This article is intended to be an exposition of Marc Richir’s grounding of a transcendental aesthetics and his understanding of art, which is based on the hypothesis that imagination and phantasy are fundamental pre-intentional acts that delineate the horizons of the relationship of human and world, hence being the source of knowledge. From the studies of authors such as Carlson (2016, 2017), and Varela (2017), we know that Richir’s phenomenological perspective was influenced on the one hand by Edmund Husserl’s analysis of specific acts of consciousness, and, on the other hand, by Kant’s transcendental schematism. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the lack of such research in English, my argument suggests that Richir’s perspective on a transcendental aesthetics is particularly fertile because it incorporates, together with Kant’s schematism and Husserl’s Aktanalyse, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “flesh of the world” and his contribution to the understanding of the affective, bodily nature of knowledge, which, speaking of an original reciprocity between body and world, offers – as Matherne (2019) explains – a new account of the transcendental.

First, it has to be stressed how Richir’s transcendental aesthetics operates on a phenomenological basis. Husserl’s phenomenology, developed at the beginning of the 20^th century, aimed essentially at describing the appearance of things as structures of experience, claiming that our knowledge of the world – thanks to the complex constitution of transcendental consciousness – is far richer than that which sensory perception, understood in the traditional sense of Abbildung, can deliver to us. Accordingly, with regard to aesthetics, phenomenology appeared from its very beginning as a refutation of the common philosophy of representation, which affirms that a phenomenon (the appearance of a thing) is a simple reproduction, or a mental elaboration, of externally perceived objects. In this case, any image or object of art, as Plato was already claiming in his Republic, would be wrongly understood as a mere copy of a pre-given reality, something with a diminished ontological status. Husserl opened up a new way for these investigations, distinguishing between acts of perception, imagination, and signifying1 acts, pointing out that imagination has a distinct status separate from perception: it is not a kind of weakened perception, but has its own character, fundamental for the eidetic constitution of the world. In this regard, the philosopher spoke about the concept of “image consciousness”, indicating a unique kind of experience that involves both perception and imagining.

Furthermore, as mentioned, for the Belgian philosopher, understanding imagination and aesthetic experience meant assuming the transcendental schematism of Kantianism – where imagination comes to play a fundamental, strategic role in knowledge. In fact, first of all – as Carlson correctly formulated – in Kant’s thought, imagination is situated critically at the bifurcation between proper knowledge and the

“transcendental illusion”2. On the one hand, it can always be a source of illusion, as long as it sells as a reality what it is merely (in Kantian terms) thinking. On the other hand, imagination provides access to a real, vivid experience, in which knowledge is something realized by a concrete, particular subjectivity – and, in this sense, something necessarily connected with its schematizing work and its articulation with the concepts of reason3. Even though Kant’s influence will not be investigated here, it is important to stress Richir’s reception of Critique of Judgment and how Kant’s own terminology builds a part of Richir’s conceptual apparatus, as it can be affirmed that Kant anticipates the idea of a transcendental aesthetics – something that will be related to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis too. To this regard, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant affirms that: “The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi), as a faculty of intuition without the presence of the object, is either productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation [ursprüngliche Darstelung], of the object (exhibitio originaria) which thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of derivative presentation [abgeleitete Darstellung] of the object (exhibitio derivativa), which brings back to the mind an intuition that it had previously”4. This means that imagination, as a faculty of presentation, is able to give to us more than is perceptually present and delivered through the senses, and in this regard represents a capacity of preceding and sketching out experience.

Hence, taking inspiration from the rich field opened by Husserl’s phenomenology and its work of unfolding the sense of all the notions and acts implied in the human being’s relation to the world, as well as from Kant’s transcendentalism, Richir’s work aimed at clearing the horizons from which knowledge is arising; horizons that, in a broad sense, coincide with the ones of the aesthetic experience: literally, investigating the horizons at the origin of knowledge (its conditions of possibility), and identifying them with the horizons of the aesthetic experience, would mean nothing other than speaking about a transcendental aesthetics.

