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Maurice Merleau-Ponty | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908-03-14)14 March 1908 Rochefort-sur-Mer,Charente-Inférieure, France |
| Died | 3 May 1961(1961-05-03) (aged 53) Paris, France |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure University of Paris |
| Academic advisor | Émile Bréhier |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental[1] Phenomenology Western Marxism |
| Main interests | |
| Notable ideas |
|
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty[2] (/ˌmɜːrloʊˈpɒnti/MUR-lohPON-tee;French:[mɔʁismɛʁlopɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a Frenchphenomenologicalphilosopher, strongly influenced byEdmund Husserl andMartin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in humanexperience was his main interest and he wrote onperception,art,politics,religion,biology,psychology,psychoanalysis,language,nature, andhistory. He was the lead editor ofLes Temps modernes, theleftist magazine he established withJean-Paul Sartre andSimone de Beauvoir in 1945.[3][4][5]
At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role thatperception plays in the humanexperience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoingdialogue 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. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalising phenomenology, in whichphenomenologists use the results ofpsychology andcognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty emphasised the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placingconsciousness as the source ofknowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirectontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world" (la chair du monde), seen in his final and incomplete work,The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, "Eye and Mind".[6]
Merleau-Ponty engaged withMarxism throughout his career. His 1947 book,Humanism and Terror, has been widely misunderstood as defense of theMoscow Trials, for instance by Marxist philosopherSlavoj Žižek.[7] In his "Author's Preface", Merleau-Ponty explains how his essay avoids the definitive endorsement of a view on theSoviet Union, but instead engages with theMarxist theory of history as acritique of liberalism, in order to reveal an unresolvedantinomy in modern politics, betweenhumanism andterror: if human values can only be achieved through violent force, and if liberal ideas hideilliberal realities, how is just political action to be decided?[8]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 inRochefort-sur-Mer,Charente-Inférieure (now Charente-Maritime),France. His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old.[9] After secondary schooling at theLycée Louis-le-Grand inParis, Merleau-Ponty became a student at theÉcole Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongsideJean-Paul Sartre,Simone de Beauvoir,Simone Weil,Jean Hyppolite, andJean Wahl. As Beauvoir recounts in her autobiography, she developed a close friendship with Merleau-Ponty and became smitten with him, but ultimately found him too well-adjusted tobourgeois life and values for her taste. He attendedEdmund Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929.[10] In 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree (diplôme d'études supérieures [fr], roughly equivalent to aM.A. thesis) from theUniversity of Paris, on the basis of the (now-lost) thesisLa Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin ("Plotinus's Notion of the Intelligible Many"), directed byÉmile Bréhier.[11] He passed theagrégation in philosophy in 1930.[citation needed]
Merleau-Ponty was raised as aRoman Catholic. He was friends with theChristian existentialist author and philosopherGabriel Marcel and wrote articles for theChristian leftist journalEsprit, buthe left the Catholic Church in 1937 because he felt hissocialist politics were not compatible with thesocial and political doctrine of the Catholic Church.[12]
An article published in the French newspaperLe Monde in October 2014 makes the case of recent discoveries about Merleau-Ponty's likely authorship of the novelNord. Récit de l'arctique (Grasset, 1928). Convergent sources from close friends (Beauvoir, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin) seem to leave little doubt thatJacques Heller was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty.[13]
Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33) and then got a fellowship to do research from theCaisse nationale de la recherche scientifique [fr]. From 1934 to 1935 he taught at the Lycée deChartres. He then in 1935 became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he tutored a youngMichel Foucault andTrần Đức Thảo and was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books:La structure du comportement (1942) andPhénoménologie de la Perception (1945). During this time, he attendedAlexandre Kojève's influential seminars onHegel andAron Gurwitsch's lectures onGestalt psychology. Merleau-Ponty possessed extensive knowledge in psychology,neurology, andpsychiatry.[14]
In the spring of 1939, he was the first foreign visitor to the newly establishedHusserl Archives, where he consulted Husserl's unpublished manuscripts and metEugen Fink andHerman Van Breda. In the summer of 1939, asFrance declared war on Nazi Germany, he served on the frontlines in theFrench Army, where he was wounded in battle in June 1940. Upon returning to Paris in the fall of 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, aLacanian psychoanalyst, and founded anunderground resistance group with Jean-Paul Sartre called "Under the Boot". He participated in an armed demonstration against theNazi forces during theliberation of Paris.[15] After teaching at theUniversity of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at theSorbonne from 1949 to 1952.[16] He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at theCollège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for the leftist journalLes Temps modernes from its founding in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth, he had readKarl Marx's writings[17] and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him toMarxism.[18] E. K. Kuby states that while Merleau-Ponty was not a member of theFrench Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument justifying theMoscow Trials andpolitical violence for progressive ends in general in the workHumanism and Terror in 1947. Kuby states that, about three years after that, however, he renounced his earlier support for political violence, rejected Marxism, and advocated aliberal left position inAdventures of theDialectic (1955).[19] His friendship with Sartre and work withLes Temps modernes ended because of that, since Sartre still had a more favourable attitude towardsSoviet communism. Merleau-Ponty was subsequently active in the French non-communist left and in particular in theUnion of the Democratic Forces.
Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of astroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class onRené Descartes, leaving an unfinishedmanuscript which was posthumously published in 1964, along with a selection of Merleau-Ponty's working notes, byClaude Lefort asThe Visible and the Invisible. He is buried inPère Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his mother Louise, his wife Suzanne and their daughter Marianne.
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In hisPhenomenology of Perception (first published inFrench in 1945), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the body-subject (le corps propre) as an alternative to theCartesian "cogito". This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives theessences of the worldexistentially.Consciousness, the world, and the human body as aperceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged". Thephenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of thenatural sciences, but a correlate of the human body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnatedsubjectivity intentionally elaborates things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, pre-predicative understanding of the world's makeup. The elaboration, however, is "inexhaustible" (the hallmark of any perception according to Merleau-Ponty). 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 emergentphenomena in an ongoing "becoming".
The essential partiality of the view of things, their being given only in a certainperspective and at a certain moment in time does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be copresent in the world and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (sketches, faint outlines, adumbrations). The thing transcends perception, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style ofLeibniz'smonads). Through involvement in the world –being-in-the-world – the perceiver tacitly experiences all the perspectives upon that object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment, as well as the potential perspectives that that object has upon the beings around it.
Each object is a "mirror of all others". The perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception; rather, it is anambiguousperception founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptualGestalt. Only after an integration within the environment so as to perceive objects as such can attention be turned toward particular objects within the landscape so as to define them more clearly. This attention, however, does not operate by clarifying what is already seen, but by constructing a newGestalt oriented toward a particular object. Because the bodily involvement with things is always provisional and indeterminate, meaningful things are encountered in a unified though ever open-ended world.
From the time of writingStructure of Behaviour andPhenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning withJohn Locke, that perception was not the causal product of atomicsensations. This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly inbehaviourism. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to thelifeworld (the "Lebenswelt").
This primordial openness is at the heart of histhesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "allconsciousness is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (thenoesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (thenoema). Thus, the correlation between noesis and noema becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness. However, in studying the posthumous manuscripts of Husserl, who remained one of his major influences, Merleau-Ponty remarked that, in their evolution, Husserl's work brings to light phenomena which are not assimilable to noesis–noema correlation. This is particularly the case when one attends to the phenomena of the body (which is at once body-subject and body-object),subjective time (theconsciousness of time is neither an act of consciousness nor an object of thought) and the other (the first considerations of the other in Husserl led tosolipsism).
The distinction between "acts of thought" (noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (noema) does not seem, therefore, to constitute an irreducible ground. It appears rather at a higher level of analysis. Thus, Merleau-Ponty does not postulate that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which supposes at the outset a noetic-noematic ground. Instead, he develops thethesis according to which "all consciousness isperceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that itsconceptualisations should be re-examined in the light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis.
Taking the study ofperception as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty was led to recognize that one's ownbody (le corps propre) is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition ofexperience, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. He therefore underlines the fact that there is an inherence ofconsciousness and of the body of which the analysis of perception should take account. The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of experience, so to speak, insofar as perception becomes an active and constitutive dimension.
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates a corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, and so stands in contrast with the dualistontology of mind and body in Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them. In thePhenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (1962, p. 440).
The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections onspace (l'espace) and the primacy of the dimension of depth (la profondeur) as implied in the notion ofBeing-in-the-world (être au monde; to echoHeidegger'sIn-der-Welt-sein) and of one's own body (le corps propre).[20] Reflections on spatiality in phenomenology are also central to the advanced philosophical deliberations inarchitectural theory.[21]
The highlighting of the fact that corporeityintrinsically has a dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of theego is one of the conclusions ofThe Structure of Behaviour (1942) that is constantly reiterated in Merleau-Ponty's later works. Following this theme of expressivity, he goes on to examine how anincarnate subject is in a position to undertake actions that transcend the organic level of the body, such as in intellectual operations and the products of one's cultural life.
