Merleau-Ponty on painting, sedimentation, and the cultural world

Author(s): Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne) Year: 2026 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, European Journal of Philosophy e70063)

Inkpin examines Merleau-Ponty's 1950s appropriation of Husserl's notion of sedimentation by contrasting Husserl's application of it to geometry with Merleau-Ponty's application of it to painting. The paper's distinctive contribution is a typology of sense-realizing practices, organized along two axes: the kind of artefact a practice produces (identity-based type artefacts vs non-identical concrete artefacts) and the mode of sedimentation it operates with (integration vs accumulation). Husserl's geometry sits at one extreme, Merleau-Ponty's painting at the other, with intermediate cases (tools, language) projecting a range. The cultural world must be conceived not as a homogeneous whole governed by one mode of sedimentation, but as "a complex network of heterogeneous practices" with correspondingly diverse sedimentation processes. Two applications follow: a model for cultural identity (national, racial, gender) as concretely mediated by "touchstones" rather than constituted by shared core properties, and a critique of "top-down" historical-philosophical approaches (Heidegger's Ge-stell, Foucault's épistémè, Gadamer's "concretization") that postulate abstract structures as conditions of possibility for empirical phenomena.

Core Arguments

Claim: Husserl's notion of sedimentation in geometry serves to make "ideal objectivity" possible without requiring constant reactivation. Sedimentation in this case is linked specifically with writing as a material scaffold whose enduring materiality ensures (i) the permanence of ideal structures, (ii) their availability to everyone, and (iii) the preservation of reactivatable structured meaning. Because: geometry must be both an "intuitable whole" progressively built up and validated by "evidence/intuition," yet living evidence passes and reactivation cannot run through every step; "it would be impossible if it were constantly necessary to 'run through the entire, immense chain of foundations'" (Husserl, Crisis p. 373). Writing's enduring materiality holds meanings as available without their being constantly re-actualized. Against: Platonic eternal-form views (no need for material scaffolding); views that knowledge is constantly re-constituted from scratch; readings of sedimentation as a metaphor lacking material implementation.
Claim: Geometry produces identity-based type artefacts — each performance of a geometric operation is identically the same regardless of language or instantiation; particular instances matter only as "tokens" of a "type." Because: a constitutive part of geometric operations is the awareness that the same identical structure is referred to ("evidence of identity"), permitting "arbitrary repetition with evidence of identity" (Husserl 370). Geometric artefacts are types both syntactically and semantically (Inkpin fn 10). Husserl himself contrasts geometric idealities with tools: "unlike tools (hammer, pliers) or architectures and similar products, works of this class are not repeatable in many instances that are the same as each other. The Pythagorean theorem, the whole of geometry, exists only once" (Husserl 368). Against: views that conflate geometry with tool-use (where particular instances matter as practical results, not as constituting universal meaning); views that treat all cultural meanings as identity-based.
Claim: Husserl's choice of geometry as the model is tacitly intellectualist — he generalizes from our maximally rational ability to "the entire cultural world." Because: geometry as a "model of a unified and completely intuited system of knowledge" (Husserl 378) is paradigmatically intellectualist; treating this as generalizable to the rest of the cultural world assimilates all other activities to the geometric model. Husserl's conception further centres on preserving sense identically; "continual meaning transformations" appear only as a "danger" (Husserl 376; cf. 46, 58, 67). Against: Husserl's own extension of the geometry-paradigm to "fine literature" and the cultural world (Husserl 368); Merleau-Ponty's antithetical position centred on transformation.
Claim: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) holds three sedimentation positions, two paralleling Husserl and one diverging: sedimentation is the basis of the cultural world; sedimentation is linked with passivity; only speech is capable of being sedimented — "of all expressive operations only speech is capable of being sedimented and of constituting an inter-subjective acquisition" (PdP 221). The third position excludes painting from sedimentation, as Merleau-Ponty's "Cézanne's Doubt" reaffirms ("paints as if one had never painted," Sens et Non-sens 1995: 24). Because: PdP retains a Husserlian privileging of language over other expressive modes — "all the more notable given Merleau-Ponty's broad view of expression as encompassing all embodied behaviours." Against: any reading that takes the PdP doctrine as Merleau-Ponty's settled position. Inkpin emphasizes its instability even within PdP.
