275
See also: Aristotle 56–63 ■ Edmund Husserl 224–25 ■ Ludwig Wittgenstein
246–51 ■ Martin Heidegger 252–55 ■ Jean-Paul Sartre 268–71
THE MODERN WORLD
Husserl at the beginning of the
20th century. Husserl wanted to
explore first-person experience in
a systematic way, while putting all
assumptions about it to one side.
The body-subject
Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl’s
approach, but with one important
difference. He is concerned that
Husserl ignores what is most
important about our experience—
the fact that it consists not just
of mental experience, but also of
bodily experience. In his most
important book, The Phenomenology
of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
explores this idea and comes to
the conclusion that the mind and
body are not separate entities—
a thought that contradicts a long
philosophical tradition championed
by Descartes. For Merleau-Ponty,
we have to see that thought and
perception are embodied, and
that the world, consciousness, and
the body are all part of a single
system. And his alternative to the
disembodied mind proposed by
Descartes is what he calls the body-
subject. In other words, Merleau-
Ponty rejects the dualist’s view that
the world is made of two separate
entities, called mind and matter.
Cognitive science
Because he was interested in seeing
the world anew, Merleau-Ponty took
an interest in cases of abnormal
experience. For example, he believed
that the phantom limb phenomenon
(in which an amuptee “feels” his
missing limb) shows that the body
cannot simply be a machine. If it
were, the body would no longer
acknowledge the missing part—but
it still exists for the subject because
the limb has always been bound
up with the subject’s will. In other
words, the body is never “just” a
body—it is always a “lived” body.
Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the role
of the body in experience, and his
insights into the nature of the mind
as fundamentally embodied, have
led to a revival of interest in his work
among cognitive scientists. Many
recent developments in cognitive
science seem to bear out his idea
that, once we break with our familiar
acceptance of the world, experience
is very strange indeed. ■Maurice Merleau-
PontyMaurice Merleau-Ponty was
born in Rochefort-sur-Mer,
France, in 1908. He attended
the École Normale Supérieure
along with Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir, and
graduated in philosophy in- He worked as a teacher
at various schools, until joining
the infantry during World
War II. His major work, The
Phenomenology of Perception,
was published in 1945, after
which he taught philosophy
at the University of Lyon.
Merleau-Ponty’s interests
extended beyond philosophy
to include subjects such as
education and child psychology.
He was also a regular
contributor to the journal Les
Temps modernes. In 1952,
Merleau-Ponty became the
youngest-ever Chair of
Philosophy at the College de
France, and remained in the
post until his death in 1961,
at the age of only 53.
Key works1942 The Structure of
Behaviour
1945 The Phenomenology
of Perception
1964 The Visible and the
InvisibleMan is in the world and
only in the world
does he know himself.
Maurice Merleau-PontyMRI scans of the brain provide
doctors with life-saving information.
However, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, no
amount of physical information can give
us a complete account of experience.