Merleau-Ponty on Music

source: Eidos84    2012年5月14日
A brief excerpt from Merleau-Ponty's radio lecture "Art and the Perceived World" (Causeries 1948). Throughout the lectures Merleau-Ponty emphasises a return to pure perception. As regards art, Merleau-Ponty presents an aesthetic theory which contends that the meaning of the artwork is to be found solely in our actual perceptual experience of it, and thus does not consist of a 'representation' that would point away from the artwork itself. Music however, as an inherently non-representational art form, offers "too easy an example" of his aesthetic theory, and Merleau-Ponty only briefly discusses it.
(Background music added in a recent replay on French radio)