Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), was born on March 14, 1908, and
died on May 3, 1961, he is a French philosopher and public intellectual, known as a
philosopher of the body and was the leading academic proponent of existentialism and
phenomenology in post-war France.

Terms:
Existentialism- is a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence
of the person as a free and responsible agent determining their development through
acts of the will.
Phenomenology- is an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and
the objects of direct experience.

He is best known for his original and influential work on embodiment, perception, and
ontology, and made important contributions to the philosophy of art, history, language,
nature, and politics. At the center of his philosophy is the emphasis placed on the
human body as the primary site of knowing the world.
He made use of the concept of the body schema in discussions that ranged across
several cognitive and existential issues that focused on the relationship between
self-experience and the experience of other people.

Terms:
Ontology- the branch of metaphysics (abstract theory with no basis in reality) dealing
with the nature of being.

Body Schema- For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an object, but rather a set of
possibilities for action in a given environment: an orientation toward the world that is—in
essence—our very means for “having a world” as such.

In his concept of body-subject, Merleau-Ponty argued that consciousness, the world,

and the human body are all interconnected as they mutually perceive the world.
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) explains that the world is a field
of perception, and human consciousness assigns meaning to the world, hence a man
cannot separate himself from his perceptions of it. Although he also argued that,
perception is not purely the result of sensations nor is it purely interpretation. Rather
consciousness is a process that includes sensing as well as interpreting/reasoning.

According to Merleau-Ponty, when a perception of a specific object occurs, it is not

constant. The meaning assigned to this particular object is subject to change depending
on the perspective upon which it is seen. As a result, a single object can be perceived
from multiple perspectives. What happens then is, the body seeks clarity for the
meaning of this object by constituting a perceptual gestalt (the German word for 'good
form').