As stated above, this article aims to show how Richir’s endeavor to elaborate a possible synthesis between Kant and Husserl in order to find a new transcendental aesthetics takes advantage of Merleau-Ponty’s “radical reflection” and his idea of “flesh in the world”. In order to understand properly the role of the imagination and the idea of a transcendental aesthetic, therefore, it is necessary first of all to deepen what Richir, referring to Merleau-Ponty, calls the “phenomenological architectonics”: according to the philosopher, in its regressive process phenomenology has to show the constitutive origin of the eidos within the framework of a transcendental constitution of the horizon; that is to say: if, as mentioned, phenomenology accomplishes the task of overcoming the traditional philosophy of representation, where essences are given in an ideal disincarnated world and knowledge is a sort of reproduction of these essences (so that art remains a copy of a pre-given world), then it has to find

the original ground where the same knowledge is arising, that cannot be given but in an original union between body and world – a union that precedes and establish any theoretical capacity of the subject. In his article Merleau-Ponty and the question of phenomenological Architectonics Richir, after considering Heidegger’s attempt of showing how Dasein’s possibilities are never possibilities of essences but of existence, formulates the present question as following: “Why would there not be a facticity of the Wesen in the same sense as facticity of existence? Why would the Husserlian ‘I can’ of flesh, incarnated in a Leib, a body of flesh, and not a pure intellectual possibility, why would it not be an ontological ‘I can’ of existing, and simultaneously of existing the world?”5.

According to Richir, Merleu Ponty’s contribution would have been precisely that of discovering and showing that looking for the essence of the world, as the phenomenologist says in the Foreword to his Phenomenology of Perception, does not mean looking for what it is in idea, once we have reduced it to discursive theme, but it means rather looking for what it is in fact for us before any thematization.

As stated above, what I identify as the contribution of Merleau-Ponty to the grounding of a transcendental aesthetics, and what in fact Richir retains from his thought, is the idea of the affective/imaginative/bodily nature of knowledge. This idea is based on the assumption that, in spite of being a pure spectator of the phenomenon of the world, the human being is originally and radically in the world, and this by virtue of what Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptive faith”, a rehabilitation of the Husserlian notion of Urdoxa (which designates a primordial, unshakable certainty in the fundamental features of the own self and the world6). It is by means of this faith that, as Richir underlines, we are always already in the world, and “we accept it since we are ourselves set in the world without any possibility, other than imaginary of retreating from it”7. This idea of a radical being in the world implies, as mentioned, a rethinking of the phenomenological concept of essences, or idealities, that, as known, were found by Husserl thanks to the phenomenological process of epochè. The epochè, as a technic of abstraction, aimed at disclosing the operative consciousness of the transcendental subject and the essences correlated to it. Merleau-Ponty assumed a critical position towards this phenomenological procedure: opposing the “phenomenological positivism”, whose eidetic method would base the possible on the real (the factual) – and situating himself thereby between Heidegger’s ontic fact

(the Vorhandenheit) and Husserl’s eidetic ideality (equally vorhanden and arrived at by ideation) – promotes a new concept of Wesen: Wesen as an “active essence”, or living essence, given in a precise moment to a precise subject; what would invert the hierarchization between possible and real, as all experience is built upon an ultimate radical possibility; and what pretends to overcome an intellectualistic conception of knowledge.

