Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Summary

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961) was a French Phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl. He was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and influenced by Martin Heidegger, but his philosophy tended to focus on the phenomenological and corporeal foundations of perception.

These ideas led to the concept of The Lived Body, leading us from a Divided Culture towards the concept of a Biocentric Culture (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• The World as Lived - Lebenswelt - literally life world - .
• The Lived Body - people are both bodies and subjects of thought. This extends the notion of self-definition to recognize that you first need a physical body and brain before you can create an 'essence' that is you.

The World as Lived - Lebenswelt

Merleau-Ponty believed that science (through too much abstraction) resulted in a philosophical tendency to reduce every phenomena, object, and person to nothing more than collected data. Philosophers had a duty to relate things as they were viewed, not as science described them.

This approach requires a return to The World as Lived. We can only know ourselves based upon the input of others. We are defined by all our actions, thoughts, and statements.

According to Merleau-Ponty, humans and our world are interconnected - neither causes the other, instead we shape and are shaped by our environment. We have both a natural (predefined) existence and the ability to change that nature via conscious choice.

The Lived Body

Merleau-Ponty challenged the thinking of dualisms, of subject and object, self and world, through the lived experience of the existential body, as revealed in his book Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945).

This distinction is especially important in that he perceives the essences of the world existentially, as opposed to the Cartesian idea that the world is merely an extension of our own minds.

The human body, and its perceptions, is the way we relate to and understand existence. Merleau-Ponty suggested meaning therefore begins with perception.

His statement that I am my body could be interpreted as advocating a materialist, behaviorist type position. However, he does not deny those aspects of our life which are commonly called the 'mental' but suggests that the use of this 'mind' is inseparable from our body and physical nature.

The perceiving mind is an incarnated body, and he enriches the concept of the body to allow it to both think and perceive, referring to the individual as not simply a body, but as a body-subject.

This thinking can be contrasted with that of Rene Descartes, who promoted a dualism where the non-material mind and material body are separate.