# Maurice Merleau-Ponty French philosopher (1908 to 1961), the central figure in the phenomenology of embodiment and the author of *Phénoménologie de la perception* (1945), the work from which the field of [phenomenology of perception](/codex/phenomenology-of-perception/) takes its name. Where [Edmund Husserl](/codex/edmund-husserl/) analyzed consciousness and Martin Heidegger analyzed being, Merleau-Ponty analyzed the body, arguing that the perceiving subject is not a mind receiving data at a terminal but a living body oriented in a world, whose motor capacities are part of the structure of perception rather than merely causally upstream of it. He is not a Christian thinker and should never be presented as one. He was raised Catholic and distanced himself from the Church in adulthood, and his mature position is neither theistic nor straightforwardly materialist. That is precisely what makes his descriptive work valuable in this codex: the findings it produces about perception, embodiment and the failure of the representational model are not being generated by anyone who wanted a theistic result. ## Biography - **1908**, born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, on the French Atlantic coast; his father died when he was a young child - **École Normale Supérieure**, where his contemporaries included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; agrégation in philosophy in 1930 - Taught in provincial lycées through the 1930s; served in the French army during the Second World War and was involved with the intellectual resistance in occupied Paris - **1942**, *La Structure du comportement* (*The Structure of Behavior*), his first book, a critique of both behaviorism and classical intellectualism - **1945**, *Phénoménologie de la perception*, his major work, submitted as a doctoral thesis - **1945**, co-founded the journal *Les Temps Modernes* with Sartre and Beauvoir, serving as its de facto political editor - **1949 to 1952**, held the chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne, an unusual appointment for a philosopher that shaped his interest in developmental and perceptual psychology - **1952**, elected to the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France, the youngest person to hold it - **1953**, broke publicly with Sartre over the Korean War and over Sartre's alignment with the Communist Party; his *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955) made the break philosophical - **1961**, died suddenly of a stroke at the age of fifty-three, leaving his final work unfinished - **1964**, *Le Visible et l'invisible* (*The Visible and the Invisible*) published posthumously from the manuscript and working notes ## The core argument Merleau-Ponty's target is a picture shared, he argued, by two apparently opposed schools. **Empiricism** treats perception as the reception of atomic sensory data later assembled into objects. **Intellectualism**, his name for the Cartesian and Kantian tradition, treats perception as the mind's judgment imposed on such data. Both agree that there is a raw given plus a subsequent operation. Merleau-Ponty's claim is that no such raw given is ever found. His arguments are descriptive rather than deductive, and four are load-bearing. They are set out in full at [Phenomenology of Perception](/codex/phenomenology-of-perception/). 1. **The constancy hypothesis fails.** A plate seen at a slant projects an ellipse on the retina and is experienced as a round plate at a slant. The "experienced ellipse" that the standard theory says must be corrected by inference is not present in the experience. It has to be produced by an act of painterly abstraction, which is a skill, not a datum. 2. **Perception tends toward a maximum grip.** Standing before a painting, a person moves without deliberation to the distance at which it best resolves. The seeking is part of the perceiving, which means perception is an activity of an oriented body rather than a reception by a mind. 3. **Motor intentionality is not propositional.** A skilled typist cannot say where the keys are but can type. The knowledge lives in a bodily capacity. Merleau-Ponty generalized this into the claim that the body has its own kind of understanding, prior to and independent of the ability to state it. 4. **The phantom limb.** An amputee continues to experience the missing limb, and continues to experience a world that offers possibilities the limb could take up. Neither physiology (the limb is gone) nor psychology (the patient knows it is gone) accounts for the persistence. What persists is a bodily orientation toward a world. His late work moved further, toward what he called the *chiasm* or the *flesh*: the observation that the perceiver is part of the perceptible world, exemplified by one hand touching the other and the touching and touched roles reversing. He did not live to finish the ontology this was meant to support. ## Use and limits in this codex **What his work supplies.** - The strongest available description of perception as world-delivering rather than representation-delivering, which is load-bearing under any appeal to eyewitness testimony. See [Argument from Perception](/codex/argument-from-perception/). - A dismantling of the mind-as-observer-behind-the-eyes picture that is independent of any theological motive, and therefore not vulnerable to the charge of special pleading. - A philosophical anthropology in which embodiment is constitutive of personhood rather than a limitation on it, which converges with a tradition confessing creation, incarnation and bodily resurrection. The convergence is real and worth naming; it is not an endorsement, and he did not draw it. See [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/). **What must not be claimed.** - He is not a theist, and misrepresenting him is both dishonest and tactically fatal, since anyone who has read him will know immediately. - His descriptions establish what needs explaining. They do not supply the explanatory argument, which is a further and separate step. - His relation to Marxism was serious and shifting across his career, and quoting him as a straightforward liberal or conservative figure misreads him. **Reciprocal concession**, the house pattern. Grant in full that he was not a believer and that he intended no theistic conclusion. Collect in exchange the concession that comes attached: a philosopher with no theological stake, working descriptively, concluded that the standard causal-representational account of perception fails, that the perceiving subject is irreducibly embodied, and that perception delivers a world rather than an inner picture. Those are exactly the premises the theistic argument needs, and they arrive from a source with no motive to supply them. ## See also - [Phenomenology of Perception](/codex/phenomenology-of-perception/), the field named for his 1945 book and the codex's development of it - [Phenomenology](/codex/phenomenology/), the method and movement he worked within - [Edmund Husserl](/codex/edmund-husserl/), whose late manuscripts on the lifeworld and the lived body shaped his direction - [Argument from Perception](/codex/argument-from-perception/), the apologetic argument built on the descriptive findings - [Intentionality](/codex/intentionality/), including the motor intentionality he added to the analysis - [Consciousness](/codex/consciousness/), the wider problem his work bears on - [Access and Phenomenal Consciousness](/codex/access-and-phenomenal-consciousness/), the distinction that keeps detection separate from experience - [Materialism](/codex/materialism/), which his critique of empiricism undercuts from a non-theistic direction - [Empiricism](/codex/empiricism/), one of the two positions his central argument targets - [Rene Descartes](/codex/rene-descartes/), the source of the intellectualist picture he argued against - [Immanuel Kant](/codex/immanuel-kant/), the other major source of that picture - [Thomas Nagel](/codex/thomas-nagel/), a comparable case of a non-theist whose work concedes the limits of reductive materialism - [Imago Dei](/codex/imago-dei/), the theological anthropology his account of embodiment converges with