Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Introduction

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the French philosopher whose Phenomenology of Perception (1945) reoriented phenomenology around the lived body and produced the major French systematic phenomenological work of the twentieth century. The book made embodiment a central category of philosophy and shaped subsequent work on perception, action, social cognition, and the philosophy of mind across continental and analytic traditions.

Merleau-Ponty's career was institutionally distinguished. He held the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death — the most prestigious philosophy position in France, and the youngest holder of the chair in its history. He co-founded Les Temps Modernes with Sartre and Beauvoir in 1945 and served as its political editor until his break with Sartre over Korea and the larger questions of revolutionary politics in 1953. The early death from a stroke at age 53 cut short what was widely seen as one of the most promising philosophical careers in twentieth-century France.

Life

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer in southwestern France. His father, an army officer, died when Maurice was four; the mother raised him and his siblings in Paris, where Maurice attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure (1926–30). The École years brought him into close contact with the cohort that would shape French philosophy for the next thirty years: Sartre, Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan.

Merleau-Ponty passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930 and began secondary-school teaching, then served in the French army in 1939–40. The war interrupted but did not derail the philosophical work. He completed both his doctoral theses during the German occupation: the secondary thesis La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behaviour, published 1942) and the principal thesis Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, published 1945).

The postwar years brought Merleau-Ponty into the center of French intellectual life. He was appointed to the Sorbonne in 1949 and to the Collège de France in 1952. The co-founding of Les Temps Modernes with Sartre and Beauvoir made him one of the principal political voices of the postwar French left. The 1953 break with Sartre, occasioned by their differing responses to the Korean War and the larger question of the Soviet Union, was a major event in postwar French intellectual life; Merleau-Ponty's The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) gives the philosophical articulation of the break.

The late years saw Merleau-Ponty's turn toward the revision of the Phenomenology of Perception's framework that would have produced his next major book. The materials of the projected work — the lecture courses at the Collège de France, the unfinished manuscript published posthumously as Le visible et l'invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, 1964) — develop a more ontological phenomenology in which the categories of the flesh and the chiasm replace the embodied subject of the earlier work.

Merleau-Ponty died on May 3, 1961, in Paris of a stroke at age 53, found at his desk with Descartes's Dioptrics open before him.

The problem he worked on

Merleau-Ponty's project across the major works is the development of a phenomenology adequate to the embodied character of human experience. The phenomenological tradition as he inherited it from Husserl (whose unpublished manuscripts at the Husserl Archives in Leuven Merleau-Ponty was one of the first French philosophers to consult) treated consciousness as the principal object of analysis but did not adequately develop the constitutive role of the body in perceptual and practical experience. The Cartesian framework that Husserl had inherited still shaped the analysis: consciousness was the subject of experience, the body one of the objects of consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty's response is to make the lived body (the body as experienced from within, as the medium of all perceptual and practical engagement with the world) the central category of phenomenology. The body is not an object among objects but the necessary condition of any experience of objects; perception is not the reception of sense-data by a disembodied consciousness but the active engagement of a bodily subject with an environment that solicits and responds to bodily action. The framework reconfigures every major philosophical problem the phenomenological tradition had inherited.

Contributions

Phenomenology of Perception

The 1945 Phénoménologie de la perception is the major French systematic phenomenological work of the twentieth century. The book is organized in three parts: The Body analyzes the lived body as the necessary condition of perceptual experience; The World as Perceived analyzes the structures of perceptual experience and the perceived world; Being-in-the-World and Being-for-Itself develops the broader philosophical implications.

The central methodological move is the description of perception as the engagement of a bodily subject with a meaningful environment. The body is not a physical object that consciousness inhabits but the intentional arc by which the subject is open to a world. The perceived world is not a collection of bare sense-data that consciousness organizes but a meaningful field whose structure solicits specific bodily responses.

The book engages with empirical psychology, especially the Gestalt tradition (Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Adhemar Gelb, Kurt Goldstein) and the case studies of patients with neurological damage (especially the patient Schneider, whose disordered perception illuminates the structures of normal perception). The integration of phenomenological description with empirical evidence was unusual for its time and has been one of the book's most-imitated features.

Major specific analyses in the book have been continuously influential. The analysis of the body schema (the pre-reflective awareness of the body's posture, position, and capacities); the analysis of motor intentionality (the directedness of bodily action toward goals that need not be explicitly represented); the analysis of sexuality and the other (anticipating contemporary work in the philosophy of embodiment, gender, and social cognition); the analysis of language (anticipating the post-Saussurean French engagement with linguistics that would shape structuralism and post-structuralism) — each has shaped subsequent work in continental and analytic philosophy.

The Visible and the Invisible

The unfinished Le visible et l'invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, posthumous 1964) develops the later ontology that Merleau-Ponty was working on at his death. The framework revises the Phenomenology of Perception's framework: the subject-object distinction that the earlier book had presupposed in attenuated form is replaced by the more radical category of flesh (la chair) — the common element of which both perceiving subjects and perceived objects are particular configurations.

The famous example: the experience of one hand touching the other reveals an ambiguity that resists the subject-object framework. When the right hand touches the left, the right is the toucher and the left is the touched; but the same experience can be reversed at any moment, with the left becoming the toucher and the right the touched. The reversibility is not a feature of consciousness imposed on the body but a feature of the body's relation to itself; the body is structurally both toucher and touched, both perceiver and perceived. The same structure characterizes the relation between embodied subject and perceived world more generally.

