Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty
[.] ( ; ; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French
phenomenological philosopher
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, strongly influenced by
Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art ...
. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
,
art,
politics
Politics () is the set of activities that are associated with decision-making, making decisions in social group, groups, or other forms of power (social and political), power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of Social sta ...
,
religion
Religion is a range of social system, social-cultural systems, including designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics in religion, ethics, or ...
,
biology
Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...
,
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
,
psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious mind, unconscious processes and their influence on conscious mind, conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on The Inte ...
,
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
,
nature
Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
, and
history
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
. He was the lead editor of ''
Les Temps modernes'', the
leftist magazine he established with
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism, literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th ...
and
Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human
experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing
dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalising phenomenology, in which
phenomenologists use the results of
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
and
cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...
.
Merleau-Ponty emphasised the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
as the source of
knowledge
Knowledge is an Declarative knowledge, awareness of facts, a Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with individuals and situations, or a Procedural knowledge, practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is oft ...
, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (''corporéité'') led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect
ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world" (''la chair du monde''), seen in his final and incomplete work, ''The Visible and Invisible'', and his last published essay, "Eye and Mind".
Merleau-Ponty engaged with
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...
throughout his career. His 1947 book, ''
Humanism
Humanism is a philosophy, philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and Agency (philosophy), agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The me ...
and Terror'', has been widely understood as defense of the
Moscow Trials.
Slavoj Žižek opines that it avoids the definitive endorsement of a view on the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, but instead engages with the
Marxist theory of history as a
critique of liberalism, in order to reveal an unresolved antinomy in modern politics, between
humanism
Humanism is a philosophy, philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and Agency (philosophy), agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The me ...
and
terror: if human values can only be achieved through violent force, and if liberal ideas hide
illiberal realities, how is just political action to be decided?
Life
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in
Rochefort-sur-Mer,
Charente-Inférieure (now Charente-Maritime),
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
. His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old. After secondary schooling at the
Lycée Louis-le-Grand in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
, Merleau-Ponty became a student at the
École Normale Supérieure
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
, where he studied alongside
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism, literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th ...
,
Simone de Beauvoir,
Simone Weil,
Jean Hyppolite, and
Jean Wahl. As Beauvoir recounts in her autobiography, she developed a close friendship with Merleau-Ponty and became smitten with him, but ultimately found him too well-adjusted to
bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...
life and values for her taste. He attended
Edmund Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929. In 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree (', roughly equivalent to a
M.A. thesis) from the
University of Paris
The University of Paris (), known Metonymy, metonymically as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 during the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated wit ...
, on the basis of the (now-lost) thesis ''La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin'' ("
Plotinus's Notion of the Intelligible Many"), directed by
Émile Bréhier. He passed the
agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty was raised as a
Roman Catholic
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...
. He was friends with the
Christian existentialist author and philosopher
Gabriel Marcel and wrote articles for the
Christian leftist journal ''
Esprit'', but
he left the Catholic Church in 1937 because he felt his
socialist
Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...
politics were not compatible with the
social and political doctrine of the Catholic Church.
An article published in the French newspaper ''
Le Monde
(; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...
'' in October 2014 makes the case of recent discoveries about Merleau-Ponty's likely authorship of the novel ''Nord. Récit de l'arctique'' (Grasset, 1928). Convergent sources from close friends (Beauvoir, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin) seem to leave little doubt that Jacques Heller was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33) and then got a fellowship to do research from the . From 1934 to 1935 he taught at the Lycée de
Chartres. He then in 1935 became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he tutored a young
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French History of ideas, historian of ideas and Philosophy, philosopher who was also an author, Literary criticism, literary critic, Activism, political activist, and teacher. Fo ...
and
Trần Đức Thảo and was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: ''La structure du comportement'' (1942) and ''
Phénoménologie de la Perception'' (1945). During this time, he attended
Alexandre Kojève's influential seminars on
Hegel and
Aron Gurwitsch's lectures on
Gestalt psychology. Merleau-Ponty possessed extensive knowledge in psychology,
neurology
Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix wikt:-logia, -logia, "study of") is the branch of specialty (medicine) , medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous syst ...
