ABOUT MERLEAU-PONTY
AND THE MERLEAU-PONTY CIRCLE

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) was one of the most insightful and historically influential of 20th Century phenomenologists. His early writings, for example, Phenomenology of Perception, developed an existential phenomenology of perception, behavior, and the living body as a viable alternative to Cartesian and Sartrean dualisms. This phenomenology was also designed to reveal the living pre-conditions of scientific practice – pre-conditions that are typically ignored by naïve empiricists and objectivists. In making these arguments, Merleau-Ponty is in frequent conversation with the most influential philosophers of his era: Hegel, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty also drew extensively on the experimental and experiential evidence from gestalt and developmental psychology – movements which themselves needed to be re-interpreted and rooted in life-world.

Throughout his many subsequent articles and books, Merleau-Ponty developed the implications of his phenomenology of embodied existence for understanding speech, language, sexuality, art, history, politics, and expression generally – in short, all areas of living experience that involve the creation of meaning. In this regard, he was aided by his critical analyses of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and Marxism – the latter of which led to the final break in his friendship with Sartre.

Merleau-Ponty’s final writings sought to develop an ontology of “the flesh” – an ontology in which “body” and “mind” are two differentiated yet inextricably interwoven aspects. This elemental ontology, which begins to take shape in his lecture courses at the Collège de France and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind,” became the subject of the manuscript left unfinished by Merleau-Ponty’s untimely death and which was published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. Within this ontology of the flesh, human existence achieves a much closer and more profound relationship with the natural world of which it is part.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy anticipated many of the themes found in contemporary continental thought. His influence is evident in the work of Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lyotard, and many others in the post-modern or post-structuralist tradition. Further, his commitment to embodied realism and to an interactionist (non-representational) theory of perception has recently made his philosophy a touchstone for some work in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

An extensive bibliography of Merleau-Ponty’s work and secondary sources may be found at the bibliography section of the Merleau-Ponty Circle web site.