Merleau‐Ponty on painting, sedimentation, and the cultural world

Abstract A distinctive feature of Merleau‐Ponty's thought in the 1950s is his use of painting as a model for the production and transmission of cultural meaning, based partly on a critical appropriation of Husserl's notion of sedimentation. By examining Merleau‐Ponty's application of this notion to painting, as contrasted with Husserl's focus on geometry, this article explores what ‘sedimentation’ comprises in a philosophical context and why Merleau‐Ponty's view is potentially interesting. It begins by reviewing the problem Husserl discerned in relation to geometry and how sedimentation was to solve this, before outlining how Merleau‐Ponty's view evolves from Phenomenology of Perception onwards to allow rather than excluding sedimentation in painting. I then argue that the underlying difference between their views is that painting is concerned with non‐identical concrete artefacts whereas geometry focuses on identity‐based type artefacts, and that this difference is philosophically significant in pointing to a variety of sense‐realizing practices with corresponding modes of sedimentation. Having unpacked some of its further implications for the relation between their positions and conceiving a ‘cultural world’, I show how Merleau‐Ponty's views can be applied to certain aspects of identity constitution and as an alternative to unduly abstract ‘top down’ models of historical meaning transmission.