Merleau-Ponty

Key Concepts

Rosalyn Diprose, Jack Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317493037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies, feminism and race theory.

PART I
Introduction

ONE
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: life and works

Jack Reynolds

In many respects Merleau-Ponty is the unknown man of the twentieth century’s major European philosophers. This is not to deny that he has been widely read and influential — in fact, there is good reason to agree with Paul Ricoeur that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists — but simply to observe that his life and personality have not been examined, some might say fetishized, in the manner that might be expected for a French academic philosopher of significant public repute. Certainly, he did not initially receive the same amount of attention as his contemporaries and sometimes friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He has not had biographies written about him as they have, nor had photographic diaries and movies devoted to him, as have Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, and he never courted the media in the manner of, say, Sartre, and more recently, Bernard-Henri Lévy. In fact, the life of Merleau-Ponty and the force of his personality remain something of a mystery. He seems to personify what Heidegger is reputed to have said of Aristotle: that he lived, he worked, and he died, and that was all that needed to be said about the relation between a philosopher and their biography. On the other hand, perhaps this mystery and this anonymity that surround Merleau-Ponty partly reveal his personality. At least according to Sartre’s remarkable, heartfelt eulogy, “Merleau-Ponty Vivant” (Stewart 1998), one never felt wholly familiar with Merleau-Ponty. According to both Sartre and de Beauvoir’s reflections, he had a reserve, a certain aloofness, although this should not be taken to indicate a lack of charm or charisma.

There are, of course, certain basic facts about his life that we can quickly and easily delineate. He was born on 14 March 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. As for many others of his generation, his “father” (not his biological father, as we shall see) was killed in the First World War, when Maurice was three. All accounts suggest, however, that he had a very happy childhood, living with his mother and sister in the country before moving with them to Paris. He apparently confided to Sartre that he never got over the incomparable contentment of his childhood, something that Sartre later vividly recounted in “Merleau-Ponty Vivant” in the process of implying that Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical work was always nostalgically desiring a return to such a pre-reflective state of happiness and innocence — Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida were also to make similar criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s work at later dates, albeit without the ad hominem aspect.

Merleau-Ponty was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and he began his agrégation in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in 1926, studying with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Simone Weil and other luminaries. Sartre recounts one interesting story about Merleau-Ponty’s student days. Merleau-Ponty apparently hated obscene songs and tasteless jokes, along with brutality of any kind, and tended to see good and evil in all, albeit to varying degrees. When a group of ENS students were singing some crude anti-military songs, Merleau-Ponty and Maurice de Gandillac hissed and interrupted them, only to be physically set upon, before Sartre intervened to diplomatically salvage the situation and begin a friendship that would last for about twenty-five years (Cohen-Solal 2005; Francis & Gontier 1988). It was a curious encounter between these two great French philosophers, perhaps the inversion of their more common relation to both one another (thereafter) and the world.

Early on at the ENS, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir were also very close friends (Francis & Gontier 1988: 64). Within a year or so, however, their friendship was somewhat tempered due to a tragic relationship that Merleau-Ponty had with de Beauvoir’s best friend at the time, Elisabeth Le Coin (Zaza), which had a profound impact on all three of them. Zaza and Merleau-Ponty met as students and secretly agreed to marry after Merleau-Ponty passed his agrégation and completed his military service (ibid.: 83). According to de Beauvoir’s (early) account of events, however, Zaza’s parents had already arranged for their daughter’s marriage to another man and demanded that Zaza not see either Merleau-Ponty or de Beauvoir again, deeming both to be corrupting influences. For de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty vacillated regarding his commitment to marry Zaza for fear of what it would do to his mother, who was ill. Zaza died of encephalitis soon after in 1929 and it seems that de Beauvoir partly blamed Merleau-Ponty for the distress he caused Zaza at this time. De Beauvoir did not find out for thirty years that things were more complicated than she had thought. Various sources confirm that Zaza’s parents had been quite keen on the prospect of their daughter’s marriage with Merleau-Ponty, but when they found out that Merleau-Ponty’s father was an adulterous professor rather than his mother’s husband — something that Merleau-Ponty himself did not know until Zaza’s father told him — they would not allow their daughter to marry him (ibid.: 83–8).

