GEd 106: Understanding the Self

THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES.

(1) Rene Descartes

Descartes believed that the self is the first evident truth, and the second evident truth would be the
body. He believed that the mind and body where co-independent to each other- dualism. In spite of unity of the
mind and body, they both have their ideal functions. He was convinced that we must use our own mind.
Through the mind, Descartes says it should be used to distinguish and thinking abilities to investigate, analyze,
experiment, and develop our own well-reasoned conclusions. It is also important to as far as possible all things
in order to become and real seeker for the truth.

He thought that the self is a thinking thing distinct from the body. His famous principle was “Cogito ergo
sum”, which means I think, therefore I am.

(2) Socrates

Many people never consciously contemplate this question of how one ought to live. Instead the course
of their lives is largely determined by the cultural values and norms which they unquestionably adhere to. But
according to Socrates, the examination of this question is very important as it is through striving for answers to
it that one can hope to improve their life. One of the reasons why most do not consciously contemplate this
question is because it requires that one attain self-knowledge, or in other words, turns their gaze inward and
analyzes both their true nature and the values which guide their life. And such knowledge is perhaps the most
difficult knowledge to obtain.

Care for your soul.

When we turn our gaze inward in search of self-knowledge, Socrates thought we would soon discover
our true nature. And contrary to the opinion of the masses, one’s true self, according to Socrates, is not to be
identified with what we own, with our social status, our reputation, or even with our body. Instead, Socrates
famously maintained that our true self is our soul.

As a quick side note, it is important to mention that the Ancient Greeks lived before the ascension of
Christianity, and hence for them the notion of the ‘soul’ did not have the same religious connotations that it has
for us. What Socrates actually meant when he made the claim that our true self is our soul is not known for
certain. Although many scholars have taken a view similar to the one put forth by the famous historian of
philosophy Frederick Copelston who wrote that in calling our true self our soul Socrates was referring to “the
thinking and willing subject”.

According to Socrates it is the state of our soul, or our inner being, which determines the quality of our
life. Thus it is paramount that we devote considerable amounts of our attention, energy, and resources to
making our soul as good and beautiful as possible. Or as he pronounces in Plato’s dialogue the Apology: “I
shall never give up philosophy or stop exhorting you and pointing out the truth to any one of you whom I meet,
saying in my most accustomed way:

“Most excellent man, are you…not ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth and for reputation and honor,
when you neither care nor take thought for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul?” (Apology 29d)
After coming to the realization that one’s inner self, or soul, is all important, Socrates believed the next
step in the path towards self-knowledge was to obtain knowledge of what is good and what is evil, and in the
process use what one learns to cultivate the good within one’s soul and purge the evil from it.
 Knowledge of virtue is necessary to become virtuous, and in turn that virtue is necessary to
attain happiness.

Virtue is defined as moral excellence, and an individual is considered virtuous if their character is made
up of the moral qualities that are accepted as virtues. In Ancient Greece commonly accepted virtues included
courage, temperance, prudence, and justice.

Socrates held virtue to be the greatest good in life because it alone was capable of securing ones
happiness. Even death is a trivial matter for the truly virtuous individual who realizes that the most important
thing in life is the state of his soul and the actions which spring from it:

“Man, you don’t speak well, if you believe that a man worth anything at all would give countervailing
weight to the danger of life or death, or give consideration to anything but this when he acts: whether his action
is just or unjust, the action of a good or of an evil man.” (Apology 28b-d).

In order to become virtuous Socrates maintained that we must arrive at knowledge of what virtue really
is. Knowledge of the nature of virtue, in other words, is the necessary and sufficient condition for one to
become virtuous.

This explains why Socrates went about conversing with his fellow Athenians, always in search of the
definition, or essence, of a specific virtue. He thought that when one arrived at the correct definition of virtue,
one would come to realize that virtue is the only things which are intrinsically good. And since human beings
naturally desire the good, as it alone secures happiness, with this knowledge one would have no choice but to
become virtuous.

