Merleau-Ponty and Understanding

Abstract

A number of aestheticians stress the importance of the aesthetic experience but are strongly opposed to any phenomenological account on the grounds that “phenomenological descriptions of this kind are in principle unintelligible as there is no criterion that will enable us to recognise when such a description has been successfully understood (R. Scruton). I shall concentrate on Merleau-Ponty’s later work Le Visible et l’invisible, part 2, to bring out the crucial importance of his account of the body in terms of interior and exterior horizons which serve to illuminate our understanding of experience, what makes such understanding intelligible and particularly significant for aesthetic experience.