Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty was born at Rochefort on the French Atlantic coast; his father, an artillery officer, died when he was six, and he was raised by his mother in a Catholic household, later recalling 'an incomparably happy childhood'. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure with Sartre, Beauvoir and Lévi-Strauss, passing the agrégation in 1930. In the 1930s he heard Kojève on Hegel and Gurvitch on phenomenology and read Gestalt psychology.

In 1939 he consulted Husserl's manuscripts at Leuven and was called up the same year; demobilised in 1940 he taught in Paris and joined Sartre's Resistance group. The Structure of Behaviour (1942) used Gestalt psychology against behaviourism and reflex theory, arguing that behaviour is neither mechanical nor pure consciousness but structure. The Phenomenology of Perception, his major work, appeared in 1945, the year he and Sartre founded Les Temps modernes with him as political editor; Humanism and Terror (1947) defended the Soviet Union and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) withdrew that defence and attacked Sartre's 'ultra-Bolshevism'.

The Phenomenology of Perception argues that empiricism and intellectualism both miss perception, the one treating it as an assembly of sensations, the other as judgement. Perception is the body's direct dialogue with the world; the body is not an object but our way of having a world, an 'I can' that understands space, others and language before any reflection. Cases of phantom limb, agnosia and schizophrenia reveal the hidden structure of normal perception. I am my body, the body is always already in the world, and Descartes' cogito is derived from this original experience.

In 1949 he became professor of child psychology at the Sorbonne and in 1952 the youngest philosophy professor at the Collège de France, turning to language, painting (Cézanne), structuralism and nature. The unfinished The Visible and the Invisible proposed the concept of 'flesh': seer and seen are made of one flesh, and the division of subject and object derives from their intertwining. In 1961 he died of a heart attack at his desk at fifty-three, Descartes' Optics open before him. Sartre wrote that he had never stopped being his friend. His influence extends to cognitive science, feminism, art theory and ecological philosophy.