In my last few posts, I’ve been working my way through the ideas set down by the late great Hubert Dreyfus. While I end up disagreeing with Dreyfus on a number of issues, particularly on the role of conceptuality in practical action, I still see him as largely setting the terms of the debate. As part of my effort to understand Dreyfus, I’ve been undertaking a parallel study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had a pronounced influence on Dreyfus. Below is a short summary of how I understand a few of Merleau-Ponty’s key insights. (Readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty won’t find too much ground-breaking interpretation in this post, but it does serve to ground the larger investigation I’ve been engaged in.)

His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, was first published in France in 1945. As the title indicates, the work deals with articulating a philosophy of perception. Drawing from his predecessors Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty in this effort gave primacy to the body’s practical comportment with the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the historically situated and intersubjective horizon of experience from which all theoretical and scientific investigation begins, and to which it must always return. In emphasizing the body’s dynamic behavior as central to epistemological investigation—a move seen as early as his 1942 work The Structure of Behavior—Merleau-Ponty continued the work of his predecessors in returning to twentieth century philosophy the central role of embodiment in philosophy and psychology alike (the latter effort being greatly informed by gestalt theory and the neurological sciences of Merleau-Ponty’s day).

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