Nov
28
“What is irreplaceable in the work of art? What makes it far more a voice of the spirit, whose analogue is found in all productive philosophic or political thought, than a means to pleasure? The fact that it contains, better than ideas, matrices of ideas—the fact that it provides us with symbols whose meaning we never stop developing. Precisely because it dwells and makes us dwell in a world we do not have the key to, the work of art teaches us to see and ultimately gives us something to think about as no analytical work can; because when we analyze an object, we find only what we have put into it.”
Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” reproduced in F.R. David, “Keep it to Yourself,” Spring 2009, p. 184
