Maurice Merleau-Ponty occupies a pivotal, though not undisputed, position across the depth-psychology and phenomenological corpus assembled in this library. His influence ramifies through at least four major registers: the philosophy of embodiment and the lived body as irreducible to either mechanism or idealism; the phenomenology of perception as a participatory, animistic engagement with a world that is itself active and responsive; the ontology of form, emergence, and the organism-milieu dialectic; and the philosophy of time, language, and intersubjectivity. Evan Thompson draws most systematically on Merleau-Ponty's early Structure of Behavior to theorize dynamic co-emergence, autopoiesis, and the three orders of matter, life, and mind. Iain McGilchrist recruits him as a witness for the embodied, right-hemispheric construction of reality, emphasizing empathy, the lived body, and the non-objectifiable character of time. David Abram reads Merleau-Ponty as a philosopher of animistic perception who restored agency to the sensible world and grounded language in bodily participation with a more-than-human environment. Shaun Gallagher situates him in debates over the ontogenesis of self and other. The primary tension across these readings is methodological: whether Merleau-Ponty is best appropriated as a phenomenologist of transcendental consciousness, an enactivist precursor, or a radical philosopher of flesh and nature.
In the library
25 substantive passages
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 definitive philosopher of embodied empathy and intersubjectivity, whose account of the lived body as the medium of reality-construction is central to the right-hemisphere thesis.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
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 is the precise theoretical forerunner of dynamic co-emergence, grounding the enactive account of matter, life, and mind as hierarchically integrated orders.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the sensible thing, commonly considered by our philosophical tradition to be passive and inert, is consistently described in the active voice… perception as a mutual interaction, an intercourse, 'a coition, so to speak, of my body with things.'
Abram reads Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception as a systematic recovery of the animistic, participatory character of sensory experience, in which the world actively engages the perceiving body.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
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 mobilizes Merleau-Ponty's organism-milieu dialectic to argue that behavior is irreducibly morphodynamic and dialogical, not reducible to stimulus-response or computational models.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
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 objectivism — the project of excising subjectivity from nature and then reintroducing it — as incoherent given the transcendental status of consciousness.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
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 lived and constituted time to argue that objectified, B-series time is a frozen retrospection, not time itself, supporting the thesis that the right hemisphere apprehends temporal becoming.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
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 account of individuality to distinguish the autopoietic organism as a formally self-identical system irreducible to the physical individual.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Merleau-Ponty argues that naturalism needs the notion of form (and has come to recognize this need through its own inner development), but this notion is irreducibly phenomenal.
Thompson reconstructs Merleau-Ponty's transcendental argument that the concept of form presupposes phenomenal consciousness, making any purely naturalistic account of behavior self-undermining.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
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 account of language acquisition as bodily participation to argue that language is a living, gestural field rather than an inert symbolic code.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
By 'work,' Merleau-Ponty means activities (ensembles of intentional actions) that transform physical and living nature and thereby modify the milieu or produce a new one.
Thompson expounds Merleau-Ponty's Hegelian-inflected concept of 'work' as the distinctively human mode of dialectical emergence, in which intentional action creates a new order of organism-milieu relation.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
The experience of our own body reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing… I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a 'natural' subject.
Merleau-Ponty's own text establishes the body as irreducibly ambiguous — neither pure object nor pure subject — foundational to his entire phenomenology of embodied existence.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself… a subject destined to be in the world.
This passage from Merleau-Ponty's Preface articulates the foundational claim of his phenomenology: subjectivity is constitutively worldly, not a self-enclosed interiority.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
The word has never been inspected, analysed, known and constituted, but caught and taken up by a power of speech and, in the last analysis, by a motor power given to me along with the first experience I have of my body.
Merleau-Ponty grounds linguistic meaning in pre-reflective motor intentionality, arguing that the body's perceptual-motor field is the primary medium of semantic acquisition.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
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 expression is not a sign arbitrarily attached to an inner state but embodies the very structure of affective being-in-the-world.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
The use a man is to make of his body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological entity. It is no more natural, and no less conventional, to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'.
Merleau-Ponty dissolves the nature/culture dichotomy by showing that even apparently instinctive bodily comportments are instituted — neither purely natural nor purely conventional.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
It is by communicating with the world that we communicate beyond all doubt with ourselves. We hold time in its entirety, and we are present to ourselves because we are present to the world.
Merleau-Ponty identifies self-presence with world-presence, arguing that consciousness is not transparent self-knowledge but an opaque, embodied rootedness in temporal existence.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
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 establishes the phenomenal field as an irreducible order of form that cannot be derived from either empiricist accretion of facts or rationalist imposition of law.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
the relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung.
Merleau-Ponty's concept of Fundierung articulates the non-reductive, bidirectional grounding relation between perception and reason, time and eternity, body and thought.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
The naturalism of science and the spiritualism of the universal constituting subject… had this in common, that they levelled out experience: in face of the constituting I, the empirical selves are objects.
Merleau-Ponty diagnoses naturalism and idealism as symmetrical failures that eliminate the ambiguity of lived experience in favor of either pure objectivity or pure transcendental subjectivity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
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 invokes Merleau-Ponty's developmental account of intersubjective perception as a baseline against which neonate imitation studies push the origin of self-other differentiation to earlier stages.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
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's claim that existence is constitutively spatial establishes the irreducible exteriority of embodied being as a condition of all perception and self-knowledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
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 notes in an endnote that Merleau-Ponty extends Husserl's operative intentionality to encompass motor, erotic, and habitual dimensions of the lived body.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
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 argues that solipsism and intersubjectivity are not exclusive alternatives but co-constitutive moments of a single experiential structure grounded in embodied existence.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
By taking up a present, I draw together and transform my past, altering its significance, freeing and detaching myself from it. But I do so only by committing myself somewhere else.
Merleau-Ponty's account of temporal freedom — as the perpetual re-uptake and transformation of a situated past through present commitment — is invoked here in the context of psychoanalytic cure.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside