Summary
French phenomenologist whose essays are the subject of the first essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, “Labyrinth of Incarnations” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.29-40).
Details
- A prewar normalien who worked with the Resistance while teaching at the Lycée Carnot, Merleau-Ponty founded Les Temps Modernes with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945 and broke with Sartre after a disagreement that climaxed during the Korean war in 1950 (PDF p.30-31).
- In 1953 he was made professor at the Collège de France, the youngest man ever named to a chair previously held by Bergson and Etienne Gilson; he died suddenly in 1961 at the age of fifty-three (PDF p.31).
- His thesis works, published in 1945, were The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, attempts to free the mind from pure empiricism and idealism (PDF p.31-32). In the latter: “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (quoted PDF p.32).
- Said’s reading: we are in and of the world before we think about it; perception is access to truth and involves the incarnated mind in a thinking body; we are condemned to meaning, and “expressing what exists is an endless task” (PDF p.31-35).
- His essay volumes in translation are Sense and Non-Sense (essays 1945-1947), Signs (from 1958) and The Primacy of Perception, with “Eye and Mind”; his political volumes are Humanism and Terror and The Adventures of Dialectic, and Visible and Invisible appeared from his notes in 1964 (PDF p.33, p.40).
- Society is, in his phrase from “Eye and Mind” as Said uses it, “a true labyrinth of incarnations” (PDF p.38).
Related pages
Edward Said, R. P. Blackmur, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays