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Eye and Mind
Merleau-Ponty's final completed essay, published in 1961 shortly before his death — a meditation on painting as the exemplary form of embodied thought.
'Eye and Mind' (L'Œil et l'esprit) was the last essay Merleau-Ponty completed before his sudden death in 1961. Published in the first issue of Art de France, the essay gathers his three decades of thinking about painting — particularly Cézanne, but also Klee, Matisse, Giacometti — into a concentrated meditation on what painting reveals about perception, embodiment, and the relationship between vision and the visible. The essay is Merleau-Ponty's most lyrical late statement of what would become the ontology of The Visible and the Invisible: the painter's eye as the site where the visible sees itself, where the flesh of the world folds upon itself and becomes aware.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay was composed during the period when Merleau-Ponty was also developing the ontology of the flesh in the manuscripts that would be published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. 'Eye and Mind' represents the accessible, concentrated statement of ideas that Merleau-Ponty was working out in more technical