Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the leading figure of twentieth-century French phenomenology and was the closest interlocutor — and sharpest opponent — of Sartre and Beauvoir. His central project was to overcome the Cartesian dualism of subject and object, mind and body, by grounding both in the lived body.

Born in 1908 in Rochefort to an army officer who died in the First World War when Maurice was five, he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure and formed lifelong friendships with Sartre, Beauvoir and Raymond Aron. He passed the agregation in 1930. Mobilised in 1939 and taken prisoner, the war experience shaped his later thought.

After the Resistance he published two foundational works: The Structure of Behavior (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). His thesis: the knowing subject is not Descartes' pure consciousness watching the world but a lived being who inhabits the world through the body. When I see something, my body schema is already weaving a concrete relation with it. This has rippled into cognitive science, robotics, dance theory and embodied therapy.

From 1945 he co-edited Les Temps modernes with Sartre and Beauvoir; the journal anchored postwar French left-wing intellectual life. He broke with Sartre in 1953 over Stalinism, articulating his political philosophy in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). In 1952 he became the youngest professor of philosophy in the history of the College de France at forty-four.

In The Visible and the Invisible (posthumous, 1964), he deepened his phenomenology of the body into an ontology of the flesh (la chair). His 1956-58 lectures on nature rediscovered Schelling and engaged Heidegger's late thought. In May 1961 he died of a heart attack at his desk while studying Descartes — at fifty-two, his project unfinished. The legacy passed to Lefort and today to embodied-cognition research.