Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne: On Doubt of the Thought and the Infinity of Perception

EXTRACT: "Nor as anxiety or in the eyes of the others as Sartre claims but doubting sets man free. To let the body experience, come into being and become an existence the thought escapes the doubt about me and my relation to the world, which science cannot explain."

The book unfolds Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a critique of the doubt of the thought, explaining how it enables the infinity of perception. Unfolding Cézanne's unique color modulations that both remove the necessity of the line and Cézanne's doubt of himself, unlike Descartes' Cognito, the book illustrates how the infinity of perception creates our world of surfaces, which the science claims is an illusion.

QUOTE: "The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. [...] But why do we say this, since in all these cases the landscape is not independent of the supposed perceptions of the characters and, through them, of the author's perceptions and memories? How could the town exist without or before man, or the mirror without the old woman it reflects, even if she does not look at herself in it? [...] This is Cézanne's enigma, which has often been commented upon: Man is absent from but entirely within the landscape."

(Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, p. 169)