Merleau-Ponty and the significance of style

Dr Andrew Inkpin (The University of Melbourne)

Abstract: The notion of style is a central and distinctive feature of Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of both artistic production and the perceptual and cognitive functioning of the lived body. This paper aims to identify the significance of this notion of style both within and potentially beyond Merleau-Ponty’s work. It begins by surveying the broad range of features Merleau-Ponty characterizes in terms of style and highlights – as one aspect of its importance – the central role he assigns it in defining the unity of intentional structures. I then look more closely at the view of style he develops, particularly through his discussions of painting and indirect sense in the 1950s, before contrasting this with several competing views in order both to highlight the distinctiveness of Merleau-Ponty’s position and to identify some of the conceptual challenges in understanding style adequately. Finally, I argue that the full significance of style emerges by considering how it conceives the relation between the general and the particular. In order to make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s own discussion, I claim, this relation must be taken to differ from that characterizing rules, a feature that makes the notion of style useful in capturing traits of human intelligence in action, such as its loose nonmechanical cohesion, flexibility, and openness to particularity.