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"In Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty is trying to evoke for us the experience of the painter. What is that experience and how is it supposed to change...

Merleau-Ponty focuses on embodiment, or how our bodies live and move and have being in the world. In "Eye and Mind," he looks at painters as embodied beings. Unlike scientists, who he understands as observing the world as if they are not a part of it, viewing it as an object "out there" to be studied, the painter necessarily immerses himself "in" the world. The painter's ways of seeing and moving become part of what he...

Merleau-Ponty focuses on embodiment, or how our bodies live and move and have being in the world. In "Eye and Mind," he looks at painters as embodied beings. Unlike scientists, who he understands as observing the world as if they are not a part of it, viewing it as an object "out there" to be studied, the painter necessarily immerses himself "in" the world. The painter's ways of seeing and moving become part of what he is painting. The painter sees, says Merleau-Ponty, with eyes that view the world, but these eyes also view himself, the painter, in the world. He paints with hands that are physically part of the world. His way of seeing is thus fundamentally different from the scientist's and more congruent with the reality of how humans actually interact with the world, for our bodies make us interconnected with the physical spaces we are observing. A painting is transformative because it reveals not just the detached object that the painter has rendered but a vision of the artist's consciousness in interaction with the world. This is more authentic than trying to observe as if we are standing outside of real space and time. As Merleau-Ponty writes,



I do not see [space] according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me . . .



He also writes that, "It is by lending his body to the world that the painter changes the world into paintings."


This way of seeing is transformational, which I believe is what is meant by leading to a "new cultural regime," because it erases the boundaries between self and other and emphasizes that humans are part of, not separate from, the rest of the world. We are no longer looking "at" things but "with" a thing, or "according to it," as Merleau-Ponty puts it. There is no objective place we can stand outside of other things. This may seem more commonplace to us now in the post-modern world than it did in 1964, when the essay was written, but we can also safely posit that much of how humans view the world is still in terms of looking "at" it for purposes of control and domination rather than "with" it for purposes of understanding our interconnectedness.

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