and coherence between the two : in his original opinion on language, behavior as body language (what he calls the "parole parlante", the "cogito tacite" or the "silent language") which is considered meta-language and the modality of the fleshly movement of the linguistic phenomenon, which is found in the vertical reversibility between sedimentation and the sublimation of meaning and expression and in the horizontal reversibility between 'ipséité' and 'altérité ', which is required for the fixation or incarnation of meaning functions as a principle or as an example by which its phenomenology of the body and its ontology of the flesh are defined as an ontological phenomenology or a phenomenal ontology.

L'objet de ce travail est d'interroger les liens entre philosophie et histoire dans la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Il consiste à questionner une déclaration de ce philosophe qui affirmait que "Saussure pourrait avoir inauguré une nouvelle philosophie de l'histoire". Il s'agit pour nous de savoir quel sens une telle déclaration peut avoir pour Merleau-Ponty. Nous partons de l'hypothèse qu'il y a ici un changement de paradigme de la part de Merleau-Ponty pour la compréhension de l'histoire. Il ne s'agit plus de comprendre l'histoire comme c'était le cas pour Hegel ou Marx comme quelque chose qui aurait une intelligibilité et un sens à partir d'une démarche seulement dialectique, il s'agit de comprendre l'histoire à partir de la linguistique. Notre propos est d'établir comment ce changement peut se justifier. Le travail consiste en trois parties distinctes. Dans la première nous tâchons de montrer qu'il y a eu une philosophie de l'histoire chez Merleau-Ponty avant sa lecture de Saussure et que c'était à partir de la notion de Gestalt que l'histoire pouvait être comprise. Dans notre seconde partie nous voulons néanmoins montrer que la philosophie merleau-pontyenne de l'histoire ne prend son véritable sens qu'avec la lecture de l’œuvre des linguistes et en particulier de Saussure. C'est la notion de signification en tant que "diacritique" qui permet de penser le langage et aussi l'histoire. Cette deuxième partie montre de ce fait la lecture des linguistes comme un moment charnière pour la compréhension de la philosophie merleau-pontyenne de l'histoire. Notre troisième partie montre alors que les interrogations de Merleau-Ponty dans sa dernière philosophie et ce qu'on appelle l'ontologie de la chair gravite autour d'un questionnement sur l'histoire et le langage, ce questionnement amenant Merleau-Ponty à penser l'histoire, la philosophie et son langage dans une nouvelle forme qui s'apparente à une forme quasi littéraire / The aim of this work is to investigate the links between philosophy and history in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought. This philosopher stated that "Saussure might have opened a new philosophy of history." I shall enquire what could be the meaning of such a statement to Merleau-Ponty, thus assuming that there is a transformation of the paradigm he used to conceptualise history. History indeed shouldn't be understood, as was the case with Hegel or Marx, as something having intelligibility and meaning only from a dialectical perspective, but should also be understood with the help of linguistics. Our point is to ascertain how such a change can be accounted for. This work is threefold. In the first part, I endeavour to show that Merleau-Ponty had a philosophy of history prior to his reading of Saussure, and that it was grounded in the notion of Gestalt. In a second part, I undertake to show that what is yet most significant in Merleau-Ponty's way of conceiving history comes from his interest in the work of some linguists and chiefly Saussure's. It is the notion of signification "understood as "diacritical"" which enables the conceptualisation of language as well as of history. The reading of linguists can thus be seen as a turning point in the making of his philosophy of history. The third part then goes on to show that the later Merleau-Ponty, and what has been called ontology of the flesh, revolves around a questioning of history and language bringing him to conceive history, philosophy and its language anew - that is: through a quasi-literary form

