The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1908–1961

The leading phenomenologist of post-war France, who made the lived, perceiving body the starting point for understanding mind, world, language and art.

The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction.

Phenomenology of Perception, p. lxxvii in Landes's translation, translated by Donald Landes

Born in 1908 at Rochefort-sur-Mer, Merleau-Ponty was brought up in Paris after his father died. As a student at the École Normale Supérieure he made friends with Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss and heard Husserl lecture at the Sorbonne in 1929, and in 1939 he became the first visitor from outside to study at the newly founded Husserl Archives in Louvain. Wounded in battle in June 1940, he received the Croix de guerre, and he joined Sartre in the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté.

In 1945 he founded Les Temps Modernes with Sartre and Beauvoir and served as its political editor, and the same year Phenomenology of Perception made him the foremost French phenomenologist of his time. He taught at Lyon, at the École Normale, where the young Michel Foucault was among his students, and at the Sorbonne, and in 1952, at 44, he was elected to the Collège de France’s chair of philosophy, younger than anyone before him. He died of a heart attack in 1961, with Descartes’s Optics open on his desk. His later thought influenced Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida more than is often recognised.

Key ideas

The primacy of perception
Merleau-Ponty began from perception and the body, and worked outwards from them to the relation of mind and body, of the world as science describes it to the world as we live it, and to expression in language and art.
Beyond empiricism and intellectualism
Empiricists explain experience by causal mechanisms, idealists by the synthesising acts of consciousness. Both share an “unquestioned belief in the world” as ready-made; Merleau-Ponty looked for a third way that respects the historical and embodied character of experience.
The incomplete reduction
Phenomenology describes our pre-reflective engagement with the world, but the one who reflects is always already part of the world reflected on. So no reflection is ever complete, and the reduction cannot be carried through to the end.
Flesh
In his last work the one who senses and what is sensed are no longer sharply divided; body and things are made of one “flesh”. To see is also to be visible, to touch is also to be tangible, and painting expresses this intertwining.
Politics from the left
Writing always from the left, Merleau-Ponty moved from a qualified Marxism, critical of both liberal democracy and Soviet Communism, to rejecting revolutionary politics in favour of a “new liberalism”.
Tradition
Western
Region
France

Influences

Influenced by

Maurice Merleau-Ponty1908–1961

Influenced

Influenced by

Maurice Merleau-Ponty1908–1961

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on and argued against Henri Bergson. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on and argued against Edmund Husserl. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on Martin Heidegger. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on and argued against Jean-Paul Sartre. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Michel Foucault studied with and drew on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Source: Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala, Michel Foucault, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • The Structure of Behavior (La Structure du comportement), 1942
  • Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception), 1945
  • Humanism and Terror, 1947
  • Adventures of the Dialectic, 1955
  • The Visible and the Invisible, 1964

Sources

  1. Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy