Merleau-Ponty is widely acknowledged as having anticipated recent conceptions of embodied-enacted cognition in important ways. However, based on his discussions of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception and Hubert Dreyfus’s influential interpretation, Merleau-Ponty is often read in the English-speaking world as advocating a view of embodied behaviour as noncognitive, nonrepresentational, and self-less ‘coping’. This talk takes as its point of departure Komarine Romdenh-Romluc’s critique of Dreyfus, which sought to (over)correct its neglect of cognitive control, in particular our awareness of possibilities in embodied action. Against this background I set out an alternative and intermediate view by focusing on the two examples of the act of painting Merleau-Ponty considers in The Prose of the World this talk shows, by contrast, how these outline a sui generis form of cognition. First, I argue that his discussion of a slow-motion film of Matisse commits Merleau-Ponty to conceiving painting as an act of embodied-enacted deliberation. On this view, painting is a process that requires pervasive choice-making while operating in a possibility space that is – due to its enacted and embodied character – finite, situated, unique and subject to the constraints of motoric executability. Second, I explain how the painter’s relation to the world should be understood in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Renoir at work. As part of an ongoing debate with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty uses this example to argue that painting requires a non-correspondence-based conception of truth and that painting exemplifies an ‘indirect’ and ‘allusive’ relation to reality. Having briefly considered how it is to be interpreted, I argue that this claim is vindicated by the kind of modern painting Merleau-Ponty focuses on. I conclude that, by thus combining a distinctively embodied mode of deliberation with the inflection and expression of a determinate relation to the world, Merleau-Ponty provides a description of the act of painting that a) is phenomenologically robust while remaining agnostic about its underlying causal mechanisms, and b) should be recognized as inherently cognitive in character.
