Philosopher, born in Rochefort-sur-mer, W France. He studied in Paris, taught in various lycées, and served as an army officer in World War 2, before holding professorships at Lyon (1948) and Paris (from 1949). He helped Sartre and de Beauvoir found the journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945, and was a fellow-traveller with Sartre in the Communist Party in the early post-war years. His two main philosophical works are La Structure du comportement (1942, The Structure of Behaviour) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945, Phenomenology of Perception) which investigate the nature of consciousness, and reject the extremes of both behaviouristic psychology and subjectivist accounts.
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Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy |
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|---|---|
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty | |
| Name: | Maurice Merleau-Ponty |
| Birth: | March 14, 1908 |
| Death: | May 4, 1961 |
| School/tradition: | Phenomenology, Existentialism (contested) |
| Main interests: | psychology, metaphysics, perception, epistemology, art |
| Notable ideas: | preceptions and projects shape appearances, intersubjective truths |
| Influences: | Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre |
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 – May 4, 1961) was a French phenomenologist philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl, who is often (some think mistakenly) classified as an existentialist thinker because of his close association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his distinctly Heideggerian conception of Being.
Life
After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
Next, Merleau-Ponty taught at the University of Lyon (from 1945 to 1948), then lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne (from 1949 to 1952).
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Work
In his Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of the "body-subject" as an alternative to the cartesian "cogito".
Critics have remarked that while Merleau-Ponty makes a great effort to break away from Cartesian dualism, in the end the "Phenomenology of Perception" still starts out from the opposition of consciousness and its objects. Merleau-Ponty himself also acknowledged this, and in his later work proceeded from a standpoint of unity, replacing notions that still centre on the subject by notions of "Being" and the essential reversibility of seeing and being visible.
Thematic overview of his works
The primacy of perception
From the time of writing Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with John Locke, that perception was not the causal product of atomic sensations. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the life world (to the 'Lebenswelt')
This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception.
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 noetic-noematic correlation. Thus, Merleau-Ponty does not postulate that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which supposes at the outset a noetic-noematic ground.
Corporeality
Taking the study of perception 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, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world and to its investment ([trans.?
The development of his works thus establishes an analysis which recognizes a corporeality of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, and so stands in contrast with the dualist ontology of mind and body in René Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them.
Language
The highlighting of the fact that corporeality intrinsically has a dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of the Ego is one of the conclusions from Structure of Behavior that is constantly reiterated in Merleau-Ponty's later works.
He carefully considers language, then, as the core of culture, 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, literary usage, poetry and song.
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, 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, and to work on the notion of structure through a discussion of work in psychology, linguistics and social anthropology.
Art
It is important to clarify, and indeed emphasize, that the attention Merleau-Ponty pays to diverse forms of art (visual, plastic, literary, poetic, etc) should not be attributed to a concern with beauty per se.
Still, it is useful to note that, while he does not establish any normative criteria for art as such, there is nonetheless in his work a prevalent distinction between primary and secondary modes of expression.
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.
On the subject of painting, Merleau-Ponty claims that at the moment of his creative work, the painter can start with a certain idea and desire to actualise it, or else he can begin with the material in an attempt to release a certain idea or emotion, but in each case, there is, in the activity of painting, a pregnancy between the elaboration of expression and the sense that is created (trans?
For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes.
History and Intersubjectivity
Science
In his essay "Cézanne's Doubt", in which he identifies Cézanne's Impressionistic theory of painting as analogous to his own concept of radical reflection, the attempt to return to, and reflect on, prereflective consciousnes, Merleau-Ponty identifies science as the opposite of art.
Psychology
"[My] past, though not a fate, has at least a specific weight and is not a set of events over there, at a distance from me, but the atmosphere of my present.” (Phenomenology of Perception)
Sociology and Anthropology
Flesh and the Chiasm / Visible and the Invisible
The notions of flesh and chiasm and the related ideas of visible and invisible come up mainly in Le visible et l'invisible and the work notes which accompany it (this work was incomplete when Merleau-Ponty died and was published after his death), as well as in lecture notes from a course given at the Collège de France from 1959-1961, and, very briefly, in the preface to Signes. Since these notions had not yet been fully developed, it is not always easy to work out exactly what Merleau-Ponty meant.
According to Merleau-Ponty's argument, there is no clear-cut distinction between being and ways of appearing. Rather, it is a certain reversibility of the visible and the invisible which must be understood: the visible is not the opposite of the invisible (in this, Merleau-Ponty also distances himself from the Sartrean ontology of L'Être et le néant) but rather its doubling, its 'profondeur charnelle'. For example, in L’œil et l’esprit Merleau-Ponty notes that if a painting is torn apart, it no longer has meaning but is rather returned to strips of canvas.
Politics
Contemporary influence
Anti-cognitivist cognitive science
Despite Merleau-Ponty's own critical position with respect to science - he describes scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest" in his Preface to the Phenomenology - his work has become a touchstone for the anti-cognitivist strands of cognitive science, largely through the influence of Hubert Dreyfus.
Dreyfus' 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.
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 Andy Clark's Being There (1997), the collection Naturalizing Phenomenology edited by Petitot et al.
Feminist philosophy
Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Scandinavian philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including Rosalyn Diprose and Sara Heinämaa.
Rosalyn Diprose's recent work takes advantage of Merleau-Ponty conception of an intercorporeality, or indistinction of perspectives, to critique individualistic identity politics from a feminist perspective and to ground the irreducibility of generosity as a virtue, where generosity has a dual sense of giving and being given.
Sara Heinämaa has argued for a re-reading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Hubert Dreyfus' reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviourist, 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 renowned essay "Throwing Like a Girl", and its follow-up, "'Throwing Like a Girl': Twenty Years Later."
David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the Flesh" 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."
Bibliography
The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's works in French and English translation.
| Year | Original French | English Translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1942 | La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942) | The Structure of Behavior trans. |
| 1945 | Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) | Phenomenology of Perception trans. reprinted, 2002) |
| 1947 | Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) | Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem trans. by John O'Neill, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) |
| 1948 | Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948, 1966) | Sense and Non-Sense trans. |
| 1951 | Les Relations avec autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1951, 1975) | 'The Child’s Relations with Others' trans. |
| 1953 | Éloge de la Philosophie, Lecon inaugurale faite au Collége de France, Le jeudi 15 janvier 1953 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) | In Praise of Philosophy trans. by John Wild and James Edie, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963) |
| 1955 | Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) | Adventures of the Dialectic trans. London: Heinemann, 1974) |
| 1958 | Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1958, 1975) | 'Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man' trans. |
| 1960 | Éloge de la Philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) | - |
| 1960 | Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) | Signs trans. |
| 1964 | L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) | 'Eye and Mind' trans. |
| 1964 | Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail Edited by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) | The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes trans. |
| 1968 | Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952-1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) | Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952-1960 trans. |
| 1969 | La Prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) | The Prose of the World trans. |
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