Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Life and Thought

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a prominent French philosopher, born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. Raised in a middle-class family, he demonstrated early intellectual promise, excelling in his scholarly pursuits. Merleau-Ponty’s childhood was marked by the trauma of losing his father during the First World War, an event that likely influenced his later reflections on human existence and the interconnectedness of lives. He studied philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he befriended significant thinkers of his time, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. After earning his agrégation in philosophy in 1930, Merleau-Ponty embarked on an academic career, teaching at various French high schools before joining the university system.

The period during which Merleau-Ponty lived and wrote coincided with significant historical and intellectual developments. Europe throughout the early and mid-20th century was marked by profound upheaval, including two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. These events deeply impacted cultural and philosophical discourses, as scholars grappled with questions of human freedom, alienation, and the meaning of existence. Merleau-Ponty came of age during a period where existentialism and phenomenology began taking root as dominant philosophical movements, particularly in France. These movements sought to explore human experience and the structures of consciousness in response to what many felt was a crisis of meaning in the modern world.

Phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, provided the foundation for much philosophical inquiry during Merleau-Ponty’s time. This school of thought emphasized the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person perspective, rejecting traditional metaphysical and scientific approaches to understanding reality. French thinkers such as Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, alongside Merleau-Ponty, adapted Husserl’s ideas to address pressing questions about subjectivity, freedom, and intersubjectivity. Unlike Husserl’s concerns with strict methodical rigor, the French school emphasized concrete experiences of the world, touching on issues of body, perception, and human relations.

The horrors of the Second World War, including the Holocaust and the devastations wrought by fascism, created an urgency to interrogate human existence and the responsibility of individuals within larger social and political frameworks. Philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were deeply affected by these events and frequently intertwined their philosophical endeavors with political concerns. For Merleau-Ponty, this led to an engagement with Marxist theory as he sought to understand how individual subjectivity related to broader, collective historical forces.

Merleau-Ponty’s career as a writer flourished during the mid-20th century, a time when intellectual life in France was vibrant and charged. Existentialism became synonymous with the intellectual scene of post-war France, and writers such as Albert Camus and Sartre achieved wide cultural prominence. Although Merleau-Ponty was often associated with existentialism due to his friendships with key figures and shared interest in questions of human freedom and experience, his approach was nuanced. His work diverged from Sartre’s in its focus on embodiment and perception, which came to define his unique philosophical contributions.

The intellectual period in which Merleau-Ponty wrote was also shaped by a growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches. Many philosophers of his time, including Merleau-Ponty himself, engaged with other fields such as art, literature, psychology, and political thought. This cross-pollination of ideas reflected an increasingly global and connected intellectual environment, stimulated by the influence of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and advancements in the natural sciences. Merleau-Ponty, in particular, integrated insights from psychology, especially Gestalt theory, into his exploration of perception and human experience.

Following the war, Merleau-Ponty’s academic career gained momentum, and he secured a position at the University of Lyon before moving to the Sorbonne in 1949. He eventually attained a chair at the Collège de France, one of the most esteemed positions in French academia. During this period, Merleau-Ponty published some of his most influential works, including Phenomenology of Perception (1945). His writings reflected the prevailing intellectual climate but also carved a distinct voice, emphasizing the embodied nature of human experience in contrast to the more abstract existential or phenomenological frameworks of his contemporaries.

Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual era was also influenced by the broader historical backdrop of the Cold War. The ideological tensions between the capitalist West and communist East shaped academic and political discourse in post-war France. Merleau-Ponty, like many intellectuals of his time, initially sympathized with Marxism as a potential means of addressing social and economic injustices. However, his eventual criticism of Soviet policies and his break from Sartre due to a divergence in their political positions reflected the complexities of engaging with such ideologies during this polarized period.

By the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty had increasingly distanced himself from political activism, focusing more on his philosophical inquiries. This shift reflected a broader tendency among French intellectuals to move away from overt political commitments as disillusionment with Marxist ideals grew. By this time, the French intellectual scene was also undergoing a transition, with emerging figures like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan signalling a shift towards structuralism and psychoanalytic theories.

Merleau-Ponty passed away unexpectedly on May 3, 1961, at the age of 53. His untimely death marked the loss of a brilliant thinker in the midst of his intellectual prime. During his lifetime, Maurice Merleau-Ponty contributed to shaping modern philosophical thought, playing a pivotal role in the phenomenological and existential movements. He was also emblematic of the vibrant, restless energy of mid-20th-century France, a period marked by an intense reckoning with tradition, modernity, and the enduring questions of human existence.

Key Ideas in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and intentionality
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and intercorporeality
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and non-cartesian dualism
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and our relationship with nature
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and pre-reflective consciousness
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the body as subject
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the lived world
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the primacy of perception
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, art and meaning
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, freedom and ambiguity
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, language and intent
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, space and spatiality
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, time and temporality