Writing
05.15.2026
[Art] exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.
– Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
The painter Paul Cézanne spent his life working for and against vision. He felt at war with his own mind; looking out at the landscape before him, nature revealed itself as porous and unfixed. Terrified that his “weak reason would not survive” in face of this perceptual distortion, Cézanne fell into frequent fits of despair, at times convinced there must be “trouble with his eyes.” Friends who had once praised his talents became incredulous. For French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, however, Cézanne’s so-called hereditary weaknesses were the basis of his genius. In a 1945 essay titled “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty interprets the artist’s breakdown of reason as a necessary condition for his “learning to see the world anew.” A stand-in for the philosopher’s own phenomenological project––undoing science’s monopoly on perception––Cézanne used painting to denaturalize objectivism.
According to Merleau-Ponty, science has obscured the world through concepts, language, and reason. We are all too familiar with comprehending life through the laws of nature, determined by causes and effects. What would it mean to pull back this cloak of rationality and take stock of reality? Merleau-Ponty argues that in renouncing the idea of world-as-determinate-object, a lived experience emerges of which science is but a “second-order expression.” His phenomenology aims to regain contact with this pre-reflective register, which is constituted by an unreason of which we are “the absolute source.” Suspending the primacy of science and certainty is requisite to rediscover “originary consciousness.” Doubt thus emerges as a productive epistemological posture: “to throw the ‘real’ into doubt” is to finally experience, or be free to see, the world as it is given.
In this essay, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty transforms Cézanne’s doubt into an ontological category and redefines it as an act of freedom. The first section of the paper will introduce Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and situate art within it. The second section will turn to the question of methodology, identifying the characteristics of what I name Merleau-Ponty’s psychoanalytic-phenomenological approach to the interpretation of art. The third and final section will reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Cézanne’s work, illustrating this novel method in practice. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation ultimately reveals that aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis share the common goal of unrooting us from conviction through a process of defamiliarization. Each of these disciplines arrives at the same conclusion, namely that there exists a register of experience beyond rational understanding, and the only means to access it is through a posture of doubt.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology
Indebted to both Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty characterizes phenomenology as a “study of essences” and a “descriptive psychology.” It is an expository enterprise that aims to understand human experience from a first person––and, crucially for Merleau-Ponty, embodied––point of view. In his seminal Phenomenology of Perception, published the same year as “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty argues that both empiricism and rationalism obscure our lived experience. From the modern scientific perspective, the world is an object to be studied from on high and all at once; from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, the world is in a perpetual state of emergence, and can never be understood as a totality. Like an “inalienable presence,” it is “always ‘already there’ prior to reflection.” Merleau-Ponty thus rejects Cartesian dualism––which draws divisions between subject and object, self and world––as well as sensualism and transcendental idealism––which reduce reality to mere states of consciousness. Instead, he takes up Husserl’s eidetic reduction, which interprets the world ce que je vis and aims “to match reflection to the unreflective life of consciousness.”
Merleau-Ponty introduces the idea of operative intentionality to describe this unreflective consciousness. Derived from Husserl, “operative intentionality” stands in contrast to “act intentionality.” Act intentionality, sometimes referred to as “noesis,” lives in the domain of reason and encompasses our conscious mental acts and judgements. Operative intentionality, by contrast, refers to the prereflective, habitual, and bodily way in which we engage with the natural, pre-scientific world. It “provides the text that our various forms of knowledge attempt to translate into precise language.” Merleau-Ponty suggests that operative intentionality compels us to reconsider, or doubt, our notion of what it means to have something in mind. In this way, it functions much like the unconscious in Freud’s metapsychology.
Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is the means by which we can gain access to this tacit register of experience. He has a specific concept of perception in mind here, one that has no causal relationship to science as such:
Perception is not a science of the world, nor even an act or a deliberate taking of a stand; it is the background against which all acts stand out and is thus presupposed by them. The world is not an object whose law of constitution I have in my possession; it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and of all my explicit perceptions. … When I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or of science, I do not find a source of intrinsic truth, but rather a subject destined to the world.
Because perception here operates without deference to linguistic or conceptual material, it has truth-bearing potential. Merleau-Ponty argues that the reflective attitude of science has corrupted perception, forcing a “conversion of the gaze” whereby things as they are given instantaneously transform into comprehensible phenomena. Operative intentionality is the aspect of mind that is always already united with a way of seeing prior to this conversion.
Art as Ontological Disclosure
For Merleau-Ponty, art can awaken the mind to its latent operative intentionality by bringing us back into “naïve contact” with our “primordial perception.” Merleau-Ponty backs into this argument by first articulating the limitations of a purely philosophical methodology:
[Husserl’s phenomenological] reduction is presented as the return to a transcendental consciousness in front of which the world is spread out in an absolute transparency, animated throughout by a series of apperceptions whose reconstitution, beginning from their results, is the task of the philosopher.