He carefully considerslanguage, then, as the core ofculture, by examining in particular the connections between the unfolding of thought and sense—enriching his perspective not only by an analysis of the acquisition of language and the expressivity of the body, but also by taking into account pathologies of language, painting, cinema, literature, poetry, and music.
This work deals mainly with language, beginning with the reflection on artistic expression inThe Structure of Behavior—which contains a passage onEl Greco that prefigures the remarks that he develops in "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945) and follows the discussion inPhenomenology of Perception. The work, undertaken while serving as the Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of the Sorbonne, is not a departure from his philosophical and phenomenological works, but rather an important continuation in the development of his thought.
As the course outlines of his Sorbonne lectures indicate,[citation needed] during this period he continues a dialogue between phenomenology and the diverse work carried out inpsychology, all in order to return to the study of theacquisition of language in children, as well as to broadly take advantage of the contribution ofFerdinand de Saussure tolinguistics, and to work on the notion of structure through a discussion of work in psychology, linguistics andsocial anthropology.
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears inPhenomenology of Perception (p. 207, 2nd note [Fr. ed.]) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language (le langage parlé et le langage parlant) (The Prose of the World, p. 10). Spoken language (le langage parlé), or secondary expression, returns to the speaker's linguistic baggage and cultural heritage, as well as the brute mass of relationships betweensigns andsignifications. Speaking language (le langage parlant), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at the moment where it makes itself an advent of sense.
It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions.
The notion ofstyle occupies an important place in his essay "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (the first chapter ofSignes, 1960). In spite of certain similarities withAndré Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux'sThe Voices of Silence. Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work "style" is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist's individuality. Sometimes it is used, on the contrary, in a verymetaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, amystical sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an "über-artist" expressing "the Spirit of Painting". Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorization of an artistic school or movement. (However, this account of Malraux's notion of style—a key element in his thinking—is open to serious question.[22])
For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a separation between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration the dimensions ofhistoricity andintersubjectivity. (However, Merleau-Ponty's reading of Malraux has been questioned in a recent major study of Malraux's theory of art which argues that Merleau-Ponty seriously misunderstood Malraux.)[23] For Merleau-Ponty, style is born of the interaction between two or more fields of being. Rather than being exclusive to individual human consciousness, consciousness is born of the pre-conscious style of the world, of Nature.
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In his essay "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945), in which he identifiesPaul Cézanne's impressionistic theory of painting as analogous to his own concept of radical reflection, the attempt to return to, and reflect on, prereflective consciousness, Merleau-Ponty identifies science as the opposite of art. In Merleau-Ponty's account, whereas art is an attempt to capture an individual's perception, science is anti-individualistic. In the preface to hisPhenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents a phenomenological objection topositivism: that it can reveal nothing about human subjectivity. All that a scientific text can explain is the particular individual experience of that scientist, which cannot be transcended. For Merleau-Ponty, science neglects the depth and profundity of the phenomena that it endeavors to explain.
Merleau-Ponty understood science to be anex post facto abstraction. Causal and physiological accounts of perception, for example, explain perception in terms that are arrived at only after abstracting from the phenomenon itself. Merleau-Ponty chastised science for taking itself to be the area in which a complete account of nature may be given. The subjective depth of phenomena cannot be given in science as it is. This characterizes Merleau-Ponty's attempt to ground science in phenomenological objectivity and, in essence, to institute a "return to the phenomena".
Merleau-Ponty's critical position with respect to science was stated in his Preface to thePhenomenology: he described scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest". Despite, or perhaps because of, this view, his work influenced and anticipated the strands of modern psychology known aspost-cognitivism.Hubert Dreyfus has been instrumental in emphasising the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's work to current post-cognitive research, and its criticism of the traditional view of cognitive science.
Dreyfus's seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational account of the mind),What Computers Can't Do, consciously replays Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus's critique and neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition.
With the publication in 1991 ofThe Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, byFrancisco Varela,Evan Thompson, andEleanor Rosch, this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied orenactive cognitive science, and later in the decade, toneurophenomenology. In addition, Merleau-Ponty's work has also influenced researchers trying to integrate neuroscience with the principles ofchaos theory.[24]
It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is represented by a growing number of works, including
Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, includingRosalyn Diprose andSara Heinämaa [fi].