No presente estudo, propomos o exame do problema da função simbólica nos primeiros trabalhos de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Mais especificamente, trata-se de abordar a posição do problema n\' \"A estrutura do comportamento\", obra publicada em 1942, e sua retomada crítica na \"Fenomenologia da percepção\", publicada em 1945. Esse tema, pouco explicitado pelo filósofo, é também objeto de raros debates entre seus comentadores. Em seu primeiro trabalho, Merleau-Ponty, apropriando-se da semântica do símbolo advinda da neuropsiquiatria do início do século XX, caracterizara o nível de organização da corporalidade humana a partir da sua capacidade de ultrapassar o caráter imediato das situações vividas. A atitude categorial, ou simbólica, aparecia, então, como uma nova significação do comportamento, tendo em vista as formas sincrética e amovível do comportamento encontradas na escala zoológica. A atividade humana investiria o meio de virtualidade e, assim, redimensionaria a existência concreta que se denota no comportamento animal. Nos capítulos da \"Fenomenologia da percepção\" em que Merleau-Ponty trata da espacialidade, da motricidade e da expressividade do corpo próprio, do mesmo modo que o autor prescinde das explicações causais dos fenômenos patológicos utilizados à guisa de material de discussão, ele prescinde das explicações calcadas na função simbólica, doravante associadas a análises de cunho intelectualista. O filósofo combate, tanto na neuropsiquiatria representada especialmente por Gelb e Goldstein quanto na filosofia de Cassirer, o que considera representar uma autonomia crescente da ideação simbólica na dinâmica entre conteúdo e forma. Ao mesmo tempo, Merleau-Ponty nos faz ver que, nessa neuropsiquiatria e nessa filosofia do símbolo, é possível apreender análises fenomenológicas acerca da expressividade motora, gesticular e linguageira do corpo próprio. Tais análises revelam, nele, uma forma de saber que não se reduz nem à ordem do em si nem à ordem do para si, delineando, portanto, a noção de intencionalidade que interessa ao filósofo desenvolver, fundada na unidade sinérgica do corpo próprio. Daí a importância que um outro dispositivo teórico-antropológico adquire ao longo da \"Fenomenologia da percepção\": a noção de esquema corporal. / In this study, we aim to investigate the problem of the symbolic function in Maurice Merleau-Ponty\'s first works. More specifically, we address the position of that problem in \"The Structure of Behavior\", published in 1942, and its critical review in the \"Phenomenology of perception\", published in 1945. This theme, on which the philosopher provided few specifications, is also a source of rare debates among his commentators. In his first work, Merleau-Ponty, using the semantics of the symbol from early 20th-century neuropsychiatry, characterizes the organizational level of human corporality based on its ability to go beyond the immediate nature of the experienced situations. The categorial or symbolic attitude seemed to be a new signification of behavior, in view of the synchretic and movable forms of behavior found on the zoological scale. Human activity would imbue the environment with virtuality and, thus, redimension the concrete existence denoted in animal behavior. In those chapters of the \"Phenomenology of perception\" in which Merleau-Ponty discusses the spatiality, motricity and expressiveness of the own body, in the same way as the author does without the causal explanations of the pathological phenomena used as discussion material, he dispenses with the explanations traced in the symbolic function, hereafter associated with intellectualist analyses. The philosopher combats, both in the neuropsychiatry particularly represented by Gelb and Goldstein and in Cassirer\'s philosophy, what he considers to represent a growing autonomy of the symbolic idea in the dynamics between content and form. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty makes us see that, in this neuropsychiatry and philosophy of the symbol, phenomenological analyses can be apprehended about motor, gesture and language expressions of the own body. These analyses reveal a form of knowing that is reduced neither to the order of in itself nor to the order of for itself, thus outlining the notion of intentionality which the philosopher wants to develop, based on the synergical unit of the own body. This explains the importance another theoretical-anthropological device gains in the \"Phenomenology of perception\": the notion of body schema.

