Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty's grave

Frans Hals - Portret van René Descartes

Ferdinand de Saussure

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, among others. In his work, Merleau-Ponty sought to establish the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. His philosophy is often associated with the existentialist movement, though he diverged from existentialism in several key aspects.

Biography

Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime, France, Merleau-Ponty was a leading French philosopher of the 20th century. He initially studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was influenced by his teachers and the works of Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl. After completing his agrégation in philosophy, he took up a position teaching philosophy. During World War II, he served in the French army, an experience that deeply influenced his philosophical outlook.

After the war, Merleau-Ponty became a professor at the University of Lyon, and later at the Collège de France, where he held the chair of philosophy until his death in 1961. He was also a co-editor of the influential journal Les Temps Modernes, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though he eventually parted ways with Sartre over philosophical differences.

Philosophical Work

Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is marked by his deep engagement with the nature of perception and its role in understanding the world. His seminal work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), argues against the traditional Cartesian dualism of mind and body, proposing instead that the body is the primary site of knowing the world. This work laid the groundwork for what would become known as the phenomenology of embodiment.

In addition to perception, Merleau-Ponty explored themes of art, language, and the nature of human existence. His later work, The Visible and the Invisible (published posthumously in 1964), delves into the limitations of traditional phenomenology and proposes a new ontological framework that emphasizes the intertwining of the visible and the invisible aspects of reality.

Legacy

Merleau-Ponty's influence extends beyond philosophy to fields such as psychology, cognitive science, political theory, and the arts. His emphasis on the embodied nature of human experience has contributed to the development of embodied cognition theories and has had a lasting impact on existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

Selected Works

• The Structure of Behavior (1942)
• Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
• Humanism and Terror (1947)
• The Visible and the Invisible (1964)

See Also

• Phenomenology
• Existentialism
• Embodied cognition
• Edmund Husserl
• Martin Heidegger