Art in Perception: Making Perception Aesthetic Again

221 Pages·2013·1.55 MB·English

UC Riverside
UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Art in Perception: Making Perception Aesthetic Again
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qt7g5t7
Author
Matherne, Samantha Marie
Publication Date
2013

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE

Art in Perception: Making Perception Aesthetic Again

A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Philosophy

by

Samantha Marie Matherne

June 2013

Dissertation Committee:
Dr. Pierre Keller, Chairperson
Dr. Andrews Reath
Dr. Martin Schwab
Dr. Charles Siewert
Dr. Mark Wrathall
Copyright by
Samantha Marie Matherne
2013
The Dissertation of Samantha Marie Matherne is approved:
______________________________________
______________________________________
______________________________________
______________________________________
______________________________________
Committee Chairperson

University of California, Riverside
Acknowledgments

It seems appropriate to begin with the beginning. For me, this means thanking the person
who most shaped my first years as a graduate student, the ever presently missed Paul
Hoffman. From Paul, I learned what it is to do the history of philosophy. His patient
attention, kind encouragement, and sharp eye shepherded me from the start He was and
still is the model I aspire to.
I am also deeply grateful to the members of my committee. First and foremost my
thanks extend to Pierre Keller for his unfailing support and systematic mind. His hours of
tutelage and conversation ranging over the ‘philosophers H-K’, amongst so many others
taught me to respect and pursue the historical unfolding of ideas. This project is, in many
ways, the embodiment of that lesson. While I am indebted to Pierre for our years-long
dialogue about Kant, I am also grateful to Andy Reath for revealing to me the ‘other’ side of
Kant. Just when I thought I knew Kant, Andy’s courses and conversations brought to light
the ‘proper self’ I had been neglecting. This is in addition to his subtle comments on this
work, which undoubtedly improved it. Meanwhile, springing into the 20th century, the
second half of my dissertation is indebted to my engagement with Mark Wrathall and
Charles Siewert. I was very fortunate that Mark joined the department my second year. He
offered me a new and challenging way to look at Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty.
Without the knowledge of Phenomenology I gained from his courses, translation groups,
and constant feedback, this project would not have been possible. This project would also
not have been possible had Charles not offered that fated course in the Phenomenology of
Perception the fall of my second year. This course awoke me from my Kantian slumber and
made me want to pursue Merleau-Ponty. Charles’s continued commitment to my project
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and comments from his unique perspective have taught me a great deal about how to do
philosophy, not just its history. Finally, I would like to thank Martin Schwab for his
inevitably insightful conversations on the wide-range of issues, from perception to aesthetics,
from Kant to Phenomenology, that most excite me.
Thanks are also in order for those who are not on my committee, but who have
nevertheless made this work so much better than it would have otherwise been. I am
grateful to the UCR Center for Ideas and Society and to Georgia Warnke for providing me
with a year of unencumbered support. Thank you to Michael Goerger, Joe Cressotti, John
Ramsey, Ben Mitchell-Yellin, among others for your willingness to trudge through the
earliest drafts and for your invaluable feedback. Special thanks are in order for Courtney
Morris, who both as a Kantian and as a friend, has helped me through. I am also especially
grateful to Justin Coates and Clinton Tolley for having read not only every page that follows,
but also the hundreds they so kindly suggested be ‘rethought’. Without this engagement, I
would not have thrived.
Finally, I would like to thank those who have given me a ‘respite’ from all this, my
dear friends Emmanuelle Humblet, Crista Farrell, Christine Catania, and Mark Leher; my
sister Aimee Baker; and my parents.
The text of this dissertation is, in part, a reprint of material as it appears in the
Kantian Review (Matherne (forthcoming)) (Chapter Three) and the British Journal of Aesthetics
(Matherne (2013)) (Chapter Four).
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For my parents,
without whose love, support, and fine champagne
this would not be

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Art in Perception: Making Perception Aesthetic Again

by

Samantha Marie Matherne

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Philosophy
University of California, Riverside, June 2013
Dr. Pierre Keller, Chairperson

Although separated by a century and a half, the relationship between Immanuel Kant and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty has more recently come into sharper focus. It is now common to
read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering two competing characterizations of perceptual
experience. In the present work, however, I argue that pitting Kant against Merleau-Ponty
in this way leads us to overlook the important and philosophically illuminating continuity
between their views of perception. In particular, I show that Kant and Merleau-Ponty share
a key commitment: both regard aesthetic experience, including both the production and
appreciation of a work of art, as an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of
perceptual experience more generally. It is, in particular, reflection on the role of what Kant
calls the ‘productive imagination’ and its creative and projective activities that both philosophers
think sheds light on our more mundane perceptions. This work is, in part, an effort to
clarify the development of this aesthetically inflected theory of perception from Kant’s
philosophy, through Neo-Kantians like Ernst Cassirer and Pierre Lachièze-Rey, and into
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Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. However, once we expose the development of this line of
thought between Kant and Merleau-Ponty, we shall find we have reason to revise the
standard interpretation of the relationship between these two figures. As I argue in the first
part of this work, rather than thinking of Kant as an anti-phenomenological ‘intellectualist’,
we find he is, as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty took him to be, a forefather of the
phenomenological movement of the 20th century. So too, as I argue in the second part of
this work, instead of reading Merleau-Ponty as anti-Kantian, we should recognize that he
self-consciously appropriated aspects of Kant’s philosophy of perception and is, to this
extent, a Neo-Kantian. Ultimately, what this revised understanding of Kant’s and Merleau-
Ponty’s theories of perception offers us is a unified, subtle, and promising theory of
perceptual experience that places the productive imagination and aesthetic experience at its
very heart.

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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………. ………………………...1

Chapter 1: The Basic Framework of Kant’s Theory of Perceptual Experience
Part 1: Sensibility and Understanding………………………………………………………5

Chapter 2: The Basic Framework of Kant’s Theory of Perceptual Experience
Part 2: Images and the Imagination……………………………………………………..…20

Chapter 3: Kant and the ‘Hidden Art’ of Perception……………………………………...35

Chapter 4: Kant and the Aesthetic Enrichment of Perception……………………………66

Chapter 5: From Kant to Merleau-Ponty…………………………………………………97

Chapter 6: Merleau-Ponty’s Appropriation of Kant’s Productive Imagination…………..104

Chapter 7: Merleau-Ponty’s Appropriation of Kant’s Schematism………………………137

Chapter 8: Merleau-Ponty’s Appropriation of Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas…………………...162

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...194

Bibliography………………………...………………………………………………….202

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