Maurice Merleau-Ponty The primacy of perception
What is the Primacy of Perception?
What is the Primacy of Perception?
From the time of writing Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with John Locke, that perception was not the causal product of atomic sensations. This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly in behaviourism. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the lifeworld (the "Lebenswelt").  This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema). 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 (the consciousness 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 to solipsism).  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 the thesis according to which "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that its conceptualisations should be re-examined in the light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis. CANNOTANSWER
The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "all consciousness is consciousness of something",
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the 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 perception plays in our 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. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with Gestalt psychology. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived 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 “indirect ontology” 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”.

Merleau-Ponty engaged with Marxism throughout his career. His 1947 book, Humanism and Terror, has been widely (mis)understood as a defence of the Soviet show trials. In fact, this text avoids the definitive endorsement of a view on the Soviet Union, but instead engages with the Marxist theory of history as a critique of liberalism, in order to reveal an unresolved antinomy in modern politics, between humanism and terror: if human values can only be achieved through violent force, and if liberal ideas hide illiberal realities, how is just political action to be decided? Merleau-Ponty maintained an engaged though critical relationship to the Marxist left until the end of his life, particularly during his time as the political editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes.

Life

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Inférieure (now Charente-Maritime), France. His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean 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 to bourgeois life and values for her taste. He attended Edmund Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929. In 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree (, roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) from the University of Paris, on the basis of the (now-lost) thesis La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin ("Plotinus's Notion of the Intelligible Many"), directed by Émile Bréhier. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

Merleau-Ponty was raised as a Catholic. He was friends with the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, and he wrote articles for the Christian leftist journal Esprit, but he left the Church in 1937 because he felt his socialist politics were not compatible with the social and political teaching of the Catholic Church.

An article published in French newspaper Le Monde in October 2014 makes the case of recent discoveries about Merleau-Ponty's likely authorship of the novel Nord. Récit de l'arctique (Grasset, 1928). Convergent sources from close friends (Beauvoir, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin) seem to leave little doubt that Jacques Heller was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33) and then got a fellowship to do research from the . From 1934 to 1935 he taught at the Lycée de Chartres. He then in 1935 became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he tutored a young Michel Foucault and Trần Đức Thảo and was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945). During this time, he attended Alexandre Kojeve's influential seminars on Hegel and Aron Gurwitsch's lectures on Gestalt psychology.

In the spring of 1939, he was the first foreign visitor to the newly established Husserl Archives, where he consulted Husserl's unpublished manuscripts and met Eugen Fink and Father Hermann Van Breda. In the summer of 1939, as France entered war against Germany, he served on the frontlines in the French army, where he was wounded in battle in June 1940. Upon returning to Paris in the fall of 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and founded an underground resistance group with Jean-Paul Sartre called "Under the Boot". He participated in an armed demonstration against the Nazis during the Liberation of Paris.

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. 
He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège 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 Les Temps modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.  In his youth he had read Karl Marx's writings and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to Marxism. While he was not a member of the French Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument justifying the Soviet show trials and violence for progressive ends in general in the work Humanism and Terror in 1947. However, about three years later, he renounced his earlier support for political violence, and he rejected Marxism and advocated a liberal left position in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). His friendship with Sartre and work with Les Temps modernes ended because of that, since Sartre still had a more favourable attitude towards Soviet communism. Merleau-Ponty was subsequently active in the French non-communist left and in particular in the Union of the Democratic Forces.

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on René Descartes, leaving an unfinished manuscript which was posthumously published in 1964, along with a selection of Merleau-Ponty's working notes, by Claude Lefort as The Visible and the Invisible. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his mother Louise, his wife Suzanne and their daughter Marianne.

Thought

Consciousness
In his Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the body-subject (le corps propre) as an alternative to the Cartesian "cogito". This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially. Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged". The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated subjectivity 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 our body has a "grip" (prise), while the grip itself is a function of our connaturality with the world's things. The world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming".

