“The Primacy of Perception”, Maurice Marleau-Ponty

Throughout this project (Art and the conscious mind) I have been reading “The Primacy of Perception” by Maurice Marleau-Ponty so that I could understand it in more depth. There were two parts of this book that I found helpful, firstly the chapter as titled and secondly the chapter titled, “Eye and Mind”.

“The primacy of Perception”, spoke a lot about perception being fake and giving us false truths. It states “Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences”. I found this interesting, especially since a practical session back at the beginning of this project where we were looking at ‘ambiguous depth cues’. These are ways of creating illusions of depth. Perspective used in paintings for example is just a convenient way of capturing depth. Paintings are, after all, just flat surfaces.

This chapter also spoke about us not knowing how other people see certain things. I have often wondered this myself. When I was younger I thought that it was possible that everyone had different favourite colours due to the face that we see differently.

This chapter also touched on consciousness and specifically self-consciousness which is what our last seminar was focused on. The book stated that when a small baby is hungry, it is not conscious that it is hungry, just that it has a lack of something. Referring back to this weeks seminar, questions were brought up about the necessity of consciousness. As of yet no one knows why humans have it!

I found the “Eye and Mind” section of this book more interesting than the previous one. It covered areas that we had looked at over the course of this project such as externalism. This is the idea that our mind is not located inside our brain but somewhere else. “The mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects” is a quote from “Eye and Mind”. This quote is on the same lines of externalism and expresses how the mind could be made up of a number of contributing factors. It also states in this book that the body is an “intertwining of vision and movement” and that the way in which we move and the routes we take are not decided by our minds, but our vision. One of the practical sessions that I attended during this project was based on the concept of capturing movement from different viewpoints and capturing the same movement from a few viewpoints at the same time.

This chapter also mentioned the ideas of Paul Cezanne quite a bit and how blind people see with their hands. Cezanne used to paint in relation to what all of his senses were aware of. He did not solely rely on sight much like a blind person. Earlier this academic year I made some drawings that were representations of what I felt with my hands. I found the concept of drawing without my sight really interesting as it often gave a unique perspective of the subject. When I was using touch to draw I found that I learned more about the objects that I was drawing. Drawing this way makes you think of things in different ways.