Claim: PdP's exclusion of painting from sedimentation is internally inconsistent. Merleau-Ponty applies "sedimentation" beyond language (perception PdP 249, 275; feelings in a cultural world 220-221; "life" 504); allows that "Van Gogh's painting is established in me forever – a step is taken from which I cannot return" (PdP 450), implying acquisition occurs in painting just as in geometry; and his "Cézanne's Doubt" reading relies on Cézanne's relation to impressionism (Sens et Non-sens 1995: 15-17), implicitly recognizing painting's discursive character. Because: Merleau-Ponty's broader theory of embodied expression makes the language-privilege unsustainable; the textual evidence shows him operating outside the official doctrine. Against: Merleau-Ponty's own PdP doctrine; readings that take the PdP exclusion at face value.
Claim: By The Prose of the World (1950–52, drafted concurrently with the Signs essay "Indirect Language"), Merleau-Ponty's view evolves: rather than denying sedimentation in painting, he distinguishes two modes of sedimentation — integration (Husserlian: claims to recapitulate, recover, contain past truths) and accumulation (his own contribution: paintings add themselves without containing predecessors). Because: PdM 142: "It is therefore peculiar to [le propre de] the algorithm to conserve old formulations as it changes them in themselves and in their legitimate sense, to reaffirm them at the moment it surpasses them, to save them while destroying them, and thus to make them appear as parts of a totality under construction, or as sketches of a future whole. Here sedimentation does not merely accumulate creation upon creation, it integrates." Painting is the exemplary practice for this period — "our description [...] assimilates the history of knowledge to that of painting" (IP 136). Against: PdP's earlier exclusion of sedimentation from painting; Husserl's totalization model.
Claim: What gets sedimented in painting is at two levels: (a) individual works as primary products, functioning as "matrices of symbols," "cores," "pivots" of the cultural field (IP 112-113; PdM 126: "matrices of ideas"); (b) styles as secondary patterns built up over multiple works (IP 105: "the collective history is that of styles or of procedures that are imitable, shareable, sedimented"). Because: the painter's discipline produces individual works as primary products; style emerges as a derivative general pattern that cannot be reduced to inventoriable rules — "the 'logic' of painting, i.e. the circulation of symbolic forms that are imitable and shareable, of general 'styles', rests entirely on the most individual operation" (IP 115). Note: this two-level structure is the philological backbone for the integration/accumulation distinction at level (a) — works in painting are non-identical, whereas in geometry the "primary products" are identical type artefacts. Against: views that take style as primary or rule-based; views of art history as mere juxtaposition of unconnected works.
Claim (Inkpin's original conceptual contribution): Painting is characterized by non-identity-based sense-realization — particularity (works) matters and is balanced with, but not reduced to, generality (style). This is the structural contrast to Husserl's identity-based geometry. Because: (i) "no two paintings are ever identical" (PdM 116); "pure and simple repetition is impossible in art" (PdM 116); (ii) at the second level, style cannot be reduced to "techniques" or rules — Merleau-Ponty highlights the "excess" of expressive acts (PdP 447), the "fecundity" defining institution (PdM 96; IP 50, 162), and denies that an "inventory" of means could capture style (PdM 82, 97-98); (iii) the formulation captures ordinary usage of "style" — grouping works that "manifest formal similarities despite varying in manifold ways." Against: rule-based formalism; Husserlian identity-based generalization; the geometry-as-paradigm Husserl assumes.
Claim: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each overgeneralize their chosen practice to the entire cultural world. The right view is that geometry and painting exemplify two distinct, mutually irreducible kinds of sense-realizing practice — projecting a range of possibilities along type-vs-concrete and integration-vs-accumulation axes. Tools (functionally identical instances but practical not type-constitutive aim) and language (words as type artefacts, but meaning functioning either type-constitutively or analogically) are intermediate cases. Because: monolithic models systematically obscure how different practices in fact constitute and transmit meaning; the cultural world is "a complex network of heterogeneous practices" with correspondingly diverse processes of sedimentation at the level of specific practices. Against: any monistic view of cultural transmission, including Husserl's geometry-as-paradigm and Merleau-Ponty's painting-as-paradigm.
