Maurice Merleau-Ponty was among the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His contributions to phenomenology destabilized the status quo of the Cartesian and Kantian influence on philosophy, providing an alternative path that expands upon Edmund Husserl’s footsteps.
Upbringing and Education
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 at Rochefort-sur-Mer into a middle-class French family. His father, Hubert Merleau-Ponty, was a naval officer who assumed the honorary title of a knight of the Legion of Honor. After he died in 1913, the family moved to Paris. Although the young Maurice was only five when his father died, he reported having a very happy childhood. Paris in the 20th century was the bustling hub of intellectual activity, giving rise to many influential philosophers whose works remain cornerstones of modern thought. This environment inevitably contributed to the cultivation of his intellectual life from a young age.
During his secondary studies at Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, Merleau-Ponty completed his first philosophy course under Gustave Rodrigues, for which he won the school’s “Award for Outstanding Achievement”. Later in his life, he attributed his commitment to philosophy to this course. He also won the “First Prize in Philosophy” at his other secondary school, Louis-le-Grand. In 1926, Merleau-Ponty started studying philosophy at École Normale Supérieure (ENS) alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 1929, he attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, at the Sorbonne, which indubitably influenced the remainder of his philosophical career.
Overview of Merleau-Ponty’s Career
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterMerleau-Ponty graduated in 1930 with an agrégation in philosophy and started teaching at secondary schools in Beauvais and Chartres. In 1933, he received funding from Caisse Nationale Des Sciences to conduct a year of research on the nature of perception. Merleau-Ponty aimed to find an alternative to the Kantian model of perception, whose emphasis on an objective reality independent of human subjectivity, the Noumenon, has been widely influential. Merleau-Ponty believed that abstracting our subjectivity as embodied beings was nonsensical. To redeem the philosophical status of perception, he initially attempted to synthesize the recent discoveries of Gestalt psychology and neurology, only to realize that empirical research alone was not enough.
Merleau-Ponty discovered that Gestalt psychology relied on Kantian assumptions. He insisted that to understand perception, we must look “in a very different direction, for a very different solution” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). According to him, Husserl’s phenomenology was the direction that held this potential. In his 1934 report, Merleau-Ponty argued that phenomenology is the indispensable philosophical framework for understanding perception and psychology. In 1939, he became the first foreign visitor to the Husserl Archives in Leuven, where he accessed Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. His research led to the publication of his most famous books, Consciousness and Behavior (1942) and The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), for which he received his doctorate.
Upon completing his doctorate, Merleau-Ponty worked as a psychology professor at the University of Lyon, where he was later promoted to the Chair of Psychology. Meanwhile, he also taught philosophy at ENS, where Michel Foucault and other influential philosophers were among his students. In 1948, he started teaching philosophy at the University of Paris for three years until he was elected as the Chair of Philosophy at Collège de France, which was the most prestigious post a philosopher could hold in France. He was the youngest philosopher who has ever assumed this position, which he maintained until his death in 1961. For the rest of his life, Merleau-Ponty continued to publish numerous works and lectured extensively both in France and overseas.
Political Engagement
As the French declared war on Germany in 1939, Merleau-Ponty served as a lieutenant in several Infantry Divisions until he suffered detrimental battle wounds in 1940. Back in Paris, he established an underground political resistance group with Sartre and participated in several demonstrations against Nazi forces in 1944. After the end of World War II, he collaborated with Sartre and Beauvoir to found a leftist political journal called Les Temps Modernes, where he served as a political editor until 1952. During that period, Merleau-Ponty published his first book on political philosophy, titled Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. His resignation from Les Temps Modernes was due to his critique of Sartre’s ‘ultra-bolshevism’, evident in Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955. However, Beauvoir accused him of misrepresenting Sartre’s political views in her piece, Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism, published the same year.
Merleau-Ponty’s Legacy
Merleau-Ponty’s most famous work, The Phenomenology of Perception, offered a revolutionized understanding of perception, embodied consciousness, and intersubjectivity that superseded Husserl’s groundwork in phenomenology. His works have effectively liberated the mind-body relationship model from the monopolizing influence of the Cartesian cogito that purported their separation and the superiority of the intellect. Merleau-Ponty disempowered this false dualism by grounding consciousness in the body rather than intellectual activity. According to him, our embodied perception is epistemologically superior to our intellectual reflections, for the former is what informs the latter. His interdisciplinary approach led the influence of his works to span across many fields other than phenomenology, including existentialism, cognitive science, psychology, neurology, linguistics, and anthropology. Merleau-Ponty remains among the most famous and influential philosophers to date in the fields of phenomenology and existentialism.