All evil acts are committed out of ignorance and involuntarily.

Most people dogmatically assume they know what is truly good and what is truly evil. They regard
things such as wealth, status, pleasure, and social acceptance as the greatest of all goods in life, and think that
poverty, death, pain, and social rejection are the greatest of all evils.

Most people are ignorant. If one truly knew what they were doing was evil, they would refrain from such
an action. But because all evil acts are committed out of ignorance, Socrates held that all evil acts are
committed involuntarily. Socrates did not mean that when one committed an evil act they did so in some sort of
state of complete unawareness, but rather that such an individual was unaware that their action was evil.

An individual who commits an evil act is one who is ignorant of the fact that virtue alone is the one true
good. Such an individual instead falsely assumes that wealth, power, and pleasure are the greatest goods in
life, and therefore if necessary will use evil means to attain these goods. In other words, they are ignorant of
the fact that by committing such evil acts they are tarnishing their soul and thus condemning themselves to a
perpetual unhappiness.

Injustice: Committing is far worse than suffering

“Evil doing always rests upon a false estimate of goods. A man does the evil deed because he falsely expects
to gain good by it, to get wealth, or power, or enjoyment, and does not reckon with the fact that the guilt of soul
contracted immeasurably outweighs the supposed gains.” (Socrates, A.E. Taylor)

This self-inflicted harm to one’s soul caused by not acting virtuously is the greatest evil which could
befall an individual. In fact, Socrates went so far as to put forth the astonishing claim that it is better to suffer an
injustice than to commit an injustice.

“So I spoke the truth when I said that neither I nor you nor any other man would rather do injustice than suffer
it: for it is worse.” (Gorgias)

When we commit an injustice we are harming our own soul, which is our true self. Yet on the other
hand, when we suffer an injustice it is not our soul which is harmed, but instead what is harmed is merely
something we possess: be it our wealth, reputation, or even our body. Since the state of our soul is of the
utmost importance in the attainment of happiness, we should ensure that we take care of our soul even at the
expense of our possessions and body. And if the choice confronts us, we should choose to suffer harm rather
than inflict it.

This is quite a proposition, and to conclude this lecture we will quote a passage by George Vlastos,
who presents an extreme condition which illuminates just how staggering this idea of Socrates’ really is:

“Imagine someone living under a brutal dictatorship, accused of a political crime, who saves himself by
incriminating falsely a friend, whereupon the latter is apprehended and tortured, coming out of the ordeal a
broken man to die soon after, while the accuser, well rewarded by the regime, lives on to a healthy and
prosperous old age. Socrates is claiming that the perpetrator of this outrage has damaged his own happiness
more than his victims. Has any stronger claim been ever made by a moral philosopher? I know of
none.” (Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, George Vlastos)

(3) Plato

Plato devoted his life to one goal: helping people to reach of εὐδαιμονία (Eudaimonia) or fulfillment.

Think more.
We rarely give ourselves time to think carefully and logcally about our lives and how to live them.
Sometimes we just go along with what the Greeks called ‘doxa’: popular opinions. The popular opinions edge
us towards the wrong values, careers, and relationships.

Plato supported this with a special kind of therapy, philosophy: knowing yourself. It is subjecting your
idea to examination rather than acting on impulse. If you strengthen your self-knowledge, you don’t get fooled
around by your feeling. This is called a Socratic discussion, in honor to his mentor and friend, Socrates.

Decode the message of Beauty.

Beautiful things are whispering important truths to us about the good life. We find things beautiful when
we unconsciously sense in the qualities we need to satisfy ourselves but are missing in our lives.

Plato also emphasized the social aspect of human nature. We are not self-sufficient, we need others,
and we benefit from our social interactions, from other person’s talents, aptitudes, and friendship.

