Jean Jacques Maurice Merleau-Ponty “was born March 14, 1908 at Rocheford-sur-Mer … France” (Marshall 16). After his father’s death during World War I, a young Merleau-Ponty moved with his mother and sister to Paris. In his compelling eulogy, Merleau-Ponty vivant, Jean- Paul Sartre describes Merleau-Ponty’s childlike awe as motivating his philosophy. Propelled by
a deeply close relationship with his mother, who shared her son’s love of learning, Merleau- Ponty’s childhood sense of wonder was something he strove to recapture as an adult (Sartre). In young adulthood, Merleau-Ponty’s inquisitiveness led him to the École Normale Supérieure where he studied philosophy (Lanigan Phenom. 261; Marshall 13-25).
While a student, Merleau-Ponty attended Husserl’s lectures in Paris, which were later published as Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Husserl’s lectures coupled with Merleau-Ponty’s readings of Heidegger and Kojeve’s humanist interpretation of Hegel deeply inspired Merleau- Ponty’s interest in phenomenology (Marshall 13-25). Merleau-Ponty graduated from the program in 1931 – a moment between World War I and World War II (Lanigan Phenom. 261). These interwar years offer a bleak picture of existence in France. The massive loss of citizenry during World War I, a struggling economy, and political tensions between a conservative, Catholic-right and the Communist-left, suggest a sense of hopelessness pervading Merleau- Ponty’s homeland (Goubert 287-293). Yet, amidst this climate, Merleau-Ponty’s sense of wonder led him to return to the École Normale Supérieure in 1935 to pursue graduate work (Marshall).
In terms of the larger context of media and communication studies, the development of radio broadcasts in Europe and North America during the 1930s elevated the medium’s status to that of mass media institution (Noam; Starr). Media study was still years away from McLuhan’s assertion of media as environments, yet the American pragmatist, interactionist view of The
Chicago School, eventually inspiring ecological approaches to human communication, began
during the decades following World War I (Carey TCS). With the United States adopting the post-World War I position of isolationism, Hitler’s Germany prepared to engulf Europe. On September 3, 1939, France joined Great Britain in World War II (Goubert 293).
Merleau-Ponty’s military service in World War II delayed publication of his first major work, The Structure of Behavior, until 1943. Although serving only for about a year, “Merleau- Ponty was captured and tortured by the Germans” (Marshall 17). Following his capture, and per the Armistice agreement of June 1940, France was subject to German occupation. French citizens, perceived to be resistant to the occupation, including Communists and those of Jewish faith were sent to prison camps. The conservative Catholic political contingent, meanwhile, were allegiant or indifferent to the German Vichy Regime (Goubert 293-298). Dissatisfied with the Catholic party’s response to the occupation, Merleau-Ponty distanced himself from institutional Catholicism and found greater allegiance with the Communist left. Despite this distance from Catholicism, however, Richard Kearney indicates that Merleau-Ponty never fully abandoned his faith as its practices and tenets greatly inform his work – particularly Merleau-Ponty’s
“Eucharistic” treatment of the body. Arguably, the traumatic experience of war increased
Merleau-Ponty’s passionate, natural tendency to a role as a “public intellectual,” his emphasis on embodiment, and his interest in how we understand self, others and our world (Carman 24).
Following French liberation at Normandy (June 6, 1944) and the end of World War II, Merleau-Ponty published his doctoral treatise as the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945. He went on to hold prestigious faculty positions at the University of Lyon from 1945-1949 and the
Sorbonne from 1949-1952 (Lanigan 262). Additionally, around 1948, Merleau-Ponty delivered a
series of radiobroadcast lectures, later published under the title, The World of Perception
(Marshall 17). In France, as well as North America, radio continued to represent a powerful mass media agent in the 1940s. Reeling from the effects of Hitler’s propaganda, often delivered via radio, the communication field assumed an ethical turn in scholarship (Gehrke). Media effects studies, likewise, assumed concern for avoiding the terrors of propaganda with emphasis on the
unique U.S. importance of freedom of the press (Carey TCS) – especially with the rise of a new medium in the early 1940s, the television.
Although France began television broadcasting in the middle 1930s, it was state controlled through the 1980s, which limited the medium’s normatization (Noam 96-98). In contrast, the American ethos of a free press encouraged the rapid spread and reach of commercial television into American culture and citizens’ homes. Extending Beard’s Treatise into the
electronic age, one wonders if the tempered development of television in France further aided its citizenry in avoiding the narcissistically anxious nervous exhaustion of Americanitis.
Though not suffering from anxiety per se, the decade of the 1950s, for Merleau-Ponty, was grief ridden. Through a series of political disagreements, Merleau-Ponty’s friendship with Sartre dissolved, as did Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the French communist party (Marshall 20; Sartre). Additionally, Merleau-Ponty’s mother passed away in 1952 (Marshall 20). The loss of this close relationship deeply affected him (Sartre). As Dermot Moran, drawing on Sartre, describes, “the adult Merleau-Ponty’s desire to discover” deep “attachment” with others, as well as his “attempts to find community, first in Christianity and then with the Communist Party, were … attempts to rediscover this original happiness” – the happiness that Merleau-Ponty found in his youthful wonder, which he shared with his mother (Moran 399). This series of
detachments led Merleau-Ponty to become “a recluse, only leaving his home” to visit campus (Moran 399). The anxious experience of loss deeply affected his personal life.
Despite these personal difficulties, Merleau-Ponty’s professional fervor remained unmatched (Marshall 20). “At the age of 44 (1952), Merleau-Ponty assumed the Chair of
philosopher of his time” (Marshall 20). Years later, while preparing a lecture, Maurice Merleau- Ponty passed away on May 3, 1961, leaving behind his wife and daughter (Marshall 21).
Although he published no major philosophical treatises between PhP and his death in 1961, he left audiences with two working manuscripts – The Prose of the World (1969; PW forward) and The Visible and The Invisible (1964; VI forward) (Lanigan Speak. 18-19). Merleau- Ponty intended to focus on “the phenomenology of expression” in the former, but halted progress in favor of emphasizing “a more profound concern for the ontological status of the meaning and signification process” in the latter (Lanigan Phenom. 262). “Although his topical writings range over psychology, socio-anthropology, politics, film, and philosophy, Merleau-Ponty hypostatized communication (speaking) as the foundation of each area of knowledge insofar as speaking is the vehicle of creation and preservation of knowledge in each” (Lanigan Speak. 19). The ways in which Merleau-Ponty develops his notion of the foundational nature of speaking attend heavily to a reflexive relationship between culture and communication – similar to The Chicago School view, which I described previously (Carey TCS). M.C. Dillon attends to this reflexivity through his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology.
2.2.3 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Ontology: Assumptions, Aims and Ends