Merleau-Ponty Maurice (1908–61), French philosopher described by Paul Ricoeur as ‘the greatest of the French phenomenologists.’ Merleau- Ponty occupied the chair of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne and was later professor of philosophy at the Collège de France. His sudden death preceded completion of an important manuscript; this was later edited and published by Claude Lefort under the title The Visible and the Invisible. The relation between the late, unfinished work and his early Phenomenology of Perception (1945) has received much scholarly discussion. While some commentators see a significant shift in direction in his later thought, others insist on continuity throughout his work. Thus, the exact significance of his philosophy, which in his life was called both a philosophy of ambiguity and an ambiguous philosophy, retains to this day its essential ambiguity. With his compatriot and friend, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was responsible for introducing the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl into France. Impressed above all by the later Husserl and by Husserl’s notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt), Merleau-Ponty combined Husserl’s transcendental approach to epistemological issues with an existential orientation derived from Heidegger and Marcel. Going even further than Heidegger, who had himself sought to go beyond Husserl by ‘existentializing’ Husserl’s Transcendental Ego (referring to it as Dasein), Merleau- Ponty sought to emphasize not only the existential (worldly) nature of the human subject but, above all, its bodily nature. Thus his philosophy could be characterized as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject (le corps propre). Although Nietzsche called attention to the all-importance of the body, it was Merleau- Ponty who first made the body the central theme of a detailed philosophical analysis. This provided an original perspective from which to rethink such perennial philosophical issues as the nature of knowledge, freedom, time (temporality), language, and intersubjectivity. Especially in his early work, Merleau-Ponty battled against absolutist thought (‘la pensée de l’absolu’), stressing the insurmountable ambiguity and contingency of all meaning and truth. An archopponent of Cartesian rationalism, he was an early and ardent spokesman for that position now called antifoundationalism.
Merleau-Ponty’s major early work, the Phenomenology of Perception, is best known for its central thesis concerning ‘the primacy of perception.’ In this lengthy study he argued that all the ‘higher’ functions of consciousness (e.g., intellection, volition) are rooted in and depend upon the subject’s prereflective, bodily existence, i.e., perception (‘All consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves’). Merleau- Ponty maintained, however, that perception had never been adequately conceptualized by traditional philosophy. Thus the book was to a large extent a dialectical confrontation with what he took to be the two main forms of objective thinking – intellectualism and empiricism – both of which, he argued, ignored the phenomenon of perception. His principal goal was to get beyond the intellectual constructs of traditional philosophy (such as sense-data) and to effect ‘a return to the phenomena,’ to the world as we actually experience it as embodied subjects prior to all theorizing. His main argument (directed against mainline philosophy) was that the lived body is not an object in the world, distinct from the knowing subject (as in Descartes), but is the subject’s own point of view on the world; the body is itself the original knowing subject (albeit a nonor prepersonal, ‘anonymous’ subject), from which all other forms of knowledge derive, even that of geometry. As a phenomenological (or, as he also said, ‘archaeological’) attempt to unearth the basic (corporeal) modalities of human existence, emphasizing the rootedness (enracinement) of the personal subject in the obscure and ambiguous life of the body and, in this way, the insurpassable contingency of all meaning, the Phenomenology was immediately and widely recognized as a major statement of French existentialism.
In his subsequent work in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in many shorter essays and articles, Merleau-Ponty spelled out in greater detail the philosophical consequences of ‘the primacy of perception.’ These writings sought to respond to widespread objections that by ‘grounding’ all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, the Phenomenology of Perception results in a kind of reductionism and anti-intellectualism and teaches only a ‘bad ambiguity,’ i.e., completely undermines the notions of reason and truth. By shifting his attention from the phenomenon of perception to that of (creative) expression, his aim was to work out a ‘good ambiguity’ by showing how ‘communication with others and thought take up and go beyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth.’ His announced goal after the Phenomenology was ‘working out in a rigorous way the philosophical foundations’ of a theory of truth and a theory of intersubjectivity (including a theory of history). No such large-scale work (a sequel, as it were, to the Phenomenology) ever saw the light of day, although in pursuing this project he reflected on subjects as diverse as painting, literary language, Saussurian linguistics, structuralist anthropology, politics, history, the human sciences, psychoanalysis, contemporary science (including biology), and the philosophy of nature. Toward the end of his life, however, Merleau- Ponty did begin work on a projected large-scale manuscript, the remnants of which were published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. A remarkable feature of this work (as Claude Lefort has pointed out) is the resolute way in which Merleau-Ponty appears to be groping for a new philosophical language. His express concerns in this abortive manuscript are explicitly ontological (as opposed to the more limited phenomenological concerns of his early work), and he consistently tries to avoid the subject (consciousness)–object language of the philosophy of consciousness (inherited from Husserl’s transcendental idealism) that characterized the Phenomenology of Perception. Although much of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought was a response to the later Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sets himself apart from Heidegger in this unfinished work by claiming that the only ontology possible is an indirect one that can have no direct access to Being itself. Indeed, had he completed it, Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology would probably have been one in which, as Lefort has remarked, ‘the word Being would not have to be uttered.’ He was always keenly attuned to ‘the sensible world’; the key term in his ontological thinking is not so much ‘Being’ as it is ‘the flesh’, a term with no equivalent in the history of philosophy. What traditional philosophy referred to as ‘subject’ and ‘object’ were not two distinct sorts of reality, but merely ‘differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to Being [Nature] which is the flesh.’ By viewing the perceiving subject as ‘a coiling over of the visible upon the visible,’ Merleau-Ponty was attempting to overcome the subject–object dichotomy of modern philosophy, which raised the intractable problems of the external world and other minds. With the notion of the flesh he believed he could finally overcome the solipsism of modern philosophy and had discovered the basis for a genuine intersubjectivity (conceived of as basically an intercorporeity). Does ‘flesh’ signify something significantly different from ‘body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier thought? Did his growing concern with ontology (and the question of nature) signal abandonment of his earlier phenomenology (to which the question of nature is foreign)? This has remained a principal subject of conflicting interpretations in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. As illustrated by his last, unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as a whole is fragmentary. He always insisted that true philosophy is the enemy of the system, and he disavowed closure and completion. While Heidegger has had numerous disciples and epigones, it is difficult to imagine what a ‘Merleau-Ponty school of philosophy’ would be. This is not to deny that Merleau-Ponty’s work has exerted considerable influence. Although he was relegated to a kind of intellectual purgatory in France almost immediately upon his death, the work of his poststructuralist successors such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida betrays a great debt to his previous struggles with philosophical modernity. And in Germany, Great Britain, and, above all, North America, Merleau-Ponty has continued to be a source of philosophical inspiration and the subject of extensive scholarship. Although his work does not presume to answer the key questions of existence, it is a salient model of philosophy conceived of as unremitting interrogation. It is this questioning (‘zetetic’) attitude, combined with a non-dogmatic humanism, that continues to speak not only to philosophers but also to a wide audience among practitioners of the human sciences (phenomenological psychology being a particularly noteworthy example). See also CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY , EXIS- TENTIALISM , PHENOMENOLOGY , SUBJECT – OBJECT DICHOTOM. G.B.M.