Merleau Ponty

the part played by empathy and the body in the construction of reality is central to his thinking… Merleau-Ponty wrote about the reciprocity of communication that ‘it is as if the other person’s intentions inhabited my body and mine his’.

McGilchrist positions Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of embodied empathy and intersubjectivity, situating him within the Husserlian lineage and arguing that his thought is indispensable for understanding the right-hemisphere’s construction of reality.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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What I am calling dynamic co-emergence is the sort of emergence that best describes what Merleau-Ponty means by form, namely, a whole that cannot be dislocated from its components but cannot be reduced to them either.

Thompson argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of form in The Structure of Behavior anticipates the enactive notion of dynamic co-emergence, making it foundational for a non-reductive biological phenomenology of mind.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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the sensible ‘beckons to me,’ ‘sets a problem for my body to solve,’ ‘responds’ to my summons and ‘takes possession of my senses,’ and even ‘thinks itself within me.’

Abram argues that Merleau-Ponty’s consistent grammatical animation of the sensible world in Phenomenology of Perception constitutes a philosophical vindication of animistic, participatory perception rather than mere poetic license.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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The experience of our own body reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing… the body is not an object… I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess experience.

Merleau-Ponty articulates the body as an ambiguous, irreducibly lived totality — neither pure object nor pure subject — establishing the phenomenological ground for all subsequent embodied-mind theorizing in the corpus.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis

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There can be time only if it is not completely deployed… It is of the essence of time to be in the process of self-production, and not to be; never, that is, to be completely constituted.

McGilchrist cites Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between living time and ‘constituted time’ to argue that objective, B-series temporal representation is a secondary abstraction that falsifies the dynamic self-production of genuine temporal experience.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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What Merleau-Ponty calls ‘constituted time’ here is McTaggart’s B-series time, in which you see the lot at once. But as Merleau-Ponty hints, in what sense can that be said to be time at all?

This parallel passage aligns Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time directly with McTaggart’s philosophical distinction, reinforcing the argument that static representational time is a ‘recording’ rather than time itself.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Behavior is a kind of dialogue in which the organism has an ‘aptitude’ to respond to situations as in effect questions that need answering. Behavior is, as it were, dialogical and expresses meaning-constitution rather than information processing.

Thompson reads Merleau-Ponty’s account of behavior as a structured organism-milieu dialogue to ground the enactive claim that cognition is meaning-constitution rather than computational information processing.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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Merleau-Ponty argues that naturalism needs the notion of form… but this notion is irreducibly phenomenal. Hence naturalism cannot explain matter, life, and mind, as long as explanation means purging nature of subjectivity.

Thompson reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s anti-objectivist argument: since the concept of form is irreducibly phenomenal, any naturalism that excludes subjectivity from the outset cannot coherently account for its own explanatory categories.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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When Merleau-Ponty criticizes what he calls naturalism or realism, it is really objectivism he has in mind. Objectivism tries to purge nature of subjectivity and then reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged.

Thompson clarifies that Merleau-Ponty’s critique targets not naturalism per se but objectivism — the attempt to constitute subjectivity from a nature already stripped of phenomenal qualities — situating this as a transcendental rather than metaphysical argument.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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although Merleau-Ponty earlier stated that ‘the physical form is an individual,’ he now states that an organism ‘is an individual in a sense which is not that of even modern physics.’

Thompson traces Merleau-Ponty’s evolving concept of individuality to show that living organisms represent an ontologically emergent order of nature qualitatively distinct from physical systems — a distinction central to enactive biology.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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By ‘work,’ Merleau-Ponty means activities that transform physical and living nature and thereby modify the milieu or produce a new one… Work is forward-looking and creative or productive.

Thompson draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelian concept of ‘work’ to establish that the human order of existence introduces a new dialectical relation — oriented toward possibility and futurity — that is ontologically emergent with respect to animal life.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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In order to learn a community’s language, suggests Merleau-Ponty, it is necessary simply to begin speaking, to enter the language with one’s body, to begin to move within it.