In this passage, Merleau-Ponty seems to credit the philosopher, not the artist, as the figure who can deliver us back into a pre-reflective register. Yet the phrase “beginning from their results” signals a different thesis: by introducing causal logic, Merleau-Ponty is actually making the claim that philosophers only have access to an experience after its assimilation into consciousness. The phenomenological reduction itself “teaches us” that anything fully taxonomized remains unattainable. Indeed, operative intentionality “is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.” Merleau-Ponty highlights philosophy’s disciplinary limits and introduces a gap: although language gives immense depth to our lives, it relies on concepts, and thus can only interpret or translate the world as it is given to us.
Merleau-Ponty argues that art can bridge this gap by intervening in the perceptual process before it has been made into anything. Unlike philosophy, art communicates through visual form. This was clearly true for Cézanne, who though he attempted to articulate his way of seeing in journals and letters, “could not convince by his arguments and preferred to paint instead.” As literary critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote, art “[imparts] the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” through its unique capacity to render objects “unfamiliar.” In using perception to defamiliarize objects, art engenders doubt in both its viewers and its makers. Indeed, doubt emerges as the only epistemological position within this aesthetic paradigm from which an artist can produce. This returns us to Cézanne, whose paintings were able to recondition our visual minds precisely by modeling the process––and necessity––of questioning mimetic reality. Art, for Merleau-Ponty, is thus the highest order vehicle for accessing operative intentionality.
Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics could be summarized in the following way: art makes an ontological disclosure through form. Yet some scholars maintain that the philosopher merely instrumentalizes art to elaborate an already developed phenomenology. Jonathan Gilmore, for example, has argued that in attempting to make general aesthetic claims and furnish his specific phenomenology with a visual explanation simultaneously, Merleau-Ponty fails to produce a philosophy of art. Gilmore claims that Merleau-Ponty “does not isolate anything peculiar to art, artists, or artistic experience.” However, there are numerous passages where Merleau-Ponty treats a broader concept of “the artist” to argue that art actualizes truth. What is “peculiar” to art in Merleau-Ponty’s paradigm is its ability to “teach its own lesson” by making a “claim on every possible mind” that calls forth a universal unknown.
For Merleau-Ponty, art’s ontological disclosure is distinct from philosophy because works of art cannot be expressions of the rational mind. Art abdicates its stake in an “already constituted reason” and moves the viewer “toward a reason which contains its own origins.” Art can thus never be an act of translation: “Expression is like a step taken in the fog––no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.” This is true for the artist as well, who remains a stranger to the meaning of their own work up until the moment it has been realized. The creative act, says Merleau-Ponty, is only “a vague fever”; an artist who attempts to illustrate a concept “misses the mystery” altogether. The work of art becomes a meeting place for two minds cloaked in dark, grasping at something for which they have no name. It follows that an artwork must always be novel––that is, must provide an aesthetic experience so unfamiliar no concept could be adequate to it. Merleau-Ponty thus dubs Cézanne’s problem that of “the first word.”
The Psychoanalytic-Phenomenological Approach
Any effort at interpreting works of art within this aesthetic paradigm––art as ontological disclosure through defamiliarization––must itself remain open to doubt. Here psychoanalysis reenters the picture as a method grounded in uncertainty. Given Merleau-Ponty’s desire to denaturalize the certainty of scientific objectivism, he by no means accepted the psychoanalytic project at face value. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty disparages Freud’s gratuitous preoccupation with sexuality in our psychological self-understanding: “it is obvious that a doctrine which brings in sexuality everywhere cannot, by the rules of inductive logic, establish its effectiveness anywhere.” Freud’s metapsychological framework of a psychic economy––which contends that any science of the mind would be incomplete without a quantitative perspective––is similarly at odds with Merleau-Ponty’s project, since any attempt to operationalize a speculative theory of mind precludes the disavowal of science.
Yet Merleau-Ponty contends that these critiques only hold up “on paper.” For Merleau-Ponty, the task at hand was to tease apart the strands of Freud’s theory of mind that could be usefully integrated into his phenomenology. Freud’s greatest contribution was his theory of the unconscious, which closely aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of operative intentionality. In a 1915 essay, Freud writes: “it is both untenable and presumptuous to claim that whatever goes on in the mind must be known to consciousness.” He continues:
Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psychoanalysis bids us not to set conscious perception in the place of the unconscious mental process which is its object. The mental, like the physical, is not necessarily in reality just what it appears to be.
