Merleau-Ponty: life and works

A close contemporary of Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. His early education followed the expected trajectory of an academic: he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1926, where he studied with the neo-Kantian Léon Brunschvicg and also became acquainted with Sartre and de Beauvoir. In the mid-1930s, after teaching and conducting research under the auspices of a fellowship from the Caisse Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Merleau-Ponty returned to the École Normale to pursue a doctoral degree. He submitted his preliminary thesis, The Structure of Behaviour in 1938, although it was not published until 1942. In this work, Merleau-Ponty developed a critique of then-prevalent conceptions of the conditioned reflex as a purely physiological phenomenon, and he was highly critical as well of behaviourist theories in psychology. The orientation of these criticisms, to the effect that such quasi-mechanical views fail to account for the sense and significance of embodied movements and activity, foreshadowed his more mature phenomenological views.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Merleau-Ponty served in the infantry as a lieutenant. He returned to teaching after the demobilization, and began conducting the research that led to the completion of Phenomenology of Perception, which was published in 1945. Throughout the 1940s, Merleau-Ponty was closely allied with Sartre and other figures in the emerging existentialist school of thought.