The essential partiality of our view of things, their being given only in a certain perspective 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 with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (sketches, faint outlines, adumbrations). The thing transcends our view, 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 of Leibniz's monads). 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". Our perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception; rather, it is an ambiguous perception founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual Gestalt. Only after we have been integrated within the environment so as to perceive objects as such can we turn our attention 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 new Gestalt oriented toward a particular object. Because our bodily involvement with things is always provisional and indeterminate, we encounter meaningful things in a unified though ever open-ended world.

The primacy of perception
From the time of writing Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with John Locke, that perception was not the causal product of atomic sensations. This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly in behaviourism. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the lifeworld (the "Lebenswelt").

This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology is "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema). 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 (the consciousness 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 to solipsism).

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 the thesis according to which "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that its conceptualisations should be re-examined in the light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis.

Corporeity

Taking the study of perception as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty was led to recognize that one's own body (le corps propre) is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition of experience, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. He therefore underlines the fact that there is an inherence of consciousness 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 dualist ontology of mind and body in Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them. In the Phenomenology 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).

Spatiality
The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on space (l'espace) and the primacy of the dimension of depth (la profondeur) as implied in the notion of being in the world (être au monde; to echo Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein) and of one's own body (le corps propre). Reflections on spatiality in phenomenology are also central to the advanced philosophical deliberations in architectural theory.

Language
The highlighting of the fact that corporeity intrinsically has a dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of the ego is one of the conclusions of The Structure of Behavior that is constantly reiterated in Merleau-Ponty's later works. Following this theme of expressivity, he goes on to examine how an incarnate 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 considers language, then, as the core of culture, 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 song.

This work deals mainly with language, beginning with the reflection on artistic expression in The Structure of Behavior—which contains a passage on El Greco (p. 203ff) that prefigures the remarks that he develops in "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945) and follows the discussion in Phenomenology 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, during this period he continues a dialogue between phenomenology and the diverse work carried out in psychology, all in order to return to the study of the acquisition of language in children, as well as to broadly take advantage of the contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure to linguistics, and to work on the notion of structure through a discussion of work in psychology, linguistics and social anthropology.

Art
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 207, 2nd note [Fr. ed.]) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language () (The Prose of the World, p. 10). Spoken language (), or secondary expression, returns to our linguistic baggage, to the cultural heritage that we have acquired, as well as the brute mass of relationships between signs and significations. Speaking language (), 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 of style occupies an important place in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence". In spite of certain similarities with André Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux's The 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 very metaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a mystical 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.)

For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage 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 of historicity and intersubjectivity. (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.) 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.

Science
In his essay "Cézanne's Doubt", in which he identifies Paul 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 his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents a phenomenological objection to positivism: that it can tell us 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 an ex 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".

Influence

Anticognitivist cognitive science
Merleau-Ponty's critical position with respect to science was stated in his Preface to the Phenomenology: 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 as post-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 of The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied or enactive cognitive science, and later in the decade, to neurophenomenology. In addition, Merleau-Ponty's work has also influenced researchers trying to integrate neuroscience with the principles of chaos theory.

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
 Ron McClamrock's Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World (1995),
 Andy Clark's Being There (1997),
 Naturalizing Phenomenology edited by Petitot et al. (1999),
 Alva Noë's Action in Perception (2004),
 Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005),
 Grammont, Franck Dorothée Legrand, and Pierre Livet (eds.) 2010, Naturalizing Intention in Action, MIT Press 2010  .
 The journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Feminist philosophy
Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including Rosalyn Diprose and .

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, 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 by Iris 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 we experience the world in terms of the "I can" – that is, oriented towards certain projects based on our 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
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.

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. 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 and lived 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".

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..." Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death, and published with the half-complete manuscript of The 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." 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')." 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.

Bibliography
The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's works in French and English translation.