Taking Freud at his most general, there are aspects of mental life that are unconscious. Freud famously remarked that psychoanalysis “[proves] to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.” Freud gives a name to the paradoxes of certainty to argue that any picture of the mind must leave room for doubt. Phenomenology, too, posits that we aren’t “masters” of our houses, and aims to decenter the conscious mind. Merleau-Ponty credits psychoanalysis with “[teaching] us to notice echoes, allusions, repetitions.” As an hermeneutic practice, psychoanalysis reveals “how each life muses over riddles whose final meaning is nowhere written down.” Psychoanalysis from this perspective shores up details which would otherwise go unnoticed, providing a framework of interpretation that illuminates but in no way determines a life.
By employing this framework to interpret art, Merleau-Ponty stands in direct opposition to traditions that have long struggled to make sense of art that defies linguistic clarity. Merleau-Ponty takes aim at two specific methods in “Cézanne’s Doubt”: formalism and psychobiography. While formalism isolates visual properties to produce an analysis emptied of external significance, psychobiography locates meaning in the artist’s psyche and familial history, often missing the work’s affective charge. The former is orthodox and ahistorical; the latter fails to adequately decode aesthetic encounters. I will focus on the latter in an effort to show how Merleau-Ponty’s own psychoanalytic-phenomenology differs from this tradition.
Psychobiographical readings tend to reduce works of art to an artist’s psychology––or more commonly, pathology––and often codify the “tortured artist” trope in the process. Merleau-Ponty argues that this overemphasis on psychology caused many in Cézanne’s life to illicitly dismiss his genius. Émile Zola saw Cézanne as a “genius gone wrong”; Emile Bernard dubbed the artist’s turn away from classical perspective “Cézanne’s suicide”; Camille Mauclair viewed his “admissions of powerlessness” as proof of psychological weakness. Merleau-Ponty himself diagnosed the artist as schizophrenic, yet refused to reduce the meaning of Cézanne’s work or life to this affliction. As Galen A. Johnson has argued, Merleau-Ponty instead defends a dialectical understanding of the relation between Cézanne’s work and his life. This view, Johnson argues, “permits neither a Sartrean reduction of artistic meaning to the subject’s for-itself project nor the mechanistic interpretation of psychoanalysis that would reduce artistic meaning to the unconscious of the body-object.” Johnson’s use of the word mechanistic is crucial here: an overdetermined psychoanalysis––here styled as psychobiography––will never prove adequate as a method to interpret works of art.
In an interesting reversal, Merleau-Ponty holds up Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci as somewhat of a model for this dialectical method. Though critics have situated Freud’s Leonardo study within the psychobiographical canon, Freud gives it the name “pathography.” Freud neglects to provide any positive definition of this method, articulating only what pathography should not be held accountable for, namely “making the great man’s achievements intelligible.” Freud’s primary goal in the essay is to extract meaning vis-à-vis the artist’s history, psychological life, and conscious or unconscious intentions. Freud expresses little interest in the ways in which Leonardo’s art represents the world, which, by contrast, Merleau-Ponty identifies as Cézanne’s highest achievement. Though pathography puts forth an artist-as-patient model of interpretation, Merleau-Ponty seemingly introduces Freud’s efforts as an instantiation of good interpretive practice, inadvertently arguing that pathography can be applied as a dialectical rather than deterministic approach.
Freud’s analysis of Leonardo maintains that the “nature of the artistic function” remains “inaccessible to us along psycho-analytic lines.” Here Merleau-Ponty would certainly agree, having attributed Cézanne’s artistic inspiration to “an infinite Logos.” Freud soon after declares, however, that psychoanalysis is capable of making Leonardo’s “manifestations” and “limitations intelligible to us.” Anticipating a critique based on the notion that psychology can account for the origin of inspiration, Freud posits: “surely no one should be blamed for not carrying out something he has never promised to do.” Though Freud draws a clear distinction between “the artistic function” and the work itself, this does not reconcile these apparently contradictory statements.
The possibility of synthesis emerges when Freud writes, “we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance.” Merleau-Ponty takes the word “chance” as an opening, in a sense erasing any seeming contradiction: the “psychoanalyst’s hermeneutic musing” resists all causal logic by claiming that any interpretation is “in principle simply possible.” If each moment in a given life is “like the words of the oracle, an ambiguous symbol,” interpretation can only go so far. Merleau-Ponty concludes that an artist’s life at once betrays nothing, and yet, “if we know how to interpret it––we can find everything in it.” If we can agree that the work of psychoanalysis is to elucidate the dialectical relation between reality and fantasy, past and future, certainty and doubt, it follows for Merleau-Ponty that we can’t “demand inductive rigor from it.” For this reason, Merleau-Ponty concludes that though Freud’s analysis of certain events in Leonardo’s life may appear deterministic, this cannot alone discredit his “psychoanalytic intuition.” He takes this as a starting point for his own methodology, using psychoanalysis to inform phenomenology.