Despite this tragedy, Merleau-Ponty completed his agrégation in 1930, and began teaching philosophy at lycées in Beauvais, Chartres and, after 1935, as a junior member of the ENS. In the meantime he worked on the Catholic journal, Esprit, and struggled with his Catholicism, which he was soon to renounce. During the Second World War, Merleau-Ponty served in the infantry in the rank of second lieutenant, unlike Sartre who took it as a badge of honour that he was but a run-of-the-mill soldier. During the Nazi Occupation, Merleau-Ponty was active in the Resistance and returned to his teaching. When the Liberation came in 1945, he joined the University of Lyon and became founding co-editor of Les Temps modernes from October 1945 without ever putting his name to it in that capacity. While he repeatedly refused to be explicitly named as an editor alongside Sartre, he was at least as important behind the scenes. Officially he was political editor for the influential political, literary and philosophical magazine.

Around this time, Merleau-Ponty was married to a physician and psychiatrist in Paris, Suzon, and they had one child, a daughter, Marianne. By most accounts it was a happy marriage, although that is not to say it was monogamous. For a time, Merleau-Ponty had an affair with Sonia Brownell (soon to be Sonia Orwell). His eventual breaking off of the relationship clearly devastated Sonia, who declared Merleau-Ponty the love of her life and wrote that the fact that “a lover” and “un amour” are not an exact translation of each other has caused more confusion between the English and the French than most of the wars of politics and religion. Although one could never reconstruct the reasons for her marriage to George Orwell, who was a bed-ridden invalid at the time (the marriage lasted for fourteen weeks), the break in her and Merleau-Ponty’s prior relationship seems to have been a factor in her acceptance of Orwell’s second marriage proposal (Spurling 2003).

With the completion of his docteur des lettres based on two dissertations, The Structure of Behavior (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty rather rapidly became one of the foremost French philosophers of the period immediately following the Second World War. He was made Professor at the University of Lyon in 1948, Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at Sorbonne from 1949–52, and was the youngest ever Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France when he was awarded this position in 1952. He continued to fulfil this role until his untimely death on 44 May 1961 of a stroke from coronary thrombosis, apparently while preparing a lecture on Descartes.

In the period from 1948 until 1953, Merleau-Ponty was one of the first philosophers to bring structuralism and the linguistic emphasis of thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure into a relationship with phenomenology and existentialism. In the 1960s his structuralist friend Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted arguably his major work, The Savage Mind, to Merleau-Ponty’s memory. Throughout his career an abiding cross-disciplinarity was a feature of his work, and his various essays on politics, history, aesthetics, psychology and so on are collated in several collections of enduring importance, including Humanism and Terror (1947), Sense and Non-Sense (1948), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and Signs (1960).

Merleau-Ponty was initially more Marxist than Sartre, but it was the latter’s continuing support for the Soviet Union that forced a break in their friendship in December 1952. As a result Merleau-Ponty quit Les Temps modernes and eventually published his book, Adventures of the Dialectic. The fallout between them was rather acrimonious, although not as vicious as the earlier confrontation between Camus and Sartre. With his political ambitions somewhat attenuated by these historical and personal events, Merleau-Ponty returned to ontological considerations and began work on his final, unfinished opus, The Visible and the Invisible (posthumously published in 1964), which continues to stimulate much philosophical interest. Various different collections of Merleau-Ponty’s course notes (or those collated by students and checked by him) have also been published recently, perhaps most significantly Nature (2003). His work remains highly influential in contemporary “continental” philosophy as it is practised both on the European continent and beyond, but it is also increasingly significant to those aspects of the analytic tradition that are concerned with the relation between mind and body, perception, developmental psychology and the interdisciplinary “discipline” of cognitive science.

TWO
A guide to Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts

Rosalyn Diprose

Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts introduces the reader to the fundamental ideas that have emerged from these intertwinings, outlined in Chapter 1, of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical heritage, cross-disciplinary interests, and his personal and political life. His own reflections on the philosophical enterprise indicate how he may have understood the relationship between “life” and “work”, and they also provide the best guide to how we might approach his philosophy, as well as to how to approach the essays in this book.