In this respect, without renouncing the idea of essence, a primary phenomenological notion, Merleau-Ponty develops an attempt to think it beyond the typical antithesis existence/essence or fact/essence. He affirms in The Visible and the Invisible:

This indicates indeed that a fundamental possibility, more primary than “the logico-eidetic possibility of ideations and the variations based on facts” exists, such that eidetic possibilities “appear themselves like factual possibilities of existing that are organized by the possibility which opens my experience to the world and to Being.” This is the idea of a Wild Being, “that pre-spiritual milieu without which nothing is thinkable”9. For Merleau-Ponty, essences “overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them from a brute being, wherein we must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations”10. In this sense, the essences are not positive, but rather “articulations or hinges of Being”. As a matter of fact, even in the phenomenological process of epochè the revealed essences show themselves as “removed” or abstracted from a brute and wild being that preceded them and is “non-coincident with them”. That’s why according to Richir, if it is possible at all to speak about a transcendental eidetic (of which, as the Belgian philosopher underlines, Eugen Fink spoke extensively in his VI Cartesian Meditation), then man should speak about a “transcendental eidetic of the wild Wesen”. That is to say, assuming that life is an original structure of being – which brings Merleau-Ponty to the formulation of an ontology based on the ideas of process, event, and temporality – essences will be understood, using Richir’s term, as incarnate existentials. They will be Wesens of flesh, of the body-of-flesh and of the world11. All essences are given in fact thanks and in the lived experience of a living body open to the world.

To explain further the idea of a wild wesen and the primordial reciprocity of Leib and world, Richir takes up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of recouvrement (coincidence) and elaborates on the idea of an original distortion of the phenomenon. This means generally that in order to avoid conceiving of the intuition of essences as a frontal and disincarnate vision12, it is necessary to understand the “pure difference” (the

non-coincidence with itself) of the phenomenalization of phenomena13, which at the same time speaks for this original complicity between body and world, more original than what we filter and interpret in the phases of presence of consciousness. This is Merlaeu-Ponty’s idea of a “flesh of the world”, which according to Richir would remove the barrier between phenomenology and metaphysics14: the idea of essence is here not simply the object of a disembodied eidetic intuition to which pure individuals, “indivisible glaciers of being”, would be opposed. Rather, the “flesh” (chair) designates a pregiven ontological texture that supports both perception and world, prior to the subject–object division. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The flesh of the world is (…) a pregnancy of possibles (...) absolutely not an object (…) it is by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis one can understand the lived body (…) The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, and it is by it that we can understand the percipere”15.

According to this, for Richir, both essence and individual appear as having been intrinsically tied together “as brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and the antinodes of the same ontological vibration”16. In this sense, as the philosopher specifies, the field of ideality itself belongs to the phenomenological field: “It is neither another world nor a ‘hinter-world’, but a dimension (which has itself been put in a phenomenal sense into a lower gear) of the phenomenon”17. In this regard, Richir quotes a passage of Merleau-Ponty’s famous work The Visible and the Invisible that considers the body self-relation as making possible the “overlaying-at- a-distance” of consciousness to things:

This would mean, as Costello underlines, that a distance or deflection is the opening of the body to itself, of the body onto the thing, which speaks for a proximity of the

body to the thing, that is never a full coincidence, but rather a unity, without which a transcendental phenomenology could not work at all19. As mentioned, Merleau-Ponty himself was not averse to calling his phenomenology a “transcendental philosophy”, being his transcendental philosophy, as Matherne argues, the proper subject matter of his phenomenological method, the method of “radical reflection”20, which refers to the a priori as the still unreflective, bodily experience of the world.

Thus, this kind of cohesion constitutes the basis of a transcendental aesthetics, where body and world are taken in the same original facticity, no longer being two separated entities: so, the images are no longer understood as mere representations of things, but much more as constitutive processes of our intercourse with the world.

Merleau-Ponty insists on this in his Eye and Mind:

So, the problem of the imaginary concerns the visibility of which both body and world are made of: if I see to the extent that I can project my body into the world it is nonetheless true that “my body can see only to the extent that it is itself part of the visible.” As Merleau-Ponty says in the Eye and the Mind, it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings, which presupposes that the artist’s body is immersed in and made of the same stuff as the world: to touch, one must be tangible, and to see, visible. Merleau-Ponty describes this as an “intertwining” or “overlapping”, in which the artist’s situated embodiment is the other side of its opening to the world. There is yet no sharp division between the sensing and the sensed, between body and things as one common “flesh”, and painting arises as the expression of this relation: it is a “visible to the second power, a carnal essence or icon” of embodied vision22. Having said that, it is necessary to better understand how for Merleau-Ponty the body assumes the function of a “schema”, that is something that, constituting one’s perspective on the world, articulates the whole space of possibilities of experience.

As Merleau-Ponty insists on in the Phenomenology of perception, the horizons of all possible perceptual experience are functions of the body in which it is realized.

The simple fact of the asymmetry existing between bodily perspective and objective observation points to the way in which the structure of perception is not just caused or conditioned but constituted by the structure of the body23. As Husserl already observed, perception is not just the presence of objects to a subject, but it is always given in a horizontal structure, specifically the visual field that relates to the body – that’s why seeing a photograph is something very different than seeing the object itself. In this regard, as Carman underlines, all perception has a figure/ground contrast, which is not merely a physiological fact, corresponding to the physiological structure of the eye, but part of an a priori structure of perception, and this in the sense that it provides a stable framework within which we are able to recognize the element of our experience. To this respect, the phenomenal field is not just a bundle of sensory facts, but instead it constitutes a “transcendental field”24, a space of abiding perceptual possibilities25; and – what is of great importance for the subject matter of this article – Merleau-Ponty affirms that this space of possibilities is articulated by what he calls the body schema (schéma corporel), a concept he develops notably in Phenomenology of Perception, where he defines it as “a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ in the world. As he explains, the body does not occupy space as an object among others, but opens a spatiality of situation, where it appears “as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task”, and thus articulates perceptual experience through the body schema (schéma corporel)26.

It is precisely the notion of schema, whose philosophical relevance can be traced back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that accounts for the new transcendentalism we are describing here. So, what is the body schema? Kant, with his idea of schematism, intended to resolve the problem of applying the categories of the intellect to the empirical intuitions: if the categories, qua pure concepts and mediate universal representations, are heterogeneous with respect to intuitions, qua immediate empirical representations, and if we cannot literally see (or feel or hear) such things as number, possibility, causality, or substance, and yet we perceive things as exhibiting those concepts, then a “third thing” (ein Drittes) must be found, homogeneous with both the concept and the intuition. This third thing appears to be the transcendental schemata:

The schema of a concept, therefore, is a procedure by which the imagination provides the concept with an image. Consequently, the schema is to be distinguished

from an image, for whereas images are always concrete particulars, schemata must anticipate in advance an indefinitely wide range of possible applications of the concept. It is therefore the imagination, and not the intellect, which shapes the space of possibilities in which we can apprehend objects as falling under concepts28. The body schema represents thus the structure which sketches out in advance our awareness of things, the ability – as Carman affirms – to anticipate and incorporate the world prior to applying concepts of objects. This is a “dynamic” capacity, in as much as my body appears to me as a posture with a view to a certain actual or possible task. “... If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and the whole of my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet”29. It has to be stressed that, by doing this, Merleau-Ponty is not just offering – as it could be interpreted from some passages and as Carman himself seems to argue – a theory of perception, but is developing a pre-cognitive account of understanding that serves as an alternative to the intellectualist view, and in which the imagination assumes the role of conditioning the possibility of experience30. In this sense, the traditional idea of understanding has to be rethought in a way that acknowledges that it has its basis not in cognition or judgment, but rather in our bodily engagement with the world. According to this, Merleau-Ponty indicates that the bodily understanding accounts for both the “real” and the “virtual” engagement with the world, as “… the normal subject’s body is not merely ready to be mobilized by real situations that draw it toward themselves, it can also turn away from the world… and be situated in the virtual… the normal person reckons with the possible”31.

That this transcendental function of the body is something more complex than the role played by the simple structure of human perception – and that it can be claimed that it works properly as Kantian schematism (but, we can say, in an “incarnate” way) – is testified by what Merleau-Ponty calls the function of projection32, a fundamental function lying beneath intelligence and perception, namely the general power of placing oneself in a situation,

Again, it is the body, the origin of all expressive spaces, projecting significations on the outside by giving them a place and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and before our eyes34. Thus, the expression, at the origin of which is the body, or, in other words, these “bodily projections”, is what literally makes significations exist, and be perceptually present to us.

