Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his existential philosophy by drawing heavily upon the works of Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty has been categorized as both an phenomenologist and an existentialist, indicating the difficulty of separating the two schools. Each holds as a primary tenet that the individual defines both self and the world experienced. Merleau-Ponty rejected the Western philosophical tradition of ideals and transcendent “truth” to emphasize human experience. For Merleau-Ponty, experience did encompass more than sense / reason: he included nonsense / un-reason.
Merleau-Ponty suggested that philosophers, scientists, and educators of all manner, were limited by their own physical existences and experiences. One of the challenges presented by Merleau-Ponty is that while he thought science and emperical data were paths towards the truth, he also rejected the notion that science, as a set of methods, could discover philosophical truths. As Continental philosophers were rejecting “scientism” in the aftermath of the two World Wars, Merleau-Ponty was suggesting there was still a value in science, but not in science alone.
Immediate Experience: The Lebenswelt
It was Merleau-Ponty’s contention that science and too much abstraction had resulted in a philosophical tendency to reduce every phenomena, every object, every person to nothing more than collected data. Merleau-Ponty believed that philosophers had a duty to relate things as they were viewed, not as science described them.
We must return to the Lebenswelt, the world in which we meet in the lived-in experience, our immediate experience of the world.
In contrast to Sartre’s contention “we are condemned to freedom,” Merleau-Ponty stated “we are condemned to meaning.” According to his theories, since we are only able to know ourselves based upon the input of others, all our actions, thoughts, and statements define us and have historical consequences. In accordance with the idea that true human nature never ceases to change, Merleau-Ponty described philosophy as “like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”
Body and Subject
For Merleau-Ponty, people are both bodies and subjects of thought. The act of self-contemplation is not the same as the tradutional dualism of mind-body; Merleau-Ponty is not discussing the “spirit” when he writes of the body-subject. There is a curious ambiguity, a tension, between bodily existence and the self as a subject of contemplation. The body-self relationship cannot be severed, yet the two are not one thing. Unity was also considered by Merleau-Ponty when he wrote on the relationships of thought-to-speech and fact-to-value.
You must exist physically before you can think about what it means to exist. This extends the notion of self-definition to recognize that you first need a physical body and brain before you can create an “essence” that is you. Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Phenomenology of Perception:
It is the definition of the human body to appropriate in an indefinite series of non-continuous acts “centers of meaning” which go beyond its natural powers and transform it.
Our thoughts move us to act physically. The complication is that even our thought process is a physical, concrete process of chemical and electrical signals in the brain. Without the physical, there is no self-conception. If self-conception itself is a physical act, then we are always at risk of reducing our view of humanity to the empirical study of the brain.
About the only thing clear in Merleau-Ponty’s view is that nothing can be certain. We struggle to define terms like “self” and “body” which are the very basis for philosophy. If we cannot define “person” without creating a tangled web of relationships, then nothing else can be reduced to an ideal. It would seem the one thing we should know, ourselves, is impossible to know.
In The Structure of Behavior, a study of psychological theories, Merleau-Ponty wrote that his aim was “to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social.” According to Merleau-Ponty, humans and our world are interconnected: neither causes the other, instead we shape and are shaped by our environment. Furthermore, we have both a natural (predefined) existence and the ability to change that nature via conscious choice.
[If] one understands by perception the act which makes us know existences, all the problems we have just touched on [in the book] are reducible to the problem of perception.
The Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy of Perception, published in 1945, further explained his theory of perception.
[Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.
Merleau-Ponty’s theories were advanced in his major work The Phenomenology of Perception. The text opens with a preface and long introduction. Merleau-Ponty used these pages to explain his phenomenology, including both its concepts and procedures. Again, Merleau-Ponty was setting his approach apart from that of Husserl.
Phenomenology, as proposed by Merleau-Ponty, is concerned primary with physical existence. The human body, and its perceptions, is the way we relate to and understand existence. Merleau-Ponty suggested meaning therefore begins with perception. Because meaning begins with perception, Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to discuss how perception works. Perception starts, according to Merleau-Ponty, with the preconscious moment the external comes into contact with the body. The conscious interpretation of input, as neurologists have affirmed, follows the experience by a significant lapse.
Free Will
Merleau-Ponty did not advocate a concept of “absolute free will” in his works. Instead, there are limitations on human choice. The Phenomenology of Perception served to illustrate differences between Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding of free will and that of Merleau-Ponty. Though a simplification, it has been suggested that Sartre’s “free will” is always absolute. As Albert Camus and others have written, the radical interpretation is that even choosing to live each day is a choice. For Merleau-Ponty, the suggestion that reality is created by individuals was too simplistic. Sartre, according to Merleau-Ponty, was too quick to imply that the only obstacles one faces are created by the individual. Absolute free will is impossible, Merleau-Ponty believed, because real barriers to choice are all around us.
In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty developed the argument that humans are “situated” within their environments. There are physical and cultural limits on choice. While Sartre argued one can always reject such limits, especially cultural limits, Merleau-Ponty proposed conditional free will. People can act on their environments, and via these constant interactions the individual and the environment are changed.
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