چکیده:
In his courses on Nature، the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly does not agree with Kant's antropocentrism. In particular the Kantian notion of the disinterestedness of aesthetic perception is untenable in an aesthetics of nature which is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's thought. Nature and human embodiment are seen as separated in this Kantian tradition.
In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology on the contrary، we can find the idea of the chiasm of the body-subject and the world: an artist perceives objects and is perceived by them. So، there is no distance، no gap between them. This means that Merleau-Ponty leaves a generally accepted tradition of thought. With its time-honored origins in the work of Plato، the tradition starts from the opposition between what is assumed real and what is considered imaginary، namely the object itself and its representation. Art then، is the manifestation of an idea، and، while the idea had to express a unity، art itself cannot reach beyond the limiting diversity of manifestations. In Merleau-Ponty this ‘divided’ thinking is evaded by an 'embodied thinking'، in which the body is the interaction of sight and movement. For him، the body is the ‘axe’ of our world.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"For Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, in the arts, the chiasm of the body-subject and the world is eminently present: an artist perceives objects and is perceived by them.
By rejecting both kinds of separation, it becomes possible to proceed towards a conception of aesthetics as a general theory of perception, one which is not restricted to the arts, and which ascribes an eminent role to both body and nature.
Again, it becomes clear how Merleau-Ponty avoids every dualism of subject versus object, mind versus body: our movement is not the effect of an intellectual decision; rather, it is the effect of the seeing, the maturing of it.
Not coincidentally, his name is cited in recent works about an aesthetics of nature, in which it is attempted to think nature and art in a single movement, with the body as its axis.
It is precisely because both subject and nature are considered in a new way that the works of Merleau-Ponty open new perspectives for a theory in which nature, body and aesthetics are brought together.
With Merleau-Ponty, we can return to the original meaning of aesthetics, namely a general theory of perception.
For, if we accept that the subject is indeed affectively touched by the condition of her environment and, moreover, that we experience in our own body the state of nature around us, an ecologically orientated aesthetics of nature positions our bodily-sensorially being in nature at the centre of its argument."