Abram draws on Merleau-Ponty’s embodied theory of language acquisition to argue that genuine speech is a bodily, participatory event — an entering into a living fabric — rather than the manipulation of arbitrary conventional signs.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

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The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions… man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Merleau-Ponty’s preface establishes the bedrock phenomenological claim that the world is not a constituted object of consciousness but the primordial field of existence within which subjectivity is always already embedded.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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The Gestalt of a circle is not its mathematical law but its physiognomy… The recognition of phenomena as an original order is a condemnation of empiricism as an explanation of order and reason in terms of a coming together of facts.

Merleau-Ponty invokes Gestalt against empiricism to argue that phenomenal order is irreducible to contingent natural fact, establishing perception as encountering a physiognomic, not merely mathematical, world.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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The use a man is to make of his body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological entity… Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which, like paternity, seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions.

Merleau-Ponty dissolves the nature/culture binary by demonstrating that bodily conduct — including emotional expression — is simultaneously natural and instituted, resisting any fixed hierarchy of biological over cultural determination.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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One day I ‘caught on’ to the word ‘sleet’… not by analysing it and performing an articulatory or phonetic action corresponding to each part of the word as heard, but by hearing it as a single modulation of the world of sound.

Merleau-Ponty uses the acquisition of a word to demonstrate that linguistic meaning is grasped bodily and holistically — as a motor-perceptual event — rather than through analytic decomposition and conscious inference.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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perception is opaque, for it brings into play, beneath what I know, my sensory fields which are my primitive alliance with the world… my consciousness of existing merges into the actual gesture of ‘ex-sistence.’

Merleau-Ponty argues that present consciousness is not transparent self-reflection but an opaque, existential alliance with the world — a being-present that cannot be fully recuperated into reflective knowledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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the relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time… is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator.

Merleau-Ponty deploys Husserl’s concept of Fundierung to articulate the non-hierarchical, reciprocally constitutive relation between perception and thought, body and reason, time and eternity.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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We have said that space is existential; we might just as well have said that existence is spatial, that is, that through an inner necessity it opens on to an ‘outside.’

Merleau-Ponty establishes the co-implication of space and existence — spatiality is not a container for experience but an inner necessity of embodied existence itself.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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the smile, the relaxed face, gaiety of gesture really have in them the rhythm of action, the mode of being in the world which are joy itself.

Merleau-Ponty argues that emotional gesture is not a sign pointing to an interior state but actually embodies the mode of being it expresses, grounding his account of the body as expressive meaning rather than mechanism.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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For Merleau-Ponty operative intentionality includes the intentionality of movement, erotic intentionality, the habitual body, etc. Phenomenological analyses of these modes of intentionality take place on the level of the lived-body.

Thompson clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s extension of Husserl’s operative intentionality into pre-reflective, motile, and habitual dimensions of the lived body, positioning this as crucial to the phenomenological account of non-thematic experience.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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Solitude and communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma, but two ‘moments’ of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do exist for me.

Merleau-Ponty refuses the opposition of solipsism and intersubjectivity, arguing that solitude and communication are co-constitutive moments of a single existential phenomenon rather than mutually exclusive positions.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no object… Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

Merleau-Ponty argues that intentional consciousness is irreducibly self-conscious — not as a separate reflective act but as the immediate structure of any directed experience.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside

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For traditional theorists, problems concerning the perception of others and of self are postponed in ontogenetic time until the child is at least 6 months of age (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1964).

Gallagher cites Merleau-Ponty as representative of a tradition that defers the emergence of self- and other-perception to relatively late ontogenetic stages, against which neonatal imitation studies now press for an earlier, bodily basis.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside

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I crouch in the midst of this eternity, my naked toes hugging the soil and my eyes drinking the distances, trying to discern where, in this living landscape, the past and the future might reside. Merleau-Ponty, in one of the notes found…

Abram invokes Merleau-Ponty’s late working notes as a philosophical resource for understanding how past and future are embedded within the corporeal present rather than constituting autonomous mental realms.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside

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