In the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty concludes his rendition of phenomenology and existentialism with the suggestion that philosophy “is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being” and “[t]rue philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world” (PP: xx). He later made a similar point in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1952 (published as In Praise of Philosophy in 1953): “the philosopher, in order to experience more fully the ties of truth which bind him to the world and history, finds neither the depth of himself nor absolute knowledge, but a renewed image of the world and of himself placed within it among others” (EP: 63). These definitions of philosophy in part reflect Merleau-Ponty’s ontological commitments, in particular the idea that the self and world are inextricably entwined: to express oneself is to express a world that is already both a historical and natural event of meaning, but is no less real for that; and expression, whether philosophical, historical or scientific, is fundamentally creative. The idea that philosophy is creative in its attempt “to complete and conceive” an “unfinished world” (PP: xx) presents the reader of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy with a particular challenge. Not only does this mean that Merleau-Ponty transforms the philosophical and other traditions with which he engages in decidedly creative and innovative ways, but also it means that it is often difficult to work out where tradition ends and Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy begins. While more often than not he presents his ideas in the context of expositions of the concepts of others, in a mark of his own philosophical generosity Merleau-Ponty rarely indicates exactly where he departs from his interlocutors, and never in a confrontational way. Even Descartes, whose philosophy of the cogito provides the most obvious contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the body is the ground of experience, is treated less as an adversary than a resource for ideas that merely need extra development. Hence, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty applauds Descartes’s attempt (in his Meditations) to restore perceptual faith in a world, suggesting also that “Cartesianism, whether it intended to do so or not, did inspire a science of the human body” in an analysis that requires rectifying rather than abandoning (VI: 26).

Given the complexities of Merleau-Ponty’s own conviction that philosophy is creative, his readers would be advised to approach his texts in the same way that he characterizes the phenomenological project: with “the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being” (PP: xxi). Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts aims to assist in this process of better understanding and appreciating Merleau-Ponty’s “renewed image of the world”.

The volume is divided into four parts (Part I consists of two introductory chapters): the essays in “Part II: Interventions” situate Merleau-Ponty’s work with regard to the key philosophical influences and debates with which he was concerned; the essays in “Part III: Inventions” explain and discuss the main conceptual innovations of his philosophy; and the chapters in “Part IV: Extensions” focus on how his work has been taken up in other fields, outside philosophy, in the last two decades. The authors of these essays include some of the most significant established and exciting new anglophone scholars of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. As such, they approach his work with the same passion for philosophy’s creative dimension. The essays guide the reader through Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, noticing how these ideas develop and the different ways they might be understood. They aim to inspire further reading of his oeuvre rather than claiming to be the final word on what it means. That task, like the taking up and renewing of a world that Merleau-Ponty describes, is “unfinished”.

The two philosophical traditions with which Merleau-Ponty is most associated are phenomenology and existentialism. The first two chapters of Part II situate Merleau-Ponty as an interlocutor in these traditions. As Ted Toadvine suggests in Chapter 3, while Merleau-Ponty drew “on a range of disciplines and intellectual traditions in crafting his own unique philosophical style, including psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, literature and biology” (p. 17), it was phenomenology that provided him with the basis not only for his philosophical method, but also for his account of perceptual experience as an alternative to realist and idealist doctrines. While particularly interested in Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty revised it in novel ways, most notably by departing from Husserl’s focus on consciousness as the seat of experience of the world and paying more attention to the latent content of experience that marks the limits of the phenomenological method. Toadvine guides us through this revision, including Merleau-Ponty’s later call for a “hyper-reflection” that measures the incompleteness of consciousness and, hence, of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s unique take on phenomenology would not have been what it is without the influence of existentialism on his thought. In Phenomenology of Perception he describes his understanding of the relation between the two as follows: while phenomenology “is the study of essences”, including “the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness”, phenomenology also “puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’” (PP: vii). Along with existentialism, Merleau-Ponty puts existence before essence where “‘existence’ is the movement through which man is in the world and involves himself in a physical and social situation which then becomes his point of view on the world” (SNS: 72). As with phenomenology, though, Merleau-Ponty leaves his unique stamp on this tradition. In Chapter 4, Thomas Busch takes us through Merleau-Ponty’s debts to, and departures from, Sartre’s existentialism, paying particular attention to the advances Merleau-Ponty makes in terms of four aspects of human existence: embodiment, the advent of meaning, the relation to “otherness”, and freedom. While together phenomenology and existentialism provide Merleau-Ponty with his starting point for developing an account of human existence between realism and idealism, he characterizes realist and idealist doctrines in his own unique way, usually preferring the labels “empiricism” and “intellectualism”. Taylor Carman outlines in Chapter 5 what Merleau-Ponty means by “empiricism” and “intellectualism”, noting how his critiques of these traditions are crucial to the development of his account of the bodily basis of perception.

Unlike other phenomenologists and existentialists, Merleau-Ponty was sympathetic to many aspects of the account of human existence emerging from psychoanalytic theory in France in the first half of the twentieth century. While not adopting Freud’s notion of the unconscious as s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Translations and abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Interventions
• Part III: Inventions
• Part IV: Extensions
• References
• Index