Returning to the transcendental claim and its relation to imagination, the way in which Merleau-Ponty himself points out the continuity between his view and Kant’s should be stressed, as Matherne shows. In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty affirms:

In this passage, Merleau-Ponty insists on how Kant, by demonstrating the union of imagination and understanding that “precedes” experience, shows how this union is indeed pre-conceptual. By doing this, as Matherne notes, he suggests that Kant is thereby recognizing that imagination underwrites not only reflective and aesthetic judgment, but also serves as the condition of possibility of both knowledge and the unity of consciousness – with the latter referring not just to the unity of all subjective intentional acts, but to that fungierende Intentionalität that concerns our pre-predicative relation to the world, through imagination, perception, affect, etc36. Hence, if already in Kant we can find the idea that imagination involves our power to figure any intention whatever in the world, Merleau-Ponty adds the important condition that this just happens thanks to the function of the body schema, and its capacity of sketching out in advance all possibility of experience and all awareness of things.

Returning to Richir, as said above, the Belgian philosopher proposes an architectonic regrounding of phenomenology, which is not based anymore, as in Husserl’s, on the intentional experiences of consciousness – where the objectifying acts of perception define man’s definitive relationship to things – but rather in the type of “pre-intentional knowledge” where the body schema and the imagination play the most fundamental role. It can be therefore affirmed that, starting from (and at the same time buildig on) the works of Husserl, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty, the aim of Richir’s philosophy consists in exploring the imaginative and bodily basis of intentionality underlying all objectivization. Richir’s phenomenology holds therefore a transcendental claim, not in the traditional sense of the transcendental ego, but rather in the transcendental sense of the “power of the phenomenalization” that imagination (and phantasy, to use

another, wider concept of it37) consists in38. With this, Richir, as we’ll now illustrate, purports on the one hand to offer a better account of human experience, and on the other hand to elucidate the problem of appearance, or, better said, of phenomena as appearance. The former point implies a rethinking of Kantian schematism that would consider the basic human experience of man, endowed with a live body and projecting himself in the world; the second one implies a radicalization of the husserlian concept of epoché, which would mean not just suspending the thesis about the existence of the natural world in order to regain its modalities of appearance to consciousness, but rather considering what Husserl himself called the “institution of sense” (Sinnstiftung) as a proper “sense-formation” (Sinnbildung), that is something of a fashioning – impersonal, “asubjective” – of sense39. This would necessarily imply thinking appearance as having radical no-identity with itself, that is, as fundamentally indeterminate. With Richir’s words:

Richir’s insistence on appearances as something fundamentally plural, not- identical with themselves and indeterminate (and even “absent”) – a no-identity that speaks for a new “impersonal” grounding of phenomenology – clearly owes a debt to Merleau-Ponty. As the French philosopher already saw – as shown in §1 – the world, and human experience itself, are characterized by what he calls the reversibility of flesh; there is a not-identity of appearance with itself, as there is a not-identity of oneself with himself; there is an original distance, a deflection, an opening of the body to itself and to the things. The reversibility of the flesh suggests that, as Merleau- Ponty affirms in his late essay on Husserlian phenomenology, The Philosopher and his Shadows, my body and the body of the other are like organs of one single intercorporeality. From here, all phenomenon is understood as a phenomenon of the “body of the flesh” (phénomène de corps-de-chair), hence being constituted by a sensibility which is not the sensibility of the mere sensation, but rather a “spiritual sensibility”, in the sense given to it by Kant in his third Critique by speaking of imagination41. Richir clarifies his vision of phenomenology in the following way:

