Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908-1961 · French · Phenomenology, Philosophy of Perception, Existentialism, Ontology
True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew.
When Maurice Merleau-Ponty submitted his doctoral theses in 1945, he was taking aim at an error so deep it had gone unnoticed: Cartesian rationalism and behaviorist science both assumed a world of already-constituted objects and then tried to account for how we perceive them. Against this shared premise — what he called "objective thought" — he argued that perception is lived from inside, by a body already at home in its world before reflection begins.
Topics Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses
- objective thought
- the phenomenal field
- the lived body
- the body schema
- motor intentionality
- operative intentionality
- flesh and chiasm
- reversibility
- wild being
- perceptual faith
- the return to phenomena
- the phenomenological reduction
- hyper-reflection
- sedimentation
- the depth of the visible
- expression
- situated freedom
- the perception of history
- the liquidation of the dialectic
- Molyneux's problem
- temporality
- the problem of other minds
- empathy and intersubjectivity
- the philosophy of painting
Questions to put to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Perception and the Return to Phenomena
- What do you mean by 'objective thought' and why is it the shared error of both intellectualism and empiricism?
- How does phenomenology return to the perceptual phenomenon before the subject-object split?
- What's the difference between the phenomenal field and the objective world of science?
- Can you walk me through what happens when I see a cube — how does perception actually work for you?
- Why does Molyneux's problem matter so much for your account of perception?
The Lived Body and Motor Intentionality
- What do you mean by the body schema and how is it different from my body as an object?
- How does motor intentionality work — what's happening when my fingers find the keys before I think about it?
- Why do you say the body is the medium of having a world rather than an object in the world?
- What's wrong with Descartes's account of the body as res extensa?
- How is your view of the body different from Sartre's body-for-others?
Freedom, Situation, and the Break with Sartre
- How is freedom always situated and conditioned in your view?
- What's wrong with Sartre's account of radical freedom in Being and Nothingness?
- Can you help me understand what sedimentation means for how I'm free?
- Why did you break with Sartre in 1955 over his Communist Party essays?
- How can politics be dialectical without sliding into either ultra-bolshevism or liberal proceduralism?
Flesh, Chiasm, and the Late Ontology
- What do you mean by flesh and how is it different from matter or mind?
- Can you explain the reversibility of the touching-touched — what's happening when my left hand touches my right?
- How does the late ontology of The Visible and the Invisible relate to the body-subject of Phenomenology of Perception?
- What is wild Being and why does it matter?
- What do you mean by the depth of the visible?
Expression, Painting, and the Visible World
- Why does Cézanne matter so much for your philosophy?
- What does painting show us that philosophy has been trying to think?
- How does expression work in your account — what happens when language or art expresses something?
- Can you walk me through what you mean in Eye and Mind about the painter's vision?
- What's the difference between operative intentionality and the intentionality of conscious acts?
Converse with Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's own writing, cited to the page.