(4) Immanuel Kant

 He tried to work out how human beings could be good and kind outside of the exaltations and
blandishments of traditional religions. He did not have religious beliefs, but he was acutely aware of how just
religion had contributed to his family’s ability to cope with all the hardships of their existence and how religion
could foster social cohesion and community. He was a pessimist about human character and believed that we
are by nature intensely prone to corruption.

Categorical Imperative.

“Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time that it should become a universal law.”

This was only formal restatement of an idea that’s been lingering around for a long time, do unto others
what you want others do unto you. It is designed to shift our perspective, to get us to see our own behavior in
less immediately personal terms and recognize some of its limitations. But then he went to argue that the core
idea of the categorical imperative could be stated in act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves,
never as mere means.

It is also the rational voice of ourselves that we truly believe when we’re thinking sensibly, it’s the rule
our own intelligence gives us. We are free only when we act in accordance with our own best nature and
slaves whenever we are under the rule of our own passions or those of others.

(5) Sigmund Freud.

The self is multilayered.

He discussed the unconscious mind and its role in human behavior. He believed that there are three
levels of consciousness: (1) unconscious mind which exists outside of our awareness at all times, (2) pre-
conscious mind which includes all that you are not currently aware of but can be recalled, and (3) conscious
mind is the current state of awareness.

Three parts to the personality.

According to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, these are the id, superego, and ego.

Id is the biological component of the personality and includes your instincts that operate in our
unconscious mind. It operates according to the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is the idea that all of
your needs should be met immediately

Super-ego exists in all three levels of consciousness. It is always concerned with what is socially
acceptable and pushes to obtain the ego ideal or your view of what is right. It is also represent your
consciousness or your view of what is considered wrong.

Ego operates in your preconscious in conscious mind. It is a part of the personality that makes sure to
sit. The ego is in the middle that makes the decision and faces the consequences. It operates according to the
reality principle. The reality principle is the idea that the desires of the id must be satisfied in a method that is
both socially appropriate and realistic.

(6) John Locke

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self,
figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as David Hume, Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.
Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the
mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he
maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by
experience derived from sense perception. This is now known as empiricism. An example of Locke's belief in
empiricism can be seen in his quote, "whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be
the forwardest to throw it into the fire." This shows the ideology of science in his observations in that something
must be capable of being tested repeatedly and that nothing is exempt from being disproven. Challenging the
work of others, Locke is said to have established the method of introspection, or observing the emotions and
behaviors of one’s self.

(7) Saint Augustine of Hippo

Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine
with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions
to Western philosophy. He argues that skeptics have no basis for claiming to know that there is no knowledge.
In a proof for existence similar to one later made famous by René Descartes, Augustine says, “[Even] If I am
mistaken, I am.” He is the first Western philosopher to promote what has come to be called "the argument by
analogy" against solipsism: there are bodies external to mine that behave as I behave and that appear to be
nourished as mine is nourished; so, by analogy, I am justified in believing that these bodies have a similar
mental life to mine. Augustine believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive capacity that comprehends
deductive truths and logical necessity. Additionally, Augustine adopts a subjective view of time and says that
time is nothing in reality but exists only in the human mind’s apprehension of reality. He believes that time is
not infinite because God “created” it.
(8) Aristotle

Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics,
mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a
student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates
and is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms.

As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he
touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas referred to him simply as "The Philosopher." In his lifetime, Aristotle
wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive. Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of
lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his
reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was
the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and
ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today.

As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a formalized system for reasoning. Aristotle
observed that the validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic
example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is
mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also
guaranteed to be true. Aristotle’s brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of
modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later.

Aristotle’s emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the scientific method forms the
backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his work in ethics and politics, Aristotle identifies the highest
good with intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates certain virtues based on reasoning.
And in his work on psychology and the soul, Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which
unifies and interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge.

Aristotle famously rejected Plato’s theory of forms, which states that properties such as beauty are
abstract universal entities that exist independent of the objects themselves. Instead, he argued that forms
are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, and so must be studied in relation to them.

However, in discussing art, Aristotle seems to reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal
form which artists attempt to capture in their work.

Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in Athens, Greece; and he was an
inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers from the Lyceum

(9) David Hume

In the years immediately following Hume's death in 1776 his near-contemporaries were in no doubt
about the surest foundation of his claim to lasting reputation. Thomas Ritchie, writing in 1807, could see no
merit in Hume's contributions as either a metaphysician, or a moralist, or as a writer on economics and politics.

For Ritchie, it had been only when Hume turned aside from these speculations and applied himself to
the history of his country that he had achieved anything durable. In the pages of the History of England, Ritchie
announced, there was to be found "a source of useful information to the statesman, a noble monument of its
author's talents, and an invaluable bequest to his country".

The disregard for Hume's philosophical writings expressed by Ritchie strengthened during the first half
of the 19th century. In that Kantian climate Hume could be presented only as a thinker who had, with a kind of
gifted wrong-headedness, explored the dead-end of scepticism with unprecedented thoroughness. Hume had
been a mesmerising magician who with virtuoso flourishes had demonstrated the melancholy truth that,
pursued in this way, there was after all no rabbit in the philosophical hat.
 Sir William Hamilton dramatised Hume's career as a moment of disciplinary dilemma, when
philosophers were forced to choose between "either . . . surrendering philosophy as null, or of ascending to
higher principles, in order to re-establish it against the sceptical reduction". Hume's contribution had been the
vital but ancillary one of supplying the crucial first impetus to Kant.

The Victorians, however, were no more enthusiastic about Hume's historical works than about his
philosophy. Even when the volumes of the History of England had first been published some had noticed that
they were, in the polite euphemism, "lightly researched". It was clear that Hume had worked solely from printed
sources, and that he possessed neither the technical skills, nor in all probability the appetite, to forage in
archives to any good effect. His was a history written in a library, and it was bound to suffer once the Germanic
revolution in historiography had been assimilated by English writers.

John Stuart Mill dismissed the History of England as "really a romance [which] bears nearly the same
degree of resemblance to any thing which really happened, as Old Mortality or Ivanhoe". Francis Jeffrey,
writing in the Edinburgh Review, pronounced the devastating verdict (he was of course fond of pronouncing
devastating verdicts) that Hume's "credit among historians, for correctness of assertion, will soon be nearly as
low as it has long been with theologians for orthodoxy of belief".

It was only towards the end of the 19th century that the tide began to turn, and then only in a limited
way. In respect of Hume's philosophy, eventual disenchantment with Kant was a necessary preliminary to a
partial restoration of Hume's fortunes.

Hume wanted the world to see that philosophy was not the answer to everything. A more pragmatic
approach to understanding life was needed. David Rowe

The publication of Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876
initiated a tentative reassessment of Hume's philosophy, in that the questions Hume had pondered were
rescued from the condition of being simply misconceived. On the contrary: these had been and were still the
stubborn, fundamental philosophical questions. Stephen did not find Hume's answers satisfactory, but the
questions had at least been the right ones:

(10) Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican priest and Scriptural theologian. He took seriously the medieval
maxim that “grace perfects and builds on nature; it does not set it aside or destroy it.” Therefore, insofar as
Thomas thought about philosophy as the discipline that investigates what we can know naturally about God
and human beings, he thought that good Scriptural theology, since it treats those same topics, presupposes
good philosophical analysis and argumentation. Although Thomas authored some works of pure philosophy,
most of his philosophizing is found in the context of his doing Scriptural theology. Indeed, one finds Thomas
engaging in the work of philosophy even in his Biblical commentaries and sermons.

