Maurice Merleau-Ponty: biography of this French philosopher.

A review of the life of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, famous French intellectual.

European thought on reality is strongly influenced by authors of the 16th and 17th centuries. In particular, the figure of René Descartes (who postulated the dualism between mind and body) has contributed to almost all sciences and arts, thanks to a legacy of enormous philosophical and historical significance.

Many have long pondered how the body and the mind could coexist within two different ontological planes, and what their respective interactions (if any) would be. This has given rise over time to positions both congenial and dissenting, which have stimulated many of the advances in philosophy over the past centuries.

In this article we will detail the life and work of one of the most prolific French authors of the twentieth century, who "revived" the Cartesian thesis and tried to reconcile it with ideas of metaphysics and phenomenology. His proposal (influenced by George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Edmund Husserl) had remarkable social and political connotations.

Here we will see which were the most representative contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who lived during the ominous period of the twentieth century.who lived during the ominous period of the two great world wars and maintained a position on existence that would resonate widely in modern culture, arts and sciences.

Biography of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who lived in the first half of the last century.. He was born in the town of Rochefort-sur-Mer on March 14, 1908, and died in 1961 of an acute myocardial infarction. He is currently considered as one of the most relevant European existentialist thinkers, since his work served to build bridges between philosophical visions (especially idealism and empiricism) that were being distanced by the deep horror of the wars that gripped the earth in the years he lived. This effort is known as the ontological "third way".

His teaching work was also very important, both at the Faculty of Letters in Paris (where he also obtained the title of Doctor) and at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, where he would occupy one of the most notable chairs of Theoretical Philosophy until the day of his death (his body would appear lifeless over a work by Descartes, one of the most relevant authors to understand his way of thinking and living). He was known for his concern in the field of politics and society, showing a strong Marxist perspective which he later disavowed.

Despite his death at a young age, he bequeathed many books/reflections. He was one of Jean Paul Sartre's greatest friends.with whom he formed a group of intellectual resistance (during the first of the world wars) and founded one of the most iconic publications in Europe and the world: the political/literary journal Les Temps Modernes. In this project also participated another author of enormous importance in the feeling and thinking of that gray moment: Simone de Beauvoir. Its format of monthly issues, which would later become quarterly, included some of the most valuable philosophical ideas of the post-war period, which allowed it to continue to exist until recent years (from 1945 to 2018).

In addition to the numerous writings he shared in the aforementioned journal (collected in "Sense and Non-Sense"), Merleau-Ponty devoted much of his life to literary creation on philosophy. Phenomenology was the branch of knowledge that most attracted his attention.s inspiration from Edmund Husserl and other great thinkers of a similar orientation.

Among his works, the following stand out Phenomenology of Perception (perhaps the author's best known), the Adventures of Dialeticsthe Visible and the Invisible (he died while he was writing it and it was published posthumously), the Prose of the WorldThe Eye and the Spirit and the Structure of Behavior (his first complete work). Most of his works have been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish.

The distancing from communism was an important transformation in the life and work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.On the one hand, he abandoned the daily writing on political issues, and on the other hand, he ended up breaking the friendship that linked him to Jean Paul Sartre. In fact, during the last years they "engaged" in very bitter polemics, and criticized each other's ideas with particular vehemence. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty's death had a powerful emotional impact on Sartre, who dedicated to him a letter of more than 70 pages (in the journal in which they both participated) extolling all the virtues of his work and recognizing his great value as a thinker and human being.

In the following we will go deeper into the thinking and feeling of the French author, always "troubled" by the consequences of Cartesian dualism. the consequences of Cartesian dualism in the subjective experience.. His orientation was clearly phenomenological, and he addressed such important issues as freedom and integrative monism. He also thought of the potentiality of the felt body as the inescapable vehicle for experience. Let's see what were his main contributions.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought.

One of the main goals of this author was to find a meeting point that would reconcile the discrepancies between idealism and idealism. the discrepancies between idealism (consciousness as the only source of potential knowledge) and materialism (reality rests on what we know). (reality rests in that which has tangible matter).

He was also a profound connoisseur of the Cartesian thesis, but he did not did not conceive that the body (res extensa) and thought (res cogitans) should have an independent nature, opting for the coherent integration of the body (res extensa) and thought (res cogitans).He opted for the coherent integration of both as common facts of equivalent essence. If this were not the case, every individual would experience a powerful dissociation when observing himself, as if he were composed of two dimensions that never come to coexist on the same plane of reality.

One of the ways in which he achieved this theoretical purpose was with his postulate of the body as a sentient subject (or leib), distinct from the physiological organism that was the object of the natural sciences (körper). By means of such a vision, corporeality would be endowed with a component foreign to the res extensa, which would sink within the cogito and subjectivity, being able to unite physical "activity" with that of thought (since they would come to dwell together and mutually recognize each other).

Through this idea, the classical dilemma of freedom would be partially resolved, since the author proposed that all thoughts are free in essence, but that they are constrained by the limits of the body in its quality of matter. Thus, it could only be solved by subjectivizing the flesh, in a way identical to his proposal.

This division of the body implies that it becomes a channel of communication in the social space, and a fundamental form of consciousness about oneself (self) in the face of the things of the world.and a fundamental form of consciousness about oneself vis-à-vis the things of the world. Such a body would not be the limit, but would be the vehicle that would make possible the experience of interaction between the plane of the sentient and the sensible world. This would happen because of its nature halfway between the physical and the mental. The encounter of one body and another body would be the axis through which the subjective lives of two beings would unfold or distinguish themselves as unique, in the bases and foundation of all social knowledge.

The thinking individual would subjectivize the environment through his participation in it as body and flesh, postulating the concept "embodiment" as the confluence or tacit cogitans. In this sense, reality would be no more than the simple projection of the individual in coordinates of space and time that do not exist beyond his own experience. that do not exist beyond his own experience, thus touching on some of the elementary foundations of subjective idealism and integrating epojé (which Edmund Husserl rescued and adapted from Greek philosophy) with materialism.

Merleau-Ponty would not deny the existence of a physical dimension, but would equate it with that of the body itself, and would conclude that it is accessible as a stage where conscious beings make use of their freedom to exist (body located at the juncture between consciousness and the world of nature). Beyond this, time and space would lack their own existence, since they would only be a property of objects (so that they can be felt).

From the prism he presented, no philosopher (a person open to the knowledge of things) would be only a passive spectator of reality, but would exert a direct effect on it as an active and transforming agent.but would exert on it a direct effect as an active and transforming agent. Behind this phenomenon would lie the relationship between being and otherness (which is the elementary mechanism for phenomenological creation) and the subjective knowledge that we all treasure within ourselves, which is unique and hardly reproducible or generalizable through any procedure of conventional science, would be constructed.

As can be seen, Merleau-Ponty's interest was in the study of consciousness starting from the individual perception of reality.and for this reason he is considered one of the main authors of perceptual phenomenology. Although in the last chapter of his life he reformulated concepts of his philosophy, he firmly maintained the belief that the relationship between every man and history necessarily passes through the way he perceives the events that unfold during his life cycle, defining a dialectic between thinking bodies as an ecosystem for the memory of humanity.

Bibliographical references:

• Botelho, F. (2008). Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and communication research. Signo y Pensamiento, 27(52), 68-83.
• González, R.A. and Giménez, G. (2010). Phenomenology of the intersection between the body and the world in Merleau-Ponty. Ideas y Valores, 145, 113-130.