Maurice Merleau-Ponty Philosophy of Art: Term Paper

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The person is different than they were before they gazed at the work, even though, as before the moment of the 'gazing' they are not looking at the artifact. (148) the person before seeing the "Mona Lisa" for the first time, and the person walking away from the work is a different, changed, and touched person. The painting has gazed back, touched the onlooker, just as the onlooker's eye has touched the subject of the painting.

Thus, for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a painting is not simply looked at. Because looking at a painting changes the viewer, essentially the viewer is being looked at and penetrated, or touched, by the substance of the painting as well. While Descartes said, I think therefore I am, Merleau-Ponty suggests one's consciousness only occurs when he or she can say, 'I gaze and am gazed at, therefore I am,' stressing the mutual and subjective nature of consciousness, rather than the external, objective nature of consciousness.

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Another example of this might be the way in which looking at another person or a painter looking at nature, always has a small realization that, even though we may think we are the origins of consciousness, we too can be looked at. But rather than as Sartre's philosophy would have it "we are never simply a disembodied looker, or a transcendental consciousness." The otherness of the look of a work of art, of nature, or simply the eyes and hands of another." Thus, the philosopher, although a compatriot of Sartre, "instead affirms an interdependence of self and other that involves these categories overlapping and intertwining with one another, but without ever being reduced to each other and never propounded the same extreme accounts of freedom, anguished responsibility," and conflict-ridden "relations with others, for which existentialism became both famous and notorious. (Reynolds, 2005)

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