O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a questão da pintura na filosofia de Merleau-Ponty. Inicialmente inscrita nos quadros de uma filosofia da existência, e depois, com maior destaque, nos quadros de uma ontologia. A questão da arte, particularmente a pintura, surge como meio privilegiado de investigação das nossas relações mais surdas e secretas com o Ser, ou com isso que Merleau-Ponty chamava de camada pré-reflexiva de sentido de mundo, anterior às teses de nossa linguagem. Isso porque a atividade da pintura revela os meios da visibilidade, que nosso olhar cotidiano deixa para trás e esquece a favor do mundo constituído culturalmente. Ou seja, habitamos um mundo que esquece suas premissas, e a tarefa do pintor, especialmente a de Cézanne, é recuperar o contato do olhar com este mundo inabitual. Nesta relação originária do corpo com o mundo, destaca-se, na obra de Merleau-Ponty, uma nova concepção de profundidade, que não é apenas do espaço, mas do corpo, e também das coisas. Merleau-Ponty apontou para esta noção em seus ensaios sobre arte, na tentativa de recolocar em questão a atividade artística como atividade que revela a implicação entre o mundo percebido e a corporeidade. Percebeu na profundidade a implicação da reversibilidade do corpo: a visibilidade a que se abre o vidente é também a de seu corpo visível, que é ao mesmo tempo vidente e visível, senciente e sensível. O autor afirma que, uma vez que este entrecruzamento está dado, aí estão, igualmente, colocados todos os problemas da pintura. Sendo assim, a pintura revela o enigma do próprio corpo. Minha visão se faz nas coisas e me apreende ao mesmo tempo no meu olhar desdobrado diante de mim, entrelaçamento que possibilita uma visibilidade secreta, ou um duplo carnal. O filósofo desenvolve o termo ?carne? para denominar este ?entre? o vidente e o visível, abertura de um ao outro, e passagem de um no outro, que define nosso acesso ao Ser. Percorremos algumas questões: entre o mundo percebido e o ato expressivo, o que é a atividade do artista, senão uma coerência com a visibilidade que o provoca e, portanto, que mal se desprende do espetáculo do mundo? Como o pintor ou o poeta expressariam outra coisa senão seu encontro com o mundo? E o que buscam neste encontro, senão uma relação mais verdadeira, sem ser uma verdade que se assemelhe ao mundo, mas coerente em seu encontro, isto é, capaz de expressar o invisível que anima a relação do olhar com a visibilidade, ou do sentir com a realidade? Neste movimento de pensamento, que inicialmente enfatiza uma nova idéia de Razão ou de Verdade através da atividade do olhar, chega-se, por fim, à noção de desejo ou de corpo libidinal. Perceber é desejar, movimento inscrito na abertura do Ser sensível, que inaugura as trocas entre o corpo e as coisas, em que o olhar ou a visibilidade é um elemento privilegiado. / The aim of this study is the research of the problem of painting in the philosophy of Merleau Ponty. Originally enrolled in the frames of an existencialistic philosophy, aferwards it was put with more prominence, in the frame of an ontology.The problem of art, especially of painting, arises as a privileged way of research of our more deaf and secret relations with Being, or wich that what Merleau Ponnty nominated the pre-reflexive layer of the sense of the world, previous to the thesis of our language. This is so because the activity of painting reveals the means of visibility that our daily look leaves behind and forgets privileging the cultural constructed world. In other words, we live in a world that forgets its premisses, and the task of the painter, especially of Cézanne, is to recover the contact of the look on this unhabitual world. In this original relation of the body with the world we may emphasize, in the work of Merleau Ponty, a new concept of depth, that is not only of space, but of the body, and also of the things. Merleau Ponty pointed to this notion in his essays about arts, trying to question again the artist?s activity as an activity that reveals the implication between the perceived world and the bodyness. He perceived in the depth the implication of the revertibility of the body: the visibility which opens itself to the beholder is also that of his visual body, which is at the same time beholder and visible object, sensing and sensible. The author states that once this intercrossing is given, all the problems of painting are here placed in the same way. In being so, the painting reveals the enigma of the body itself. My look realizes itself in the things and grasps me at the same moment in my look unfolded in front of myself, this interlinking makes possible a secret visibility or a carnal double. The philosophe develops the term \"flesh\" to denominate this \"between\" the beholder and the visible, opening one to the other, giving passage from one to the other, which defines our access to Being. We will deal with some questions: What is the activity of the artist between the perceived world and the expressive act, other then a coherence with the visibility that it causes and, therefore, what harm does come from the spectacle of the world? How the painter and the poet would express other things than their meeting with the world? And in this meeting what they are looking for other than a more true relation, without being a truth which is similar to the world, but coherent in their meeting, this is, capable to express the invisible that cheers up the relation of the gaze with the visibility or of the feeling with the realityIn this movement of thoughts, which emphasizes initially a new idea of Reason and of Truth by means of the activity of looking, one arrives, finally to the notion of desire or of the libidinal body. To perceive is to desire, a movement graved in the opening of sensitive Being, that inaugurates the exchanges between the body and the things, in whicht he looking or the visibility is a privileged element.