Cézanne’s Doubt
Merleau-Ponty’s account of Cézanne’s formal technique serves as the meeting point for his original philosophical problem––science’s monopoly on perception––and his procedural intervention––a psychoanalytic-phenomenology. By treating Cézanne’s life and work dialectically, Merleau-Ponty proves that Cézanne’s doubt was the necessary condition for his genius. For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne enacted in paint a way of seeing that doubted the facticity of a scientific perspective. The philosopher thus provides an insight into the artist and his work that would be impossible without a psychoanalytic-phenomenology.
Cézanne is widely remembered for having triumphed over tradition by refusing to mimetically represent reality. The artist, like Merleau-Ponty, understood that lived experience is neither geometric nor photographic. While classical painting uses linear perspective to present a world already organized by science, photography produces an image frozen in time. For Cézanne, as for Merleau-Ponty, both styles are distortions rather than representations of reality.
By contrast, Cézanne “wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization.” As such, he had to break with what preceded him and start anew. Merleau-Ponty identifies two formal techniques that exemplify this new style: color and line. In Cézanne’s work, a multitude of outlines emerge through color, causing the two to become essentially indistinguishable. When contours are rendered using singular lines, the object takes on the quality of a geometrical concept, suddenly fixed in place. For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s use of multiple outlines creates an oscillating visual effect that mimics the “swelling” that occurs when we perceive objects in time:
… it is Cezanne's genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.
Together, these techniques form a visual language that, according to Merleau-Ponty, allows the viewer to get in touch with the world’s “true density.” Reality is thus given to the viewer as an infinite composite rather than as a static image.
Cézanne’s style encourages us to doubt a version of perceptual experience characterized by a clarity that his own perceptual experience lacked. Each painting invites us to share in his doubt, and in doing so, encounter truths about the world previously locked away in the artist’s tortured mind. Rather than perceiving a table at a right angle to the floor beneath it, complete with four sharp corners, Cézanne’s painting reveals the object’s true nature as an always unfolding, moving image. The canvas thus acts as an opening to reunite us with operative intentionality—that pre-conceptual ground which sees things as they truly are:
In giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions, as, for example, the illusion we have when we move our head that objects themselves are moving––if our judgement did not constantly set these appearances straight.
Cézanne’s surrender to chaos and refusal of linear perspective allowed him to destabilize the fixity through which we interpret the visual world and return us to an experiential fluidity far older and more basic.
Conclusion
How did the same psychological trait––doubt––for so long condemn, and suddenly vindicate, Cézanne’s work? For Merleau-Ponty, the answer resides in the struggle of lived experience against science’s monopoly on perception. In experiencing the world solely through the lens of reason, we deny ourselves access to truth. Doubt, by unrooting us from scientific conviction, restores the world as an emerging, indeterminate “mass without gaps.” Within this framework, doubt is transformed from a hereditary weakness into a productive epistemological posture: the process by which we might rediscover operative intentionality.
Insofar as lived experience precludes any degree of certainty, deterministic interpretation commits a philosophical error by enacting the very habituation it seeks to undo. Merleau-Ponty thus moves from an ontological problem to a methodological one, presenting psychoanalytic-phenomenology as the only interpretive tool capable of respecting a life’s inherent circularity. He refuses to taxonomize the artist’s work through a history of style or causal pathology, instead advocating for a dialectical understanding of a life and its output. In shoring up details which would otherwise go unnoticed, psychoanalysis provides a framework of interpretation that illuminates but in no way determines a life. Rather than foreclose doubt, this integrative method treats it as a necessary precondition.
While both philosophy and psychoanalysis work to unroot us from conviction, they remain constricted by language; conversely, art has a unique capacity to communicate at the pre-rational level. Art’s ontological disclosure is distinct from philosophy because it can never be an expression of the rational mind. Merleau-Ponty argues that Cézanne’s work makes an ontological disclosure by giving form to the always unfolding process of lived experience. Cézanne’s work is the perfect instantiation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in painting––by “abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations,” Cézanne was able to freeze “primordial perception” on the canvas. In probing Cézanne’s relationship to visual reality, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that the artist’s perennial questioning was not an obstacle but the means by which he could access “the revolt of life’s immediacy against reason.”
Merleau-Ponty ultimately argues that refusing the deadening force of habituation is an act of freedom. In synthesizing aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, he reveals their shared project of decentering the conscious mind to approach reality as it is truly given. Within this paradigm, doubting the world is exactly what will “awaken” us to our originary, embodied experience, ce que nous voyons.