Maurice Merleau-Ponty: biography of this French philosopher

European thinking about reality is highly influenced by authors from the 16th and 17th centuries. Very particularly, the figure of René Descartes (who would postulate the dualism between mind and body) has contributed to almost all the sciences and arts, thanks to a legacy of enormous philosophical and historical.

Many have long pondered how the body and mind could coexist within two different ontological planes, and what their respective interactions would be (in the case of have them). From this, both sympathetic and dissident positions have arisen over time, which have stimulated many of the advances of Philosophy in past centuries.

In this article we will detail the life and work of one of the most prolific French authors of the century XX, 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; that he lived through the ominous period of the two great world wars and held a position on existence that would resonate widely in modern culture, arts, and sciences.

• Related article: "Phenomenology: what it is, concept and main authors"

Maurice Merleau-Ponty biography

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 of an acute myocardial infarction. He is currently considered one of the most relevant European existentialist thinkers, since his work served to build bridges between philosophical visions (very especially idealism and empiricism) who were distancing themselves by the deep horror of the wars that gripped the earth in the years that corresponded to them. to live. This effort is known as the ontological "third way."

His teaching work was also very important, both at the Paris Faculty of Letters (where he also obtained the title of Doctor) and at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France, in which he would hold one of the most notable chairs of Theoretical Philosophy until the day of his death (his body would appear lifeless on a work of Discards, one of the most relevant authors to understand his way of thinking and living from him). He was known for his concern in politics and society, showing a strong Marxist perspective that he came to deny some time later.

Despite passing away at a young age, he bequeathed 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 Les Temps Modernes. Another author of enormous importance in the feeling and thinking of that gray moment also participated in this project: Simone de Beauvoir. Its monthly delivery format, which would later become quarterly, included some of the ideas philosophical philosophies of the postwar period, which allowed it to continue to exist until recent years (from 1945 until 2018).

In addition to the numerous writings that she came to share in the aforementioned magazine (compiled in "Sentido and Nonsense "), Merleau-Ponty devoted a lot of time in his life to the literary creation on Philosophy. Phenomenology was the branch of knowledge that most attracted his attention, rocked by the inspiration of Edmund husserl and other great thinkers of similar orientation.

Of his works, the Phenomenology of Perception (perhaps the best known of the author), the Adventures of Dialectics, it Visible and the Invisible (he died while I was writing it and it was published posthumously), the Prose of the World, the Eye and Spirit and the Behavioral Structure (the one that was the first complete work of him). 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 the daily writing on political matters, 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 "got caught up" in very bitter polemics, and they criticized their respective ideas with particular vehemence. Despite this, the death of Merleau-Ponty had a powerful emotional impact on Sartre, who dedicated a letter of more than 70 pages to him (in the magazine in which both participated) extolling all the virtue of his work and recognizing the great value of him as a thinker and being human.

From now on we will delve into the thinking and feeling of the French author, always "troubled" by the consequences of Cartesian dualism on subjective experience. His orientation was clearly phenomenological, and he addressed such important issues as freedom and integrative monism. He also thought of the potentiality of the felt body, as the inescapable vehicle for experience. Let's see what his main contributions were.

• You may be interested: "What is the Philosophy of Mind? Definition, history and applications"

Thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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 (the reality rests on what has a tangible matter).

He was also a deep connoisseur of the Cartesian thesis, but he did not conceive that the body (res Amplia) 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 it were composed of two dimensions that never coexist in the same plane of reality.

One of the ways in which he achieved this theoretical purpose was with his postulate of the body as sentient subject (or leib), different from the physiological organism that was the object of natural sciences (körper). Through such a vision, the corporeality would be endowed with a component alien to the extensive res, which sinks into the cogito and the subjectivity, being able to combine physical "activity" with that of thought (since they would come to live together and recognize each other mutually).

Through the aforementioned idea, the classic dilemma of freedom would be partially resolved, since the author suggested that All thoughts are essentially free, but they are constrained by the limits of the body in its quality of matter. Thus, it could only be solved by subjectivizing the meat, in an identical way to that of his proposal.

This division of the body implies that it becomes a channel of communication in the social space, and a fundamental form of conscience about oneself (self) in front of the things of the world. Such a body would not be the limit, but 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 so by 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 distinguish themselves as unique, on the basis and foundation of all knowledge Social.

The thinking individual would subjectivize the environment through his participation in it as body and flesh, postulating the concept of "incarnation" as the confluence or tacit cogitans. In this sense, reality would not be more than the simple projection of the individual in some coordinates of space and time that they do not exist beyond their own experience, thus touching on some of the elementary foundations of idealism subjective and integrating the epojé (that Edmund Husserl rescued and adapted from Greek Philosophy) with the materialism.

Merleau-Ponty would not deny the existence of a physical dimension, but would equate it with that of the body itself, and would conclude that it is accessible as a stage where conscious beings make use of their freedom to exist (body located at the juncture between consciousness and the world of nature). Beyond that, time and space would lack their own existence, since they would only be a property of 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 have a direct effect on it as an active and transforming agent. Behind this phenomenon would reside the relationship between being and otherness (which is the elemental mechanism for phenomenological creation) and knowledge would be built subjective that we all treasure within us, which is unique and difficult to reproduce or generalize through some procedure of science conventional.

As can be seen, Merleau-Ponty's interest was the study of consciousness starting from 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 passes necessarily by 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 the humanity.

Bibliographic references:

• Botelho, F. (2008). Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and communication research. Sign and Thought, 27 (52), 68-83.
• González, R.A. and Giménez, G. (2010). Phenomenology of the intersection between the body and the world in Merleau-Ponty. Ideas and Values, 145, 113-130.