Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Born March 14, 1908, Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist philosopher and key figure of 20th century French Philosophy. In his first work Phenomenology of Perception, he healed what is known in philosophy as “The Cartesian Split” (derived from Descartes, who believed that everything in the world is an unchanging object of the natural sciences that we merely perceive as a function of our sensory/mental awareness). Merleau-Ponty showed that consciousness (mind), the world, and the human body as a perceiving instrument are always mutually “engaged” and influencing each other. For Merleau-Ponty, the things in the world are not unchanging, but a correlate of our body and its sensory functions, and our minds, which intentionally reconstruct things within an ever-present, pre-conscious world view. In other words, a mutuality exists between the things in the world, human consciousness, and the bodily senses – they inform and shape one another. In his second great work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty described the basic structure of this mutual relationship.
