Phenomenology Series (Sess 6): Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception

This is our sixth Meetup in a series focused on Phenomenology.

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961) was a French phenomenologist strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the lead editor of Les Temp Modernes, a leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. His emphasis on the body as the primary site of knowing the world challenges the long philosophical tradition of placing consicousness as the source of knowledge and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other.

In his most important work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the body-subject (le corps propre) as an alternative to the Cartesian "cogito". Consciousness, the world, and the human body are intertwined and mutually "engaged". The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of the human body and its sensory-motor functions. Things are that upon which the body has a "grip" (prise), while the grip itself is a function of human connaturality with the world's things. The world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming".

The Phenomenology of Perception is large complex work with many important concepts and ideas, which could easily justify a dozen sessions. Given the scope, I have selected a small number of sections to discuss that I hope will often a cohesive view into Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre.

Introduction:
Section IV: The Phenomenal Field (~17 pages)
Part One: The Body
Introduction (~6 pages)
The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology (~17 pages)
Part Two: The Perceived World
Introduction (~6 pages)
Sending (~30 pages)
Part Three: Being-For-Itself and Being-In-The-World
The Cogito (~45 Pages)

I will be using the Routledge edition translated by Donald A. Landes