Claim: Merleau-Ponty's view of painting models a concrete mediation of cultural worlds — engagement is piecemeal (mediated by individual works), fragmentary (only part of the field is considered), personal (effected by the individual not a "community"), and loosely cohesive (shared conditions rather than properties). This contrasts with the abstract mediation of Husserlian type-sharing (immune to modification by particular instances). Because: a painter's relation to tradition is mediated through "touchstones" — limited, personal, idiosyncratic actual influences within a much larger field of potential influences. Cézanne's response to impressionism (using colour and brush-stroke patterning to negate transient effects of light and capture the solidity of perceived things) is the paradigm case; Cézanne may or may not have been familiar with Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, but his work nonetheless takes up a determinable place in the field through its determinate relations to actual influences. Against: type-based models that require sharing core properties for cultural participation; views in which engagement with a culture is given by its essence rather than negotiated through particulars.
Claim (application 1): Cultural identity (national, racial, gender, taste) is better understood through Merleau-Pontian concrete mediation than through Husserlian type-sharing. Englishness is constituted by negotiating self-understanding relative to touchstones — 1066, 1966, the Watford Gap, the miners' strike, fish and chips, Shakespeare, the last night of the Proms — rather than by sharing a determinate set of "core character traits." Because: such touchstones can elicit very different responses (rapture, indifference, repulsion); no clear determination of how many touchstones are required; the relevance is a possibility-of-relation, not a determination. The model offers "a degree of freedom in our relation to our sociocultural surroundings" — "negotiated rather than imposed, selective and differentiated rather than monolithic." This does not deny that homogenizing or oppressive structures exist; these may best be understood as type-based aspects (rule- or norm-based). Against: type-based identity views; Foucault's overgeneralization of disciplinary structures to the whole of society as a "carceral archipelago" (Foucault 1993: 347-358; cited fn 40).
Claim (application 2): Merleau-Ponty's view opposes "top-down" historical-philosophical approaches that postulate abstract general structures as conditions of possibility for empirical phenomena. Heidegger's Ge-stell (in "The Question Concerning Technology," 1954: 25-27, where modern science is "antecedently technical in character") and Foucault's épistémè (Foucault 2002: 89, 145, where the microscope was "made possible by, rather than itself initiating," a new visibility) are paradigmatic cases. Because: such approaches commit abstract mediation — they postulate higher-level features unmodified by their instantiations, "flowing downwards" rather than being inflected by empirical phenomena. They invert the direction of explanation by making vague, highly abstract structures explanatory of more intelligible empirical events; they postulate structures agents are unaware of; and they fail to make intelligible how "abstract mediation is to bring about its supposed effects." Underlying is a problematic assumption: that subsuming under a more general structure is what explanation/intelligibility requires. Against: Heidegger's Ge-stell; Foucault's épistémè / discursive formations / regimes of truth (also citing Foucault 2008: 56-57; 2001: 160 in fn 41); top-down explanation in cultural-historical philosophy more generally.
Claim: Gadamer's dialogical conception of historical transmission, while close in some respects to Merleau-Ponty's approach, retains a tenuous attachment to type-artefactual notions. Merleau-Ponty's view is preferable. Because: Gadamer rightly recognizes that rules undergo "productive completion" and "concretization" through the "productivity of the single case" (Gadamer 1990: 44, 335-336) — but he claims not that rules change but that "the identity of the rule, the 'same' rule, is maintained over a potentially indefinite number of changes." This is "at best misleading, and at worst incoherent." Plus Gadamer's "fascination with the supposed 'authority' of tradition" (Gadamer 1990: 281ff.) is a further distancing point. Against: Gadamer's hybrid type-and-particular reading of tradition.

