Sense and Nonsense. Cézanne’s Doubt

Abstract

Sense and Nonsense (Sens et non-sens) is the first major collection published by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at Editions Nagel in 1948. The triple division of topics dedicated to art, philosophy, and politics will be kept up to his last posthumously published book, Visible and Invisible (1964). Similarly, his specific theory of art is fostered through the years by his interest in Cézanne’s life and work. Cézanne’s Doubt is a key text for any philosophy due to the challenging questions it poses ranging from psychoanalysis and depth psychology to ontology of art, awareness of meaning, predetermination, and freedom borne by the contact of one’s interior and exterior world. With the Doubt we continue to ask ourselves: What is that all-encompassing which is expressed by the small word ‘see’? How to grasp the positive sense of creativity? What is that ‘more enigmatic intertwined inthe very roots of being’? (The text appears for the first time in Bulgarian translated from the French by prof. Lidia Denkova.)