The framework has been one of the most-engaged in late twentieth-century continental philosophy. The deconstructive engagement through Derrida, the engagement through Levinas, the contemporary work on the phenomenology of medicine (Drew Leder, Havi Carel), the contemporary engagement with cognitive science (especially the Merleau-Ponty influence on the enactive cognition tradition through Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë), and the recent engagement through Elizabeth Grosz, Iris Marion Young, and the phenomenology of race (Lewis Gordon, Linda Martín Alcoff) all engage the late Merleau-Pontian framework.

Political philosophy

Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy is the second major dimension of his work. Humanisme et terreur (Humanism and Terror, 1947) was a controversial defense of the Moscow trials and Soviet revolutionary violence as historically intelligible if not justified; the book was widely read as Merleau-Ponty's most direct engagement with the Marxist tradition. Les aventures de la dialectique (The Adventures of the Dialectic, 1955) marks his decisive break with Sartre and with revolutionary Marxism over the questions raised by the Korean War, the Hungarian uprising, and the broader trajectory of Soviet policy. The book engages major figures in the Marxist tradition (Lukacs, Weber, Sartre) and articulates Merleau-Ponty's mature position of skeptical engagement with Marxism rather than commitment to it.

Key works

• The Structure of Behaviour (1942)
• Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
• Humanism and Terror (1947)
• Sense and Non-Sense (1948)
• In Praise of Philosophy (Collège de France inaugural lecture, 1953)
• The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955)
• Signs (1960)
• The Visible and the Invisible (posthumous, 1964)
• Eye and Mind (1961, published posthumously 1964)

The Gallimard editions are the French standard. The English translations include Colin Smith's Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; revised 2002) and the more recent Donald Landes translation (Routledge, 2012, now the dominant English text). The Northwestern University Press Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series anchors the English-language scholarly editions; the Collège de France lecture courses are being published through Northwestern in ongoing translation.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Husserl (the phenomenological framework Merleau-Ponty developed and modified); Heidegger (the existential-ontological framework, especially the early Heidegger of Being and Time); the Gestalt psychologists (Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Goldstein); Henri Bergson (the French predecessor in the philosophy of life and time); Hegel (mediated through Alexandre Kojève's Paris lectures); Marx (the political-theoretical framework engaged in his political writings); Saussure (the linguistic framework Merleau-Ponty engaged in the late work); William James (the influence on Merleau-Ponty's account of consciousness).

Influenced: The French phenomenological tradition through Henri Maldiney, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Renaud Barbaras; the post-structuralist tradition through Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault (each engaged Merleau-Ponty critically); the contemporary phenomenology of embodiment through Drew Leder, Havi Carel, Dorothee Legrand; the enactive cognition tradition through Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, Shaun Gallagher; the phenomenology of gender through Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz; the phenomenology of race through Frantz Fanon (whose Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, engages Merleau-Ponty directly), Lewis Gordon, Linda Martín Alcoff; the Anglo-American philosophy of mind through Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and the 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) movement.

Reception

Merleau-Ponty's contemporary reception was in France but slower in the Anglo-American world. The Collège de France chair and the role in Les Temps Modernes gave him a central place in postwar French intellectual life; the early death cut short what would likely have been a longer and more visible career.

The Anglo-American reception was slower. Colin Smith's 1962 translation of the Phenomenology of Perception made the book available but did not immediately produce broad engagement; the analytic tradition's general suspicion of phenomenology limited the academic engagement until the 1970s and 1980s. Hubert Dreyfus's championing of Merleau-Ponty alongside Heidegger in the cognitive science debates of the 1970s and 1980s (especially What Computers Can't Do, 1972, and Mind Over Machine, 1986) brought Merleau-Ponty into the analytic engagement with the philosophy of mind. The contemporary cognitive science engagement through the enactive cognition movement has produced one of the most active areas of contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholarship.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Taylor Carman's Merleau-Ponty (2008, second edition 2020), Theodore Toadvine's Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature (2009), Renaud Barbaras's The Being of the Phenomenon (2004, English translation), David Morris's Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology (2018), and Shaun Gallagher's work integrating Merleau-Ponty with cognitive science. The Chiasmi International journal, the Merleau-Ponty Circle (annual conferences since 1976), and the Collège de France lecture-course publication project anchor continuing scholarship. Active debates concern the relation between the Phenomenology of Perception and the late ontology of The Visible and the Invisible, the contemporary applicability of the Merleau-Pontian framework in cognitive science, the political dimensions of Merleau-Ponty's late work, and the relation between Merleau-Ponty and the post-structuralist generation that followed him.

Further reading

• Phenomenology — the tradition Merleau-Ponty developed
• Husserl — the founder of the tradition whose framework Merleau-Ponty extended
• Heidegger — the existential-ontological predecessor
• Sartre — the contemporary co-founder of Les Temps Modernes with whom Merleau-Ponty eventually broke
• Beauvoir — the contemporary co-founder of Les Temps Modernes
• William James — the predecessor whose account of consciousness Merleau-Ponty engaged
• Existentialism — the related tradition Merleau-Ponty's work belongs to

The French philosopher whose Phenomenology of Perception made the lived body the central category of twentieth-century phenomenology.