Argumentative Movement

The paper is structured by a four-part movement that mirrors its conceptual ambition. §1 reconstructs Husserl on geometry to extract the scaffolding function of sedimentation and the identity-based-type-artefact model. §2 traces Merleau-Ponty's evolution from the PdP exclusion of painting through the PdM/IP distinction between integration and accumulation, identifying paintings (as concrete artefacts) and styles (as analogically grounded patterns) as the two levels at which sedimentation operates in painting. §3 is the analytic core, deriving the type-vs-concrete typology from the contrast and arguing that the cultural world must be conceived as a heterogeneous network of practices. §4 makes the typology productive: it offers a concrete-mediation account of cultural identity and uses the typology to diagnose top-down approaches in Heidegger, Foucault, and Gadamer.

The argument is not premise-conclusion at the chapter level — it is constructive. Each section sets up the conceptual machinery of the next: the Husserl reconstruction makes the type-artefact category visible; the Merleau-Ponty reconstruction makes the concrete-artefact category visible; together they make the typology available; the typology then makes the application-level critiques possible. Scholarly exegesis (§§1-2) and original conceptual contribution (§§3-4) are inseparable; without the careful reading of PdM 142, the typology has no philological basis, and without the typology, §4's critiques have no diagnostic apparatus.

Key Findings

The "scaffolding function" of sedimentation links Husserl's writing-of-geometry with Merleau-Ponty's paintings-as-inscriptions, but the kind of artefact scaffolded determines the kind of sedimentation that can operate (§1).
Merleau-Ponty's PdP doctrine that "only speech is capable of being sedimented" (PdP 221) is unstable even within PdP — Van Gogh's "established in me forever" (PdP 450), the Cézanne-impressionism reading, and the application of "sedimentation" to perception/feelings/life all push against the official exclusion (§2).
Merleau-Ponty's PdM/IP view distinguishes two modes of sedimentation: integration (algorithmic / geometrical / Husserlian totalization) and accumulation (painting's adding-without-containing).
Non-identity-based sense-realization — particularity balanced with but not reduced to generality — is what painting introduces as a counter-paradigm to geometry's identity-based model.
The cultural world must be conceived as a complex network of heterogeneous practices rather than a homogeneous whole; sedimentation operates at the level of specific practices.
Cultural identity (national, racial, gender) admits concrete mediation via touchstones rather than (only) type-sharing; the model gives "a degree of freedom" in cultural-horizon-inhabiting that abstract-mediation models obscure.
Top-down historical philosophy (Heidegger's Ge-stell, Foucault's épistémè, Gadamer's "concretization") commits to abstract mediation and fails to make intelligible how abstract structures produce empirical effects.

Methodology

The paper combines close textual reconstruction of Husserl's "Origin of Geometry" / Crisis and a series of Merleau-Ponty texts (Phenomenology of Perception, "Cézanne's Doubt," The Prose of the World, Institution and Passivity, the 1958-9 lectures, Eye and Mind, Visible and the Invisible) with systematic comparison and original conceptual articulation. Inkpin's interpretive method is philological in setup (tracking Merleau-Ponty's evolution through specific PdP / PdM / IP passages with footnoted attestations) and analytic in payoff (deriving a typology of sense-realizing practices). The argument's hybrid form makes the philological and analytic moves mutually load-bearing: the typology is grounded in the philological reconstruction of integration/accumulation, and the philological reconstruction is what gives the typology its non-arbitrary axes.

