Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (French:
[mɔʁis mɛʁlo pɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3
May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher,
strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning
in human experience was his main interest
and he wrote on perception, art, and politics.
He was on the editorial board of Les Temps
modernes, the leftist magazine established
by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.
At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
is a sustained argument for the foundational
role perception plays in understanding the
world as well as engaging with the world.
Like the other major phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty
expressed his philosophical insights in writings
on art, literature, linguistics, and politics.
He was the only major phenomenologist of the
first half of the twentieth century to engage
extensively with the sciences and especially
with descriptive psychology. It is through
this engagement that his writings became influential
in the project of naturalizing phenomenology,
in which phenomenologists use the results
of psychology and cognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary
site of knowing the world, a corrective to
the long philosophical tradition of placing
consciousness as the source of knowledge,
and maintained that the body and that which
it perceived could not be disentangled from
each other. The articulation of the primacy
of embodiment led him away from phenomenology
towards what he was to call “indirect ontology”
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 supported Soviet communism and
his endorsement of the Soviet show trials
and prison camps was published as Humanism
and Terror in 1947.
== Life ==
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in
Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime, France.
His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty
was five years old. After secondary schooling
at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Merleau-Ponty
became a student at the École Normale Supérieure,
where he studied alongside Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Jean
Hyppolite. He attended Edmund Husserl's "Paris
Lectures" in February 1929. In 1929, Merleau-Ponty
received his DES degree (diplôme d'études
supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA
thesis) from the University of Paris, 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.
An article published in French newspaper Le
Monde 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 Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique.
From 1934–1935 he taught at the Lycée de
Chartres. He then in 1935 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).
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 Les Temps
modernes from the founding of the journal
in October 1945 until December 1952. In his
youth he had read Karl Marx's writings and
Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted
him to Marxism. While he was not a member
of the French Communist Party and did not
identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument
justifying the Soviet show trials and violence
for progressive ends in general in the work
Humanism and Terror in 1947. However, about
three years later, he renounced his earlier
support for political violence, and he 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 in
1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing
for a class on René Descartes. He is buried
in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
== Thought ==
=== Consciousness ===
In his Phenomenology of Perception (first
published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty
developed the concept of the body-subject
(le corps propre) as an alternative to the
Cartesian "ego cogito." This distinction is
especially important in that Merleau-Ponty
perceives the essences of the world existentially.
Consciousness, 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
sciences, but a correlate of our 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 our body has a
"grip" (prise), while the grip itself is a
function of our connaturality with the world's
things. The world and the sense of self are
emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming."
The essential partiality of our 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 with us and with other things
than through such "Abschattungen" (sketches,
faint outlines, adumbrations). The thing transcends
our view, 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." Our
perception of the object through all perspectives
is not that of a propositional, or clearly
delineated, perception; rather, it is an ambiguous
perception 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 we have been
integrated within the environment so as to
perceive objects as such can we turn our attention
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 our bodily involvement with things
is always provisional and indeterminate, we
encounter meaningful things in a unified though
ever open-ended world.
=== 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. 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 of the primacy of perception. The
slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "all
consciousness 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 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. He therefore underlines
the fact that there is an inherence of consciousness
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 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).
The question concerning corporeity connects
also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on space
(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).
=== 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 Behavior 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, 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, literature,
poetry and song.
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 (p. 203ff) 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, 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 ===
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary
and secondary modes of expression. This distinction
appears in Phenomenology of Perception (p.
207, 2nd note [Fr. ed.]) and is sometimes
repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language
(le langage parlé et le langage parlant)
(The Prose of the World, p. 10). Spoken language
(le langage parlé), or secondary expression,
returns to our linguistic baggage, to the
cultural heritage that we have acquired, as
well as the brute mass of relationships between
signs and significations. Speaking language
(le langage parlant), 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 occupies an important
place in "Indirect Language and the Voices
of Silence". 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 sense (in
Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a mystical 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 cleavage 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 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", in which
he identifies Paul Cézanne'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: that it can tell
us 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 only arrived
at 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, 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 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's Existential Cognition: Computational
Minds in the World (1995),
Andy Clark's Being There (1997),
Naturalizing Phenomenology edited by Petitot
et al. (1999),
Alva Noë's Action in Perception (2004),
Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the
Mind (2005),
Grammont, Franck Dorothée Legrand, and Pierre
Livet (eds.) 2010, Naturalizing Intention
in Action, MIT Press 2010 ISBN 978-0-262-01367-3.
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 Sara Heinämaa.
Diprose's recent work takes advantage of Merleau-Ponty's
conception of an intercorporeity, 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.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 we experience the world in terms
of the "I can" – that is, oriented towards
certain projects based on our 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 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')."
== Bibliography ==
The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's
works in French and English translation.
== Notes ==
== References ==
Abram, D. (1988). "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice
of the Earth." Environmental Ethics 10, no.
2 (Summer 1988): 101–20.
Alloa, E. (2017) Resistance of the Sensible
World. An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty, New
York: Fordham University 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.
Gallagher, Shaun 2003. How the Body Shapes
the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, G., Smith, Michael 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.
Xavier Tilliette, 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 ==
Quotations related to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
at Wikiquote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty at 18 from the French
Government website
English Translations of Merleau-Ponty's Work
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Maurice
Merleau-Ponty by Jack Reynolds
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Maurice
Merleau-Ponty by Ted Toadvine
The Merleau-Ponty Circle — Association of
scholars interested in the works of Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty page at Mythos & Logos
Chiasmi International — Studies Concerning
the Thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in English,
French and Italian
O’Loughlin, Marjorie, 1995, "Intelligent
Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities: Merleau-Ponty’s
Corrective to Postmodernism’s “Subjects”
of Education."
Popen, Shari, 1995, "Merleau-Ponty Confronts
Postmodernism: A Reply to O’Loughlin."
Merleau-Ponty: Reckoning with the Possibility
of an 'Other.'
The Journal of French Philosophy — the online
home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine
de Philosophie de Langue Française
Online Merleau-Ponty Bibliography at PhilPapers.org