, and
psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior.
...
.
In the spring of 1939, he was the first foreign visitor to the newly established
Husserl Archives, where he consulted Husserl's unpublished manuscripts and met
Eugen Fink and
Herman Van Breda. In the summer of 1939, as
France declared war on Nazi Germany, he served on the frontlines in the
French Army
The French Army, officially known as the Land Army (, , ), is the principal Army, land warfare force of France, and the largest component of the French Armed Forces; it is responsible to the Government of France, alongside the French Navy, Fren ...
, where he was wounded in battle in June 1940. Upon returning to Paris in the fall of 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, a
Lacanian psychoanalyst, and founded an
underground resistance group with Jean-Paul Sartre called "Under the Boot". He participated in an armed demonstration against the
Nazi forces during the
liberation of Paris.
After teaching at the
University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the
Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the
Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for the leftist journal ''
Les Temps modernes'' from its founding in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth, he had read
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
's writings and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...
. E. K. Kuby states that while Merleau-Ponty was not a member of the
French Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument justifying the
Moscow Trials and
political violence
Political violence is violence which is perpetrated in order to achieve political goals. It can include violence which is used by a State (polity), state against other states (war), violence which is used by a state against civilians and non-st ...
for progressive ends in general in the work ''Humanism and Terror'' in 1947. Kuby states that, about three years after that, however, he renounced his earlier support for political violence, rejected Marxism, and advocated a
liberal left position in ''Adventures of the Dialectic'' (1955). His friendship with Sartre and work with ''Les Temps modernes'' ended because of that, since Sartre still had a more favourable attitude towards
Soviet communism. Merleau-Ponty was subsequently active in the French non-communist left and in particular in the
Union of the Democratic Forces.
Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a
stroke
Stroke is a medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to a part of the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemor ...
in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on
René Descartes
René Descartes ( , ; ; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and Modern science, science. Mathematics was paramou ...
, leaving an unfinished
manuscript
A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...
which was posthumously published in 1964, along with a selection of Merleau-Ponty's working notes, by
Claude Lefort as ''The Visible and the Invisible''. He is buried in
Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his mother Louise, his wife Suzanne and their daughter Marianne.
Thought
Consciousness
In his ''
Phenomenology of Perception'' (first published in
French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the body-subject (''le corps propre'') as an alternative to the
Cartesian "
cogito". This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the
essences of the world
existentially.
Consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
, the world, and the human body as a
perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged". The
phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the
natural science
Natural science or empirical science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer ...
s, but a correlate of the human body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated
subjectivity intentionally elaborates things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, pre-predicative understanding of the world's makeup. The elaboration, however, is "inexhaustible" (the hallmark of any perception according to Merleau-Ponty). Things are that upon which the body has a "grip" (''prise''), while the grip itself is a function of human connaturality with the world's things. The world and the sense of self are emergent
phenomena
A phenomenon ( phenomena), sometimes spelled phaenomenon, is an observable Event (philosophy), event. The term came into its modern Philosophy, philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which ''cannot'' be ...
in an ongoing "becoming".
The essential partiality of the view of things, their being given only in a certain
perspective and at a certain moment in time does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be copresent in the world and with other things than through such "''Abschattungen''" (sketches, faint outlines, adumbrations). The thing transcends perception, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style of
Leibniz's monads). Through involvement in the world –
being-in-the-world – the perceiver tacitly experiences all the perspectives upon that object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment, as well as the potential perspectives that that object has upon the beings around it.