The Wittgensteinian register is acknowledged in fn 35 — the heterogeneous-network view of the cultural world rests on a "(Wittgensteinian) thought" about overlapping practices and forms of life, developed at length in Inkpin 2021 (Complex Community: Towards a Phenomenology of Language Sharing).

Concepts Developed

(Concepts where Inkpin does original work, beyond what an existing wiki page already captures.)

non-identity-based-sense — Inkpin's coinage. Sense-realization in which particulars (works) are irreducible to general types (styles); patterns emerge over a domain of irreducibly non-identical elements without rules subsuming particulars. Painting is the paradigm; geometry is the contrastive case.
concrete-mediation — Inkpin's term. Cultural-world relation that is piecemeal, fragmentary, personal, loosely cohesive — mediated by particular works/touchstones rather than by shared types. Contrasts with abstract mediation (Husserlian, Heideggerian, Foucauldian).
cultural-world — Inkpin's heterogeneous-network reading. The cultural world is not a homogeneous whole but a network of overlapping practices with diverse sedimentation modes.
sedimentation — Inkpin's distinctive contribution: the typological pluralization of sedimentation by practice type, with the integration/accumulation axis foregrounded from PdM 142 and the type/concrete-artefact axis added by Inkpin himself. Adds the "scaffolding function" framing.

Concepts Referenced

stiftung — used in Inkpin's reading of Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Husserlian terms; not original work on the concept itself.
institution — the active uptake/modification of intentional structures yielding new sediment; reference but not development.
coherent-deformation — implicitly close to Inkpin's "type-free, analogically grounded patterns" (style); Inkpin doesn't explicitly thematize the term.
lebenswelt — Husserl's term, mentioned in passing.
passivity — referenced in Inkpin's PdP reconstruction.
lateral-universal — not explicitly invoked but implicitly present in §3's range-projection (geometry, painting, intermediate cases).
two-historicities — not engaged directly, though §4's critique of Hegelian/Foucauldian top-down approaches has affinities.

Terminology

The paper uses both German (Husserl) and French (Merleau-Ponty) original terminology alongside English. Selected terms:

Original	English	Attestation locations	Translation notes
Sinngebilde / Sinnbildung	meaning structure / meaning formation	Husserl 367, 371-2	What is sedimented in geometry
Stiftung / Urstiftung / Endstiftung / Neustiftung	institution / primal institution / final institution / re-institution	Husserl 12; IP 48-50, 162	MP follows Husserl's vocabulary
Sinnentleerung	emptying of sense	Husserl 376	The "danger" Husserl warns against
Vorhabe	pre-possession	Husserl 19	Heideggerian term used by Husserl (cf. fn 4)
Ge-stell	enframing	Heidegger 1954: 25-27	The structure Heidegger imputes to modern science
épistémè	episteme	Foucault 2002: 89	"General system of thought"
acquis	acquired	PdP 151, 221, 445	MP's near-synonym for sedimentation
parole	speech	PdP 221	MP's privileging case in PdP
intégration / accumulation	integration / accumulation	PdM 142	MP's two sedimentation modes
déformation cohérente	coherent deformation	not explicitly cited	Implicit affinity with type-free style

Key Passages

"A distinctive feature of Merleau-Ponty's thought in the 1950s is his use of painting as a model for the production and transmission of cultural meaning by critically appropriating several closely related Husserlian terms." (Inkpin p. 1)

Husserl, on the inscriptional foundation of ideal objectivity:

"through being written down a transformation of the original mode of being of the meaning structure [Sinngebilde] takes place [...]. It [the meaning structure] becomes sedimented, so to speak." (Husserl 371-2; quoted Inkpin §1)

Husserl, on the identity-based character of geometric idealities (the textually decisive passage for Inkpin's typology):

