Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 ? May 4, 1961) was a French phenomenologist philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl, and often somewhat mistakenly classified as an existentialist thinker because of his close association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his distinctly Heideggerian conception of Being.

Thematic overview of his works

Translated from the French version of this page

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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 behaviorist psychology. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the lived world (to the Lebenswelt)

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This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl 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.

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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 noetic-noematic 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).

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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.

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Corporeality

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 and to its investment (). 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, in so far as perception becomes an active and constitutive dimension.

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The development of his works thus establishes an analysis which recognizes a corporeality of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, and so stands in contrast with the dualist ontology of mind and body in René Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them.

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Language

The highlighting of the fact that corporeality intrinsically has a dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of the Ego is one of the conclusions from 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.

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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, literary usage and poetry.

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One can see a certain preoccupation with language, beginning with the reflection on artistic expression in Structure of Behavior - which contains a passage on El Greco (p. 219ff {Fr. Ed.}) that prefigures the remarks that he develops in "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945) which itself follows the discussion in the Phenomenology of Perception. To this extent, the work undertaken while he occupied the Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of the Sorbonne is not an interlude in his philosophical and phenomenological preoccupations. It represents, rather, a significant moment in the development of his thought.

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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 anthropologie.

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Art

It is important to clarify that the attention Merleau-Ponty pays to diverse forms of art (visual, plastic, literary, poetic, etc) should not be attributed to a concern with beauty. Nor is his work an attempt to elaborate normative criteria for art. Thus, one does not find in his work a theoretical attempt to discern what constitutes a major work or a work of art, or even handicraft (l'artisanat).

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Still, it is useful to note that, while he does not establish any normative criteria for art as such, there is nonetheless in his work a prevalent distinction between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in the Phenomenology of Perception (p 207, 2nd note {Fr. ed.}) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language (language parlé et parlant) (The Prose of the World, p 17-22 {Fr. ed.}). Spoken language (le language 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 language 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.

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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.

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On the subject of painting, Merleau-Ponty claims that at the moment of his creative work, the painter can start with a certain idea and desire to actualise it, or else he can begin with the material in an attempt to release a certain idea or emotion, but in each case, there is, in the activity of painting, a pregnancy between the elaboration of expression and the sense that is created (trans? - une prégnance de l?élaboration de l?expression avec le sens qui est mis en ?uvre). Beginning with this basic description, Merleau-Ponty attempts to explicate the invariant structures that characterise expressivity, attempting to take account of the over-determination of sense that he had described in "Cezanne's Doubt".

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Among the structures to consider, the study of 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 categorisation of an artistic school or movement.

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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.

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History and Intersubjectivity

Science

Psychology

Sociology and Anthropology

Flesh and the Chiasm / Visible and the Invisible

Politics