Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, in the province of Charente-
Maritime, on March 14, 1908.
Merleau-Ponty pursued secondary studies at the Parisian lycees Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand,
completing his first course in philosophy at Janson-de-Sailly with Gustave Rodrigues in 1923–24.
He attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930. After a year of mandatory military
service, Merleau-Ponty taught at the lycee in Beauvais from 1931 to 1933, pursued a year of research
on perception from the Caisse nationale des sciences 1933–34, and taught at the lycee in Chartres in
1934–35. From 1935 to 1940, he was a tutor (agégé-répétiteur) at the École Normale Supérieure. With
the outbreak of World War Two, Merleau-Ponty served for a year as lieutenant in the 5th Infantry
Regiment and 59th Light Infantry Division, until he was wounded in battle in June 1940, days before the
signing of the armistice between France and Germany.
He returned to teaching at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he remained from 1940 until 1944. In
November 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, and their daughter Marianne was born in June 1941.
Merleau-Ponty with Jean-Paul Sartre, , through their involvement in the resistance group Socialisme et
Liberté. The group published around ten issues of an underground review until the arrest of two
members in early 1942 led to its dissolution. After the conclusion of the war, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty
would collaborate with Sartre and Beauvoir to found Les Temps Modernes, a journal devoted to
“littérature engagée”, for which he served as political editor until 1952.
At the end of the 1943–44 school year, Merleau-Ponty completed his main thesis, Phénoménologie de
la perception [Phenomenology of Perception, PP], and in 1944–45 he taught at the Lycée Condorcet in
Paris. in July 1945, fulfilling the requirements for the Docteur ès lettres, which was awarded “with
distinction”.
In 1947, Merleau-Ponty participated regularly in the Collège philosophique, an association formed by
Jean Wahl to provide an open venue for intellectual exchange without the academic formality of the
Sorbonne, and frequented by many leading Parisian thinkers.
In the fall of 1948, Merleau-Ponty delivered a series of seven weekly lectures on French national radio
that were subsequently published as Causeries 1948 (2002/2004).
Merleau-Ponty declined an invitation to join the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
as a Visiting Professor in 1948–49, but instead received a leave from Lyon for the year to present a
series of lectures at the University of Mexico in early 1949.
Later in 1949, Merleau-Ponty was appointed Professor of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the
University of Paris, and in this position lectured widely on child development, psychoanalysis,
phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty held position in 1952, to the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, the most
prestigious post for a philosopher in France, which he would hold until his death in 1961. At forty-four,
Merleau-Ponty was the youngest person ever elected to this position, but his appointment was not
without controversy.
Merleau-Ponty, French philosopher and public intellectual, was the leading academic proponent of
existentialism and phenomenology in post-war France. Best known for his original and influential work
on embodiment, perception, and ontology, he also made important contributions to the philosophy of art,
history, language, nature, and politics.
Merleau-Ponty played a central role in the dissemination of phenomenology, which he sought to
integrate with Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Saussurian linguistics.
Major influences on his thinking include Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max
Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as neurologist Kurt Goldstein, Gestalt theorists such as Wolfgang
Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary figures including Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry.
In turn, he influenced the post-structuralist generation of French thinkers who succeeded him, including
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, whose similarities with and debt to the later
Merleau-Ponty have often been underestimated. Merleau-Ponty published two major theoretical texts
during his lifetime: The Structure of Behavior (1942 SC) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945 PP).
Other important publications include two volumes of political philosophy, Humanism and Terror (1947
HT) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955 AdD), as well as two books of collected essays on art,
philosophy, and politics: Sense and Non-Sense ([1948]1996b/1964) and Signs (1960/1964). Two
unfinished manuscripts appeared posthumously: The Prose of the World (1969/1973), drafted in 1950–
51; and The Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I), on which he was working at the time of his death.
Lecture notes and student transcriptions of many of his courses at the Sorbonne and the Collège de
France have also been published.
For most of his career, Merleau-Ponty focused on the problems of perception and embodiment as a
starting point for clarifying the relation between the mind and the body, the objective world and the
experienced world, expression in language and art, history, politics, and nature. Although
phenomenology provided the overarching framework for these investigations, Merleau-Ponty also drew
freely on empirical research in psychology and ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and
the arts.
The characteristic approach of Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical work is his effort to identify an alternative to
intellectualism or idealism, on the one hand, and empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their
common presupposition of a ready-made world and failure to account for the historical and embodied
character of experience.
Rationalists
- claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained
independently of sense experience.
- is the belief in innate ideas, reason, and deduction.

Empiricists
- claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.
- is the belief in sense perception, induction, and that there are no innate ideas.

Perception
- a thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances
- an awareness of things through the physical senses, esp. sight