Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Biography Of This French Philosopher
European thinking about reality is greatly influenced by authors from the 16th and 17th centuries. Very particularly, the figure of René Descartes (who would postulate the dualism between the mind and the body) has contributed to almost all sciences and arts, thanks to a legacy of enormous philosophical and historical significance.
Many have reflected at length on how the body and mind could coexist within two different ontological planes, and what their respective interactions would be (if any). From this, both similar and dissident positions have emerged over time, which have stimulated many of the advances in Philosophy in past centuries.
In this article we will detail the life and work of one of the most prolific French authors of the 20th century, who “revived” the Cartesian thesis and tried to reconcile it with ideas from metaphysics and Phenomenology. His proposal (influenced by George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Edmund Husserl) had notable social and political connotations.
Here we will see What were the most representative contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? ; who lived during the ominous period of the two great world wars and maintained a position on existence that would resonate widely in modern culture, arts and sciences.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who lived in the first half of the last century He was born in the town of Rochefort-sur-Mer on March 14, 1908, and died in 1961 from an acute myocardial infarction. He is currently considered one of the most relevant European existentialist thinkers, as his work served to build bridges between philosophical visions (especially idealism and empiricism) that were distancing themselves due to the deep horror of the wars that gripped the earth in the years that he had to live. This effort is known as the ontological “third way.”
His teaching work was also very important, both at the Faculty of Letters in Paris (where he also obtained the title of Doctor) and at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France, where he would occupy one of the most notable chairs of Theoretical Philosophy until the day of his death (his body would appear lifeless on a work by Descartes, one of the most relevant authors for understanding his way of thinking and living). He was known for his concern in the field of politics and society, showing a strong Marxist perspective that he came to renounce some time later.
Despite dying at a young age, he left behind many books/reflections. He was one of the greatest friends of Jean Paul Sartre with which he formed an intellectual resistance group (during the first of the world wars) and founded one of the most iconic publications in Europe and the world: the political/literary magazine The Modern Times. Another author of enormous importance in the feeling and thinking of that gray moment also participated in this project: Simone de Beauvoir. Its format of monthly deliveries, which would later become quarterly, included some of the most valuable philosophical ideas of the postwar period, which allowed it to continue existing until recent years (from 1945 to 2018).
In addition to the numerous writings that he shared in the aforementioned magazine (collected in “Sense and Non-Sense”), Merleau-Ponty dedicated a lot of time in his life to literary creation on Philosophy. Phenomenology was the branch of knowledge that attracted his attention the most rocked by the inspiration of Edmund Husserl and other great thinkers of a similar orientation.
Of his works, the Phenomenology of Perception (perhaps the best known of the author), the Adventures of Dialeticsit Visible and the Invisible (he died while writing it and it was published posthumously), the Prose of the Worldhe Eye and the Spirit and the Behavioral Structure (which was his first complete work). Most of his works have been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish.
The distancing from communism represented an important transformation in the life and work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: on the one hand he abandoned his daily writing on political affairs, and on the other he ended up breaking the friendship that united him with Jean Paul Sartre. In fact, during the last few years they “engaged” in very bitter controversies, and criticized their respective ideas with particular vehemence. Despite this, Merleau-Ponty’s death had a powerful emotional impact on Sartre, who dedicated a letter of more than 70 pages to him (in the magazine in which they both participated) extolling all the virtue of his work and recognizing its great value. as a thinker and human being.
From now on we will delve into the thinking and feelings of the French author, always “troubled” by the consequences of Cartesian dualism in subjective experience His orientation was clearly phenomenological, and he addressed such important issues as freedom and integrative monism. He also thought about the potentiality of the felt body, as the unavoidable vehicle for experience. Let’s see what his main contributions were.
One of the main goals of this author was to find a meeting point that would reconcile the discrepancies between idealism (consciousness as the sole source of potential knowledge) and materialism (reality rests on what has tangible matter).
He was also a deep connoisseur of the Cartesian thesis, but he did not conceive that the body (res extenso) and thought (res cogitans) should have an independent nature, opting for the coherent integration of both as common facts and of equivalent essence. If this were not the case, every individual would experience a powerful dissociation when observing himself, as if he were composed of two dimensions that never coexist on the same plane of reality.
One of the ways in which he achieved this theoretical purpose was with his postulate of the body as a sentient subject (or leib), different from the physiological organism that was the object of the natural sciences (körper). Through such a vision, corporality would be provided with a component foreign to the res extenso, which sinks into the cogito and subjectivity, being able to combine physical “activity” with that of thought (since they would come to live together and recognize each other). ).
Through the aforementioned idea, the classic dilemma of freedom would be partially resolved, since the author stated that all thoughts are essentially free, but that they are constrained by the limits of the body in its quality as matter. Thus, it could only be solved by subjectivizing the meat, in a way identical to his proposal.
This division of the body implies that it becomes a communication channel in the social space, and a fundamental form of self-awareness in the face of the things of the world. Such a body would not be the limit, but rather it would be the vehicle that would make possible the experience of interaction between the plane of the sentient and the sensible world. This would happen due to its nature halfway between the physical and the mental. The meeting of a body and another body would be the axis through which the subjective lives of two beings would unfold or be distinguished as unique, in the bases and foundation of all social knowledge.
The thinking individual would subjectivize the environment through his participation in it as body and flesh, postulating the concept “incarnation” as the confluence or tacit cogitans. In this sense, reality would be nothing more than the simple projection of the individual in some coordinates of space and time that do not exist beyond their own experience, therefore touching some of the elemental foundations of subjective idealism and integrating epoché (which Edmund Husserl rescued and adapted from Greek Philosophy) with materialism.
Merleau-Ponty would not deny the existence of a physical dimension, but he would equate it with that of the body itself, and would conclude that this is accessible as a setting where conscious beings make use of their freedom to exist (body located at the juncture between consciousness and the world of nature). Beyond this, time and space would lack their own existence, since they would only be a property of the objects (so that they can be felt).
From the prism that he presented, no philosopher (person open to the knowledge of things) would be only a passive spectator of reality, but would exert a direct effect on it as an active and transformative agent. Behind this phenomenon would reside the relationship between being and otherness (which is the elemental mechanism for phenomenological creation) and the subjective knowledge that we all treasure within ourselves would be constructed, which is unique and difficult to reproduce or generalize through any procedure of conventional science.
As can be seen, Merleau-Ponty’s interest was the study of consciousness based on the individual perception of reality, which is why he is considered one of the main authors of perceptual phenomenology. Although in the last chapter of his life he reformulated concepts of his philosophy, he firmly maintained the belief that the relationship between every man and history necessarily involves the way in which he perceives the events that unfold during his life cycle. defining a dialectic between thinking bodies as an ecosystem for the memory of humanity.
