Rodin’s The Thinking Man utilizes the rough texture of bronze to break the conventional wisdom that sculpture is a visual art. This aligns with French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, which suggests that art is moving beyond the visual to stimulate the senses of the entire body, including tactile experiences.
Rodin’s The Thinking Man, by the renowned modern French sculptor, defies the conventional wisdom that sculpture is a visual art. The Thinking Man has a rough surface, as the artist utilized the texture of the bronze itself, and does not present a visually perfect silhouette. As a result, the viewer encountering The Thinking Man experiences the rough texture of the surface itself. Rodin wanted to animate the work through the natural texture of the bronze, which allows the viewer to feel the sculpture more vividly.
The fact that viewers respond to rough surfaces suggests that sculpture has shifted from being an art for the eyes to an art for the body. The tactile experience of responding to the texture of a surface presupposes our ‘body’ as a holistic entanglement of eyes, hands, nose, ears, etc. This response invites the viewer to engage with the work on a deeper level, mobilizing a variety of senses other than sight. This tendency is reminiscent of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘philosophy of the corps’.
Merleau-Ponty argues that all experience comes from the human body. He speaks of the body as “that which keeps the visual spectacle alive, animates it, enriches it internally, and forms a system with it. He gives the body the status of a subject. He does not doubt or deny the existence of the world, but sees the meaning of the world as something that can only be elongated by the body, the subject rooted and inhabiting it. The body is not just a physical, chemical, and physiological mass. It is the source of all our experiences and shapes our relationship to the world.
Merleau-Ponty relates the experience of the body to “phenomena,” which, for him, are the product of objectivity and subjectivity. For example, say you’re watching TV in your room and you hear a clanking sound coming from the kitchen. Normally, we would describe this event as a phenomenon by focusing on the sound and what caused it. Merleau-Ponty, however, believes that an event is only a phenomenon if there is a receiver who perceives the sound. No matter how loud the ‘clang’ caused by the fall of a plate, if there is no receptor that perceives the vibration as sound, there is no phenomenon of sound. The phenomenon of sound is created by the combination of an object, which we usually call an actual object, and a subject, which is a receiver.
According to Merleau-Ponty, everything we experience in the world is a phenomenon. However, phenomena contain meaning. He sees the occurrence of a phenomenon as the “birth of meaning. To explain this, Merleau-Ponty utilizes the German philosopher Husserl’s concept of orientation. According to Husserl, our consciousness is ‘always directed towards something’. Merleau-Ponty embraces this notion of orientation and sees it as the foundation of all phenomena and meanings we experience, explaining that when people have different experiences and read different meanings into the same object or event, it’s because they have different orientations to that object or event.
Merleau-Ponty calls our response to the world ‘perception’. Perception is not just the activity of the sensory organs or the brain, but the engagement with the world as a total body activity. For example, imagine you’re looking at a monitor. We always look at an object from a single point in space and time. My view has parts that are revealed and parts that are hidden. What I actually see is the front of the monitor. However, Merleau-Ponty says that at this point, we perceive not only what is visible, but also what is not directly visible, based on the experiences accumulated in the body. At this point, the various senses can be communicated and unified, which he sees as the work of the body, not purely the work of the intellect. He calls the subject who is in the world and moving toward the world through activities such as perception “être au monde”. We can recognize ourselves as “being in the world” through certain perceptual activities, such as experiencing a work of art.
The field in which perception takes place is neither a purely objective world nor a purely subjective world, for it is the field in which perception takes place through the encounter and relationship between object and subject. Merleau-Ponty calls the field of perception the phenomenal field. In the phenomenal field, the world does not exist apart from the perceiving subject or its objects. Perceptual activity is a bodily activity that precedes thought, and in the moment of that activity, the perceiving subject participates in the world and grasps its meaning. From this perspective, Merleau-Ponty criticizes the position of cognitivist philosophy, which views the world as ideologically constructed by the subject through thought.
Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the body as fundamental is a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition, which has emphasized the abstract mental activity of the human mind, or intellect, over the body as the ultimate value. Western philosophy, up until the modern era, has devalued the human body and considered the intellect to be the highest value, but Merleau-Ponty argues against this. He saw the human intellect as only one part of a broader bodily activity. This position is at odds with the Western intellectual tradition.
For Merleau-Ponty, the body is the perceiver of the world and the existential expression of human existence. Rodin’s work, with its emphasis on the body, is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Rodin transformed sculpture into something for the body, not just for the eye; his works were not intended for visual gratification, but to create a space that elicited a specific bodily response. A work like this creates an intimate relationship with the viewer. In the process of viewing Rodin’s sculptures, we interact with them, and that interaction is not limited to the visual dimension, but includes a tactile experience. On the other hand, an artwork that is only visible to the eye is disconnected from the body, and it is not easy to establish a close relationship between the body and the artwork. Rodin’s The Thinking Man is a work that connects with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in that it elicits a response in which the body is the subject.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy continues to influence contemporary art today. Artists don’t just seek visual beauty, they want to create a deep connection with the viewer through their work. This is deeply connected to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body and shows that a work of art can function as a medium for interacting with the viewer, rather than just a visual object.