See also
Gestalt psychology
Process philosophy
Embodied cognition
Enactivism
Difference (philosophy)
Virtuality (philosophy)
Field (physics)
Hylomorphism
Autopoiesis
Emergence
Umwelt
Habit
Body schema
Affordance
Perspectivism
Reflexivity
Invagination (philosophy)
Incarnation

Notes

References
 Abram, D. (1988). "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth" Environmental Ethics 10, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 101–20.
 Alloa, E. (2017) Resistance of the Sensible World. An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty, New York: Fordham University Press.
 Alloa,E., F. Chouraqui & R. Kaushik, (2019) (eds.) Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press.
 Barbaras, R. (2004) The Being of the Phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 Carbone, M. (2004) The Thinking of the Sensible. Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
 Clark, A. (1997)  Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Dillon, M. C. (1997) Merleau-Ponty's Ontology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
 Gallagher, S. (2003) How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Guilherme, Alexandre and Morgan, W. John, 'Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)-dialogue as being present to the other'. Chapter 6 in Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education: Nine modern European philosophers, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 89–108, .
 Johnson, G., Smith, M. B. (eds.) (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Chicago: Northwestern UP 1993.
 Landes, D. (2013) Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, New York-London: Bloomsbury.
 Lawlor, L., Evans, F. (eds.) (2000) Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, Albany: SUNY Press.
 Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J-M. (eds.) (1999) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 Toadvine, T. (2009) Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
 Tilliette, X. (1970) Maurice Merleau-Ponty ou la mesure de l'homme, Seghers, 1970.
 Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

External links

 
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty at 18 from the French Government website
 English Translations of Merleau-Ponty's Work
 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty by Jack Reynolds
 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty by Ted Toadvine
 The Merleau-Ponty Circle — Association of scholars interested in the works of Merleau-Ponty
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty page at Mythos & Logos
 Chiasmi International — Studies Concerning the Thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in English, French and Italian
 O’Loughlin, Marjorie, 1995, "Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities: Merleau-Ponty’s Corrective to Postmodernism’s “Subjects” of Education."
 Popen, Shari, 1995, "Merleau-Ponty Confronts Postmodernism: A Reply to O’Loughlin."
 Merleau-Ponty: Reckoning with the Possibility of an 'Other.'
 The Journal of French Philosophy — the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française
 Online Merleau-Ponty Bibliography at PhilPapers.org

1908 births
1961 deaths
20th-century French non-fiction writers
20th-century French philosophers
Action theorists
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Collège de France faculty
Consciousness researchers and theorists
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
École Normale Supérieure alumni
Ecophenomenologists
Enactive cognition
Environmental philosophers
Epistemologists
Existentialists
French communists
French socialists
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French male non-fiction writers
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Lycée Carnot teachers
Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni
Marxist theorists
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People from Rochefort, Charente-Maritime
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Phenomenology of Perception () is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.

Summary
Merleau-Ponty attempts to define phenomenology, which according to him has not yet received a proper definition. He asserts that phenomenology contains a series of apparent contradictions, which include the fact that it attempts to create a philosophy that would be a rigorous science while also offering an account of space, time and the world as people experience them. Merleau-Ponty denies that such contradictions can be resolved by distinguishing between the views of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, commenting that Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) "springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the 'natürlicher Weltbegriff' or the 'Lebenswelt' which Husserl, toward the end of his life, identified as the central theme of phenomenology, with the result that the contradiction appears in Husserl's own philosophy".

Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty attempts to reveal the phenomenological structure of perception. He writes that while the "notion of sensation ... seems immediate and obvious", it is in fact confused. Merleau-Ponty asserts that because "traditional analyses" have accepted it, they have "missed the phenomenon of perception." Merleau-Ponty argues that while sensation could be understood to mean "the way in which I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself", there is nothing in experience corresponding to "pure sensation" or "an atom of feeling". He writes that, "The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice." Merleau-Ponty's central thesis is that of the "primacy of perception." He critiques the Cartesian stance of "cogito ergo sum" and expounds a different conception of consciousness. Cartesian dualism of mind and body is called into question as the primary way of existing in the world, and is ultimately rejected in favor of an intersubjective conception or dialectical and intentional concept of consciousness. The body is central to Merleau-Ponty's account of perception. In his view, the ability to reflect comes from a pre-reflective ground that serves as the foundation for reflecting on actions.

