Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty bigraphy, stories - French phenomenological philosopher

Maurice Merleau-Ponty : biography

14 March 1908 – 4 May 1961

Maurice Merleau-Ponty ( 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 created 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. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential in recent 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 his insight 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 last incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”.

Life

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.Thomas Baldwin in Introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2008): 2. 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, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

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).

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.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952. Translated by Talia Welsh. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010. 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 Les Temps modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth he had read Karl Marx writingsMartin Jay, (1986), Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, pages 361–85. and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to marxismMartin Jay, (1986), Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, page 361.. Their friendship ended over a quarrel as he became disillusioned about communism, while Sartre still endorsed it.

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Thought

Consciousness

Phenomenology of Perception prise

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.