Each object is a "mirror of all others". The perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception; rather, it is an
ambiguous perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual ''
Gestalt''. Only after an integration within the environment so as to perceive objects as such can attention be turned toward particular objects within the landscape so as to define them more clearly. This attention, however, does not operate by clarifying what is already seen, but by constructing a new ''Gestalt'' oriented toward a particular object. Because the bodily involvement with things is always provisional and indeterminate, meaningful things are encountered in a unified though ever open-ended world.
The primacy of perception
From the time of writing ''Structure of Behaviour'' and ''Phenomenology of Perception'', Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with
John Locke
John Locke (; 29 August 1632 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thi ...
, that perception was not the causal product of atomic
sensations. This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly in
behaviourism. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the
lifeworld (the "''Lebenswelt''").
This primordial openness is at the heart of his
thesis
A thesis (: theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: D ...
of the primacy of perception. The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "all
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the
noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the
noema). Thus, the correlation between noesis and noema becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness. However, in studying the posthumous manuscripts of Husserl, who remained one of his major influences, Merleau-Ponty remarked that, in their evolution, Husserl's work brings to light phenomena which are not assimilable to noesis–noema correlation. This is particularly the case when one attends to the phenomena of the body (which is at once body-subject and body-object),
subjective time (the consciousness of time is neither an act of consciousness nor an object of thought) and the other (the first considerations of the other in Husserl led to
solipsism).
The distinction between "acts of thought" (noesis) and "
intentional objects of thought" (noema) does not seem, therefore, to constitute an irreducible ground. It appears rather at a higher level of analysis. Thus, Merleau-Ponty does not postulate that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which supposes at the outset a noetic-noematic ground. Instead, he develops the thesis according to which "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that its conceptualisations should be re-examined in the light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis.
Corporeity
Taking the study of
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty was led to recognize that one's own
body (''le corps propre'') is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition of
experience
Experience refers to Consciousness, conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience i ...
, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. He therefore underlines the fact that there is an inherence of
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
and of the body of which the analysis of perception should take account. The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of experience, so to speak, insofar as perception becomes an active and constitutive dimension.
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates a corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, and so stands in contrast with the dualist
ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
of mind and body in Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them. In the ''Phenomenology of Perception'' Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (1962, p. 440).
Spatiality
The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on
space
Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions. Modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless ...
(''l'espace'') and the primacy of the dimension of depth (''la profondeur'') as implied in the notion of ''being in the world'' (''être au monde''; to echo
Heidegger's ''In-der-Welt-sein'') and of one's own body (''le corps propre''). Reflections on spatiality in phenomenology are also central to the advanced philosophical deliberations in
architectural theory
Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, and writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in all architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are t ...
.
Language
The highlighting of the fact that corporeity
intrinsically has a dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of the
ego is one of the conclusions of ''The Structure of Behaviour'' (1942) that is constantly
reiterated in Merleau-Ponty's later works. Following this theme of expressivity, he goes on to examine how an
incarnate subject is in a position to undertake actions that transcend the organic level of the body, such as in intellectual operations and the products of one's cultural life.
He carefully considers
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
, then, as the core of
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
, by examining in particular the connections between the unfolding of thought and sense—enriching his perspective not only by an analysis of the acquisition of language and the expressivity of the body, but also by taking into account pathologies of language, painting, cinema, literature, poetry, and music.
This work deals mainly with language, beginning with the reflection on artistic expression in ''The Structure of Behavior''—which contains a passage on
El Greco that prefigures the remarks that he develops in "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945) and follows the discussion in ''Phenomenology of Perception''. The work, undertaken while serving as the Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of the Sorbonne, is not a departure from his philosophical and phenomenological works, but rather an important continuation in the development of his thought.
As the course outlines of his Sorbonne lectures indicate, during this period he continues a dialogue between phenomenology and the diverse work carried out in
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
, all in order to return to the study of the
acquisition of language in children, as well as to broadly take advantage of the contribution of
Ferdinand de Saussure to
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, and to work on the notion of structure through a discussion of work in psychology, linguistics and
social anthropology
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...
.
Art
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in ''Phenomenology of Perception'' (p. 207, 2nd note
r. ed. and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language () (''The Prose of the World'', p. 10). Spoken language (), or secondary expression, returns to the speaker's linguistic baggage and cultural heritage, as well as the brute mass of relationships between
signs and
significations. Speaking language (), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at the moment where it makes itself an advent of sense.
It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions.
The notion of
style
Style, or styles may refer to:
Film and television
* ''Style'' (2001 film), a Hindi film starring Sharman Joshi, Riya Sen, Sahil Khan and Shilpi Mudgal
* ''Style'' (2002 film), a Tamil drama film
* ''Style'' (2004 film), a Burmese film
* '' ...
occupies an important place in his essay "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (the first chapter of ''Signes'', 1960). In spite of certain similarities with
André Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux's ''The Voices of Silence''. Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work "style" is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist's individuality. Sometimes it is used, on the contrary, in a very
metaphysical
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of h ...
sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a
mystical
Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight ...
sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an "über-artist" expressing "the Spirit of Painting". Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorization of an artistic school or movement. (However, this account of Malraux's notion of style—a key element in his thinking—is open to serious question.)
For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a separation between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration the dimensions of
historicity
Historicity is the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality of being part of history instead of being a historical myth, legend, or fiction. The historicity of a claim about the past is its factual status. Historicity deno ...
and
intersubjectivity. (However, Merleau-Ponty's reading of Malraux has been questioned in a recent major study of Malraux's theory of art which argues that Merleau-Ponty seriously misunderstood Malraux.) For Merleau-Ponty, style is born of the interaction between two or more fields of being. Rather than being exclusive to individual human consciousness, consciousness is born of the pre-conscious style of the world, of Nature.
Science
In his essay "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945), in which he identifies
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation, influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century a ...
's impressionistic theory of painting as analogous to his own concept of radical reflection, the attempt to return to, and reflect on, prereflective consciousness, Merleau-Ponty identifies science as the opposite of art. In Merleau-Ponty's account, whereas art is an attempt to capture an individual's perception, science is anti-individualistic. In the preface to his ''Phenomenology of Perception'', Merleau-Ponty presents a phenomenological objection to
positivism
Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positivemeaning '' a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, ''Soci ...
: that it can reveal nothing about human subjectivity. All that a scientific text can explain is the particular individual experience of that scientist, which cannot be transcended. For Merleau-Ponty, science neglects the depth and profundity of the phenomena that it endeavors to explain.
Merleau-Ponty understood science to be an ''ex post facto'' abstraction. Causal and physiological accounts of perception, for example, explain perception in terms that are arrived at only after abstracting from the phenomenon itself. Merleau-Ponty chastised science for taking itself to be the area in which a complete account of nature may be given. The subjective depth of phenomena cannot be given in science as it is. This characterizes Merleau-Ponty's attempt to ground science in phenomenological objectivity and, in essence, to institute a "return to the phenomena".
Influence
Anticognitivist cognitive science
Merleau-Ponty's critical position with respect to science was stated in his Preface to the ''Phenomenology'': he described scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest". Despite, or perhaps because of, this view, his work influenced and anticipated the strands of modern psychology known as
post-cognitivism.
Hubert Dreyfus has been instrumental in emphasising the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's work to current post-cognitive research, and its criticism of the traditional view of cognitive science.
Dreyfus's seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational account of the mind), ''What Computers Can't Do'', consciously replays Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus's critique and neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition.
With the publication in 1991 of ''The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience'', by
Francisco Varela,
Evan Thompson, and
Eleanor Rosch, this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied or
enactive cognitive science, and later in the decade, to
neurophenomenology. In addition, Merleau-Ponty's work has also influenced researchers trying to integrate neuroscience with the principles of
chaos theory.
