Maurice Merleau-Ponty has the distinction of being the face of phenomenology in France in the 1930’s, soon after its inception in Germany by Husserl. His philosophy focuses mainly on the body, and how it interacts with the world around us. The body is our guide to the world, our mode of access to it as such. Merleau-Ponty does not assign the body to either nature or mind, thus requiring that it must be thought of as both, instead of either/or. The fact that one side of this duality cannot be privileged over the other gives his philosophy an air of ambiguity and fluidity. Found within this characteristic of his thought is something he calls the third dimension.
This dimension is described as a place “in which philosophical reflection and positive knowledge can meet.” The upshot of this idea is that neither science nor philosophy is given primacy over the other. Rather, they are meant to intersect and enter into a reciprocal relationship. Merleau-Ponty used this relationship to posit a theory of behavior in his first major work—The Structure of Behavior (1942)—that is not at all a mechanical behaviorist theory such as those favored by psychologists of the era. Instead, Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of consciousness using his idea of the third dimension discussed above.
Integral to this dimension are the concepts of shape and structure. These are not ideas as they are usually discussed, but are the ways in which reality organizes itself. It becomes obvious here that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is inextricably connected to the physical. Any conception of mind, consciousness, or freedom must be connected somehow to the body and its relation to being in the world. Organisms, mirroring reality as such, also organize themselves through shape and structure, a connection of both the interior and the exterior.
In focusing on lived experience Merleau-Ponty concentrates on perception. Perception is spontaneous and open, as well as providing a direct link with reality; it is the tool used to create the backgrounds for life’s experiences. There is a distinction to be made between original perception and secondary perception. While the latter recognizes the familiar and is empirical, the former—the focus of phenomenology—is inexhaustible and “concentrates on a sense in statu nascendi.”
The way that he defines perception lets Merleau-Ponty connect it directly to the body. Our existence as bodies in the world is made possible by perception, the link between the two. As we perceive the world through things such as space, movement, sexuality, expression, and linguistics we are opened up to the world, to others, and to ourselves. In this way we are constantly engaged in dialogue with the world through our senses.
This relationship is completed by the dialogue with others. Nature and culture are in a both/also relationship just like the body and the mind described earlier; there is no either/or. As the body, the world, and others all come together in an ever-evolving dialogue of relationships they create the transcendent phenomenological field that is “being-for-itself.” This is in essence a field of freedom, in which a person’s actions determine how free they really are.
This philosophy very much depends on open structures. In a way it can be seen as a precursor to hermeneutics in the way Merleau-Ponty does not allow for one side of a duality to win out over the other. The constant push/pull between the idea of the both/also resists the all or nothing characterization. The freedom that Merleau-Ponty describes is situational, and comes about through the response to what is experienced, a notion incompatible with the all or nothing idea of freedom described by Sartre in his earlier work, especially his masterwork Being and Nothingness.
Sources: A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.
Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Routledge, 2002.
