Maurice Merleau-Ponty

born March 14, 1908, Rochefort, Fr.
died May 4, 1961, Paris
philosopher and man of letters, the leading exponent of
Phenomenology in France.
Merleau-Ponty studied at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris and took his agrégation in philosophy in 1931. He
taught in a number of lycées before World War II, during
which he served as an army officer. In 1945 he was appointed
professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon and in
1949 was called to the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1952 he
received a chair of philosophy at the Collège de France.
From 1945 to 1952 he served as unofficial co-editor (with
Jean-Paul Sartre) of the journal Les Temps Modernes.
Merleau-Ponty’s most important works of technical
philosophy were La Structure du comportement (1942; The
Structure of Behavior, 1965) and Phénoménologie de la
perception (1945; Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). Though
greatly influenced by the work of Edmund Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty rejected his theory of the knowledge of other
persons, grounding his own theory in bodily behaviour and in
perception. He held that it is necessary to consider the
organism as a whole to discover what will follow from a
given set of stimuli. For him, perception was the source of
knowledge and had to be studied before the conventional
sciences.
Turning his attention to social and political questions,
in 1947 Merleau-Ponty published a group of Marxist essays,
Humanisme et terreur (“Humanism and Terror”), the most
sophisticated defense of Soviet communism in the late 1940s.
He argued for suspended judgment of Soviet terrorism and
attacked what he regarded as Western hypocrisy. The Korean
War disillusioned Merleau-Ponty and he broke with Sartre,
who defended the North Koreans.
In 1955 Merleau-Ponty published more Marxist essays, Les
Aventures de la dialectique (“The Adventures of the
Dialectic”). This collection, however, indicated a change of
position: Marxism no longer appears as the final word on
history, but rather as a heuristic methodology. Later he
returned to more strictly philosophical concerns.