"unlike tools (hammer, pliers) or architectures and similar products, works of this class [the cultural world, ideal objectivities] are not repeatable in many instances that are the same as each other. The Pythagorean theorem, the whole of geometry, exists only once, no matter how often and even in whichever language it may be expressed. It [geometry] is identically the same." (Husserl 368; quoted Inkpin §1)

Inkpin coining the type/concrete distinction:

"To capture this important feature, I will characterize geometrical practices as being focused on the production and transmission (i.e. sedimentation) of identity-based type artefacts, with the term 'artefact' serving simply as a reminder that these structures are human-made, through such practices, rather than having some special, but obscure, metaphysical status (as 'essences')." (Inkpin §1, p. 3)

Inkpin diagnosing Husserl:

"Husserl's approach is tacitly intellectualist in seeking to generalize a view based on the exercise of our maximally rational abilities." (Inkpin §1 closing, p. 3)

Merleau-Ponty's PdP doctrine that excludes painting:

"of all expressive operations only speech is capable of being sedimented and of constituting an inter-subjective acquisition" (PdP 221; quoted Inkpin §2)

Merleau-Ponty's PdP inconsistency — Van Gogh as acquired:

"Van Gogh's painting is established in me forever – a step is taken from which I cannot return – and, even if I don't retain any precise recollection of the paintings I have seen, all my aesthetic experience henceforth will be that of someone who has been acquainted with Van Gogh's painting" (PdP 450; quoted Inkpin §2)

Merleau-Ponty's reversal in IP:

"our description [...] assimilates the history of knowledge to that of painting." (IP 136; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 5)

Merleau-Ponty distinguishing integration from accumulation (the philological backbone of Inkpin's §3):

"It is therefore peculiar to [le propre de] the algorithm to conserve old formulations as it changes them in themselves and in their legitimate sense, to reaffirm them at the moment it surpasses them, to save them while destroying them, and thus to make them appear as parts of a totality under construction, or as sketches of a future whole. Here sedimentation does not merely accumulate creation upon creation, it integrates" (PdM 142; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 5)

Painting as adding without containing:

"[the painter's works] add themselves to the works already made: they do not contain them, they do not render them useless, they re-commence them" (PdM 139; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 5)

Each painting taking up a place in the field:

"Each new painting takes [its] place in the world inaugurated by the first painting, it accomplishes the past's vow, is its proxy, acts in its name, but it does not contain [the past] in a manifest state" (PdM 140-141; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 5)

Each work re-makes painting by inheriting it:

"Each choice re-makes painting by inheriting it. Each [individual] work, if it is truly a work, recreates a painter's entire oeuvre by inheriting it" (IP 113; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 5)

Individual works as primary, styles as secondary:

"the 'logic' of painting, i.e. the circulation of symbolic forms that are imitable and shareable, of general 'styles', rests entirely on the most individual operation" (IP 115; quoted Inkpin §2, p. 6)

Inkpin's central conceptual claim:

"painting is characterized by its non-identity-based sense-realization in which particularity/singularity (works) matters and is balanced with – but not reduced to – generality (style)" (Inkpin §3, p. 7)

The cultural-world thesis:

"a 'cultural world' must be conceived as made up of a complex network of heterogeneous practices and as having correspondingly diverse processes of sedimentation at the level of specific practices" (Inkpin §3, p. 8)

Concrete mediation in summary:

"for now engagement with a cultural field is piecemeal (mediated by individual works), fragmentary (only part of the whole field is considered), personal (effected by the individual not a 'community'), and has a loose cohesion (shared conditions rather than properties). In these respects the painter's relation to a cultural field is mediated concretely rather than in the abstract way described above." (Inkpin §4, p. 9)

The Englishness touchstones list:

"Such touchstones for Englishness might include dates such as 1066 or 1966, the Watford Gap, the miners' strike, fish and chips, Shakespeare's works, the last night of the Proms etc. These touchstones need not elicit the same responses or attitudes from everyone: one might be enraptured, appalled, or completely indifferent in responding, for example, to Benjamin Britten's Jerusalem." (Inkpin §4, p. 10)