Within his large body of work, Thomas treats most of the major sub-disciplines of philosophy, including logic,
philosophy of nature, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophical
theology, the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy. As far as his philosophy is concerned,
Thomas is perhaps most famous for his so-called five ways of attempting to demonstrate the existence of God.
These five short arguments constitute only an introduction to a rigorous project in natural theology—theology
that is properly philosophical and so does not make use of appeals to religious authority—that runs through
thousands of tightly argued pages. Thomas also offers one of the earliest systematic discussions of the nature
and kinds of law, including a famous treatment of natural law. Despite his interest in law, Thomas’ writings on
ethical theory are actually virtue-centered and include extended discussions of the relevance of happiness,
pleasure, the passions, habit, and the faculty of will for the moral life, as well as detailed treatments of each
one of the theological, intellectual, and cardinal virtues. Arguably, Thomas’ most influential contribution to
theology and philosophy, however, is his model for the correct relationship between these two disciplines, a
model which has it that neither theology nor philosophy is reduced one to the other, where each of these two
disciplines is allowed its own proper scope, and each discipline is allowed to perfect the other, if not in content,
then at least by inspiring those who practice that discipline to reach ever new intellectual heights.

In his lifetime, Thomas’ expert opinion on theological and philosophical topics was sought by many,
including at different times a king, a pope, and a countess. It is fair to say that, as a theologian, Thomas is one
of the most important in the history of Western civilization, given the extent of his influence on the development
of Roman Catholic theology since the 14th century. However, it also seems right to say—if only from the sheer
influence of his work on countless philosophers and intellectuals in every century since the 13th, as well as on
persons in countries as culturally diverse as Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Italy,
Japan, Poland, Spain, and the United States—that, globally, Thomas is one of the 10 most influential
philosophers in the Western philosophical tradition.