It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is represented by a growing number of works, including
*
Ron McClamrock, ''Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World'' (1995)
*
Andy Clark, ''Being There'' (1997)
*
Jean Petitot et al. (eds.), ''Naturalizing Phenomenology'' (1999)
*
Alva Noë, ''Action in Perception'' (2004)
*
Shaun Gallagher, ''How the Body Shapes the Mind'' (2005)
* Franck Grammont, Dorothée Legrand, and
Pierre Livet (eds.), ''Naturalizing Intention in Action'' (2010)
* The journal ''
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences''
Feminist philosophy
Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including
Rosalyn Diprose and .
Heinämaa has argued for a rereading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Dreyfus's reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviorist, and as neglecting the importance of the phenomenological reduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.)
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body has also been taken up by
Iris Young in her essay "
Throwing Like a Girl," and its follow-up, "'Throwing Like a Girl': Twenty Years Later". Young analyzes the particular modalities of feminine bodily comportment as they differ from that of men. Young observes that while a man who throws a ball puts his whole body into the motion, a woman throwing a ball generally restricts her own movements as she makes them, and that, generally, in sports, women move in a more tentative, reactive way. Merleau-Ponty argues that people experience the world in terms of the "I can" – that is, oriented towards certain projects based on capacity and habituality. Young's thesis is that in women, this intentionality is inhibited and ambivalent, rather than confident, experienced as an "I cannot".
Ecophenomenology
Ecophenomenology can be described as the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003).
This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely subjective, because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness, phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.
David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" (''chair'') as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity", and he identifies this elemental matrix with the interdependent web of earthly life. This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality, which Merleau-Ponty calls "the flesh" and which Abram refers to variously as "the animate earth", "the breathing biosphere" or "the more-than-human natural world". Yet this is not nature or the biosphere conceived as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather "the biosphere as it is experienced and ''lived from within'' by the intelligent body — by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Ponty's ecophenemonology with its emphasis on holistic dialog within the larger-than-human world also has implications for the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language; indeed he states that "language is the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest".
Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break..." Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death, and published with the half-complete manuscript of ''The Visible and the Invisible'', several make it evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature". Hence, in November 1960 he writes: "Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother." And in the last published working note, written in March 1961, he writes: "Nature as the other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as 'matter')." This resonates with the conception of space, place, dwelling, and embodiment (in the flesh and physical, vs. virtual and cybernetic), especially as they are addressed against the background of the unfolding of the essence of modern technology. Such analytics figure in a Heideggerian take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (''Seinsfrage'') by way of the fourfold (''Das Geviert'') of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (''Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen''). In this strand of "ecophenomenology", ecology is co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking.
[See the research of Nader El-Bizri in this regard in his philosophical investigation of the notion of χώρα (]Khôra
In semiotics, ''khôra'' (also ''chora''; ) is the space that gives a place for being. The term has been used in philosophy by Plato to designate a receptacle (as a "third kind" 'triton genos'' '' Timaeus'' 48e4), a space, a material substratum ...
) as it figured in the '' Timaeus'' dialogue of Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
. See for example: Nader El-Bizri, "Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
's '' Timaeus''," ''Existentia Meletai-Sophias'', Vol. XI, Issue 3-4 (2001), pp. 473–490; Nader El-Bizri, "''ON KAI KHORA'': Situating Heidegger between the ''Sophist
A sophist () was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught ''arete'', "virtue" or "excellen ...
'' and the '' Timaeus''," ''Studia Phaenomenologica'', Vol. IV, Issue 1-2 (2004), pp. 73–9
; Nader El-Bizri, "''Ontopoiēsis'' and the Interpretation of Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
's ''Khôra''," ''Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research'', Vol. LXXXIII (2004), pp. 25–45. Refer also to the more specific analysis of related Heideggerian leitmotifs in: Nader El-Bizri, "Being at Home Among Things: Heidegger's Reflections on Dwelling", ''Environment, Space, Place'' Vol. 3 (2011), pp. 47–71; Nader El-Bizri, "On Dwelling: Heideggerian Allusions to Architectural Phenomenology (architecture), Phenomenology", ''Studia UBB. Philosophia'', Vol. 60, No. 1 (2015): 5-30; Nader El-Bizri, "Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways", in ''The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places'', ed. E. Champion (London : Routledge, 2018), pp. 123–143.