Merleau-Ponty's account of the body helps him undermine what had been a long-standing conception of consciousness, which hinges on the distinction between the for-itself (subject) and in-itself (object), which plays a central role in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness was released in 1943. The body stands between this fundamental distinction between subject and object, ambiguously existing as both. In Merleau-Ponty's discussion of human sexuality, he discusses psychoanalysis. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the body "can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes it."

Publication history
Phenomenology of Perception was first published in 1945 by Éditions Gallimard. In 1962, an English translation by Colin Smith was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. In 2013, Routledge published an English translation by Donald Landes.

Reception
The philosopher A. J. Ayer criticized Merleau-Ponty's arguments against the sense datum theory of perception, finding them inconclusive. He considered Merleau-Ponty's inclusion of a chapter on sexuality surprising, suggesting that Merleau-Ponty included it to give him an opportunity to revisit the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave. He compared Merleau-Ponty's views on sex to those of Sartre in Being and Nothingness. The sociologist Murray S. Davis observed that Merleau-Ponty's view that aspects of psychoanalysis, such as its attribution of meaning to all human actions and the diffusing of sexuality throughout the whole of human existence, are similar to phenomenology is controversial, and that other authors would view psychoanalysis as "materialistic and mechanical".

Helmut R. Wagner described Phenomenology of Perception as an important contribution to phenomenology. Rhiannon Goldthorpe called the book Merleau-Ponty's major work, noting that its discussion of subjects such as the relationship of the body to spatial experience, and sexuality, went beyond "the nominal range of his title." The philosopher David Abram observed that while "the sensible thing" is "commonly considered by our philosophical tradition to be passive and inert", Merleau-Ponty consistently describes it in the active voice in Phenomenology of Perception. He rejected the idea that Merleau-Ponty's "animistic" language was the result of poetic license, arguing that he "writes of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers, and of the sensible itself as a field of animate presences, in order to acknowledge and underscore their active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience."

American vice president Al Gore, in a 1999 interview with the critic Louis Menand in The New Yorker, mentioned Phenomenology of Perception as an inspiration. The philosopher Stephen Priest commented that, following the book's publication, Merleau-Ponty decided that in it he had taken "subject-object dualism as phenomenologically primitive" and "made use of a comparatively superficial psychologistic vocabulary" that he wished to replace. The philosopher Robert Bernasconi observed that the book established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and along with Merleau-Ponty's other writings, found a more receptive audience among analytic philosophers than the works of other phenomenologists.

G. B. Madison observed that the book was recognized as a major statement of French existentialism, and is best known for Merleau-Ponty's central thesis of "the primacy of perception". According to Madison, Merleau-Ponty sought to respond in his later work to the charge that by grounding all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, he was promoting reductionism and anti-intellectualism and undermining the ideals of reason and truth. Madison further stated that some commentators believed that Merleau-Ponty's thought had taken a significantly different direction in his late, unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, edited by the philosopher Claude Lefort, while others emphasized the continuity of his work, with the issue receiving "much scholarly discussion".

References

Bibliography
Books

External links
 Excerpts can be found at Google Books: 
 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy listing

1945 non-fiction books
Books about perception
Books by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Éditions Gallimard books
Existentialist books
French non-fiction books
Phenomenology literature
Routledge books Moral perception is a term used in ethics and moral psychology to denote the discernment of the morally salient qualities in particular situations. Moral perceptions are argued to be necessary to moral reasoning (see practical reason), the deliberation of what is the right thing to do. Moral perception is variously conceptualized by Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, and Martha C. Nussbaum. Lawrence Blum (1994) distinguishes moral perception from moral judgment. Whereas a person's judgment about what the moral course of action would be is the result of a conscious deliberation, the basis for that process is the perception of aspects of one's situation, which is different for each person. Moral perceptions are also particular in nature.

Empirical research in moral psychology suggests that people are capable of rapidly - perhaps even subconsciously - detecting the moral qualities of situations and stimuli.

References  

Ethics
Moral psychology
Perception