Course:MDIA300/Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French philosopher, writer, and editor. Influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s work in the field of phenomenology was contemporary to that of other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty is regarded as an influential figure in mid-20th century philosophy, incorporating psychoanalysis into his writings on perception, social structures, linguistics and human experience.

Personal Life and Education

Merleau-Ponty was born on March 14, 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. His family moved to Paris in 1913 following the death of his father. Merleau-Ponty cited his interest in philosophy to him being awarded his secondary schools “Award for Outstanding Achievement” in the discipline at age sixteen. He later studied at École Normale Supérieure, becoming acquaintances with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Claude Lévi-Straus. Merleau-Ponty was strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl after attending his 1929 Sorbonne lectures.

Merleau-Ponty served in the military for one year in 1930 upon graduating École Normale Supérieur. He taught at lycees and his alma mater from 1931 to 1940, continuing to study privately. Injured after a year of service in World War Two in 1940, he resumed teaching at Lycée Carnot in Paris until 1944 and was involved in the Nazi-resistance group Socialisme et Liberté. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1945. Merleau-Ponty accepted a role at the University of Lyon, where he would teach until 1949 when he went on a lecture tour of the United States and accepted a professor position at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 1952, he left this position due to his election as Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France.,holding this position until his death from a heart attack on May 3, 1961 at age fifty-three.

Les Temps Moderne

While a member of the resistance organization Socialisme et Liberté in Nazi-Occupied France, Merleau-Ponty began a working relationship with his École Normale Supérieur peer Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1945, the pair established the journal Les Temps Modernes. Serving as the publication's political editor, the magazine became a hub of left wing critiques of French society throughout the mid-century. Merleau-Ponty left the editorial board in 1947 due to a rejection of prior condonements of violence and marxism, resulting in an irreconcilable rift between Merleau-Ponty and both Sartre and the editorial board. Following his departure, the magazine found its greatest success throughout the 1960s, taking antagonistic positions toward President Charles de Gaulle and the French military during the Algerian civil War. Les Temps Modernes ceased publication in 2019, following a seventy-four year print run.

Major Philosophical Contributions

Merleau-Ponty contributed most prominently to the field of phenomenology, being cited as among the most influential philosophers of post-war France. Though his works incorporate existentialist themes — at that point, a developing philosophical stream among French academics — he is less commonly associated with the school of thought due to less focus on personal freedom than flagbearers like Sartre or Albert Camus.

Lived-Body

Merleau-Ponty was a major critic of mind-body dualism. In his 1945 essay Phenomenology of Perception, he presents his idea of the lived-body. He rejects the notion that the human mind is independent to, or separate from, the body, offering insteading the perspective that each aspect of the body is deeply interconnected and expressive of one another, constituting an enmeshed, singular experience of existence. In effect, he asserts that the whole of an object is greater than the sum of its parts, writing that “Each part of my body is expressive of the body as a whole, and thus I am in possession of this body as a whole. I am ‘enveloped’ in my body. This suggests that I do not primarily control my body through conscious deliberation."

Flesh and Chiasm

In his final two works — The Visible and Invisible and an essay. “Eye and Mind” — Merleau-Ponty proposed the related concepts of flesh and chiasms. Flesh is used in reference to an ontological worldview that conceives our world as being perceived through a world of surfaces that connects externally perceived flesh with the perceiving subject, with the face of the surface being analogous to skin. Similarly, the term Chiasm is used to describe this relationship of the perceived flesh with the perceiving subject, underlying the reversible relationship that drives the process of change in shape and form of both subjects.

Impact on Media Studies

Merleau-Ponty’s works and ideas have had both a direct and indirect impact on Media Studies. Both The Visible and Invisible and “Eye and Mind” were cited in Tim Ingold’s Making, drawing extensively on his perceiver-perceived ontology in respect to their material constitution and how meaning is determined. Other authors cited by Ingold have also been influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s theory, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Merleau-Ponty is also notable for his rejection of intellectualism, with his theory’s incorporation of psychoanalysis and empirical examinations of art and nature serving as a foundation for the multi-disciplinary approach of Media Studies.