(11) Gilbert Ryle

Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy (notably in the history of
philosophy and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philosophical dilemmas, a
series of articles on the concept of thinking, and a book on Plato, The Concept of Mindremains his best known
and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he
was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated, he is
thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism's replacement, the doctrine known
as philosophical (and sometimes analytical)behaviourism. Sometimes known as an “ordinary language”,
sometimes as an “analytic” philosopher, Ryle—even when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and
his followers—is considered to be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise),
philosophical track.
Philosophical behaviourism has long been rejected; what was worth keeping has been appropriated by
the philosophical doctrine of functionalism, which is the most widely accepted view in philosophy of mind today.
It is a view that is thought to have saved the “reality” of the mental from the “eliminativist” or “fictionalist”
tendencies of behaviourism while acknowledging the insight (often attributed to Ryle) that the mental is
importantly related to behavioural output or response (as well as to stimulus or input). According to a
reasonably charitable assessment, the best of Ryle's lessons has long been assimilated while the problematic
has been discarded. If there are considerations still brewing from the 1930s and 40s that would threaten the
orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind, these lie somewhere in work of Wittgenstein and his followers
—not in Ryle.
But the view just outlined, though widespread, represents a fundamental misapprehension of Ryle's
work. First, Cartesianism is dead in only one of its ontological aspects: substance dualism may well have been
repudiated but property dualism still claims a number of contemporary defenders. The problem of finding a
place for the mental in the physical world, of accommodating the causal power of the mental, and of
accounting for the phenomenal aspects of consciousness are all live problems in the philosophy of mind today
because they share some of the doctrine's ontological, epistemological, and semantic assumptions.
Second, and importantly, Ryle is not a philosophical behaviourist—at least he does not subscribe to any of the
main tenets associated with that doctrine as it is known today. One may be confused by this if one is also
confused about Ryle's conception of philosophy. Although there is some truth in identifying him as an analytic
philosopher—he announces (1932, 61) that “the sole and whole function of philosophy” is philosophical
analysis—this is likely to be misunderstood today if one thinks that the proper goal of philosophy (attainable if
not in practice at least in ideals) is definitional analysis. It is this that encourages the association with
behaviourism (in at least one of its many senses). But Ryle was not an analytical philosopher in this sense.
True, Ryle acknowledges the influence of Moore's emphasis on common sense (and thus on ordinary
language); true, he takes himself to be pursuing the type of philosophical investigation (exemplified by
Russell's Theory of Descriptions) that involves uncovering the logical form of grammatically misleading
expressions. But it is important to take account of the differences that separate Ryle from the early Moore and
Russell for it is their conception of philosophy that has been inherited by many of us working within the
“analytic” tradition in philosophy today. That is the third point. For Ryle does not believe in meanings (concepts
or propositions) as these have been traditionally construed (as stable objects or rules, the grasp of which is
logically prior to, and thus may be used to explain, the use of expressions). Indeed, Ryle's conception of
philosophy was not fundamentally different from that of Wittgenstein. Ryle sets out in print as early as 1932 a
philosophical agenda that prefigures the published work of the later Wittgenstein; the “elasticity of significance”
and “inflections of meaning” Ryle finds in most expressions appear to be the family of structures, more or less
related, noticed by Wittgenstein; and Ryle's attack on the “intellectualist legend” shares Wittgenstein's concern
to understand a proper—non-exalted—place for rules in an explanation of various philosophically interesting
achievements. In spite of the fact that some of Wittgenstein's protégés were dismissive of Ryle's work, [1] the
best way to understand Ryle is to see him, if not as following in Wittgenstein's footsteps, then as walking some
stretches of philosophical terrain down a parallel path.
(12) Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), French philosopher and public intellectual, was the
leading academic proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in post-war France. Best known for his
original and influential work on embodiment, perception, and ontology, he also made important contributions to
the philosophy of art, history, language, nature, and politics. Associated in his early years with the existentialist
movement through his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty played a
central role in the dissemination of phenomenology, which he sought to integrate with Gestalt psychology,
psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Saussurian linguistics. Major influences on his thinking include Henri Bergson,
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as neurologist Kurt Goldstein,
Gestalt theorists such as Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary figures including Marcel Proust, Paul
Claudel, and Paul Valéry. In turn, he influenced the post-structuralist generation of French thinkers who
succeeded him, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, whose similarities with and
debt to the later Merleau-Ponty have often been underestimated. Merleau-Ponty published two major
theoretical texts during his lifetime: The Structure of Behavior(1942 SC) and Phenomenology of
Perception (1945 PP). Other important publications include two volumes of political philosophy, Humanism and
Terror (1947 HT) and Adventures of the Dialectic(1955 AdD), as well as two books of collected essays on art,
philosophy, and politics: Sense and Non-Sense ([1948]1996b/1964) and Signs (1960/1964). Two unfinished
manuscripts appeared posthumously: The Prose of the World (1969/1973), drafted in 1950–51; and The
Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I), on which he was working at the time of his death. Lecture notes and
student transcriptions of many of his courses at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France have also been
published.
For most of his career, Merleau-Ponty focused on the problems of perception and embodiment as a starting
point for clarifying the relation between the mind and the body, the objective world and the experienced world,
expression in language and art, history, politics, and nature. Although phenomenology provided the
overarching framework for these investigations, Merleau-Ponty also drew freely on empirical research in
psychology and ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the arts. His constant points of
historical reference are Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The characteristic approach of Merleau-Ponty’s
theoretical work is his effort to identify an alternative to intellectualism or idealism, on the one hand, and
empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their common presupposition of a ready-made world and
failure to account for the historical and embodied character of experience. In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty
becomes increasingly critical of the intellectualist tendencies of the phenomenological method as well,
although with the intention of reforming rather than abandoning it. The posthumous writings collected in The
Visible and the Invisible aim to clarify the ontological implications of a phenomenology that would self-critically
account for its own limitations. This leads him to propose concepts such as “flesh” and “chiasm” that many
consider to be his most fruitful philosophical contributions.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought has continued to inspire contemporary research beyond the usual intellectual history
and interpretive scholarship, especially in the areas of feminist philosophy, philosophy of mind and cognitive
science, environmental philosophy and philosophy of nature, political philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy
of language, and phenomenological ontology. His work has also been widely influential on researchers outside
the discipline of philosophy proper, especially in anthropology, architecture, the arts, cognitive science,
environmental theory, film studies, linguistics, literature, and political theory.