Bibliography
The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's works in French and English translation.
See also
*
Affordance
*
Autopoiesis
*
Body schema
*
Difference (philosophy)
*
Embodied cognition
Embodied cognition represents a diverse group of theories which investigate how cognition is shaped by the bodily state and capacities of the organism. These embodied factors include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions wi ...
*
Embodied phenomenology
*
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.
Emergence plays a central rol ...
*
Enactivism
*
Gestalt psychology
*
Habit
*
Hylomorphism
*
Incarnation
Incarnation literally means ''embodied in flesh'' or ''taking on flesh''. It is the Conception (biology), conception and the embodiment of a deity or spirit in some earthly form or an Anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic form of a god. It is used t ...
*
Invagination (philosophy)
*
Perspectivism
*
Process philosophy
*
Reflexivity
*
Umwelt
*
Virtuality (philosophy)
Notes
References
* Abram, D. (1988). "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth" ''Environmental Ethics'' 10, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 101–20.
* Abram, D. (1996). ''The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World'', New York: Pantheon Books.
* Alloa, E. (2017) ''Resistance of the Sensible World. An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty'', New York: Fordham University Press.
* Alloa, E., F. Chouraqui & R. Kaushik, (2019) (eds.) ''Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy'', Albany: SUNY Press.
* Barbaras, R. (2004) ''The Being of the Phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology'' Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
* Carbone, M. (2004) ''The Thinking of the Sensible. Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy'', Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
* Clark, A. (1997) ''Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Dillon, M. C. (1997) ''Merleau-Ponty's Ontology''. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
* Gallagher, S. (2003) ''How the Body Shapes the Mind''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Guilherme, Alexandre and Morgan, W. John, 'Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)-dialogue as being present to the other'. Chapter 6 in ''Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education: Nine modern European philosophers'', Routledge, London and New York, pp. 89–108, .
* Johnson, G., Smith, M. B. (eds.) (1993) ''The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting'', Chicago: Northwestern UP 1993.
* Landes, D. (2013) ''Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression'', New York-London: Bloomsbury.
* Lawlor, L., Evans, F. (eds.) (2000) ''Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh'', Albany: SUNY Press.
* Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J-M. (eds.) (1999) ''Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
* Toadvine, T. (2009) ''Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature''. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
*
Tilliette, X. (1970) ''Maurice Merleau-Ponty ou la mesure de l'homme'', Seghers, 1970.
* Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) ''The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience''. Cambridge: MIT Press.
External links
Maurice Merleau-Ponty at 18from the French Government website
*
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''IEP'') is a scholarly online encyclopedia with around 900 articles about philosophy, philosophers, and related topics. The IEP publishes only peer review, peer-reviewed and blind-refereed original p ...
Maurice Merleau-Pontyby Jack Reynolds
*
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') is a freely available online philosophy resource published and maintained by Stanford University, encompassing both an online encyclopedia of philosophy and peer-reviewed original publication ...
Maurice Merleau-Pontyby Ted Toadvine
The Merleau-Ponty Circle— Association of scholars interested in the works of Merleau-Ponty
at ''Mythos & Logos''
Chiasmi International— Studies Concerning the Thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in English, French and Italian
* O'Loughlin, Marjorie, 1995,
* Popen, Shari, 1995, "
ttps://web.archive.org/web/20060901151543/http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/popen.html Merleau-Ponty Confronts Postmodernism: A Reply to O'Loughlin.
Merleau-Ponty: Reckoning with the Possibility of an 'Other.'— the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française
Online Merleau-Ponty Bibliographyat PhilPapers.org
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