The diagnosis of top-down approaches:

"for Heidegger, the characteristics of 'enframing' (ontological level) are manifested in the same way by each technological device or process (ontic level); they are to flow downwards, so to speak, rather than being inflected by and approximating to empirical phenomena." (Inkpin §4, pp. 10–11)

The Gadamer critique:

"[Gadamer] claims not that such cases involve changing from one rule to another, nor that the rule is transformed, but that the identity of the rule, the 'same' rule, is maintained over a potentially indefinite number of changes." (Inkpin §4, p. 11)

The paper's closing thesis:

"the distinction between abstract and concrete mediation applies at the level of specific practices, so that for some practices (such as geometry) the model of type-transmission and abstract mediation remains plausible, but that in others the model of concrete mediation is more convincing. Instead of overgeneralizing either model, we should acknowledge the heterogeneity of practices making up a cultural world and consequently recognize that our relation to such a world and its historical transmission must be understood as correspondingly complex." (Inkpin §4 close, p. 11)

What's Not Obvious

Three things about this text that would not appear in a conventional summary or book review:

The term "sedimentation" actually fits painting better than geometry, even though Husserl coined the term for the latter (§2 closing observation, Inkpin p. 6). The geological imagery of layers built up from non-identical elements naturally fits painting's "statistical and granular" character, whereas geometry's "precise, systematic construction of type-artefactual structures" is more like a deductive crystal than a sediment. Inkpin makes this observation almost in passing, but it inverts the conventional Husserlian narrative — and reveals why Inkpin can run his typology: the original intuitive case for sedimentation actually favors the non-identity-based case, even though Husserl reserved it for the identity-based one. (Anchors to PdM 116; Husserl 376; passage references at Inkpin p. 6.)
Merleau-Ponty's choice of painting in PdM is not just "another example" of expressive operation but is deliberately chosen as a counter-paradigm to Husserl's geometry. The §2 closing observation makes this explicit: painting is "a conspicuously embodied ('hands on') and nonlinguistic representational activity" that contrasts with and "ultimately oppose[s] Husserl's intellectualist choice of geometry as a privileged model." This connects to the wiki's existing reading of Merleau-Ponty's evolution from PdP through PdM/IP via institution and stiftung — but Inkpin's reading sharpens what was implicit: painting is not just a domain to which Merleau-Ponty extends sedimentation but is the anti-Husserlian model he mounts against geometry. The full force of this becomes legible only when the IP 136 passage ("our description [...] assimilates the history of knowledge to that of painting") is read as the climactic reversal of Husserl's geometry-as-paradigm thesis.
The paper's positive thesis about the cultural world quietly rests on a Wittgensteinian commitment that is not explicitly defended. Footnote 35 marks this: the heterogeneous-network thesis "implies that one cannot assume a homogeneous community as the correlate of a cultural world. Rather, our community with others is complex and partial, a function of the overlapping practices making up our respective 'forms of life'. I develop this (Wittgensteinian) thought, for the case of language, in more detail in Inkpin 2021, especially 180–183." The whole architecture of "sense-realizing practices" (rather than "structures" or "concepts") does Wittgensteinian work the paper doesn't pause over. Without this commitment, the §4 critiques of Heidegger and Foucault would lack their force — top-down approaches assume a unified field of inquiry, and the reply that "the cultural world is heterogeneous" is convincing only if the heterogeneity is genuinely Wittgensteinian rather than a placeholder for some hidden unity. The paper's full payoff therefore depends on Inkpin 2021 in a way the abstract does not signal.

