Explanation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological Interpretation of Cezanne's Paintings

The French phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), based his doctrine on the theory of “being-in-the-world”. Following Husserl and Heidegger, he tried to focus on the proportion between us and the world. One of the main concepts in Husserl’s phenomenological notions is the “return to the thing” to which modern science does not pay attention. Merleau-Ponty, relying on the nature and the thing depicted in Cezanne’s works, tries to explain the phenomenological notion of the “return to the thing” and the nature; he tries to put Cezanne’s paintings as the intermediate between two types of reduction, the eidetic and the transcendental one, and so fills up the gap between these two reductions. This article studies phenomenologically Merleau-ponty’s attempts regarding the concept of the nature, the thing and the artist Cezanne’s approach towards these concepts. How it is possible to fill up the gap between the perception and the world, is explained, in terms of Merleau-ponty’s doctrines.