As we can read, the object of this “phenomenology as phenomenology” is not this or that phenomenon, but what makes it so that the phenomenon occurs – what Richir calls “phenomenalization”. This implies that in any case the phenomenon in its phenomenalization starts from or relies on a pre-given concept, and that’s why precisely imagination (schematism) plays a decisive role. Therefore, as Schnell affirms, using Kant’s terms in the Critique of Judgement, it is not “determinate”, but rather “reflective”:

The originality of Richir consists thus precisely in the introduction of a phenomenological schematism which is not conceivable without the body and its being one flesh with the world, inverting thereby the constitutive relationship between the opening to the world and its understanding, or reflexive appropriation by the subject: “It is the (...) ek-stasis of the phenomenon of phenomenon, coextensive to the originary distortion of phenomenon, to the inscription that is always already carried out in the transcendental schematisms of the phenomenalization, that constitutes the conditions of possibility and the transcendental matrix of the worldly ek-stasis (in the Heideggerian sense) rather than the opposite”44. This would allow, as Carlson observes, a coping with a phenomenon as a concrete one, far away from being an appearance of what is reflected in and by a cogito, a phenomenon as the appearance (parution) of a “place in the world”:

In fact, vision, sensation, thought, dream, this excavation of the world never corresponds to the sum or to the delimitation of what one actually sees, feels, thinks, dreams. The actual, as actually present, is never but “the shadow that the concept projects on the phase of presence, which is in turn coextensive of the world phenomenon and of the phenomenon in the world, as incarnated one”46. What is a phenomenon also? According to Richir, painters have always been conscious of it. Constable, for example, knew it well when he said that it is not about a house, but it is about a summer morning in which there is a house. A phenomenon, in this sense, is nothing but a phase of the world.

With this, as seen, Richir is explicitly moving a critique to the traditional philosophy of representation, but also to the idea that the image, imago is something that refers to the “fixed” domain of the visual and aims to cover the entire field of imagination (or even of human experience in general). With his philosophy, Richir is looking for a deeper dimension, a dimension “beyond the image” – something that would be witnessed for example by the fact that someone unable to see can demonstrate the same capacity for imagining and phantasizing as anyone else47. In fact, imagination, which at its foundation is essentially “unfigurable”, belongs to the order of affectivity–that ground of life not yet marked by what we understand by “subject”, “consciousness” etc., in the classical senses of these words. Accordingly, as Richir affirms, it is possible to admit a “human glance”, proper to the perceptive imagination, where–“in an exchange of glances”–each one perceives in the other this “original unfigurable”, beyond the bodily limits, where a reciprocal “dwelling” is possible (even if not a “coincidence”, to use Merleau-Ponty’s words). In fact, a glance that crosses another glance does not properly see “anything”, but rather sees in it “something unfigurable, like his life, or the modulations, in the form of affections, of his affectivity”. If a glance were properly speaking a vision, one would see in the other eye just one’s own pupil, as Hegel already stated in his Phenomenology of the Spirit.

This is also the task of painting: it tries, “perceiving in phantasy”, to grasp something transcendent. In fact, it is not that the painter tries to reproduce faithfully and according to his own talent something that he sees in the real world; rather he tries, so to say, to both unravel and enable by the means at his disposal (his abilities and the rules and materials of painting in a given historical moment) access to this unfigurable present in the figurable–and this, according to the gestures of his Leibkörper and his affections. Artists create out of their Leiblichkeit, but this Leiblichkeit itself cannot be represented voluntarily and directly: it remains in its undefined vagueness and may only be felt during its unintentional activity.

In this sense, artistic creation has its telos neither in convincing illusions (recognizable and confirming fictions) nor in rhetorical effects, but in opening our minds to the unconceivable: its telos lies in activating non-intentional phantasy and as-yet unshaped affect48.

This means, according to Richir, that artistic creation consists in looking for the true self through an image that has to “remove” or “suspend” itself, in order to give

access to the perceptive imagination and its operativity: the true self present in the image will be the same thing that the spectator (if he is not “dazzled” by what the painting supposedly represents) will perceive, in his radical singularity.