Critique / Limitations

The integration/accumulation distinction (PdM 142) is the philological backbone of §2 and one of two structuring axes of §3's typology. But Inkpin's own §2 admits painters can "respond to" predecessors and operate within "an integrated field" (PdM 140-141), and §2 closes by saying accumulation is "somewhat weaker than integration in not systematically 'conserving' or 'containing' past meaning and acts." If accumulation already involves a kind of integration (just weaker), the bright line between integration and accumulation is harder to draw than the typology suggests — risking a difference of degree rather than of kind.
The "non-identity-based sense" formulation needs to do philosophical work without rules or formulae but also avoid sheer heterogeneity. Inkpin gestures at "type-free, analogically grounded patterns" (§3, p. 7) — but how analogical grounding works if not through rules/types is left under-specified. The paper assumes the result of Inkpin 2019 (on style) without re-arguing it.
The §4 critique of Heidegger and Foucault treats "conditions of possibility" as if they made empirical-causal claims. A Heideggerian or Foucauldian could push back that Ge-stell and épistémè don't explain in the empirical sense; they articulate the intelligibility-framework within which empirical phenomena become legible. Inkpin's critique presupposes that intelligibility-explanation must move from concrete to general, not the reverse — which is itself a controversial (broadly Wittgensteinian) commitment that the paper assumes rather than defends.
The Gadamer critique (p. 11) is compressed. Inkpin flattens Gadamer's "concretization" to a type-artefactual residue without engaging the alternative reading on which what persists is not the rule's identity but the tradition's hermeneutic continuity. A more sympathetic reading would see Gadamer as a third model (between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) rather than as a confused half-Husserlian.
The paper's empirical examples (Englishness via 1066, Shakespeare, fish and chips) are evocative but selective; Englishness is precisely the kind of cultural identity where touchstones are vivid. Caste membership, religious identity, or strongly normative identity formations might fit type-sharing better. Inkpin acknowledges this with the concession that "homogenizing or oppressive structures and practices [...] may well be best understood as type-based aspects of cultural identity formation."

Connections

extends merleau-ponty-1973-prose-of-the-world — Inkpin's reading of PdM 142 is the philological backbone of his integration/accumulation distinction; central evidence for the typology
extends merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — IP 105, 112-113, 115, 117, 136 are the IP citations that ground the two-level (works / styles) reading of painting's sedimentation
contests merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — PdP 221's exclusion of painting from sedimentation is read as an unstable Husserlian residue, internally undermined by PdP 450, 249, 275, 504
applies sedimentation to a typology of practices — Inkpin pluralizes sedimentation by practice type, sharpening the wiki's existing treatment of sedimentation as one structure with multiple applications
contrasts with Husserl's privileging of geometry as paradigm of cultural transmission ("Origin of Geometry" / Crisis §9)
critiques Heidegger's Ge-stell and Foucault's épistémè as cases of abstract mediation that invert the direction of explanation
critiques Gadamer's "concretization" as retaining a tenuous attachment to type-artefactual notions
complements Kee 2025 — Kee records the qualification (fn 20) that linguistic sedimentation may be tied to writing, which Inkpin's typology generalizes structurally
coordinates with coherent-deformation — Inkpin's "type-free, analogically grounded patterns" coincides with MP's "system of equivalences" reading on coherent deformation; the two readings are coordinate, not co-extensive
contests Husserl's overgeneralization of geometry to "the entire cultural world" and (more controversially) Merleau-Ponty's overgeneralization of painting

Sources

inkpin-2026-painting-sedimentation-cultural-world — this paper. Inkpin (Andrew), European Journal of Philosophy (2026), e70063. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70063. The paper itself is a self-citing source for the typology and the application-level critiques. Inkpin's two prior cited works — Inkpin 2019 ("Merleau-Ponty and the Significance of Style," EJP 27: 468-483) and Inkpin 2021 ("Complex Community: Towards a Phenomenology of Language Sharing," in Language and Phenomenology, ed. Engelland, Routledge) — are not in raw/ but are referenced for the underspecified theoretical commitments (style as type-free pattern; Wittgensteinian heterogeneous community).