Heinämaa has argued for a rereading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Dreyfus's reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviorist,[25] and as neglecting the importance of the phenomenological reduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.)
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body has also been taken up byIris Young in her essay "Throwing Like a Girl," and its follow-up, "'Throwing Like a Girl': Twenty Years Later". Young analyzes the particular modalities of feminine bodily comportment as they differ from that of men. Young observes that while a man who throws a ball puts his whole body into the motion, a woman throwing a ball generally restricts her own movements as she makes them, and that, generally, in sports, women move in a more tentative, reactive way. Merleau-Ponty argues that people experience the world in terms of the "I can" – that is, oriented towards certain projects based on capacity and habituality. Young's thesis is that in women, this intentionality is inhibited and ambivalent, rather than confident, experienced as an "I cannot".
Ecophenomenology can be described as the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003).
This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely subjective, because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness, phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.[26]
David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" (chair) as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity", and he identifies this elemental matrix with the interdependent web of earthly life.[27] This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality, which Merleau-Ponty calls "the flesh" and which Abram refers to variously as "the animate earth", "the breathing biosphere" or "the more-than-human natural world". Yet this is not nature or the biosphere conceived as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather "the biosphere as it is experienced andlived from within by the intelligent body — by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Ponty's ecophenemonology with its emphasis on holistic dialog within the larger-than-human world also has implications for the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language; indeed he states that "language is the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest".[28]
Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break..."[29] Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death, and published with the half-complete manuscript ofThe Visible and the Invisible, several make it evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature". Hence, in November 1960 he writes: "Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother."[30] And in the last published working note, written in March 1961, he writes: "Nature as the other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as 'matter')."[31] This resonates with the conception of space, place, dwelling, and embodiment (in the flesh and physical, vs. virtual and cybernetic), especially as they are addressed against the background of the unfolding of the essence of modern technology. Such analytics figure in a Heideggerian take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen). In this strand of "ecophenomenology", ecology is co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking.[32]
The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's works in French and English translation.
| Year | Original French | English translation |
|---|---|---|
| 1942 | La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942) | The Structure of Behavior – trans. by Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963; London: Methuen, 1965) |
| 1945 | Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) | Phenomenology of Perception – trans. by Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962); trans. revised by Forrest Williams (1981; reprinted, 2002); new trans. by Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012) |
| 1947 | Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) | Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem – trans. by John O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) |
| 1948 | Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948, 1966) | Sense and Non-Sense – trans. by Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) |
| 1949–50 | Conscience et l'acquisition du langage (Paris:Bulletin de psychologie, 236, vol. XVIII, 3–6, Nov. 1964) | Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language – trans. byHugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) |
| 1949–52 | Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne: résumé de cours, 1949-1952 (Grenoble: Cynara, 1988) | Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 – trans. by Talia Welsh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010) |
| 1951 | Les Relations avec autrui chez l'enfant (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1951, 1975) | The Child's Relations with Others – trans. by William Cobb inThe Primacy of Perception ed. byJames M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 96-155 |
| 1953 | Éloge de la Philosophie, Lecon inaugurale faite au Collége de France, Le jeudi 15 janvier 1953 (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) | In Praise of Philosophy – trans. by John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963) |
| 1955 | Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) | Adventures of the Dialectic – trans. by Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1974) |
| 1958 | Les Sciences de l'homme et la phénoménologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1958, 1975) | Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man – trans. by John Wild inThe Primacy of Perception ed. by James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 43–95 |
| 1960 | Éloge de la Philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) | In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays – trans. by John Wild, James M. Edie and John O'Neill (Northwestern University Press, 1988) |
| 1960 | Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) | Signs – trans. by Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) |
| 1961 | L'Œil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) | Eye and Mind – trans. by Carleton Dallery inThe Primacy of Perception ed. by James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190; revised translation by Michael Smith inThe Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (1993), 121-149 |
| 1964 | Le Visible et l'invisible, suivi de notes de travail – edited byClaude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) | The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes – trans. byAlphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) |
| 1968 | Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952-1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) | Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952-1960 – trans. by John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) |
| 1969 | La Prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) | The Prose of the World – trans. by John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1974) |
{{cite book}}:|website= ignored (help)During the liberation of Paris he joined an armed street patrol.
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